Keller preferred to describe women, and he did it with the greatest
ease. We can tell by the construction of his sentences how smoothly the
work developed under his touch, and how easily everything found its
way into its proper place without exertion on his part or any need for
serious thought; whereas with his male characters, or those of them
at least who were not of a purely superficial nature, it was by no
means such an easy task. The thread knotted and broke where one least
expected it, and the texture became unequal and lost its freshness as
though it had been woven by hot and trembling fingers. They were a
trouble to him, not a pleasure, and when we see Keller turning a sudden
somersault in the middle of one of his most serious passages, we may
feel assured that he did it, not out of arrogance, but in order to
make good his escape. He had one characteristic which must have been
as common in ancient times as it is at present, although it may have
sprung from a too individual refinement to find room for expression,
it was a characteristic which is common enough among young lyric poets
whom it generally leads to their downfall, while Keller, because he
had just missed being a lyric poet, was able to provide it with a warm
and sheltered corner where it might grow in secret. It consisted in
that species of love for women which produces great erotic geniuses,
where human longing is mingled with a capacity for spiritual affection,
the body is permeated by the soul, desire is purified, and spiritual
affection itself vibrates with desire. From a condition such as this,
with its great expectations and still greater disappointments, the
bitterest women-haters may be evolved. But it is rare, or at least it
seldom comes into the light of day, and in the case of Gottfried Keller
it was probably only a latent characteristic. It was there none the
less. We can distinguish it in _Green Henry_, the story of his own
youth, in the strange way by which he is attracted by woman and longs
to be near her and to breathe her atmosphere, while at the same time he
is filled with mistrust for the only woman who loves him passionately,
as Judith does. He is afraid of wasting his abundance on a desert soil
which gives him nothing in return, he has an instinctive misgiving
that he must become inseparable from the one with whom he is united,
a foreboding that he is one of love’s elect--a susceptible stringed
instrument, a being with sensitive nerves which awake the impulse and
then hold him back. In the second edition of _Green Henry_, which was
published in Keller’s old age, he added the end of the story of Judith,
which describes his personal manner of giving and receiving love. It
was this love, which was not continued long enough for him to weary of
it, to which he owed his unequalled comprehension of women. His need
of woman made her the continual subject of his dreams and caused his
fancies to take shape whenever he wrote of her. It was to this that he
owed a very peculiar quality which shows itself in his autobiographical
story, _Green Henry_; it lent him that incomparable diagnosis of woman,
which, with its purely intuitive grasp of the everlasting variable,
would have made of him a woman’s doctor of the first rank, if he had
not had too much of the poet and the artist in him; while the absence
of this same attribute is the cause of the grossest blunders in the
majority of women’s doctors, who regard the sensitive woman with a
feeling partly of disgust and partly as though she were a comic figure.
It was this also which made him sensitive and harsh with regard to any
malformations in woman, enabling him to detect every abnormity. If
he came upon any such thing in the act of blossoming, his anger knew
no bounds, he would have liked to strip naked the poisonous vermin
and to beat it across the country from frontier to frontier, had such
punishment been consistent with the laws of our civilisation.
There was one satisfaction, however, which he would not allow himself
to be deprived of. He warned the public against the outrages of the
woman’s rights movement which was then in its infancy, and thus he
became the forerunner of his Scandinavian colleague Strindberg.
I have already remarked that there was one special peculiarity in
Keller’s great romance, _Green Henry_, and I must add that it was one
which puzzled me for years. It was the hero’s passiveness with regard
to women and the insignificant position which he occupied as an active
agent. There was no lack of opportunity, for he was obviously one of
those young men who possess a strong attraction for the Eves of the
opposite sex. Anna tries gently to tempt him, Judith takes him by
force, while the forlorn Agnes nearly dies of love for him and silently
offers herself, thereby claiming compensation for her injured soul;
the starving sempstress is also willing, and so is little Dorothy
of the iron image. But Green Henry is never seen to move. He goes
about amongst them like a sleep-walker and appears to have no other
sensations than such as are caused by a heavy heart. It was not until
long afterwards, when I became acquainted with another erotic writer
and had read his writings, that I understood this characteristic
feature in all its sincerity.
There are a whole row of erotic writers who belong to what we
might call the pseudo-erotic school. They are the conquerors, the
“Tannhäusers.” They recount their adventures and place them in their
true light, and themselves also; they think both of themselves and
their listeners. Woman is to them an object, which they possess--the
rosebud, which they pluck. They are the vainglorious who boast of love,
and whom the multitude run after. The others have positively nothing to
say, they feel in silence, they experience in silence, they are sparing
of their words because their hearts overflow. They do not magnify their
own importance, because for them life is everything, and woman the only
object of their interest and their study. Keller was erotic in this
sense, and that is why Green Henry is so feebly drawn. His experiences
were unconscious ones, but his impressions were a surprise to him and
he was deeply conscious of them. This is the reason why in nearly all
writings where love and woman are revealed to man, the man seems to
fall into the background.
There is a good deal of the _Sensitiva-amorosa_ nature about Keller,
though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too.
It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself in _Green Henry_,
in _The Governor of Greifensee_, and in other places besides. His
longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive
personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an
unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results.
He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself
as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving
the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a
stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are
full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting in
_Green Henry_ takes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it
becomes quite a cheerful event in the _Governor of Greifensee_, and
the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when
we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never
pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied
by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just
such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe
so vividly the intellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman--that
emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite
is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really
deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair
of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like
the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed
by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, in
_The Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow_. Or when it becomes apparent that the man
does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for
example: _Salome_. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable
and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about
heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.
There is another _Sensitiva-amorosa_ trait which is that love makes us
sad and melancholy. For those who are real erotic geniuses, love is
not a trifle to occupy their spare moments, they cannot leave her at
intervals and then follow their professions holding their heads high.
No, they cannot hold their heads high, that is just it; love takes
them entirely by surprise, she has no mercy and no pity; those who
have had other experience may rest content, for evidently they have
never known what it is to love. Love pursues her victim like fate, and
he sinks beneath her powerful grasp. He wanders in darkness as though
it were night, while she is all in all to him, and everything else
is forgotten. This is why Green Henry remains in the Count’s castle,
under the spell of graceful, cunning little Dorothy, when he ought to
have been on his way to the poor mother who was dying of sorrow. He can
do nothing unless her eyes rest upon his work, and for this reason he
can paint pictures for the Count although he cannot write a letter to
his mother. He describes his love for Dorothy in the deep symbol of an
iron image which feels like a heavy burden that he bears continually
in his heart. But in the midst of this enchantment his inner self
struggles for freedom; his sensitive nature is conscious of not having
experienced the fervent affection of which it is capable, his love is
not sufficiently intense for him to give himself up entirely. This
fervent affection for which he seeks, and in which he feels that he can
rest without compulsion and without loss to himself, this his sensitive
nature finds at last in Judith.
Judith is _the_ woman, the apocalypse of woman even for Keller, the
embodiment of warm-hearted sympathy. In this woman, of whom he wrote at
two different periods of his life, are united all his most fantastic
ideas about women, together with all his most personal experiences. She
is the most daring revelation of love that German literature, with its
strict conventions, possesses. She is considerably older than Green
Henry, and Keller is not in the least afraid of saying so. She is a
woman in the full bloom of life, who has reached the age when a strong
healthy woman is the most attractive, and Green Henry is eighteen years
old. These contrasts, who are mutually attracted to one another, are
frequent everywhere except in the literature of Germany. But the cause
of this mutual attraction is by no means the most elevated; Judith
is a mature, sensuous woman and Green Henry is an immature, sensuous
youth. She has lived amongst coarse-grained peasants and is very
coarse-grained herself; but when she comes in contact with Henry’s more
refined and complicated nature, she becomes a thorough woman, _i.e._
plastic material. Judith has none of that innate stupidity which so
often causes the woman to maintain her ascendancy over the man, to the
destruction of his happiness. At first she is imperious and exacting,
but as she sees more of Green Henry she gradually changes into a loving
woman, by which I mean a self-subjecting woman, for a woman who loves
cannot do otherwise than subject herself. He goes into the world, she
goes to America. Keller does not tell us much about her while she is
there. Time passes and Green Henry comes home, a _Sensitiva_ and poetic
nature with whom the world has dealt harshly. His vitality is slackened
and he feels depressed. Judith meets him, after having sought for him
as one whom love has bewitched, who cannot forget; hers is the love of
a strong, whole-hearted woman, smitten in the depths of her nature,
willing to cast everything aside if only she may love. Her love has
nothing to offer, and she does not believe that she can make him
happy, she only begs in silence to be allowed to remain with him, for
he is all she has in the world. She makes no stipulation, she asks for
no outward sign, she requires no vindication in the eyes of mankind, he
is free to come and go when he will. Green Henry can endure love after
this manner, and they love one another.
In the story of little Meret, Keller probes deeper still into the
nature of woman. Little Meret is Judith over again in the person of a
martyred child; it is Judith’s nature in the bud.
In the first volume of _Green Henry_, Keller informs us that he found
the story of poor little Meret among the papers of an orthodox pastor
in the beginning of the eighteenth century; but according to Bächtold,
in _Keller’s Letters_, she seems to have been an invention of his own.
However this may be, the story of little Meret, the witch-child, is the
most valuable contribution towards a study of the psychology of the
child-woman that we possess in German literature.
In this story Keller displayed the secret nature of the child-woman
in its rarest perfection and vitality, which is a thing that a man
can scarcely understand and which no woman likes to talk about. It is
one of those revelations which belong only to him who is born a poet
in soul and nerves and every fibre of his being, born an unconscious
poet, by which I mean an intuitive seer. In this child, tormented
to death, is displayed the primeval trait, the innermost kernel of
woman’s nature, and the woman of genius in the bud is made visible.
Little Meret possesses the one quality, the only one through which
woman is more nearly related to nature than man, it is a carefully
concealed quality, seen only by the few, but which for ever shuts out
the woman from outward conformity with the man, and which is the key
to her most secret, most mysterious witchcraft--her wildness. The best
and the worst women are not docile and tameable, they are not capable
of being cultivated and civilised like man--such are only women of
middling quality--they are ungovernable, irreverent, full of instinct,
nothing but feminine instinct. Whence should come the regeneration of
humanity, unless it be from the unused sources of nature, the source
of woman’s unconscious glory? Whence should proceed the mysterious
power of loving, with love’s inexplicable dominion over souls, unless
it be from the unfathomable, the incomprehensible nature of woman,
with her utter disregard for law and justice and all the rest of the
intricate building of commonsense upon which human society is founded?
Owing to her physiological structure woman is a creature of instinct,
and this instinct is her most precious possession, the heritage which
she bequeaths to future generations; it is always the same instinct,
whether it reveals itself in an evil race of feminine malefactors such
as Strindberg’s women, or in the richly gifted specimens of Keller’s
apocalypse of woman: Judith and little Meret. They are not to be
forced in either case! They are all children of nature.
Judith finds the man to whom it is natural to submit herself of her
own free will. Little Meret is hunted to death because she refuses to
submit herself to a stupid and ignorant training, and one morning they
find her lying naked and dead in the garden. She preferred to freeze to
death there than to live indoors, in a hideous, unbecoming, penitential
dress. Here we have the genius of the child-woman to whom her sense of
beauty and the consciousness of her power to charm is her one and only
possession. Here lies the true genius of woman; all her intellectual
powers and all her strivings after outward emancipation are unnatural
invasions into the territory of man.
Keller kept a sharp and malicious eye fixed on what we might call the
hybrid type of humanity. For him it possessed the attraction of a
repulsive object, and he would not let it escape him. As a man who was
born sensitive and erotic, to whom woman was a necessity and a delight,
he held all such in abhorrence. The same instinct which enabled him
to describe little Meret, that nervous child of the Renaissance, gave
him the power to understand those abnormities of whose true nature the
clever men of our time are so ignorant that they do their utmost to
encourage them. It is true that social problems were far simpler in
Keller’s day, he for instance knew nothing of the daily bread question,
and when he saw any trace of it, he laughed it to scorn, as in the
case of the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler, who trained their
daughters as governesses and companions, and then cheated the poor
creatures out of the hard-earned savings which they had received in
return for their squandered lives.
But the times when Keller attacked these women in solemn earnest was
when they brought their intellectual or artistic pretensions before his
notice. In the story of poor Regina there is a lady artist who is a
manlike, priggish creature, only there to be the misfortune of others.
Keller in his indignation has not spared the trouble to describe her
character with many carefully studied details. She is the woman with a
profession who “no longer wants man.”
In another passage, in the _Seven Legends_, he describes the learned
woman who does not wish to have any dealings with men, who despises
love, and makes copy out of her male companions.
She ends by becoming a monk and abbot in a monastery. But one day “she
felt with a bitter sorrow that she was thrust out from a more beautiful
world,” and if she, after having arrived at this understanding, did not
share the same fate as Strindberg’s _Miss Julia_, she had only to thank
the nobler character of the man whom she chanced to meet.
Keller speculated a great deal upon these hybrid beings. Not only
on the turning of women into men by manly occupations, of which
England and Scandinavia have provided numerous instances during
the last quarter of the present century, but he also touched upon a
more profound, and as yet scarcely explored territory, the stages
of transition between man and woman and the combination of the two
characters in the same person. The anecdote of the Emperor Nero, who
dressed himself like a woman, and insisted that he was going to have
a child, gave him a great deal to think about. His poetic insight
extended over the whole territory of organic phenomena, and his
instinct was too true to dismiss that which might have a physical
explanation with less thought than that which was a purely mental
trouble. In those most precious pearls, his _Seven Legends_, the
relation of the sexes is the foundation for every single story. Every
time it is a woman with a perverted soul, one who in consequence of
some inward or outward influence has relinquished her feminine nature.
A woman may err as much as she likes, provided she does it naturally,
but should she act contrary to her nature as a woman, Keller will never
forgive her. In every legend he introduces a Bible or Church tenet to
which he gives a profane interpretation.
In this mischievous little book the Holy Virgin, contrary to all
traditions, comes to the fore as an enthusiastic matchmaker, and
disdains no means whereby she may bring together two silly people who
do not know how to manage the matter for themselves. A pious monk is
alienated from the Church by a little girl who is desirous of marrying
him. An hysterical saint makes a love-lorn youth as hysterical as
herself; and even the muses go astray in Paradise and behave in such a
manner that the Holy Trinity is obliged to silence them by a loud clap
of thunder.
In the midst of these distorted elements, the history of the nun “who
went out of the convent to quiet her longing” is great and strong as
the everlasting evangel of the fulfilment of human love. In these
stories we have human love itself in a plain but mighty symbol--spring
with its storms bursting its obtruding bonds, summer with its hot
raptures, autumn with its fruits, and winter with its calm.
_Paul Heyse and the Incommensurable_
I
Warmth, sunshine, peace, and a soft, fresh wind. The blunt peaks of the
Bavarian mountains appear above the horizon with their hollows full
of snow, the pale blue lake glistens with streaks of silver in the
midday sun, and a soft, blue mist obscures the distant view. There is a
gentle, monotonous sound of murmuring wind, the first flies of the year
are buzzing on the window pane, and the buds on the trees are bursting
their scales. The meadows are sparsely clothed in green and speckled
yellow and white with cowslips and anemones. Everything is so still, so
still that you can hear your own pulse beat, but presently you hear it
no more--you are lifted up into the Infinite.
Still, quite still, a half-wakened, susceptible murmuring within, the
soul enjoying its siesta and the mind at rest--such should be your mood
ere you immerse yourself in Paul Heyse. You do not read him, you do not
need to think about him, yet your pulse beats faster and your lungs
breathe the pure air of the silent mountains, while somewhere in the
distance you catch a murmuring sound as of the loud tumultuous world;
or is it only the torrent that flows behind the house?
Paul Heyse’s best writings are only for those who are quite young
or for those who are quite mature, for those who are still dreaming
innocent dreams on the threshold of life, or for those who have dived
down and emerged again from the dusty, gasping tumult, and who stand on
one side, not wishing to enter again upon the “Steeplechase for life.”
This accounts for his unpopularity at the present time.
Outwardly he belongs to an older period which has long ceased to be,
but inwardly he belongs to a new period which has not yet begun. He
stands before the young people of our time as a classic and an Epigoni,
a polished and well-preserved gentleman who contrasts unfavourably with
their unbrushed coats, weak spines and sickly faces; he stands before
them as an old gentleman who has gained an easy victory, whereas they
are panting neurotics ruining themselves in the struggle after renown
and the new culture, who grudge him his intuition and despise his
old-fashioned methods.
There is a peculiarity about Paul Heyse which consists in its being
almost impossible to remember his writings, there is so little material
substance in them, they are not at all attractive at first, and virtue
is seen too seldom to sit at table with him after crime has expended
itself.
But we will now leave virtue for the residue, it is a moral necessity
in which the _juste milieu_ between socialists and anarchists is
encountered. Paul Heyse would certainly never have lived to be sixty
years of age, and a celebrated author into the bargain, if he had not
made some concessions to respectable principles; but the manner in
which he did it is very unsatisfactory. He does not pant beneath the
burden of the moral law, nor does he quarrel with it, he merely avoids
it mechanically, as one avoids a bailiff.
His best writings lie on the further side of the ten commandments,
middle class decorum and the penal code. They are included in the
mysterious province of instinct and impulse, and are sometimes so
dreamy that one sees that they are the production of the writer’s
intuitive nerves rather than the result of serious thinking.
It is this that distinguishes Heyse from the German authors of our
day, and because his intuition is so fine, his susceptibility so
delicately toned, he is one of the greatest diviners in the province of
spiritualised sexuality that has ever been, or now is. And because he
was always an intuitive physiologist, he was also a convinced fatalist.
He, with his poet’s soul, had gazed beyond the accepted standard of
good and evil long before Nietzsche, he had recognised the present
type of emancipated womanhood long before the Woman’s Rights movement
was in full swing. It was this delicate sensibility which put him in
touch with every secret movement before it had gained ground and become
universal, and it is because he possessed this fine susceptibility of
the nerves that he became acknowledged as the only one among German
authors who knew how to write about love.
Outside the birds are twittering, the torrent roars and the wind of
early spring moans around the house, bringing a longing with it, a
vague, restless longing for freedom and happiness, a longing to lose
one’s self and to live one’s own life to a degree that is not possible
on earth, a longing to shake off everything that holds one down and to
be united to the Infinite....
It is the yearning of first youth, which returns again with passionate
tears in last youth ... it is the yearning peculiar to Heyse, the
longing of the awakened child-girl and the sorrowful desire of the
matured woman, these are the two types of womanhood which he has
divined as no one else has done, these are the two passionate ages, the
beginning and the end, between which lies the much-trodden, phlegmatic
middle path.
Woman is a revelation only in her youth and in her age, in her
first blossoming and in the years when she begins to fade; all that
lies between is merely education, common sense, discretion and that
luke-warm temperament in which the majority of bourgeois marriages are
contracted.