Barbey’s descriptions are physical rather than psychical, and only women can judge of the truth of his psychological divinations, and judge—not with words, but with the quivering of their nervous fibres. It relates not to this one case only, but to thousands of other cases, which to a man would appear quite human and endurable,—cases, not of violence, but merely of error and self-deception.
There is one thing that is known only to ourselves, and that is that woman’s most inexorable task-master is woman, as in this instance, when the otherwise irreproachable mother torments her dearly-loved child. If only on account of this one novel, Barbey may be said to belong to the future, when there will exist a psychology of man and woman and human conditions, of which the germs are only just beginning to show themselves in him and in one or two others.
But what of his Catholicism? He lets the monk die after having undergone a severe penance in a Trappist monastery, after which he receives absolution and is duly reconciled with Heaven. Everything that has broken with nature can be reconciled in nature, because all life is only a fragment and a groping in the darkness, and in the deepest sense there exists no immutable link between cause and effect, crime and punishment. The innocent must suffer more than human martyrdom, while the guilty escapes with an insignificant, but as he supposes, just penance. Barbey’s Catholicism is that great, deep, intuitive understanding that fathoms all humanity.
How do we Stand?
In this book I have tried to draw a characteristic sketch of the eight most remarkable heads among the legion of authors belonging to the nineteenth century. I have not stopped to make any literary estimates, as these are of no lasting importance, because they vary with the change of standards. What I have done is to uncover and expose to view the subject-matter of their productions. I have tried to drag forward the personality of the author, in order that the man may be measured by his work, and the work by the man; for a man’s work is no fortuitous incident. The man and his work are one; the work of a manly man is man’s work, the work of an effeminate man is fancy work, and the work of a half man is half work.
Now I ask: What is it that we women have to demand from the men of this century who have offered to be our guides, teachers, deliverers, cavaliers and religious teachers? And this is our reply: We ask that they should be men, nothing more. The more manly they are, the more womanly we shall be—preaching and education, rivalry and competition, boasting and flattery are all of no good, only the manly man can redeem the womanly in woman; all else is make-believe.
Let us consider these eight representative men in relation to their work. We must confess that the oldest and the two youngest among them have bequeathed man’s work, by which we mean lasting work which will be valued more highly as time goes on. The manliness of their work is proved by the fact that they looked neither to the right nor to the left, nor hearkened to the course of time, nor winked at the women, but said what they had to say—neither more nor less—and wrote what they were obliged to write, owing to their personal temperament. None of them wrote for us, neither Keller, Barbey nor Maupassant, nor did they stop writing to wonder what we should say. They never thought about us at all, and that is why they are the greatest of women’s authors, not the authors for the women of yesterday, to-day or to-morrow, but the interpreters of woman, authors from whom we can learn to understand ourselves as we gaze upon the reflection of our own images in the soul of man.
The authors who were young about the middle of this century form a group apart, and they treat both us and themselves with equal solemnity. How excellent are their intentions, and how deep their interest in us! They want to raise us, purify and deliver us, and they want to do it so thoroughly that they would rejoice if they could deliver us from our womanhood. They write for us, they appeal to us—Björnson, Ibsen, Heyse, Tolstoy, Strindberg—each in his own way. The one would have us be intellectual women, the other sexless women, and the third (in his latter years) would like to make us into apple dumplings with whipped cream, the fourth into men-haters, etc. We have their permission to be anything we like—doctor, professor, and a lady to the tips of our fingers, only not the mother of future generations to whom nothing human is strange, because she carries humanity at her breast.