Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in the woman's. Adolphe is woman's Werther. The passion and melancholy of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the other sex. In Werther it was the man who loved, suffered, stormed, and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and unharmed—perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. In Werther it was the woman who submitted to the laws of society, in Adolphe it is the man who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants. To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era, he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent, loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace; from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate. In Elective Affinities he has made a study of the mysterious and irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy; Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul.

An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it. This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood, something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements. In Adolphe, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness, enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a multitude of mountains and valleys.

From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial, than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races, which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not occur. Our Danish love-tragedy, Axel and Valborg, seems, indeed, to deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot—but in Axel and Valborg constancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological analysis.

It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of in Adolphe—under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise? And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish, as any of those which it fences round and supports.

Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general. The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two characters?

In the first place, who is he? He is a very young man, who (like the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German courts, after completing his studies at a small German university. He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones.

At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles, all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable, without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate their actions and be applicable in individual cases."

He revenges himself for the boredom which his associates inflict on him by jesting at them and their ideals, and soon acquires a character for ill-natured frivolity. He does not himself approve of his own contradictory, mocking spirit. "But," he says, "I may urge in self-defence that it takes time to accustom one's self to such beings, to that which selfishness, affectation, vanity, and cowardice have made of them. The astonishment a man in his early youth feels at such an artificial, arbitrarily regulated state of society witnesses rather to the naturalness of his character than to depraved tendencies. Besides, this society has nothing to fear from such as us; it weighs us down, its foolish influence is so strong that it quickly moulds us to the general pattern. Then we only wonder that we were ever astonished. We become accustomed to the new life as men become accustomed to the air in a room full of people, where at first they feel as if they could not breathe."

These skirmishes with his narrow surroundings were not sufficient to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg. Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing. The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought through many a century. He has desired much, but willed nothing, and the more lacking in will he feels himself, the vainer does he become; for vanity is the invariable stop-gap with which those in whom will or ability is defective, attempt to fill the lacunae in their will or ability. He wishes to love and to be loved, looking on love in the light of a tonic for his self-esteem. He expects to attain to a stronger persuasion of his own worth, to be raised in his own and other people's eyes, by some great triumph and scandal. The happiness that love is to bring to him is the happiness of feeling for once that his will is strong, because he is able to bend another's to it. He is not by nature more faithless than other men. It is in him to love more tenderly, to act more unselfishly than many do, but for him to love faithfully many circumstances would need to be altered. He is still so young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able, without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the eighteenth.