The Malady of the Century

by Max Simon Nordau

Bhani sprang to her feet and hastened toward him, but he put her aside with a word, and going into his study he appeared again bearing a folio bound in leather and with the corners fastened with copper.

"This is my diary," he said. "I have had the weakness to keep this since I was sixteen. There are three volumes already, and I began the fourth when I returned to Germany. Listen now, and don't put yourself under any constraint. I will laugh with you."

He opened the folio, and after a short search began to read. It was the romance of his early life, written in the form of a diary, simply told at some length. Quite an ordinary story of an acquaintanceship made with a pretty girl, the daughter of a bookseller, who sat next to him in a theater. Meetings out of doors, then the introduction to her parents' house, and then the betrothal. The Revolution of 1848 broke out, and the many demands on the young doctor turned his thoughts away for the time from plans of marriage. His fiancee greatly admired the fiery orator and fighter at barricades, and told him so, in enthusiastic speeches and letters. The father, however, had no sympathy with reactionaries, and soon conceived a violent antipathy for his future single-minded son-in-law. As long as the democratic party held the upperhand, he kept his feelings in the background, making nevertheless endless pretexts for delaying the marriage. The party of reactionaries broke up, however, and the bookseller declared war; he forbade the young democrat to enter his house, and even denounced him to the police. The young lovers were, of course, dreadfully unhappy, and vowed to be true to one another. He determined to go away, and tried to persuade her to go with him. She was frightened, but he was audacious and insisted. They would go to London, and be married there; he could earn his living, and they would defy the father's curse. All was arranged; but at the last moment her courage failed, and she confessed all to the tyrant, who set the police on the young man's track, and sent the girl away to relations in Brandenburg. The unfortunate lover's letters were unanswered. He left Germany, and heard after some weeks that his betrothed was married to a well-to-do jeweler, apparently without any great coercion.

This story was disentangled from letters, conversations, accounts of opinions in the form of monologues, interviews, visits, and descriptions of sea-voyages; all sufficiently commonplace. But what excitement these daily effusions showed! What boundless happiness about kisses, what cries of anguish when the storm broke! Would it not be better to commit suicide and die together? Was it possible that this quiet man with his apathetic calm could ever have been through these stormy times? It did not seem credible, and Schrotter seemed conscious of the immense difference between the man who had written the book and the man who now read it. His voice had a slightly ironical sound, and he parodied some of the scenes in reading them, by exaggerating the pathos. But this could not last long. The real feeling which sighed and sobbed between the pages made itself felt, and carried him back from the cold present to the storm-heated past; he became interested, then grave, and if he had not suddenly shut the book with a bang when he came to the place where his faithless love was married, who knows—

At all events, Wilhelm had not smiled once; his eyes even showed signs of tears. Schrotter took the book into the other room, and when he came back every trace of emotion in look and manner had vanished.

"So you see," he began, "a sensible boy like I am has behaved like an ass in the past. But I did not shoot myself after all, that was so far good, and I am ashamed to tell you how soon I got over it. I often go past her shop in Unter den Linden, and see her through the window beyond all her brilliants and precious stones. She is still very pretty, and seems happy, much happier no doubt than if she had been with me. She would certainly not recognize me now, and I can look at her and my heart beats no whit the faster. Dwell on my example."

"I am not sure that you are not slandering yourself."

"You can feel easy about that," said Schrotter earnestly. "The disenchantment was quick and complete, and very naturally so. Just get Schopenhauer's 'objectivity' out of your head; I don't believe in Plato's theory of the soul divided into two halves which are forever trying to join again. Every sane man has ten thousand objects which are able to awaken and return his love. All he has to do is not to go out of their way."

"Ought not there to be an individual one?"

"I venture to say no. The story of the pine trees of Ritter Toggenburg, which love the palm trees, is the creation of a sentimental poet. Lawgivers in India to all appearance believe in faithfulness unto death; and the widow or even the betrothed follows her husband to the grave of her own free will. This free-will offering only comes, however, by aid of the sharpest threatening of punishment. I have known fourteen-year-old widows who offered themselves miserably to be burned. If they had known how soon they would be consoled, and new love sprang up, they would have violently resisted such suicide! Bhani there is a living example of this,"