II
There is an old word that was often used in Germany during the merry days of the Renaissance, and it had a beautiful sound, although at that time its actual signification may not have been beautiful. It is the word Courage-giver. The expression first came into use among the knights of the German Order in Prussia and Livonia at the time when history tells us of their downfall, i.e. when asceticism began to decline. When a knight of that period had sufficient disregard for his eternal salvation to procure himself a lady-love, he called her his Courage-giver, because she gave him renewed courage. But as soon as the Lutheran pastors, with their protestant ideas about conversion and discipline, opposed this being who was not acknowledged in the service-book, the good word came to have an evil sound. But when one wishes to describe Keller’s women, the old word suggests itself again, for his women are good Courage-givers; they are bright as a spring morning which expands the heart and rejoices the soul of man, refreshing as the first verdure of the year, and sweet as the young, juicy grass of the meadows.
Where did Keller learn to know these women who are such genuinely natural beings, such harmonious, unspoilt, sensitive natures? Where did he first see Judith, little Meret, his village Juliet, and the numerous other revelations in his portrait gallery? In this respect, Gottfried Keller stands alone and unequalled by any in his century.
We have only to turn to the classics. Schiller’s woman was composed of little else than a long skirt, and the same may be said of his entire progeny of sentimental and pathetic dramatists extending down to our own time. If one took away the skirt there was something underneath it which bore a strong resemblance to a young man, a being who was half a man in its actions and feelings, just as the women in Lessing’s dramas are, for the most part, dialecticians in veils and stays. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this there were no less than an entire group of authors who were remarkable for their inability to create women, and they tried to make up for it by introducing their own nature into that of the opposite sex. Even Kleist sometimes resorted to this method. It was the origin of all their heroines who inspirited men to brave deeds and encouraged the faint-hearted, from the Maid of Orleans onwards, they were nothing but men split in half; the authors personified their own grand qualities and then contrasted them with their own weaknesses in the person of the woman.
The century advanced, and woman in German literature was and remained the superior being, the exalted being, the more loving being; it was always she who was the most energetic in love and who led the way to action. Compare the writings of Gutzkow and Spielhagen. It was woman who made man happy with the gift of her love, it was she who condescended to the worshipping man, while he rejoiced in her love without exactly understanding it. Woman stood upon a pedestal, indescribable, incomprehensible, she was “the exalted woman.” Some partial authors designated her in high-flown language as “sublime.” This sublime woman, whom men were made to worship with an ecstatic reverence, played a favourite part in the novels of second-rate authors and authoresses whose works were most popular in lending libraries.
There was not the faintest trace of anything of this sort in Keller’s novels. There was no perverseness there, no amazement, no holding up of the hands in adoration. There were none of those strange moods which a man is said to respect although he cannot understand them, and which have provided a subject for many volumes, and problems for as many authors.
In his representation of woman, Keller very nearly falls out of the frame of this sentimental period.
What can be the cause of it? What was the sombre influence which failed to influence him, while it united the other writers of the different schools, the writers of the classical age, of young Germany and of the older period? Why is it that he is almost the only one in whom there lurks no trace of the bombast style or the high-flown phrases of the “storm and stress” and the eight-and-forty period?
The answer to both these questions is the same. He is, so far as my knowledge extends, the only one among all the German writers of the century who has either wholly escaped from, or been completely unsusceptible to, the Rousseau epidemic in its various forms of inoculation.
This undoubtedly proves Keller’s superiority to the other authors, both as an individual and as a man with regard to women.
It was Rousseau who introduced the worship of woman into literature, and likewise her superiority, and her resemblance to man.
There were, as we ascertain from reading Rousseau’s Confessions, not only psychological but also physiological reasons to account for this, and here the modern student of culture may find fresh ground for enquiry.
Rousseau was the author who introduced something entirely new. It was Rousseau, the half Frenchman, who introduced the element of high-sounding sentimentality into a literature which had hitherto known nothing of it. It was Rousseau, the bourgeois with the character of a plebeian, who introduced a new class into literature, a class which had grown up in a time of revolution; it was he who introduced the feelings of a plebeian in relation to a woman of higher birth than himself.
This man was one of those by no means rare specimens of persons who are born with perverse sexual instincts, who have more than once been known to exercise a secret influence on the direction of human thought and feeling. He could not feel as a man in relation to a woman, he felt strongest towards her as her offspring, her subject, her slave. He felt impelled to raise her above him and to amalgamate love with filial affection, and this was how the “exalted woman” found her way into literature.
Rousseau influenced the younger writers of Germany. The literature of the ancien régime, which had helped to form the early youth of Lessing and Goethe, had been frivolous and chivalrous, but not in any way distorted. It was Rousseau who introduced the distorted element, intermingled with his theories about liberty and fresh air, for in this latter respect he was as Swiss as Keller.
The younger writers became filled with revolutionary ideas, they went into ecstasies over Rousseau and wrote like him. The impulses which he had inspired continued to bear fruit in the works of popular writers long after the Germany of our century had ceased to read him.
The number of ideas will not bear comparison with the number of their promulgators. It is a well-known fact that a very few commonplace ideas are sufficient to nourish the intellect, for ideas in themselves are of no great importance however much they may be pushed to the fore. Impulses are of chief importance. Ideas have only to do with thinking, but impulses distrain body and mind alike, and a given impulse is like an acoustic vibration which ebbs and flows in numberless vibrations, and dies away so gradually that one cannot say for certain when it has stopped. Yet an impulse may be the result of mere chance, and it is so generally. A young, strong, excitable race, in which the strength of generations is collected, stands waiting for an indefinable “something” which shall correspond with its embryo condition. This “something” comes, and the fruitful soil procreates it over and over again, until the land is exhausted by the same seed and reproduces it weaker and weaker. A new literature is always accompanied by a new conception of woman, because woman is the author’s chief point, and in that respect he is like the bird in spring who sings as he goes in search of his little mate. Yet Rousseau’s personal views of woman, united as they were with a national temperament which was full of deep feeling, though without much faculty for observation, was destined to bear fruit for a hundred years in a literature where a thousand figures bear witness to their origin.
When the German Empire was founded, German literature became extinct. Germany became the land of manhood par préférence, and the worship of woman was treated as a myth at which people sceptically shook their heads. But in the fundamental conception of social democracy the myth descends upon the earth under another form.
Perhaps it is because all eyes are now turned in a different direction that no one has noticed the inner freedom, the inconceivable stamp of personality that betrays itself in the manner in which Keller gazes at woman. That Keller does not reflect with her, that he does not idealise her, these are the distinctive features which form as it were a key to the right comprehension of Keller’s women.
If we examine his characters one by one they will soon shew us of what material they were made.
Gottfried Keller had two starting points from whence he depicted woman, and which appear to have come so naturally to him that it is impossible to suppose that they cost him much thought; we, however, give them our attention, because, in the first place, we are in search of another literary basis, and, secondly, because on these two points he is essentially a child of the age with which he otherwise has little in common. One of his starting points is the simplification of life and of woman, and the restriction of the same to decided, easily varied, and primitive forms. To this many will object that the scheming thus involved is a mistake with which Keller, least of all men, deserves to be reproached, for he is essentially one of Germany’s richest authors and the one who possesses most strongly the creative faculty. But for that very reason, because he is rich, it is all the more important to examine his works and to discover how small is the amount of material hitherto made use of in the literature, not only of Germany, but also of France and Scandinavia. Keller introduced the true and authentic psychology of a healthy woman, of whom he himself says in Ursula: “She was like a little spot of fruitful soil which turns green again as soon as it is refreshed by a ray of sunshine and a drop of dew.” This psychology originated with simple conditions of life and less complicated personalities than those which surround us nowadays, when fifty years have gone by since Keller’s youth—youth being the most impressionable period of human life. Whenever we stop to observe the characters of people who have attained to a certain height of spiritual culture, with whom I do not include the inhabitants of towns, because they are out of the question in a discussion on Keller, but country people and the dwellers in small villages,—we find that in Switzerland, as in other parts of Europe, we need only to probe to the hidden depths of human nature to discover outstanding personalities in women, even amongst those living in the plainest and least artificial surroundings.
This is easily accounted for by the fact that our facilities for gaining a personal knowledge of one another have greatly increased of late years, and also that our capacity for reading the text of human nature has developed itself both in breadth and depth. Our self-consciousness has become wide awake, our personal needs are more complicated, and our understanding of one another is finer and more flexible than it used to be, while our feelings in general have become more sensitive and we are more easily moved than formerly. What before Keller’s time were whole notes with a stop, became with Keller half notes dwelling long on an even tone, and are now an irritating rising and falling of semiquavers which require a finer ear and between which the pauses are fewer. Our notion of health itself has undergone continual changes, and is changing still. With Keller it signifies something symmetrical, something which changes unwillingly and then only to spring back again into what it was at first. It is health in the abstract, something universal and typical and authentic, but which would not suffice for the present creative characteristic, since we know to how many oscillations, to how much heaviness, discomfort and suffering, even the most vigorous health is subject; moreover, we know that health in other words is really nothing but a certain overplus of vital energy which helps us on to our legs again every time that we succumb. But as for meaning anything absolute, continuous and unbroken, as in the case of animal life—that, although it may have been Keller’s meaning, is not health in the sense that we understand it now.
The literature which bases its creations on this interpretation of human nature is now only in its first groping beginnings; the authors whose nerves are as a sensitive, stringed instrument are scarce indeed—there are but one or two.
Keller, who is the most modern writer of the old school, always describes woman as normally healthy, whereas the modern French authors describe her as being always ill; it was they who introduced the great army of détraquées, in the same way as the modern Scandinavians continually describe the emancipated woman in her various phases. But, after all, these are only features on the surface of time, opinions without foundation, rays without focus, they are old ways and old methods in new and cheap clothing. Our object is to pursue the outward phenomena to their physiological roots, and to unravel the intricate skeins which have woven themselves out of the physical qualifications of woman in her conflict with the laws and influences of the surrounding world. For woman, as regards her outward surroundings, is the most dependent creature upon earth, while as regards her natural disposition, she is the most self-willed. A true poet ought to understand this without being told. And as it happens the poets have all written a verse upon it and have altered the text to make it suit; this they have done out of a manly love of theorising—with or without experience of life. But the modern French writers, like the modern Scandinavians, looked chiefly into their own little corner of the world and studied the little extract of life against which it was their luck to run their noses. It was an author’s experience, and nothing more!
Old Gottfried Keller saw considerably further, but then he was not a writer with a purpose.
It was not that he had absorbed himself too deeply in the physiological question, but rather that it shone through everything he wrote. It went with him according to the Biblical saying of the many who run in vain, while the children of Heaven are given it in their sleep. He never racked his brains about it, and with advancing years the gift naturally forsook him also, and when he thought over it in order to make a motive, as with the religious insanity of Ursula, or the hereditary madness of Leu, there was naturally not much scope left for individuality. Yet if he did but glance at a real live woman with thoughtful and contented eyes, all her physical and intellectual endowments seemed to shine through her. We have only to think of Judith and little Meret, both of whom we have already mentioned, but especially of the woman in the Seven Legends. The natural impulses, the instinct which makes a woman of her, the plus or minus of the sensitive faculty and of individual feeling, the marked nobility or peculiar perverseness, each resting on its own physiological foundation, are clearly discernible in every one of Keller’s women; let us recall, for instance, the gentle approach of old-maid-dom in the intellectual and cultivated Lux (An Epigram), the missionary zeal of the anæmic Afra Zigonia in the story of Herr Zwiehahn (Green Henry), Frau Litumlei’s indolent obsequiousness, and good Frau Amrain’s suppression of sexual feeling after her unhappy marriage, etc.