They came upon him unawares, and he let them do as they pleased and write themselves down as best they could, but gently and slily he held them fast by the hair, lest they should try to mystify him. And if they began to throw dust in his eyes, he gave their hair a gentle pull so that they might know that he was watching them.
Gottfried Keller was a just man who gave every one their due, including women.
Here I should like to make a disgraceful confession, and to remark that, in my unworthy estimation, he—in the great forest of German authors—is the first, the last, and the only one who thoroughly and entirely understands the natural woman.
Keller’s woman is nothing but nature, unadorned and unfalsified; it is true she is not the whole of nature, but she is a genuine part of it. In order to discover this woman, he journeyed in a circle round the towns to every road which marks the boundary where town and country meet. There he sometimes met with women who had a natural disposition to live, without having learned anything from books. According to him it was the sign of a praiseworthy woman that she should know where to find her husband, and as to those who were more or less bunglers in the matter, he refused to waste his time upon them. He went straight to the root of the question, like a man who will not allow himself to be deceived, and according to his knowledge of human nature the principal business of every young woman was to find the man who was best suited to her, and having found him, to win him. This is just what Keller’s young women were busily engaged in doing, and they accomplished it in various ways, without being in the least aware of it, or, if the reader prefers it, though it comes to the same in the end, they did it out of their moral consciousness. But it was not enough for Keller that they should have proved their true womanliness by these means alone, more was necessary; they must be able to keep their husbands, and that again without conscious effort (“moral consciousness” would be quite out of place here), they must be able to keep him by means of their personal attractions and that magic charm of womanhood which it is impossible to analyse, by which the man is made too happy and too contented to have any wish to escape. When our honest author had got them thus far, he took delight in adding to the story the welcome intelligence that they lived long, had many children, and that their race prospered and increased.
II
There is an old word that was often used in Germany during the merry days of the Renaissance, and it had a beautiful sound, although at that time its actual signification may not have been beautiful. It is the word Courage-giver. The expression first came into use among the knights of the German Order in Prussia and Livonia at the time when history tells us of their downfall, i.e. when asceticism began to decline. When a knight of that period had sufficient disregard for his eternal salvation to procure himself a lady-love, he called her his Courage-giver, because she gave him renewed courage. But as soon as the Lutheran pastors, with their protestant ideas about conversion and discipline, opposed this being who was not acknowledged in the service-book, the good word came to have an evil sound. But when one wishes to describe Keller’s women, the old word suggests itself again, for his women are good Courage-givers; they are bright as a spring morning which expands the heart and rejoices the soul of man, refreshing as the first verdure of the year, and sweet as the young, juicy grass of the meadows.
Where did Keller learn to know these women who are such genuinely natural beings, such harmonious, unspoilt, sensitive natures? Where did he first see Judith, little Meret, his village Juliet, and the numerous other revelations in his portrait gallery? In this respect, Gottfried Keller stands alone and unequalled by any in his century.
We have only to turn to the classics. Schiller’s woman was composed of little else than a long skirt, and the same may be said of his entire progeny of sentimental and pathetic dramatists extending down to our own time. If one took away the skirt there was something underneath it which bore a strong resemblance to a young man, a being who was half a man in its actions and feelings, just as the women in Lessing’s dramas are, for the most part, dialecticians in veils and stays. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this there were no less than an entire group of authors who were remarkable for their inability to create women, and they tried to make up for it by introducing their own nature into that of the opposite sex. Even Kleist sometimes resorted to this method. It was the origin of all their heroines who inspirited men to brave deeds and encouraged the faint-hearted, from the Maid of Orleans onwards, they were nothing but men split in half; the authors personified their own grand qualities and then contrasted them with their own weaknesses in the person of the woman.
The century advanced, and woman in German literature was and remained the superior being, the exalted being, the more loving being; it was always she who was the most energetic in love and who led the way to action. Compare the writings of Gutzkow and Spielhagen. It was woman who made man happy with the gift of her love, it was she who condescended to the worshipping man, while he rejoiced in her love without exactly understanding it. Woman stood upon a pedestal, indescribable, incomprehensible, she was “the exalted woman.” Some partial authors designated her in high-flown language as “sublime.” This sublime woman, whom men were made to worship with an ecstatic reverence, played a favourite part in the novels of second-rate authors and authoresses whose works were most popular in lending libraries.
There was not the faintest trace of anything of this sort in Keller’s novels. There was no perverseness there, no amazement, no holding up of the hands in adoration. There were none of those strange moods which a man is said to respect although he cannot understand them, and which have provided a subject for many volumes, and problems for as many authors.