We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

This is the reason why Keller is not a writer suited for summer sportsmen who breathe in the country air as though they would like to lay in a store, and who wish the sun to shine full upon them.

His chosen confidants are those who are accustomed to spend their lives in the open air.

This devotee of the open air had his circle whom he described and his circle whom he did not describe. The circle whom he did not describe consisted of those who were born ladies, and them he left severely alone. But if, on a special occasion, he finds them necessary for some incident which must be told, he arranges it so that he may have the opportunity of rebuking them, as with Lucie in the book already mentioned, Pankraz, the Cynic, or as in the case of the busybodies in the story of poor Regina. When he describes ladies with sympathy, as in The Governor of Greifensee, he transfers them into a period at least a century ago and places them in the open air.

The women with whom Keller consents to have any dealings must allow themselves to be placed in the open air. Freshness by candle-light has no attraction for him, and as for beauty in a drawing-room—he is suspicious of it. Out they must go, without gloves and veils, stiff collars or steeled stays, without any of the paraphernalia to which modern literature is generally so much addicted. If you can allow yourself to be looked at full in the eyes, with sleeves tucked up and crumpled—then and only then Gottfried Keller may perhaps stop to consider whether it is possible to write about you.

Gottfried Keller’s portraits are nearly all open-air studies, and Gottfried Keller’s women are nearly all lovers of the open air.

There are wonderful disclosures in his great portrait gallery; we find there the women whom he loved as well as the women whom he hated. Wherever he describes a virtuous, happy, loving, teasing, laughing woman; wherever he pictures Eve in whom Adam finds his happiness, or Eve who finds her happiness in Adam, the decisive moment is sure to take place in the open air, for the scenes out of doors are the principal points in his writings, the principal points in the soul-harmonies of his characters, the moments when love steps forth from her concealment and the lovers understand one another. Romeo and Juliet in the Village spend their wedding day out-of-doors; the neighbour’s children in The Company of the Seven Just Men devise their plan of association out-of-doors; the married couple in The Lost Smile meet again out-of-doors, after having been separated by various domestic circumstances; in the Misused Love Letter, the innocent little woman comes to the still more innocent little schoolmaster out-of-doors; the heroine in Ursula regains her senses during the fearful night spent out-of-doors; in Dietegen, the situation between the hero and his lady-love reaches its climax out-of-doors; Fran Amrain, when she has an affair of importance to discuss with her son, always goes to look for him out-of-doors; and nearly every time that Green Henry feels his heart beat for a woman, it is out-of-doors. With Keller all good people are lovers of the open air.

Sedentary natures, on the contrary, are generally characteristic of persons in whom it is wisest not to place much confidence. There is always something ludicrous connected with them, and they are always unfortunate in one way or the other. They are often jealous, conceited, vulgar, pale-faced and dirty, whereas fresh cheeks are always accompanied by a pleasant atmosphere. The three Just Comb-Manufacturers with their miserable follies were all sedentary people; The Maker of His Fortune and Herr Litumlei were provincials, while all the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler sit in absolute idleness in their little workshops; the tailor, in Feathers make the Bird, became an extraordinary creature in consequence of the sedentary life which he led; and whenever Keller wishes to draw the character of an insignificant woman, he makes her sit in her room doing nothing, or engaged in some silly occupation, or else running in and out of other people’s houses. The story of poor Regina is the only one of Keller’s stories in which a good and beautiful creature is misunderstood and made to suffer, and there all the principal scenes are enacted in large and gloomy town houses, where the heavy front door serves as a symbol to show the impossibility of escaping out of a bewitched circle into the light of truth and freedom. Regina, who was a true child of the outer air, would never have gone to her ruin if she had been placed in different surroundings.

Fresh air is the one condition which Keller takes as the starting-point for his portraits of women, and it is a condition which is quite original in its way, for it is not as decidedly expressed in the writings of any other author, least of all a modern one. His women must have plenty of air, fresh air, air in which they can move their limbs and which penetrates their clothing. His women are not the productions of culture, nor the fruit of education, they do not belong to the species of “clever daughters,” but neither are they idealised country girls, they are not phantoms, and they are not discoveries, they are living human beings whom he has seen and known, they are personified reality like the trees, the meadows, the cows—they are fragments of nature placed in the midst of other fragments of nature.

They are not Keller’s ideal of what a woman should be, they are exact descriptions according to his knowledge of what women really are, as it pleased him to write them down for his own amusement during idle evenings when he sat over his wine.

It is human nature as the Swiss understand it, human nature personified and at the same time purified, which moves him to describe women whom he has known or whom it would have amused him to know, and he describes them with lively little flourishes here and there.