We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

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.