IV

These three fundamental principles form the standpoint from whence

Heyse regarded humanity. Humanity, did I say? I mean women, for he is

essentially their author. He has been accused of writing for women only

and not for men, and it is said that he cannot describe the latter.

But with regard to that I should like to point out that he has been

the teacher and model of some of the best Scandinavian writers, and

the only model which they found in Germany. The construction of his

novels and the grace of his diction won him several followers in young

Denmark, where his influence is clearly discernible, but in Germany he

had no followers, for he is altogether inimitable; thus he remained

alone in his home on the mountain of culture where, although he was

much admired and much enjoyed, he was as a tower without access to

the critical understanding and to the authors who succeeded him. As

for the accusation of his being unable to describe men, the reason is

probably this, that in comparison with the depth and directness of his

comprehension of women, his men appear commonplace and uninteresting.

They nearly all seem a mere secondary consideration, and to exist only

as the indispensable background and emotional force for woman. This

gives one the impression that Heyse is not interested in man as a

whole, but only in that side of him whereby his peculiar sensibility

is brought into contact with woman, and through which his entire

nervous system is set in motion. Paul Heyse’s man is seldom the one who

makes the choice; it is nearly always the woman who gives the first

impulse. The man usually remains long in a state of stupid wonderment,

understanding nothing, while the woman who loves him has great

difficulty in making herself understood.

This is an extremely delicate psychological feature. For man the

choice is not the matter of chief importance, but for woman it is. A

man, however refined and cultured, could be quite happy with twenty

or thirty women who were entirely different from one another, and he

could feel himself warmly attracted by any one of them without his

strongest emotions being stirred or his whole existence responding;

but for a woman the absolute in love is the greatest, the only great

event in her life. For this reason the superior woman will always be

the chooser, she will always realise what the man is to her long before

he knows it; her silent love will always be the first attraction and

will bind him as it were with a thousand invisible cords, while the

strange atmosphere which proceeds from her will wrap him round like

the tremulous mist on a hot summer’s noon. Yet at first he does not,

except under the most propitious circumstances, understand that this

woman is sympathetic to him, but when the secret workings of organic

attraction have completed themselves, he suddenly awakes to find that

he is surrounded by a great and ardent love. In those rare cases when

a man loves with the whole passion of his nature, and when his love

is not, as it is oftenest described, and in our time of cultured

barbarism too often is, a perverseness--_i.e._ love for a woman who has

frequently experienced love already--in those rare cases it is always

the woman who gives the first impulse, and in Heyse’s writings it is

invariably the woman. In order to awake a deep, lasting and spiritual

emotion in man, a woman needs more than mere physical attraction, she

needs a spiritualised womanliness with all the enduring charm of its

indestructible intensity. The Incommensurable in love is not a primeval

quality in man as it is in woman; a man may have great nobility of soul

and yet be able to exist without it, whereas a woman cannot. For her

it is the primal condition of her being; for him it is an unexpected,

charmed light, illumining his whole existence.

_The Author in a Cul-de-sac_

_Henrik Ibsen_

The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common,

which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of

perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their

perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma

Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future

is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter

half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less

roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has

occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience.

This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our

time.

We will not concern ourselves with the lesser playwrights, for the

utmost that they can do is to follow the example of their masters

and parody them by their imitation. We will turn instead to one of

the masters themselves, to one who is justly considered a great

dramatist--Henrik Ibsen.

If we examine his entire life-work, piece by piece, we shall arrive at

the conclusion that it was a persistent wandering out of one cul-de-sac

into the other.

It began with _Love’s Comedy_: Marriage is synonymous with

stupefaction, not to marry is synonymous with theorising; remains the

missing x, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; result: cul-de-sac.

It is continued in _Per Gynt_: Romantic imagination is synonymous with

self-deception; school of life is synonymous with apathy; the missing x

is synonymous with the result: cul-de-sac.

In _Brand_ the diagram is simpler: Excessive desire for moral

perfection contra absolute religious indifference; result: cul-de-sac.

Whoever reads carefully these three great Speculative works of Ibsen’s

will be astonished to find that it was by no means unconsciously that

he ran into these cul-de-sacs; on the contrary, he steered straight for

them, and the last sentences of _Brand_ read like a triumphal epigram.

But by this time the floor of universal speculation had become too hot

for him, and he trod it no more. He turned to a more comprehensible

genre--if one may so call the popular discussions on social morals and

society problems.

Here it seemed that the author and the thinker might wander arm in arm

towards a clearly perceptible goal. How far he attained is a question

which we will leave for the next chapter.

I

Above my table hangs an old engraving after the portrait of a woman

by the younger Holbein in the gallery at Windsor. It is a face of the

Hedda Gabler type--Hedda Gabler three hundred years ago. Fair as a

lily, dressed after the newest fashion of her day with a half aureole

on her head, puffed sleeves and a high collar, everything fashionably

squeezed and tight-laced, and added to this an inscrutable face with

cold, veiled eyes, and a small mouth which promises nothing good. She

is undoubtedly a well-bred lady of good family, who is not likely to

relax her features or change her deportment, but who might possibly

allow others to make advances to her. She looks so conscious of her

innocence and so demurely attractive, that one thinks that she also may

have had an Eckert Lövborg to initiate her theoretically into the lives

of young men.

Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so

carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study

of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some

preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret

structure of her soul. As one well versed in life and anxious to divert

attention from the track which he was pursuing, Ibsen declared that

this time it was only a psychological study, with no criticism of

society and no wrathful pessimism. And so, dear society, good and bad,

you may set yourself at rest!

But society was not at rest. This Hedda Gabler was a creature

who displeased it. Nearly all women objected to her and declined

to entertain such a moral monster at their tea-table, while all

women-worshippers felt that through her the whole sex had been wronged,

and finally the majority of men were opposed to her because they were

not able to discover any traces of either manly or womanly psychology.

This was not only the case in Germany, and in England which is the

home of emancipated women and the birthplace of moral zeal, but even

in the author’s own Scandinavia they fought shy of her. The priests

listened--they who guarded the sacred fire on the altars of the great

mystery. “What is this?” they asked. “Is he beginning to speak with

tongues?” And the chaste priestesses of the pure Ibsen cult maintained

an ominous silence. Everywhere stillness ensued--the stillness of the

storm when it rains hailstones.

Another author would have been made to suffer for it; but the great

name of the great moralist held hands and tongues at bay.

Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as

happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a

little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the

midst of a phlegmatic bourgeois _milieu_ put an end to all illusion.

Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with

or without vine-leaves in the hair!--Where, in the name of wonder, do

people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they

feel like it?

You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and

lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.

Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden

away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and

palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in

touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we

never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve,

perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with

which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought

palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.

The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly

this: the dissection of an ideal.

In _Nora_, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; in _Hedda

Gabler_ he dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious

work of digging. The miner[1] climbs down into the depths where he

digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does

not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds.

Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed

woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised

a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it,

he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more

carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal.

_Nora_ is the rough diamond, _The Lady from the Sea_ is the

rock-crystal, _Hedda Gabler_ is a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal

too.

How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally

celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynist _à la_

Strindberg?

“Man created woman--out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his

god, the Ideal.”

It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated

essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung

by man about woman.

All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his

soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and

his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all

these man has immortalised in his songs on woman.

Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense

in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping

sound like that of a little bird; in later times--in the times of the

celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler,

etc.--they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern

authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in

knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of

“women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.

The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has

never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid.

She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated

and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the

happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about

her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....

Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description

of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man

expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not

find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul

throughout all ages.

Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type

of woman.

The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the

century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious

little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller,

created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has so

conscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no

longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves

and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature,

with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,”

they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.

Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of

horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would

require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in

all the unreal reality of their being.--There still remains Ibsen’s

woman.

Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself

a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his

works, and as she stands before us in real life.