III
Keller preferred to describe women, and he did it with the greatest ease. We can tell by the construction of his sentences how smoothly the work developed under his touch, and how easily everything found its way into its proper place without exertion on his part or any need for serious thought; whereas with his male characters, or those of them at least who were not of a purely superficial nature, it was by no means such an easy task. The thread knotted and broke where one least expected it, and the texture became unequal and lost its freshness as though it had been woven by hot and trembling fingers. They were a trouble to him, not a pleasure, and when we see Keller turning a sudden somersault in the middle of one of his most serious passages, we may feel assured that he did it, not out of arrogance, but in order to make good his escape. He had one characteristic which must have been as common in ancient times as it is at present, although it may have sprung from a too individual refinement to find room for expression, it was a characteristic which is common enough among young lyric poets whom it generally leads to their downfall, while Keller, because he had just missed being a lyric poet, was able to provide it with a warm and sheltered corner where it might grow in secret. It consisted in that species of love for women which produces great erotic geniuses, where human longing is mingled with a capacity for spiritual affection, the body is permeated by the soul, desire is purified, and spiritual affection itself vibrates with desire. From a condition such as this, with its great expectations and still greater disappointments, the bitterest women-haters may be evolved. But it is rare, or at least it seldom comes into the light of day, and in the case of Gottfried Keller it was probably only a latent characteristic. It was there none the less. We can distinguish it in Green Henry, the story of his own youth, in the strange way by which he is attracted by woman and longs to be near her and to breathe her atmosphere, while at the same time he is filled with mistrust for the only woman who loves him passionately, as Judith does. He is afraid of wasting his abundance on a desert soil which gives him nothing in return, he has an instinctive misgiving that he must become inseparable from the one with whom he is united, a foreboding that he is one of love’s elect—a susceptible stringed instrument, a being with sensitive nerves which awake the impulse and then hold him back. In the second edition of Green Henry, which was published in Keller’s old age, he added the end of the story of Judith, which describes his personal manner of giving and receiving love. It was this love, which was not continued long enough for him to weary of it, to which he owed his unequalled comprehension of women. His need of woman made her the continual subject of his dreams and caused his fancies to take shape whenever he wrote of her. It was to this that he owed a very peculiar quality which shows itself in his autobiographical story, Green Henry; it lent him that incomparable diagnosis of woman, which, with its purely intuitive grasp of the everlasting variable, would have made of him a woman’s doctor of the first rank, if he had not had too much of the poet and the artist in him; while the absence of this same attribute is the cause of the grossest blunders in the majority of women’s doctors, who regard the sensitive woman with a feeling partly of disgust and partly as though she were a comic figure.
It was this also which made him sensitive and harsh with regard to any malformations in woman, enabling him to detect every abnormity. If he came upon any such thing in the act of blossoming, his anger knew no bounds, he would have liked to strip naked the poisonous vermin and to beat it across the country from frontier to frontier, had such punishment been consistent with the laws of our civilisation.
There was one satisfaction, however, which he would not allow himself to be deprived of. He warned the public against the outrages of the woman’s rights movement which was then in its infancy, and thus he became the forerunner of his Scandinavian colleague Strindberg.
I have already remarked that there was one special peculiarity in Keller’s great romance, Green Henry, and I must add that it was one which puzzled me for years. It was the hero’s passiveness with regard to women and the insignificant position which he occupied as an active agent. There was no lack of opportunity, for he was obviously one of those young men who possess a strong attraction for the Eves of the opposite sex. Anna tries gently to tempt him, Judith takes him by force, while the forlorn Agnes nearly dies of love for him and silently offers herself, thereby claiming compensation for her injured soul; the starving sempstress is also willing, and so is little Dorothy of the iron image. But Green Henry is never seen to move. He goes about amongst them like a sleep-walker and appears to have no other sensations than such as are caused by a heavy heart. It was not until long afterwards, when I became acquainted with another erotic writer and had read his writings, that I understood this characteristic feature in all its sincerity.
There are a whole row of erotic writers who belong to what we might call the pseudo-erotic school. They are the conquerors, the “Tannhäusers.” They recount their adventures and place them in their true light, and themselves also; they think both of themselves and their listeners. Woman is to them an object, which they possess—the rosebud, which they pluck. They are the vainglorious who boast of love, and whom the multitude run after. The others have positively nothing to say, they feel in silence, they experience in silence, they are sparing of their words because their hearts overflow. They do not magnify their own importance, because for them life is everything, and woman the only object of their interest and their study. Keller was erotic in this sense, and that is why Green Henry is so feebly drawn. His experiences were unconscious ones, but his impressions were a surprise to him and he was deeply conscious of them. This is the reason why in nearly all writings where love and woman are revealed to man, the man seems to fall into the background.
There is a good deal of the Sensitiva-amorosa nature about Keller, though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too. It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself in Green Henry, in The Governor of Greifensee, and in other places besides. His longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results. He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting in Green Henry takes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it becomes quite a cheerful event in the Governor of Greifensee, and the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe so vividly the intellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman—that emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, in The Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow. Or when it becomes apparent that the man does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for example: Salome. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.
There is another Sensitiva-amorosa trait which is that love makes us sad and melancholy. For those who are real erotic geniuses, love is not a trifle to occupy their spare moments, they cannot leave her at intervals and then follow their professions holding their heads high. No, they cannot hold their heads high, that is just it; love takes them entirely by surprise, she has no mercy and no pity; those who have had other experience may rest content, for evidently they have never known what it is to love. Love pursues her victim like fate, and he sinks beneath her powerful grasp. He wanders in darkness as though it were night, while she is all in all to him, and everything else is forgotten. This is why Green Henry remains in the Count’s castle, under the spell of graceful, cunning little Dorothy, when he ought to have been on his way to the poor mother who was dying of sorrow. He can do nothing unless her eyes rest upon his work, and for this reason he can paint pictures for the Count although he cannot write a letter to his mother. He describes his love for Dorothy in the deep symbol of an iron image which feels like a heavy burden that he bears continually in his heart. But in the midst of this enchantment his inner self struggles for freedom; his sensitive nature is conscious of not having experienced the fervent affection of which it is capable, his love is not sufficiently intense for him to give himself up entirely. This fervent affection for which he seeks, and in which he feels that he can rest without compulsion and without loss to himself, this his sensitive nature finds at last in Judith.
Judith is the woman, the apocalypse of woman even for Keller, the embodiment of warm-hearted sympathy. In this woman, of whom he wrote at two different periods of his life, are united all his most fantastic ideas about women, together with all his most personal experiences. She is the most daring revelation of love that German literature, with its strict conventions, possesses. She is considerably older than Green Henry, and Keller is not in the least afraid of saying so. She is a woman in the full bloom of life, who has reached the age when a strong healthy woman is the most attractive, and Green Henry is eighteen years old. These contrasts, who are mutually attracted to one another, are frequent everywhere except in the literature of Germany. But the cause of this mutual attraction is by no means the most elevated; Judith is a mature, sensuous woman and Green Henry is an immature, sensuous youth. She has lived amongst coarse-grained peasants and is very coarse-grained herself; but when she comes in contact with Henry’s more refined and complicated nature, she becomes a thorough woman, i.e. plastic material. Judith has none of that innate stupidity which so often causes the woman to maintain her ascendancy over the man, to the destruction of his happiness. At first she is imperious and exacting, but as she sees more of Green Henry she gradually changes into a loving woman, by which I mean a self-subjecting woman, for a woman who loves cannot do otherwise than subject herself. He goes into the world, she goes to America. Keller does not tell us much about her while she is there. Time passes and Green Henry comes home, a Sensitiva and poetic nature with whom the world has dealt harshly. His vitality is slackened and he feels depressed. Judith meets him, after having sought for him as one whom love has bewitched, who cannot forget; hers is the love of a strong, whole-hearted woman, smitten in the depths of her nature, willing to cast everything aside if only she may love. Her love has nothing to offer, and she does not believe that she can make him happy, she only begs in silence to be allowed to remain with him, for he is all she has in the world. She makes no stipulation, she asks for no outward sign, she requires no vindication in the eyes of mankind, he is free to come and go when he will. Green Henry can endure love after this manner, and they love one another.
In the story of little Meret, Keller probes deeper still into the nature of woman. Little Meret is Judith over again in the person of a martyred child; it is Judith’s nature in the bud.
In the first volume of Green Henry, Keller informs us that he found the story of poor little Meret among the papers of an orthodox pastor in the beginning of the eighteenth century; but according to Bächtold, in Keller’s Letters, she seems to have been an invention of his own. However this may be, the story of little Meret, the witch-child, is the most valuable contribution towards a study of the psychology of the child-woman that we possess in German literature.
In this story Keller displayed the secret nature of the child-woman in its rarest perfection and vitality, which is a thing that a man can scarcely understand and which no woman likes to talk about. It is one of those revelations which belong only to him who is born a poet in soul and nerves and every fibre of his being, born an unconscious poet, by which I mean an intuitive seer. In this child, tormented to death, is displayed the primeval trait, the innermost kernel of woman’s nature, and the woman of genius in the bud is made visible. Little Meret possesses the one quality, the only one through which woman is more nearly related to nature than man, it is a carefully concealed quality, seen only by the few, but which for ever shuts out the woman from outward conformity with the man, and which is the key to her most secret, most mysterious witchcraft—her wildness. The best and the worst women are not docile and tameable, they are not capable of being cultivated and civilised like man—such are only women of middling quality—they are ungovernable, irreverent, full of instinct, nothing but feminine instinct. Whence should come the regeneration of humanity, unless it be from the unused sources of nature, the source of woman’s unconscious glory? Whence should proceed the mysterious power of loving, with love’s inexplicable dominion over souls, unless it be from the unfathomable, the incomprehensible nature of woman, with her utter disregard for law and justice and all the rest of the intricate building of commonsense upon which human society is founded? Owing to her physiological structure woman is a creature of instinct, and this instinct is her most precious possession, the heritage which she bequeaths to future generations; it is always the same instinct, whether it reveals itself in an evil race of feminine malefactors such as Strindberg’s women, or in the richly gifted specimens of Keller’s apocalypse of woman: Judith and little Meret. They are not to be forced in either case! They are all children of nature.
Judith finds the man to whom it is natural to submit herself of her own free will. Little Meret is hunted to death because she refuses to submit herself to a stupid and ignorant training, and one morning they find her lying naked and dead in the garden. She preferred to freeze to death there than to live indoors, in a hideous, unbecoming, penitential dress. Here we have the genius of the child-woman to whom her sense of beauty and the consciousness of her power to charm is her one and only possession. Here lies the true genius of woman; all her intellectual powers and all her strivings after outward emancipation are unnatural invasions into the territory of man.
Keller kept a sharp and malicious eye fixed on what we might call the hybrid type of humanity. For him it possessed the attraction of a repulsive object, and he would not let it escape him. As a man who was born sensitive and erotic, to whom woman was a necessity and a delight, he held all such in abhorrence. The same instinct which enabled him to describe little Meret, that nervous child of the Renaissance, gave him the power to understand those abnormities of whose true nature the clever men of our time are so ignorant that they do their utmost to encourage them. It is true that social problems were far simpler in Keller’s day, he for instance knew nothing of the daily bread question, and when he saw any trace of it, he laughed it to scorn, as in the case of the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler, who trained their daughters as governesses and companions, and then cheated the poor creatures out of the hard-earned savings which they had received in return for their squandered lives.
But the times when Keller attacked these women in solemn earnest was when they brought their intellectual or artistic pretensions before his notice. In the story of poor Regina there is a lady artist who is a manlike, priggish creature, only there to be the misfortune of others. Keller in his indignation has not spared the trouble to describe her character with many carefully studied details. She is the woman with a profession who “no longer wants man.”
In another passage, in the Seven Legends, he describes the learned woman who does not wish to have any dealings with men, who despises love, and makes copy out of her male companions.
She ends by becoming a monk and abbot in a monastery. But one day “she felt with a bitter sorrow that she was thrust out from a more beautiful world,” and if she, after having arrived at this understanding, did not share the same fate as Strindberg’s Miss Julia, she had only to thank the nobler character of the man whom she chanced to meet.
Keller speculated a great deal upon these hybrid beings. Not only on the turning of women into men by manly occupations, of which England and Scandinavia have provided numerous instances during the last quarter of the present century, but he also touched upon a more profound, and as yet scarcely explored territory, the stages of transition between man and woman and the combination of the two characters in the same person. The anecdote of the Emperor Nero, who dressed himself like a woman, and insisted that he was going to have a child, gave him a great deal to think about. His poetic insight extended over the whole territory of organic phenomena, and his instinct was too true to dismiss that which might have a physical explanation with less thought than that which was a purely mental trouble. In those most precious pearls, his Seven Legends, the relation of the sexes is the foundation for every single story. Every time it is a woman with a perverted soul, one who in consequence of some inward or outward influence has relinquished her feminine nature. A woman may err as much as she likes, provided she does it naturally, but should she act contrary to her nature as a woman, Keller will never forgive her. In every legend he introduces a Bible or Church tenet to which he gives a profane interpretation.
In this mischievous little book the Holy Virgin, contrary to all traditions, comes to the fore as an enthusiastic matchmaker, and disdains no means whereby she may bring together two silly people who do not know how to manage the matter for themselves. A pious monk is alienated from the Church by a little girl who is desirous of marrying him. An hysterical saint makes a love-lorn youth as hysterical as herself; and even the muses go astray in Paradise and behave in such a manner that the Holy Trinity is obliged to silence them by a loud clap of thunder.
In the midst of these distorted elements, the history of the nun “who went out of the convent to quiet her longing” is great and strong as the everlasting evangel of the fulfilment of human love. In these stories we have human love itself in a plain but mighty symbol—spring with its storms bursting its obtruding bonds, summer with its hot raptures, autumn with its fruits, and winter with its calm.