In his representation of woman, Keller very nearly falls out of the frame of this sentimental period.
What can be the cause of it? What was the sombre influence which failed to influence him, while it united the other writers of the different schools, the writers of the classical age, of young Germany and of the older period? Why is it that he is almost the only one in whom there lurks no trace of the bombast style or the high-flown phrases of the “storm and stress” and the eight-and-forty period?
The answer to both these questions is the same. He is, so far as my knowledge extends, the only one among all the German writers of the century who has either wholly escaped from, or been completely unsusceptible to, the Rousseau epidemic in its various forms of inoculation.
This undoubtedly proves Keller’s superiority to the other authors, both as an individual and as a man with regard to women.
It was Rousseau who introduced the worship of woman into literature, and likewise her superiority, and her resemblance to man.
There were, as we ascertain from reading Rousseau’s Confessions, not only psychological but also physiological reasons to account for this, and here the modern student of culture may find fresh ground for enquiry.
Rousseau was the author who introduced something entirely new. It was Rousseau, the half Frenchman, who introduced the element of high-sounding sentimentality into a literature which had hitherto known nothing of it. It was Rousseau, the bourgeois with the character of a plebeian, who introduced a new class into literature, a class which had grown up in a time of revolution; it was he who introduced the feelings of a plebeian in relation to a woman of higher birth than himself.
This man was one of those by no means rare specimens of persons who are born with perverse sexual instincts, who have more than once been known to exercise a secret influence on the direction of human thought and feeling. He could not feel as a man in relation to a woman, he felt strongest towards her as her offspring, her subject, her slave. He felt impelled to raise her above him and to amalgamate love with filial affection, and this was how the “exalted woman” found her way into literature.
Rousseau influenced the younger writers of Germany. The literature of the ancien régime, which had helped to form the early youth of Lessing and Goethe, had been frivolous and chivalrous, but not in any way distorted. It was Rousseau who introduced the distorted element, intermingled with his theories about liberty and fresh air, for in this latter respect he was as Swiss as Keller.