IV
These three fundamental principles form the standpoint from whence Heyse regarded humanity. Humanity, did I say? I mean women, for he is essentially their author. He has been accused of writing for women only and not for men, and it is said that he cannot describe the latter. But with regard to that I should like to point out that he has been the teacher and model of some of the best Scandinavian writers, and the only model which they found in Germany. The construction of his novels and the grace of his diction won him several followers in young Denmark, where his influence is clearly discernible, but in Germany he had no followers, for he is altogether inimitable; thus he remained alone in his home on the mountain of culture where, although he was much admired and much enjoyed, he was as a tower without access to the critical understanding and to the authors who succeeded him. As for the accusation of his being unable to describe men, the reason is probably this, that in comparison with the depth and directness of his comprehension of women, his men appear commonplace and uninteresting.
They nearly all seem a mere secondary consideration, and to exist only as the indispensable background and emotional force for woman. This gives one the impression that Heyse is not interested in man as a whole, but only in that side of him whereby his peculiar sensibility is brought into contact with woman, and through which his entire nervous system is set in motion. Paul Heyse’s man is seldom the one who makes the choice; it is nearly always the woman who gives the first impulse. The man usually remains long in a state of stupid wonderment, understanding nothing, while the woman who loves him has great difficulty in making herself understood.
This is an extremely delicate psychological feature. For man the choice is not the matter of chief importance, but for woman it is. A man, however refined and cultured, could be quite happy with twenty or thirty women who were entirely different from one another, and he could feel himself warmly attracted by any one of them without his strongest emotions being stirred or his whole existence responding; but for a woman the absolute in love is the greatest, the only great event in her life. For this reason the superior woman will always be the chooser, she will always realise what the man is to her long before he knows it; her silent love will always be the first attraction and will bind him as it were with a thousand invisible cords, while the strange atmosphere which proceeds from her will wrap him round like the tremulous mist on a hot summer’s noon. Yet at first he does not, except under the most propitious circumstances, understand that this woman is sympathetic to him, but when the secret workings of organic attraction have completed themselves, he suddenly awakes to find that he is surrounded by a great and ardent love. In those rare cases when a man loves with the whole passion of his nature, and when his love is not, as it is oftenest described, and in our time of cultured barbarism too often is, a perverseness—i.e. love for a woman who has frequently experienced love already—in those rare cases it is always the woman who gives the first impulse, and in Heyse’s writings it is invariably the woman. In order to awake a deep, lasting and spiritual emotion in man, a woman needs more than mere physical attraction, she needs a spiritualised womanliness with all the enduring charm of its indestructible intensity. The Incommensurable in love is not a primeval quality in man as it is in woman; a man may have great nobility of soul and yet be able to exist without it, whereas a woman cannot. For her it is the primal condition of her being; for him it is an unexpected, charmed light, illumining his whole existence.
The Author in a Cul-de-sac
Henrik Ibsen
The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common, which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience. This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our time.
We will not concern ourselves with the lesser playwrights, for the utmost that they can do is to follow the example of their masters and parody them by their imitation. We will turn instead to one of the masters themselves, to one who is justly considered a great dramatist—Henrik Ibsen.
If we examine his entire life-work, piece by piece, we shall arrive at the conclusion that it was a persistent wandering out of one cul-de-sac into the other.
It began with Love’s Comedy: Marriage is synonymous with stupefaction, not to marry is synonymous with theorising; remains the missing x, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; result: cul-de-sac.
It is continued in Per Gynt: Romantic imagination is synonymous with self-deception; school of life is synonymous with apathy; the missing x is synonymous with the result: cul-de-sac.
In Brand the diagram is simpler: Excessive desire for moral perfection contra absolute religious indifference; result: cul-de-sac.
Whoever reads carefully these three great Speculative works of Ibsen’s will be astonished to find that it was by no means unconsciously that he ran into these cul-de-sacs; on the contrary, he steered straight for them, and the last sentences of Brand read like a triumphal epigram.
But by this time the floor of universal speculation had become too hot for him, and he trod it no more. He turned to a more comprehensible genre—if one may so call the popular discussions on social morals and society problems.
Here it seemed that the author and the thinker might wander arm in arm towards a clearly perceptible goal. How far he attained is a question which we will leave for the next chapter.