Part 2
What a difference between the noble, spiritual-minded woman of Heyse’s time and the women of Strindberg’s creation! How changed was the image of the woman in the author’s soul! The entire character of the age had undergone a great change in the last twenty or thirty years. Women had entered into the war of competition with men, and had really won some success in the battle. Numbers of fathers and brothers were released from the burden of supporting their unmarried women-folk; they were even released from the necessity of marrying them. Indeed, nowadays, many daughters and sisters work for their parents and younger brothers. The world has grown more morose, and the whole of existence has assumed the appearance of an immense grey day of toil. Year after year competition grows harder, and every department of labour is overcrowded with envious, nervous, panting people, who are pitted one against the other. Merchant against merchant, author against author, man against woman,--all business people, all race-runners for their own gain, all struggling, restless, joyless ... all in a rudimentary or advanced stage of degeneration. And woman keeps pace bravely. She keeps pace because she knows that this is the only possible means by which she can attain to the full possession of herself, to perfect independence, to the right to dispose of her own person; she keeps pace because she must either run or be downtrodden; she runs, because every one else runs, and she takes the matter seriously, as is invariably the case with beginners. But she expects a great deal too much. She whose bodily frame is so dependent on leading a natural and healthy life, whose brain gets so easily tired, sits on school benches and studies for junior and senior examinations, and goes in for higher educational courses, and continues with these until she has reached or passed her twentieth year. She then sits on in badly-ventilated rooms as an art-worker, a book-keeper, or a telegraph clerk, and if she is exceptionally clever and industrious and has the necessary means, she studies, and when she has finished, she is six-and-twenty, eight-and-twenty, or more. After that the real work of life begins.
She is free!
True--but she is also a woman; or has she ceased to be one?
Many women have instinctively avoided this question, in the same way as they would avoid the subject of death, and they are apt to give way to an ugly exhibition of temper towards the man, but more especially towards the woman, who ventures to allude to it; but for all that, they cannot dispose of the fact any more than they can dispose of death. When they look at themselves in their glasses, they see that their eyes are tired, and their skin faded and pale from anæmia ... they see that they are sickly and overworked; the sweetest instincts of womanhood are silenced within them, or are shown only by fits and starts. Work, always work; they have few pleasures, and even those few are often too much for them. Of what use is their liberty?
They look at themselves in another glass, and this time it is the woman’s own mirror,--the works of her favourite authors. And what do they see there? It is no longer Keller and Heyse, nor even Ibsen. It is no longer those who first opened the eyes of woman, who handed us our youth as though it were a budding rose, and who let the zephyrs of spring expand our sails, while they threw open to us the door of life, and led us by the hand towards the man who loves us for our own sakes, and whom we love with the whole strength of our being. No, these old gentlemen are quite out of date nowadays, and the woman sees herself in the writings of the new authors.
There she discovers that she is good for nothing,--a vampire, an ugly, sickly, troublesome creature, only capable of exciting a passing passion, that she is a burden which a man drags after him, a luxury which he can scarcely afford, an evil which is only borne from a natural compulsion, a thing that always remains strange to us, and with which we cannot have any real sympathy, to which we are only bound by a kind of instinct, a parasite that is shaken off as we grow older, and which we attack with our fists when we meet it in the labour-market. That, according to Strindberg, is the relationship between man and woman.
Or else a Russian barbarian--who was never even heard of in Germany until his best talent was spent--comes and denounces woman as impure, advocates childlessness, and preaches subjection and the suppression of the personality, preaches a servile self-renunciation, and will have nothing but the brotherly and sisterly affection of sexless men and women. From him woman learns to regard herself as a harmful superfluity who cannot become anything worthy of respect, until she ceases to be a woman.
She has no longer either the time or the strength to be a woman. Competition in the labour-market monopolizes all her time and all her strength, she begins of her own accord to despise her womanhood, and to look upon it as a burden, while she persuades herself that a state of childless liberty is everything, and that work is the only satisfaction. This is because she has become an incongruous being, who no longer believes in herself as woman!
Nevertheless Strindberg was a great writer; he let woman gaze down into the abysses of her own nature, whose depths she had never guessed, and because he was afraid of her, he gave her an idea of her own power, such as was never dreamed of before.
Tolstoy too, in his younger days, has described the natural instinct of women as few have succeeded in doing, and he, too, was one of those who revealed woman to herself. But there was no good in either of these writers now that the confidence which had existed between man and woman had become a thing of the past. The source of their most intimate relationship was poisoned, the union between man and woman was changed into an ugly, brutal act, from which both needed to be purified, and above the yawning gulf that stretched between the sexes sat two fierce, suspicious-looking beasts of prey, who lay in wait for one another.
This was the latest revelation which woman received from her authors.
The well of her existence--the rich stream of her life--was beginning to be drained, man no longer wanted it, he asked for nothing better than to be quite free of her. She had become a torment to him.
There is yet another generation which consists of quite young girls, and the latest school of so-called “authors,” viz., our young naturalists.
They are there, no doubt. But these young people are the last to have any idea as to how they are to treat women!
Naturalism, as through a slight misunderstanding it is generally called, is the point of view taken by the Philistine in literature. In Germany it is through naturalism especially that the bourgeois spirit tries to become literary. These “authors” seem to say: “We cannot afford to waste anything, we have no superfluities, and we must do our best to succeed. Neither can we afford to give, we would sooner accept from others. For Heaven’s sake leave us in peace with your problems, and with the woman-problem in particular. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as a woman-problem, there are washer-women, and there are Christian mothers, and of course there are family quarrels and hereditary peculiarities, just as there are free unions which end badly. Once we saw a girl student who fell in love--but in quite a sisterly fashion--with a book, and therefore we have the right to maintain that we understand women. We also knew a socialist who married a baron after having presided for many years over a mantle warehouse. And one of our young girls actually went off on the spot with the very first young man whose acquaintance she made; but it did very well on the stage. We describe life exactly as we understand it, and everything that we do not understand is false and fantastical. Women are a useful institution as wives and readers, but in other ways they are as useless and insignificant as ourselves.”
Authors are the most conspicuous feature of any given period. When they are not great precursors, they are like the little house-masters of a school--a rather more presentable example of the whole class whom they affect to despise.
What the little house-masters despise most is the populace. But then Tolstoy and Strindberg despise it also--the former the Christians, the latter the Atheists. Ours, which is the plebeian age _par préférence_, makes the same enquiry about everything that is brought under its notice: “Of what use is it to me?” And even the women are judged from this point of view.
The man of this weary, utilitarian age is half a decadent and half a barbarian. What does he want with the superior woman? Nothing, of course. She is merely an annoyance to him, a burden. If he is enterprising, he marries a well-filled purse; if he has an affectionate disposition, he marries a wife of his own class. The more cultured, more highly developed women are thrust on one side, nay more, they are starved. They have a gnawing at the heart, a rankling distrust of happiness, of love, and of men in particular. They are driven to seek for consolation in their mutual affection for one another, and they refuse to have anything more to do with men.
This is the phenomenon which Maupassant, with the unfeigned astonishment of a full-blooded man, has described in _Notre Cœur_. His is the _fin de siècle_ woman whose whole being has become unproductive, her intellect, her grace, her gentle nature, and even her powers of affection. Man is no longer there for her soul and her senses! She is self-sufficient.
There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last half of the present century--how she developed in the struggle to compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of personal independence--how she became free and became her own master, and won for herself a place in the history of her time--how she escaped from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether--that is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the cause of much suffering.
A portion of these confessions have been collected by me in my book called _Modern Women_.
_Gottfried Keller and Women_
I
There are some labours to which we sit down with a sigh, conscious of having undertaken more than we are able to accomplish, while at the same time the thought of it attracts us and we do not like to give it up. I have never yet read anything about Gottfried Keller which seemed fully to grasp the real nature of the man with the secret of his separateness, and to place him before us with a certainty of comprehension such as cannot be gainsaid. He is something so complete in himself, so apart from others, that like all good things there is no getting round him. For the essence of good things consists in being so sound that there is no use in coaxing or persuading them, or in trying to discover a fault in them; and for that very reason these old jesters studied the noble art of rendering themselves inaccessible. As an author he wrote only when he felt inclined, and when he was not in the mood he waited--whether for months or years it was all the same to him. As a man he was so reserved that hardly a single one of his personal experiences found their way to publicity, and after his death it might have been supposed that he had never had any, if Jacob Bächtold had not published a collection of his letters under the title of _Gottfried Keller’s Life_, in which he speaks to us as one more alive than the living who are still among us. In reading his books we notice that the purer incidents are mingled with others of a more confidential nature, and it dawns upon us that he understood how to choose his incidents, so that afterwards they should not tell tales. This fact proves, in the first place, that he had nothing to do with those whom Nietzsche would call “literary women,” this being a silent memorial to his good taste and noble character. Secondly, it proves that he understood how to choose his society, and that, like a prudent Swiss, he never thoughtlessly confided in any one, but remembering that the world is not so good and particularly not so refined as it might be, he preferred to keep his confidences to himself. Thirdly, that he, like a righteous man, was pleased to live until those who had known him in his foolish youth had died before him with all they knew.
A vase filled with anemones, violets, ranunculuses and other spring flowers is standing on the table in front of me as I write; I took the trouble to fetch them out of the wood so that I might have something alive and sweet-smelling near while I think of Keller. Otherwise it would have been impossible to write about him, for his books are the essence of life and gladness.
The spirit of playfulness which, as he tells us in _Green Henry_, drove him when a child to try all kinds of experiments, has followed him through life in the treatment of his literary characters, who, by the way, are never inventions, but always studied portraits. Suddenly he seizes them by one leg, swings them round, and sends them flying into a purely fantastical no-man’s-land, oblivious of past events and present circumstances and such-like limitations. All his stories, or at any rate the majority of them, are marked with this feature, and the maddest confusion reigns side by side with some of the greatest psychological realities; take, for example, the end of _The Poor Baroness_. How to account for it? Is it that he had inherited the æstheticism of the romantic school? But considering that he was a man of sober temperament and not in any way romantic, it is more probable that the true reason to account for it is that he wrote only for himself and for his own satisfaction. In his youth he had been afraid of Providence and had fought a duel to prove the existence of God; in riper years he amused himself by trying to improve Providence, to put the crooked straight, to punish the wicked and reward the good, and act as though he were himself a more practical and zealous Providence. If, when he had finished, the public read it, what had that to do with Gottfried Keller? The public might rejoice if now and again he played at being its teacher and gave it a sound thrashing on that part of the human body which was especially intended for the purpose. Besides he was a Swiss, and it never entered his mind to trouble himself about the rest of the world. There is one special feature in Gottfried Keller’s productions which, since the publication of his letters, has found expression in words, and which offers a very drastic contrast to the works of later authors. It is this--that he never allowed dust to be thrown in his eyes by any one, least of all by foreigners.
When he, in the person of “Green Henry,” forsook the narrow surroundings of his home life and went out into the wide world, he believed that everything good, strong, free and new was to be found abroad.
After a long journey, undertaken for the sake of his education, “Green Henry” returned to his home wiser than when he left it. He became a Swiss in the superlative case--the Swissest of the Swiss. But although he had occasion to see all the frailties and follies of Europe disporting themselves in his beloved native land, he did not include foreign countries in the blame. He possessed the same sensible, confident self-assertion that characterises his honest fellow-countrymen who, while they are ever ready to assist strangers in a polite and blameless manner to rid themselves of their superfluous coin, always remain in their behaviour towards them as unaffectedly, great-grandfatherly, considerate and true-hearted as before.
In that Keller is quite old-fashioned. All other writers, at home and abroad, are anxious to change their skin, and complain bitterly because they cannot. Keller stretched himself in his with an expression of well-being that was positively annoying, and declared that it was a very good skin. He was still more old-fashioned in that he never sought for a problem, and never made anything of one, although he produced them by the bushel and left the precious gems lying scattered throughout his novels. Wherever he went, the strangest, most profound things seemed to cling to him like burs from roadside ditches. But the only use he made of them, when he did not immediately throw them away, was to play a little game of football with them. Three such problems, as he squandered by the dozen, would be sufficient excuse nowadays to call forth a new German literature with a new set of publishers, but he was so essentially old-fashioned in those matters that he was quite unconscious of the scope of his material, and was certainly not what we should call an “earnest” writer. He was old-fashioned in other ways also--for instance, in his best moments he possessed an individual language of his own which was quite unmistakable, and which seemed to have fallen from the clouds, no one knew how. Our modern authors, on the contrary, are always working in the sweat of their brows in the hope of obtaining an original style, and that without the smallest chance of success.
Keller was like a ploughed field where the rooks hop about in search of nourishment, and he has enough left still to fatten many rooks.
Yet there is one point in which our good little Keller is more modern than the most modern men of our time, and that is in his knowledge of women. It pleased the old _Pankraz, the Cynic_, to write a great deal about women, although he never allowed himself to be secured in visible chains.
Of all German writers, Keller is the one whom we are least able to understand with our unaided intellect. For in order to understand him, we must feel him, and he is far too reserved to admit of every one’s feeling him. Special qualifications are needful, and our modern society takes good care that these special qualifications should not exist for the great mass of sensitive readers.
Both as a man and as an author, Keller is distinctly a lover of fresh air, and for that reason he keeps all genuine townsmen at a suitable distance. It is true that they snuffle round him and become intoxicated with the strong scent of the woods and meadows, but it is just this exaggerated enthusiasm which forms as it were a Chinese wall between him and them. Keller needs to be passively enjoyed, in a waking sleep, like the peasant following his plough, or a person wandering in the mid-day sunshine, or a child resting in the arms of its mother. Keller as an author is the personification of the quiet equanimity of natural health.
At the same time he is by nature a recluse. He is that in spite of the patriotic social duties during the fulfilment of which the majority of his books were written, and even in spite of his zeal for Swiss assemblies. He is an eavesdropper; not in the sense in which a lyric poet may be called one, to whom every outward movement becomes an inward emotion, but rather as the born thinker whose sympathies live in all that moves around him, and whose own life is such still water that every picture cast upon it is clearly reflected. His affections are no dangerous whirlpool, but a quiet sympathetic companionship, to which meeting and parting are not the cause of any heartbreaking commotions.
This is the reason why Keller is not a writer suited for summer sportsmen who breathe in the country air as though they would like to lay in a store, and who wish the sun to shine full upon them.
His chosen confidants are those who are accustomed to spend their lives in the open air.
This devotee of the open air had his circle whom he described and his circle whom he did not describe. The circle whom he did not describe consisted of those who were born ladies, and them he left severely alone. But if, on a special occasion, he finds them necessary for some incident which must be told, he arranges it so that he may have the opportunity of rebuking them, as with Lucie in the book already mentioned, _Pankraz, the Cynic_, or as in the case of the busybodies in the story of poor Regina. When he describes ladies with sympathy, as in _The Governor of Greifensee_, he transfers them into a period at least a century ago and places them in the open air.
The women with whom Keller consents to have any dealings must allow themselves to be placed in the open air. Freshness by candle-light has no attraction for him, and as for beauty in a drawing-room--he is suspicious of it. Out they must go, without gloves and veils, stiff collars or steeled stays, without any of the paraphernalia to which modern literature is generally so much addicted. If you can allow yourself to be looked at full in the eyes, with sleeves tucked up and crumpled--then and only then Gottfried Keller may perhaps stop to consider whether it is possible to write about you.
Gottfried Keller’s portraits are nearly all open-air studies, and Gottfried Keller’s women are nearly all lovers of the open air.
There are wonderful disclosures in his great portrait gallery; we find there the women whom he loved as well as the women whom he hated. Wherever he describes a virtuous, happy, loving, teasing, laughing woman; wherever he pictures Eve in whom Adam finds his happiness, or Eve who finds her happiness in Adam, the decisive moment is sure to take place in the open air, for the scenes out of doors are the principal points in his writings, the principal points in the soul-harmonies of his characters, the moments when love steps forth from her concealment and the lovers understand one another. _Romeo and Juliet in the Village_ spend their wedding day out-of-doors; the neighbour’s children in _The Company of the Seven Just Men_ devise their plan of association out-of-doors; the married couple in _The Lost Smile_ meet again out-of-doors, after having been separated by various domestic circumstances; in the _Misused Love Letter_, the innocent little woman comes to the still more innocent little schoolmaster out-of-doors; the heroine in _Ursula_ regains her senses during the fearful night spent out-of-doors; in _Dietegen_, the situation between the hero and his lady-love reaches its climax out-of-doors; _Fran Amrain_, when she has an affair of importance to discuss with her son, always goes to look for him out-of-doors; and nearly every time that _Green Henry_ feels his heart beat for a woman, it is out-of-doors. With Keller all good people are lovers of the open air.