Recollections of My Childhood and Youth

by Georg Brandes

Towards her, the man was despotic and cunning, but not unkind, and in so far excusable that, let him have done what he might, she could not have got rid of the hatred that plagued him and consumed her. So dissimilar were their two natures.

Her whole aim and aspiration was to get the bond that united them dissolved. But this he would not hear of, for many reasons, and more especially from dislike of scandal. He regarded himself, and according to the usual conception of the words, justly so, as a good husband and father. He asked for no impossible sacrifice from his wife, and he was affectionate to his children. He could not help her detesting him, and indeed, did not fully realise that she did. And yet, it was difficult for him to misunderstand. For his wife scarcely restrained her aversion even when there were guests in the house. If he told an untruth, she kept silence with her lips, but scarcely with her expression. And she would sometimes talk of the faults and vices that she most abhorred, and then name his.

The incessant agitation in which she lived had made her nervous and restless to excess. As the feminine craving to be able, in marriage, to look up to the man, had never been satisfied, she only enacted the more vehemently veracity, firmness and intellect in men. But undeveloped as she was, and in despair over the dissatisfaction, the drowsiness, and the darkness in which her days glided away, whatever invaded the stagnation and lighted up the darkness: sparkle, liveliness, brilliance and wit, were estimated by her more highly than they deserved to be.

At first when, in the desolation of her life, she made advances to me, this repelled me somewhat. The equestrian performer in Heiberg's Madame Voltisubito cannot sing unless she hears the crack of a whip. Thus it seemed to me that her nature could not sing, save to the accompaniment of all the cart, carriage and riding whips of the mind. But I saw how unhappy she was, and that the intense strain of her manner was only an expression of it.

She could not know the beauty of inward peace, and in spite of her Protestant upbringing she had retained all the unaffectedness and sincerity of the natural human being, all the obstinate love of freedom, unmoved in the least by what men call discipline, ethics, Christianity, convention. She did not believe in it all, she had seen what it resulted in, and what it covered up, and she passed her life in unmitigated despair, which was ordinarily calm to all appearance, but in reality rebellious: what she was enduring was the attempted murder of her soul.

To all that she suffered purely mentally from her life with her husband in the home that was no home at all, there had of late been added circumstances which likewise from a practical point of view made interference and alteration necessary. Her lord and master had always been a bad manager, in fact worse than that; in important matters, thoroughly incapable and fatuous. That had not mattered much hitherto, since others had looked after his affairs; but now the control of them had fallen entirely into his own hands, and he managed them in such a way that expenses increased at a terrific rate, while his income diminished with equal rapidity, and the question of total ruin only seemed a matter of time.

His wife had no outside support. She was an orphan and friendless. Her husband's relations did not like her and did not understand her. And yet just at this time she required as a friend a man who understood her and could help her to save her own and the children's fortunes from the shipwreck, before it was too late. She felt great confidence in me, whom she had met, at intervals, from my boyhood, and she now opened her heart to me in conversation more and more. She confided in me fully, gave me a complete insight into the torture of her life, and implored me to help her to acquire her freedom.

Thus it was that while still quite a young man a powerful, never-to-be- effaced impression of the miseries of modern coercive marriage was produced upon me. The impression was not merely powerful, but it waked, like a cry of distress, both my thinking powers and my energy. As through a chink in the smooth surface of society, I looked down into the depths of horror. Behind the unhappiness of one, I suspected that of a hundred thousand, knew that of a hundred thousand. And I felt myself vehemently called upon, not only to name the horror by its name, but to step in, as far as I was able, and prevent the thing spreading unheeded.

Scales had fallen from my eyes. Under the semblance of affection and peace, couples were lacerating one another by the thousand, swallowed up by hatred and mutual aversion. The glitter of happiness among those higher placed dazzled the thoughtless and the credulous. He who had eyes to see, observed how the wretchedness due to the arrangement of society, wound itself right up to its pinnacles.

The vices and paltrinesses of the individual could not be directly remedied; inherited maladies and those brought upon one's self, stupidity and folly, brutality and malice, undeniably existed. But the institutions of society ought to be so planned as to render these destructive forces inoperative, or at least diminish their harmfulness, not so as to give them free scope and augment their terrors by securing them victims.