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

by Georg Brandes

And who is she? She is carefully described by the author as being such that Adolphe's love for her, however strong, is certain sooner or later to be affected by social considerations. In the first place, Adolphe is not the only man she has loved, and the verdict of society has been passed upon her before they meet; she is not his equal in its eyes, although she is so by birth. In the second place, she is considerably older than he; and in the third, hers is a passionate, power-loving nature, which could only be fused with his if social conditions favoured the process, and which must make both unhappy if they harden him against her.

When Adolphe makes her acquaintance, Eléonore is no young, inexperienced girl, who learns for the first time what love is; she is a woman, whose new emotions stand out upon a background of sad, harrowing experience. The mark which this experience has set upon her is the first noticeable trait in her personality. Eléonore has relinquished her right to all the privileges and pleasures of a safe-guarded, peaceful life. Although of good family and born to wealth, she has left home and family to follow the man she loves, as his mistress. She has chosen between the world and him, and has ennobled her action by entirely, unconditionally sacrificing herself for his sake. She has done him the greatest services, has saved his fortune, and been as faithful as any wife could be, endeavouring by this absolute fidelity to solace the pride wounded by the reprobation and scorn of the world. Strength of will is the second noticeable feature of the character.

When the first doubt of her friend's constancy assails her, the whole edifice that she has raised crumbles to pieces. Does he love her, or does he only treat her as a man of honour must? is he faithful, or is he only too proud and too well-bred to show himself ungrateful and indifferent? With tears she puts the question to herself, with anguish answers it. It is at this moment that she meets Adolphe. He is drawn to her with a desire in which his whole thirst for life and all that life contains is concentrated, drawn as to one in whom he mysteriously feels treasures of passion, tenderness, enthusiasm, intellect, and experience to be accumulated, buried, as it were. And his longing and her regret, his vanity and her despair, his youth and her disappointment take hold of each other like two wheels in the works of a watch.

It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling—an enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything, even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent thunderstorm."

It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found its king.[1]

The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful, cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity. Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child. It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and arouse the desire of possession.

The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought, though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome—in a word, mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony.

It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution of July, and George Sand had to pave the way—Saint Simon with his doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who ventured to oppose Napoleon himself—Mme. de Staël.

This new type forms a strong contrast to those female characters of Goethe's in which German poetry attained its highest level, and in which the characteristically Teutonic spiritual quality is expressed more perfectly than it ever had been before. Although Gretchen and Clärchen are the antitheses of each other, the one being mild and submissive, the other fiery and daring, both are children, both are absorbed by a single feeling, both have perfectly simple, single-minded natures, Both love for the first and only time. Both give themselves to the man they love without thought of marriage, with entire trust, without any resistance, without even the wish to resist; the one from deep womanly devotion, the other from lofty womanly enthusiasm. They do not understand that they are doing wrong, they do not think at all. Their whole being, their will, their thoughts pass out of their own possession, they themselves do not know how. Their hearts are soft as wax to receive an impression, but once received it is ineffaceable, it is as though it were stamped in gold. Their innocence, purity, and integrity are beyond compare. They are faithful by instinct, and do not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously, but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. They lose themselves, they, as it were, disappear in their lovers. What we have here is not two equals, who take each other's hands, and plight their faith to each other, but a bewildered, admiring child clinging to a man. He is her life, while she is but an episode in his. At a glance he grasps and comprehends her whole nature; she is incapable of grasping his from any point, incapable of penetrating and judging. She can see neither his limits nor his faults. Whichever way she turns, she sees him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one—like Faust, who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the sense of intellect; she is pure soul. When she performs actions which would seem to require a certain amount of will or firm determination, when Clärchen, for example, astonished and indignant that the citizens of Brussels are indifferent and cowardly enough to allow their hero to be carried off to prison and probable death, makes a public appearance in the market-place, and vainly attempts to rouse their dull souls with fiery words, the motive of the action is to be found in the young girl's naïve belief that her lover's life must be of as great importance to others as it is to her; as she sees nothing in the world but him, she cannot imagine how others can think of anything else. These young girls are genuine daughters of the great family to which Ophelia and Desdemona belong.

A sharp contrast confronts us in the new type of Frenchwoman; instead of sweetness, clinging affection, naturalness, we have passion, will, energy, and conscious intelligence. For it was in the most remarkable and intellectual woman of the day, a woman who had given up country, peace, and prosperity, rather than submit to the petty tyranny with which Napoleon's despotism pursued the unsubmissive, that Constant found the new type.