We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

The younger writers became filled with revolutionary ideas, they went into ecstasies over Rousseau and wrote like him. The impulses which he had inspired continued to bear fruit in the works of popular writers long after the Germany of our century had ceased to read him.

The number of ideas will not bear comparison with the number of their promulgators. It is a well-known fact that a very few commonplace ideas are sufficient to nourish the intellect, for ideas in themselves are of no great importance however much they may be pushed to the fore. Impulses are of chief importance. Ideas have only to do with thinking, but impulses distrain body and mind alike, and a given impulse is like an acoustic vibration which ebbs and flows in numberless vibrations, and dies away so gradually that one cannot say for certain when it has stopped. Yet an impulse may be the result of mere chance, and it is so generally. A young, strong, excitable race, in which the strength of generations is collected, stands waiting for an indefinable “something” which shall correspond with its embryo condition. This “something” comes, and the fruitful soil procreates it over and over again, until the land is exhausted by the same seed and reproduces it weaker and weaker. A new literature is always accompanied by a new conception of woman, because woman is the author’s chief point, and in that respect he is like the bird in spring who sings as he goes in search of his little mate. Yet Rousseau’s personal views of woman, united as they were with a national temperament which was full of deep feeling, though without much faculty for observation, was destined to bear fruit for a hundred years in a literature where a thousand figures bear witness to their origin.

When the German Empire was founded, German literature became extinct. Germany became the land of manhood par préférence, and the worship of woman was treated as a myth at which people sceptically shook their heads. But in the fundamental conception of social democracy the myth descends upon the earth under another form.

Perhaps it is because all eyes are now turned in a different direction that no one has noticed the inner freedom, the inconceivable stamp of personality that betrays itself in the manner in which Keller gazes at woman. That Keller does not reflect with her, that he does not idealise her, these are the distinctive features which form as it were a key to the right comprehension of Keller’s women.

If we examine his characters one by one they will soon shew us of what material they were made.

Gottfried Keller had two starting points from whence he depicted woman, and which appear to have come so naturally to him that it is impossible to suppose that they cost him much thought; we, however, give them our attention, because, in the first place, we are in search of another literary basis, and, secondly, because on these two points he is essentially a child of the age with which he otherwise has little in common. One of his starting points is the simplification of life and of woman, and the restriction of the same to decided, easily varied, and primitive forms. To this many will object that the scheming thus involved is a mistake with which Keller, least of all men, deserves to be reproached, for he is essentially one of Germany’s richest authors and the one who possesses most strongly the creative faculty. But for that very reason, because he is rich, it is all the more important to examine his works and to discover how small is the amount of material hitherto made use of in the literature, not only of Germany, but also of France and Scandinavia. Keller introduced the true and authentic psychology of a healthy woman, of whom he himself says in Ursula: “She was like a little spot of fruitful soil which turns green again as soon as it is refreshed by a ray of sunshine and a drop of dew.” This psychology originated with simple conditions of life and less complicated personalities than those which surround us nowadays, when fifty years have gone by since Keller’s youth—youth being the most impressionable period of human life. Whenever we stop to observe the characters of people who have attained to a certain height of spiritual culture, with whom I do not include the inhabitants of towns, because they are out of the question in a discussion on Keller, but country people and the dwellers in small villages,—we find that in Switzerland, as in other parts of Europe, we need only to probe to the hidden depths of human nature to discover outstanding personalities in women, even amongst those living in the plainest and least artificial surroundings.

This is easily accounted for by the fact that our facilities for gaining a personal knowledge of one another have greatly increased of late years, and also that our capacity for reading the text of human nature has developed itself both in breadth and depth. Our self-consciousness has become wide awake, our personal needs are more complicated, and our understanding of one another is finer and more flexible than it used to be, while our feelings in general have become more sensitive and we are more easily moved than formerly. What before Keller’s time were whole notes with a stop, became with Keller half notes dwelling long on an even tone, and are now an irritating rising and falling of semiquavers which require a finer ear and between which the pauses are fewer. Our notion of health itself has undergone continual changes, and is changing still. With Keller it signifies something symmetrical, something which changes unwillingly and then only to spring back again into what it was at first. It is health in the abstract, something universal and typical and authentic, but which would not suffice for the present creative characteristic, since we know to how many oscillations, to how much heaviness, discomfort and suffering, even the most vigorous health is subject; moreover, we know that health in other words is really nothing but a certain overplus of vital energy which helps us on to our legs again every time that we succumb. But as for meaning anything absolute, continuous and unbroken, as in the case of animal life—that, although it may have been Keller’s meaning, is not health in the sense that we understand it now.

The literature which bases its creations on this interpretation of human nature is now only in its first groping beginnings; the authors whose nerves are as a sensitive, stringed instrument are scarce indeed—there are but one or two.

Keller, who is the most modern writer of the old school, always describes woman as normally healthy, whereas the modern French authors describe her as being always ill; it was they who introduced the great army of détraquées, in the same way as the modern Scandinavians continually describe the emancipated woman in her various phases. But, after all, these are only features on the surface of time, opinions without foundation, rays without focus, they are old ways and old methods in new and cheap clothing. Our object is to pursue the outward phenomena to their physiological roots, and to unravel the intricate skeins which have woven themselves out of the physical qualifications of woman in her conflict with the laws and influences of the surrounding world. For woman, as regards her outward surroundings, is the most dependent creature upon earth, while as regards her natural disposition, she is the most self-willed. A true poet ought to understand this without being told. And as it happens the poets have all written a verse upon it and have altered the text to make it suit; this they have done out of a manly love of theorising—with or without experience of life. But the modern French writers, like the modern Scandinavians, looked chiefly into their own little corner of the world and studied the little extract of life against which it was their luck to run their noses. It was an author’s experience, and nothing more!