We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

II

If we are matured women, we read Heyse as those who know; if we are child-women, we read him as a guide. Heyse is not one of those who convey strong impressions to feed the hunger of impatient youth; the external events, the comings and goings of his heroes and heroines, and their names and destinies do not remain long in the memory. What does remain is an emotional feeling, something that words are powerless to describe, but which returns as often as we read him. And the day comes when an event in our lives causes it to return again with more force than before, and with advancing years it begins to personify womanly nature and to weigh good and evil according to an unknown standard; later on there comes again another day when this emotion comes forth from the unknown and reveals itself to consciousness, not to the consciousness of the mind, and not exactly to the consciousness of the soul, but to a corporeal consciousness, strange as it may sound. The time has now come when this consciousness must rule woman’s most private life in accordance with laws which do not appear in connection with the outer world, with impressions which custom has never foreseen, and with sensations of attraction and repulsion which no longer make themselves feebly felt as of old. Woman has become conscious of her own personality, she has become manifest to herself, she has attained the consciousness of her own nobility, she has discovered a foundation for the expression of her desire to love and be loved. This basis of the relations between man and woman is not an outward form, it is a physical condition, it is a sensitive expression of being, it is the greatness of the soul.

Paul Heyse is the only German author who has made this greatness of the soul in erotic matters the chief point in his philosophy of life, and he is the only one who has revealed it as the point of sensibility in the relations between man and woman.

It was owing to the fact that he introduced this characteristic into literature and into the consciousness of the period, thereby making it the foundation of an entire literature, that he became something more than a German author. He became a world-wide celebrity, one of the few through whom a new step in sensations has found expression, and through whom humanity has achieved a marked progress on the road to culture. I will not speak of all that Heyse has been to the best women. I will not speak of all that it signified to these women, when, on their spiritual and physical awakening in this world of barren conventions, they were met by a man who, with one stroke of the magic wand of his intuitive faculty for divining, awoke the hot spring which is woman’s one and only possession, the source of her genius and of her whole character, her spiritualised, harmonised sexuality. Where and in what other nation has there ever been a writer who awoke this spring? Not even the susceptible Paul Bourget, who has been feeling after it for so long, not even he found it, not one of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who write so philosophically, humorously and sensibly, not even they discovered it, not even the otherwise so tender-hearted Dickens ever had the slightest suspicion of it. And as far as the Scandinavians are concerned—with one single exception—the Danes are the only ones who deserve any attention with regard to erotics, and even in the midst of their refined, purified tenderness, there is a cold spot, something which resembles a damp fog in the innermost heart of their susceptibility; for them love is always more or less of an artificial matter, an æsthetic satisfaction, a satisfaction or enjoyment which is self-analytical. But in Paul Heyse the nature of passion remains dark as the night in which one loves, unreflected as all spontaneous impulses, unconscious as the love in German folk-songs. Think of the tale of Laurence and Laura which sounds like some primeval melody issuing from the soul of the German people. It contains nothing transcendental, for while we would speak of it with all tender respect, we must own that it is the expression of an entirely sensuous yearning. At a certain period of his authorship Heyse’s writings were as simple as these half-forgotten folk-songs; he explained, from the point of view of a noble nature, that eternal schism betwixt body and soul which has ever been the favourite subject of coarser writers, he has explained it as a peaceful, boundless and unconscious emotion whereby a person is transported into the love which has neither beginning nor end, every phase of which and every form of expression—the purely spiritual as well as the purely physical—is equally sweet, equally refreshing, and is always the same breath of life which cannot be explained and cannot be imparted. The self-surrender is complete and unhesitating, because spiritual passion does not end with the physical purpose; the soul which exists only in the other is humble, as all that is noble must ever be in the presence of the Incommensurable—which is Love.

Love is the Incommensurable; who has ever said that before, who has ever felt it? In the early folk-songs it has been both said and felt, and Goethe has declared it in the loving and playful manner of the eighteenth century, but in our youngest literature, and not only in that of Germany, it is scarcely ever either said or felt. In its place we have free love, where they take one another on trial and end by settling down for convenience’s sake, after the third or fourth attempt. It is a practical and plebeian method, worthy of the age, but it is not love. What stolid minds and dense souls must they have who need first to take one another on trial! For these thick-skinned ones love is an intellectual partnership, or a partnership of interests; maybe they are two libertines who have come across one another in their search for satisfaction. Of course these forms are the most frequent, but they lie on the boundary between barbarism and decadence and are constantly losing their balance on one side or the other.

The love which Paul Heyse saw and described is vitality itself. With him love is the essence of vitality, and as the entire philosophy of life is based on that which one feels to be the spark of vitality, so love is the central point in his philosophy. He always describes love as an extraordinary revelation of accumulated strength and power. Love does not hesitate, does not lead astray, does not diminish; as soon as love appears she makes straight for the beloved object whose presence she discerns amongst thousands the instant that he enters the circle of her atmosphere. No sooner does she find herself in the presence of the beloved, to whom she is thus sympathetically attracted, than she becomes the victim of a peculiar emotion which Heyse has never expressed in words, and which it would be very difficult to describe. It is an ardent yearning, a stretching of oneself like the plant to the sun, silent and not to be averted; all the activities of life concentrate themselves towards this one object, the attainment of which means a hitherto unknown force, while the reverse would mean decay. There is no alternative, it must be either an indescribable salvation, or else extinction. To be susceptible of this kind of love and, with the certainty of one who walks in his sleep, to discover the beloved as the one who is organically sympathetic amid thousands whom we either dislike or who are indifferent to us—is the sure sign of a very high culture and of a rare physical and spiritual purity. Just as the instincts of natural selection are being continually perfected together with more sensitive nerves and soul vibrations, just as the spiritual and sensuous needs attain a higher degree of intensity and importance in measure as they are purified and rendered more personal, so in like manner the unhesitating precision of the instinct of selection, which is the latest quality attained, is the first which the approach of degeneration causes to disappear. In the contemporary literature of Russia, France, and Scandinavia we possess a whole row of extraordinarily good, analytical sketches of these degenerates. The majority of the principal characters in these exquisite psychological studies are no longer able to love, and Paul Bourget has introduced a peculiar type to which these belong. Or else they are not yet able to love for want of spiritual and physical culture—Garborg and Strindberg have made these their special study. On the one side we have degeneration, on the other barbarism, and sometimes a mixture of both. Heyse is the only writer who has described the capacity and necessity for loving which are the organic conditions of love; but as he is not an analyst, and perhaps only an unconscious psychologist, he is not able to tell us why it is that his creations are so permeated with ardent love that his best characters are nothing else but love intensified and personified.

Does he really not know it? Or is it that he will not tell us? Perhaps it does not suit the technical method upon which his talent is formed. Deep though the analytical powers of our modern psychologists are, their human perception is shallow in the extreme. With him there is no analysis, but his perception is clear as truth itself. Our best modern Europeans have not yet got beyond realising the fact that love is a necessity which it is more or less difficult to satisfy; he leaves the necessity on one side as being too obvious to need exemplifying. He does not concern himself as to whether or not it is there, he asks how it can be satisfied, satisfied in that choice manner which a refined and spiritualised sensibility requires. From this point of view he is the most modern of modern writers, and for him love becomes the Incommensurable.

The question is now no longer whether it is or is not possible to live happily together, but whether the one finds that other with whom marriage means rapture and bliss. The union of souls must be complete, otherwise separation will ensue. These are the requirements of the highest culture, and of persons who are possessed of a truly noble personality.

Heyse never wearied of describing this noble personality from every possible point of view, and every time he did it with more or less success. He described it in the early dawn of day when the awakening senses are shy and reserved in the presence of the strange mystical power which shall decide their fate. He has described it in the quiet, fatalistic waiting for the great revelation of life which may come, or may perhaps never come, since it is not in the power of man to force it. He has described it in that inner self-destruction when the soul, through its own fault or that of another, tarnishes its proud righteousness and can no longer be a law unto itself. He has described it in the evening glow, by which it lets itself be illuminated and consumed. And all these characters have the greatest self-sufficiency combined with the immutable conviction of their dependence on fate. There is a peaceful feeling about them all, a peace which results from the consciousness of a great, universal destiny; and there is a certain self-esteem about them too which comes from the knowledge that they are free from all outer circumstances, from all silly, trivial, commonplace bonds and conventions in the great hour of Eros. People have tried to see the Epigoni in Heyse, who, according to the old receipt, raised his people above their natural circumstances, and let them grow beyond their natural size. But I think they are mistaken. I would sooner believe that the studies in erotics which we have hitherto possessed, excellent and circumstantial though they be, are utterly worthless as regards their psychology. It depends on the writer, not on the things themselves. And I believe that Paul Heyse’s way of letting his people evolve out of a state of dependence—just as the kernel drops from the shell—shews a peculiarly deep psychology productive of a rich future. In my opinion psychology is now only in its first rude beginnings, and the deeper laws of the psycho-physiological life only casually appear above the surface as though by guesswork.