There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last half of the present century—how she developed in the struggle to compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of personal independence—how she became free and became her own master, and won for herself a place in the history of her time—how she escaped from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether—that is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the cause of much suffering.
A portion of these confessions have been collected by me in my book called Modern Women.
Gottfried Keller and Women
I
There are some labours to which we sit down with a sigh, conscious of having undertaken more than we are able to accomplish, while at the same time the thought of it attracts us and we do not like to give it up. I have never yet read anything about Gottfried Keller which seemed fully to grasp the real nature of the man with the secret of his separateness, and to place him before us with a certainty of comprehension such as cannot be gainsaid. He is something so complete in himself, so apart from others, that like all good things there is no getting round him. For the essence of good things consists in being so sound that there is no use in coaxing or persuading them, or in trying to discover a fault in them; and for that very reason these old jesters studied the noble art of rendering themselves inaccessible. As an author he wrote only when he felt inclined, and when he was not in the mood he waited—whether for months or years it was all the same to him. As a man he was so reserved that hardly a single one of his personal experiences found their way to publicity, and after his death it might have been supposed that he had never had any, if Jacob Bächtold had not published a collection of his letters under the title of Gottfried Keller’s Life, in which he speaks to us as one more alive than the living who are still among us. In reading his books we notice that the purer incidents are mingled with others of a more confidential nature, and it dawns upon us that he understood how to choose his incidents, so that afterwards they should not tell tales. This fact proves, in the first place, that he had nothing to do with those whom Nietzsche would call “literary women,” this being a silent memorial to his good taste and noble character. Secondly, it proves that he understood how to choose his society, and that, like a prudent Swiss, he never thoughtlessly confided in any one, but remembering that the world is not so good and particularly not so refined as it might be, he preferred to keep his confidences to himself. Thirdly, that he, like a righteous man, was pleased to live until those who had known him in his foolish youth had died before him with all they knew.
A vase filled with anemones, violets, ranunculuses and other spring flowers is standing on the table in front of me as I write; I took the trouble to fetch them out of the wood so that I might have something alive and sweet-smelling near while I think of Keller. Otherwise it would have been impossible to write about him, for his books are the essence of life and gladness.
The spirit of playfulness which, as he tells us in Green Henry, drove him when a child to try all kinds of experiments, has followed him through life in the treatment of his literary characters, who, by the way, are never inventions, but always studied portraits. Suddenly he seizes them by one leg, swings them round, and sends them flying into a purely fantastical no-man’s-land, oblivious of past events and present circumstances and such-like limitations. All his stories, or at any rate the majority of them, are marked with this feature, and the maddest confusion reigns side by side with some of the greatest psychological realities; take, for example, the end of The Poor Baroness. How to account for it? Is it that he had inherited the æstheticism of the romantic school? But considering that he was a man of sober temperament and not in any way romantic, it is more probable that the true reason to account for it is that he wrote only for himself and for his own satisfaction. In his youth he had been afraid of Providence and had fought a duel to prove the existence of God; in riper years he amused himself by trying to improve Providence, to put the crooked straight, to punish the wicked and reward the good, and act as though he were himself a more practical and zealous Providence. If, when he had finished, the public read it, what had that to do with Gottfried Keller? The public might rejoice if now and again he played at being its teacher and gave it a sound thrashing on that part of the human body which was especially intended for the purpose. Besides he was a Swiss, and it never entered his mind to trouble himself about the rest of the world. There is one special feature in Gottfried Keller’s productions which, since the publication of his letters, has found expression in words, and which offers a very drastic contrast to the works of later authors. It is this—that he never allowed dust to be thrown in his eyes by any one, least of all by foreigners.
When he, in the person of “Green Henry,” forsook the narrow surroundings of his home life and went out into the wide world, he believed that everything good, strong, free and new was to be found abroad.