We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

Old Gottfried Keller saw considerably further, but then he was not a writer with a purpose.

It was not that he had absorbed himself too deeply in the physiological question, but rather that it shone through everything he wrote. It went with him according to the Biblical saying of the many who run in vain, while the children of Heaven are given it in their sleep. He never racked his brains about it, and with advancing years the gift naturally forsook him also, and when he thought over it in order to make a motive, as with the religious insanity of Ursula, or the hereditary madness of Leu, there was naturally not much scope left for individuality. Yet if he did but glance at a real live woman with thoughtful and contented eyes, all her physical and intellectual endowments seemed to shine through her. We have only to think of Judith and little Meret, both of whom we have already mentioned, but especially of the woman in the Seven Legends. The natural impulses, the instinct which makes a woman of her, the plus or minus of the sensitive faculty and of individual feeling, the marked nobility or peculiar perverseness, each resting on its own physiological foundation, are clearly discernible in every one of Keller’s women; let us recall, for instance, the gentle approach of old-maid-dom in the intellectual and cultivated Lux (An Epigram), the missionary zeal of the anæmic Afra Zigonia in the story of Herr Zwiehahn (Green Henry), Frau Litumlei’s indolent obsequiousness, and good Frau Amrain’s suppression of sexual feeling after her unhappy marriage, etc.

III

Keller preferred to describe women, and he did it with the greatest ease. We can tell by the construction of his sentences how smoothly the work developed under his touch, and how easily everything found its way into its proper place without exertion on his part or any need for serious thought; whereas with his male characters, or those of them at least who were not of a purely superficial nature, it was by no means such an easy task. The thread knotted and broke where one least expected it, and the texture became unequal and lost its freshness as though it had been woven by hot and trembling fingers. They were a trouble to him, not a pleasure, and when we see Keller turning a sudden somersault in the middle of one of his most serious passages, we may feel assured that he did it, not out of arrogance, but in order to make good his escape. He had one characteristic which must have been as common in ancient times as it is at present, although it may have sprung from a too individual refinement to find room for expression, it was a characteristic which is common enough among young lyric poets whom it generally leads to their downfall, while Keller, because he had just missed being a lyric poet, was able to provide it with a warm and sheltered corner where it might grow in secret. It consisted in that species of love for women which produces great erotic geniuses, where human longing is mingled with a capacity for spiritual affection, the body is permeated by the soul, desire is purified, and spiritual affection itself vibrates with desire. From a condition such as this, with its great expectations and still greater disappointments, the bitterest women-haters may be evolved. But it is rare, or at least it seldom comes into the light of day, and in the case of Gottfried Keller it was probably only a latent characteristic. It was there none the less. We can distinguish it in Green Henry, the story of his own youth, in the strange way by which he is attracted by woman and longs to be near her and to breathe her atmosphere, while at the same time he is filled with mistrust for the only woman who loves him passionately, as Judith does. He is afraid of wasting his abundance on a desert soil which gives him nothing in return, he has an instinctive misgiving that he must become inseparable from the one with whom he is united, a foreboding that he is one of love’s elect—a susceptible stringed instrument, a being with sensitive nerves which awake the impulse and then hold him back. In the second edition of Green Henry, which was published in Keller’s old age, he added the end of the story of Judith, which describes his personal manner of giving and receiving love. It was this love, which was not continued long enough for him to weary of it, to which he owed his unequalled comprehension of women. His need of woman made her the continual subject of his dreams and caused his fancies to take shape whenever he wrote of her. It was to this that he owed a very peculiar quality which shows itself in his autobiographical story, Green Henry; it lent him that incomparable diagnosis of woman, which, with its purely intuitive grasp of the everlasting variable, would have made of him a woman’s doctor of the first rank, if he had not had too much of the poet and the artist in him; while the absence of this same attribute is the cause of the grossest blunders in the majority of women’s doctors, who regard the sensitive woman with a feeling partly of disgust and partly as though she were a comic figure.

It was this also which made him sensitive and harsh with regard to any malformations in woman, enabling him to detect every abnormity. If he came upon any such thing in the act of blossoming, his anger knew no bounds, he would have liked to strip naked the poisonous vermin and to beat it across the country from frontier to frontier, had such punishment been consistent with the laws of our civilisation.

There was one satisfaction, however, which he would not allow himself to be deprived of. He warned the public against the outrages of the woman’s rights movement which was then in its infancy, and thus he became the forerunner of his Scandinavian colleague Strindberg.

I have already remarked that there was one special peculiarity in Keller’s great romance, Green Henry, and I must add that it was one which puzzled me for years. It was the hero’s passiveness with regard to women and the insignificant position which he occupied as an active agent. There was no lack of opportunity, for he was obviously one of those young men who possess a strong attraction for the Eves of the opposite sex. Anna tries gently to tempt him, Judith takes him by force, while the forlorn Agnes nearly dies of love for him and silently offers herself, thereby claiming compensation for her injured soul; the starving sempstress is also willing, and so is little Dorothy of the iron image. But Green Henry is never seen to move. He goes about amongst them like a sleep-walker and appears to have no other sensations than such as are caused by a heavy heart. It was not until long afterwards, when I became acquainted with another erotic writer and had read his writings, that I understood this characteristic feature in all its sincerity.

There are a whole row of erotic writers who belong to what we might call the pseudo-erotic school. They are the conquerors, the “Tannhäusers.” They recount their adventures and place them in their true light, and themselves also; they think both of themselves and their listeners. Woman is to them an object, which they possess—the rosebud, which they pluck. They are the vainglorious who boast of love, and whom the multitude run after. The others have positively nothing to say, they feel in silence, they experience in silence, they are sparing of their words because their hearts overflow. They do not magnify their own importance, because for them life is everything, and woman the only object of their interest and their study. Keller was erotic in this sense, and that is why Green Henry is so feebly drawn. His experiences were unconscious ones, but his impressions were a surprise to him and he was deeply conscious of them. This is the reason why in nearly all writings where love and woman are revealed to man, the man seems to fall into the background.

There is a good deal of the Sensitiva-amorosa nature about Keller, though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too. It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself in Green Henry, in The Governor of Greifensee, and in other places besides. His longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results. He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting in Green Henry takes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it becomes quite a cheerful event in the Governor of Greifensee, and the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe so vividly the intellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman—that emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, in The Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow. Or when it becomes apparent that the man does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for example: Salome. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.

There is another Sensitiva-amorosa trait which is that love makes us sad and melancholy. For those who are real erotic geniuses, love is not a trifle to occupy their spare moments, they cannot leave her at intervals and then follow their professions holding their heads high. No, they cannot hold their heads high, that is just it; love takes them entirely by surprise, she has no mercy and no pity; those who have had other experience may rest content, for evidently they have never known what it is to love. Love pursues her victim like fate, and he sinks beneath her powerful grasp. He wanders in darkness as though it were night, while she is all in all to him, and everything else is forgotten. This is why Green Henry remains in the Count’s castle, under the spell of graceful, cunning little Dorothy, when he ought to have been on his way to the poor mother who was dying of sorrow. He can do nothing unless her eyes rest upon his work, and for this reason he can paint pictures for the Count although he cannot write a letter to his mother. He describes his love for Dorothy in the deep symbol of an iron image which feels like a heavy burden that he bears continually in his heart. But in the midst of this enchantment his inner self struggles for freedom; his sensitive nature is conscious of not having experienced the fervent affection of which it is capable, his love is not sufficiently intense for him to give himself up entirely. This fervent affection for which he seeks, and in which he feels that he can rest without compulsion and without loss to himself, this his sensitive nature finds at last in Judith.