In “Regina or The Sins of Fathers,” translated by Beatrice Marshall (London and New York, John Lane) Sudermann has given us in the heroine a character of such stuff as Magdas are made of—a Magda in the raw, a Magda unintellectualized. The story treats of man’s honor and truth to himself as in “Home” the author treats of woman’s. The main difference is that in “Regina,” Boleslav’s self-trust comes too late for happiness. It is only as the story closes he echoes Arnold’s
“Ah! love, let us be true
To one another—”
in a burst of passionate insight; but the chance had passed, Regina’s lifeless, blood-smeared body lay under the Cats’ Bridge, where her imbecile father had hurled it. Her fate is not unlike Ophelia’s. She is piteously involved in the misfortunes of a hero burdened with a performance as harsh as it was akin to that of Hamlet’s. The novel is a virile work, deep-voiced, full of dramatic color and agitating some vital moral questions. Acrid to the taste it is in many respects, but absorbing throughout in its appeal.
Boleslav is pursued by the curse of his father’s treason with a good deal of that grimness with which a hero of the Greek tragedies is harrowed by the Eumenides. One lash of the furies’ whip provokes another until life seems a madness scarcely to be borne. His friends and sweetheart forsake him; the false name under which he enters the German Array fails to protect him from the ignominy of the paternal crime; he is ostracised by the whole world. We find him as the story opens returning to the ruined home of his ancestors, where lies the dead body of his traitor sire, denied the last offices of the church. It is there he meets Regina, the mistress of the deceased, a wild and beautiful peasant girl, to the portraiture of whom the story owes its chief interest. Regina is a magnificent, unforgettable creature—one of those rich chords that nature but rarely strikes upon the harp of being; she reverberates through one’s senses with a rough sweetness that represents a real experience. Her mould is Homeric; she is a creation of primal days and primal passions. To blame her is to quarrel with nature itself. Regina becomes the refuge of the stricken man whose noble motive of life is to redeem his father’s name from shame, to rebuild the homestead of his race, to face unmerited dishonor with manly dignity.
His heart still harbors the image of his early love, and for long he cannot overcome the repugnance he feels for the sturdy pariah who with pathetic self-denial and endurance becomes his slave in the maintenance of the dreary rat’s hole in the ruined castle where the two live. His ideal of womanhood is the simpering Helene who obeys her papa. It takes him a long time to realize that dangerous maxim of Nietzche’s: “Passions become evil when they are held to be evil.” And Regina’s passions are as clear-eyed as were the children of Eden before they picked the apple of Original Sin. As he realizes the fact, the girl’s character gradually usurps his soul. A powerful scene is where they struggle together—the master and the slave—for domination; the man’s strength against the peasant’s Boadicean sinew. It is like the contest of sex in the African jungle. There is no sense of masculine meanness in the contest. One recognizes some deep inner justification in it: that this fierce strife is the materialization of what is really heart warfare. It is a spiritual imbroglio. In the midst of the contest, as they pant together defiantly, Boleslav suddenly kisses the girl on the mouth; and a moment after he is fleeing from himself into the snowy night. The scene is infinitely human. In it Sudermann bares the strange mystery of the human heart as only genius can.
In spite of this flash of soul-knowledge of Boleslav’s, the pair do not become lovers. The man’s self-restraint still worships at Helene’s shrine. He finds that altar clay at last. In the agony of disillusion he lets his soul fly toward its true magnet, but the fortunes of the two have reached a tragic pass. It is Regina’s dead lips that fate now alone offers Boleslav. Under the charred rafters of his ancestral home that the peasants had burned in their patriotic fury, clasping the girl’s cold body, his mind shivers amidst the phantasmagoria of human existence. The world’s conventions seem to shrivel like a consuming scroll. Nothing remains but ashes and the conviction that Regina was “one of those perfect, developed individuals such as nature created before a herding social system, with its paralyzing ordinances, bungled her handiwork, when every youthful creature was allowed to bloom, unhindered, into the fullness of its power, and to remain, in good and in evil, part and parcel of the natural life.”
Sudermann does not set his seal to the sophistries that Boleslav’s despair formulates in these gloomy moments as he scoops out the frozen ground nearby the pedestal of a broken statue of Diana, as a resting place for his drowned Ophelia,—buried “with pagan rites.” His point of view is that of the philosophic spectator of the world’s strifes and follies, who sees in bold-browed convention its justifications, but also its flaws, its misreadings of nature, its littleness, its lack of large mercifulness. Over Regina, as over Margaret, the voice of higher reason pronounces the verdict of exoneration, Boleslav in his struggles with fell destiny offers a strengthening exemplar of manliness. He is portrayed by the author with a discriminating realism that couples weakness with might in a human way which wins for the hero our sympathy, as the character of Regina compels our admiration.
—Edward A. Uffington Valentine.