Heine said: “I should wear a dog collar inscribed: ‘I belong to Frau Varnhagen.’”
Rahel’s power over the brilliant minds of her day lay in her own wonderful personality. She was unique, knew it and gloried in it. She wrote to Varnhagen, her husband and lover: “You will not soon see my like again.” She understood thoroughly the limitations of her sex. “They are so surprisingly feeble,” she says; “almost imbecile from lack of coherence. They lie, too, since they are often obliged to, and since the truth demands intelligence.” ... “I know women: what is noble in their composition keeps together stupidity or madness.” ... And she speaks of their “clumsy, terrible stupidity in lying.” But, despite Rahel’s opinion of women, or because of her understanding of their needs, she was a true feminist and looked toward their liberation through development and self-expression.
Ellen Key writes: “How Rahel, with her lucidity of thought, would have exposed the modern superstition that it is in outward departments of work that woman gives expression to her human ‘individuality.’ She says by true economy ‘nature keeps woman nearer to the plant’! This ‘economy’ is easily understood; it is because the tender life is woman’s creation and because that life requires tranquillity for its genesis and growth; because a woman taken up by the problems of external life ... no longer possesses the psychological qualifications which are indispensable in order that a child’s soul may grow in peace and joy; because, in other words, children need mothers, not only for their physical birth but for their human bringing-up. Rahel hits the very center of the spiritual task of motherhood when she says that if she had a child she would help it to learn to listen to its own inmost ego; everything else she would sacrifice to this.... The progress or ruin of humanity depends, in Rahel’s prophetic view, upon the capacity of the mothers for performing their task.”
How Rahel had listened to her own inmost ego is shown by the following characterization by Ellen Key. “Rahel probably did not know a single date in the history of Greece, but she read Homer in Voss’s translation; it made her declare that ‘the Odyssey seems to me so beautiful that it is positively painful,’ and she discovered that Homer is always great when he speaks of water, as Goethe is when he speaks of the stars. Probably she could not enumerate the rivers of Spain, but she knew Don Quixote. In a word, she was the very opposite of the kind of talent that passes brilliant examinations and is capable of carrying ‘completely undigested sentences in its head.’ What Rahel could not transform into blood of her blood did not concern her at all. There was such an indestructible ‘connection between her abilities,’ such an intimate ‘co-operation between her temperament and her intelligence,’ that there was no room in her for all the unoriginal ballast of which the views and opinions of most other people are made up: she could only keep and only give what was her own.”
What Rahel’s power over her contemporaries was we may gather from what they say of her who was “Rahel and nothing more:”
Heine describes her as “the most inspired woman in the universe.” T. Mundt calls her “the sympathetic nerve of the time.” The Austrian dramatist, Grillparzer, relates: “Varnhagen went home with me. As we passed his house, it occurred to him to introduce me to his wife, the afterwards so celebrated Rahel, of whom I then knew nothing. I had been strolling about all day and felt tired to death, and was, therefore, heartily glad when we were told that Frau Varnhagen was not at home. But as we came down the stairs, she met us and I submitted to my fate. But now the lady,—elderly, perhaps never handsomer, shriveled by illness, reminding me rather of a fairy, not to say a witch,—began to talk, and I was altogether enchanted. My weariness disappeared, or perhaps, rather, gave way to intoxication. She talked and talked till nearly midnight, and I don’t know whether they turned me out or whether I went away of my own accord. Never in my life have I heard anyone talk more interestingly. Unfortunately it was near the end of my stay, and I could not repeat the visit.”
The Poetry of Rupert Brooke
Margaret C. Anderson
Poems, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.)
The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke—the young Oxford don whose poetry is just finding its way in this country—is that he has graduated from the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical of “the British mind” and plus those that stand as the highest expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French type. It is rather a matter of form—that quality of saying a thing in the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example, in the first sonnet of this collection: