Keller preferred to describe women, and he did it with the greatest ease. We can tell by the construction of his sentences how smoothly the work developed under his touch, and how easily everything found its way into its proper place without exertion on his part or any need for serious thought; whereas with his male characters, or those of them at least who were not of a purely superficial nature, it was by no means such aneasy task. The thread knotted and broke where one least expected it, and the texture became unequal and lost its freshness as though it had been woven by hot and trembling fingers. They were a trouble to him, not a pleasure, and when we see Keller turning a sudden somersault in the middle of one of his most serious passages, we may feel assured that he did it, not out of arrogance, but in order to make good his escape. He had one characteristic which must have been as common in ancient times as it is at present, although it may have sprung from a too individual refinement to find room for expression, it was a characteristic which is common enough among young lyric poets whom it generally leads to their downfall, while Keller, because he had just missed being a lyric poet, was able to provide it with a warm and sheltered corner where it might grow in secret. It consisted in that species of love for women which produces great erotic geniuses, where human longing is mingled with a capacity for spiritual affection, the body is permeated by the soul, desire is purified, and spiritual affection itself vibrates with desire. From a condition such as this, with its great expectations and still greater disappointments, the bitterest women-haters may be evolved. But it is rare, or at least it seldom comes into the light of day, and in the case of Gottfried Keller it was probably only a latent characteristic. It was there none the less. We can distinguish itinGreen Henry, the story of his own youth, in the strange way by which he is attracted by woman and longs to be near her and to breathe her atmosphere, while at the same time he is filled with mistrust for the only woman who loves him passionately, as Judith does. He is afraid of wasting his abundance on a desert soil which gives him nothing in return, he has an instinctive misgiving that he must become inseparable from the one with whom he is united, a foreboding that he is one of love’s elect—a susceptible stringed instrument, a being with sensitive nerves which awake the impulse and then hold him back. In the second edition ofGreen Henry, which was published in Keller’s old age, he added the end of the story of Judith, which describes his personal manner of giving and receiving love. It was this love, which was not continued long enough for him to weary of it, to which he owed his unequalled comprehension of women. His need of woman made her the continual subject of his dreams and caused his fancies to take shape whenever he wrote of her. It was to this that he owed a very peculiar quality which shows itself in his autobiographical story,Green Henry; it lent him that incomparable diagnosis of woman, which, with its purely intuitive grasp of the everlasting variable, would have made of him a woman’s doctor of the first rank, if he had not had too much of the poet and the artist in him; while the absence of this same attribute is the causeof the grossest blunders in the majority of women’s doctors, who regard the sensitive woman with a feeling partly of disgust and partly as though she were a comic figure.
It was this also which made him sensitive and harsh with regard to any malformations in woman, enabling him to detect every abnormity. If he came upon any such thing in the act of blossoming, his anger knew no bounds, he would have liked to strip naked the poisonous vermin and to beat it across the country from frontier to frontier, had such punishment been consistent with the laws of our civilisation.
There was one satisfaction, however, which he would not allow himself to be deprived of. He warned the public against the outrages of the woman’s rights movement which was then in its infancy, and thus he became the forerunner of his Scandinavian colleague Strindberg.
I have already remarked that there was one special peculiarity in Keller’s great romance,Green Henry, and I must add that it was one which puzzled me for years. It was the hero’s passiveness with regard to women and the insignificant position which he occupied as an active agent. There was no lack of opportunity, for he was obviously one of those young men who possess a strong attraction for the Eves of the opposite sex. Anna tries gently to tempt him, Judith takes him by force, while the forlorn Agnes nearly dies of love for him and silently offersherself, thereby claiming compensation for her injured soul; the starving sempstress is also willing, and so is little Dorothy of the iron image. But Green Henry is never seen to move. He goes about amongst them like a sleep-walker and appears to have no other sensations than such as are caused by a heavy heart. It was not until long afterwards, when I became acquainted with another erotic writer and had read his writings, that I understood this characteristic feature in all its sincerity.
There are a whole row of erotic writers who belong to what we might call the pseudo-erotic school. They are the conquerors, the “Tannhäusers.” They recount their adventures and place them in their true light, and themselves also; they think both of themselves and their listeners. Woman is to them an object, which they possess—the rosebud, which they pluck. They are the vainglorious who boast of love, and whom the multitude run after. The others have positively nothing to say, they feel in silence, they experience in silence, they are sparing of their words because their hearts overflow. They do not magnify their own importance, because for them life is everything, and woman the only object of their interest and their study. Keller was erotic in this sense, and that is why Green Henry is so feebly drawn. His experiences were unconscious ones, but his impressions were a surprise to him and he wasdeeply conscious of them. This is the reason why in nearly all writings where love and woman are revealed to man, the man seems to fall into the background.
There is a good deal of theSensitiva-amorosanature about Keller, though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too. It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself inGreen Henry, inThe Governor of Greifensee, and in other places besides. His longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results. He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting inGreen Henrytakes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it becomes quite a cheerful event in theGovernor of Greifensee, and the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe so vividly theintellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman—that emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, inThe Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow. Or when it becomes apparent that the man does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for example:Salome. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.
There is anotherSensitiva-amorosatrait which is that love makes us sad and melancholy. For those who are real erotic geniuses, love is not a trifle to occupy their spare moments, they cannot leave her at intervals and then follow their professions holding their heads high. No, they cannot hold their heads high, that is just it; love takes them entirely by surprise, she has no mercy and no pity; those who have had other experience may rest content, for evidently they have never known what it is to love. Love pursues her victim like fate, and he sinks beneath her powerful grasp. He wanders in darkness as though it were night, while she is all in all to him, and everything elseis forgotten. This is why Green Henry remains in the Count’s castle, under the spell of graceful, cunning little Dorothy, when he ought to have been on his way to the poor mother who was dying of sorrow. He can do nothing unless her eyes rest upon his work, and for this reason he can paint pictures for the Count although he cannot write a letter to his mother. He describes his love for Dorothy in the deep symbol of an iron image which feels like a heavy burden that he bears continually in his heart. But in the midst of this enchantment his inner self struggles for freedom; his sensitive nature is conscious of not having experienced the fervent affection of which it is capable, his love is not sufficiently intense for him to give himself up entirely. This fervent affection for which he seeks, and in which he feels that he can rest without compulsion and without loss to himself, this his sensitive nature finds at last in Judith.
Judith isthewoman, the apocalypse of woman even for Keller, the embodiment of warm-hearted sympathy. In this woman, of whom he wrote at two different periods of his life, are united all his most fantastic ideas about women, together with all his most personal experiences. She is the most daring revelation of love that German literature, with its strict conventions, possesses. She is considerably older than Green Henry, and Keller is not in the least afraid of saying so. She is a woman in the full bloom of life, who has reachedthe age when a strong healthy woman is the most attractive, and Green Henry is eighteen years old. These contrasts, who are mutually attracted to one another, are frequent everywhere except in the literature of Germany. But the cause of this mutual attraction is by no means the most elevated; Judith is a mature, sensuous woman and Green Henry is an immature, sensuous youth. She has lived amongst coarse-grained peasants and is very coarse-grained herself; but when she comes in contact with Henry’s more refined and complicated nature, she becomes a thorough woman,i.e.plastic material. Judith has none of that innate stupidity which so often causes the woman to maintain her ascendancy over the man, to the destruction of his happiness. At first she is imperious and exacting, but as she sees more of Green Henry she gradually changes into a loving woman, by which I mean a self-subjecting woman, for a woman who loves cannot do otherwise than subject herself. He goes into the world, she goes to America. Keller does not tell us much about her while she is there. Time passes and Green Henry comes home, aSensitivaand poetic nature with whom the world has dealt harshly. His vitality is slackened and he feels depressed. Judith meets him, after having sought for him as one whom love has bewitched, who cannot forget; hers is the love of a strong, whole-hearted woman, smitten in the depths of her nature, willing to cast everything aside if only she may love. Her love has nothing to offer, and shedoes not believe that she can make him happy, she only begs in silence to be allowed to remain with him, for he is all she has in the world. She makes no stipulation, she asks for no outward sign, she requires no vindication in the eyes of mankind, he is free to come and go when he will. Green Henry can endure love after this manner, and they love one another.
In the story of little Meret, Keller probes deeper still into the nature of woman. Little Meret is Judith over again in the person of a martyred child; it is Judith’s nature in the bud.
In the first volume ofGreen Henry, Keller informs us that he found the story of poor little Meret among the papers of an orthodox pastor in the beginning of the eighteenth century; but according to Bächtold, inKeller’s Letters, she seems to have been an invention of his own. However this may be, the story of little Meret, the witch-child, is the most valuable contribution towards a study of the psychology of the child-woman that we possess in German literature.
In this story Keller displayed the secret nature of the child-woman in its rarest perfection and vitality, which is a thing that a man can scarcely understand and which no woman likes to talk about. It is one of those revelations which belong only to him who is born a poet in soul and nerves and every fibre of his being, born an unconscious poet, by which I mean an intuitive seer. In this child, tormented to death, is displayed the primevaltrait, the innermost kernel of woman’s nature, and the woman of genius in the bud is made visible. Little Meret possesses the one quality, the only one through which woman is more nearly related to nature than man, it is a carefully concealed quality, seen only by the few, but which for ever shuts out the woman from outward conformity with the man, and which is the key to her most secret, most mysterious witchcraft—her wildness. The best and the worst women are not docile and tameable, they are not capable of being cultivated and civilised like man—such are only women of middling quality—they are ungovernable, irreverent, full of instinct, nothing but feminine instinct. Whence should come the regeneration of humanity, unless it be from the unused sources of nature, the source of woman’s unconscious glory? Whence should proceed the mysterious power of loving, with love’s inexplicable dominion over souls, unless it be from the unfathomable, the incomprehensible nature of woman, with her utter disregard for law and justice and all the rest of the intricate building of commonsense upon which human society is founded? Owing to her physiological structure woman is a creature of instinct, and this instinct is her most precious possession, the heritage which she bequeaths to future generations; it is always the same instinct, whether it reveals itself in an evil race of feminine malefactors such as Strindberg’s women, or in the richly gifted specimens of Keller’s apocalypse of woman: Judithand little Meret. They are not to be forced in either case! They are all children of nature.
Judith finds the man to whom it is natural to submit herself of her own free will. Little Meret is hunted to death because she refuses to submit herself to a stupid and ignorant training, and one morning they find her lying naked and dead in the garden. She preferred to freeze to death there than to live indoors, in a hideous, unbecoming, penitential dress. Here we have the genius of the child-woman to whom her sense of beauty and the consciousness of her power to charm is her one and only possession. Here lies the true genius of woman; all her intellectual powers and all her strivings after outward emancipation are unnatural invasions into the territory of man.
Keller kept a sharp and malicious eye fixed on what we might call the hybrid type of humanity. For him it possessed the attraction of a repulsive object, and he would not let it escape him. As a man who was born sensitive and erotic, to whom woman was a necessity and a delight, he held all such in abhorrence. The same instinct which enabled him to describe little Meret, that nervous child of the Renaissance, gave him the power to understand those abnormities of whose true nature the clever men of our time are so ignorant that they do their utmost to encourage them. It is true that social problems were far simpler in Keller’s day, he for instance knew nothing of the daily bread question, and when he saw any traceof it, he laughed it to scorn, as in the case of the wretched inhabitants of Seldwyler, who trained their daughters as governesses and companions, and then cheated the poor creatures out of the hard-earned savings which they had received in return for their squandered lives.
But the times when Keller attacked these women in solemn earnest was when they brought their intellectual or artistic pretensions before his notice. In the story of poor Regina there is a lady artist who is a manlike, priggish creature, only there to be the misfortune of others. Keller in his indignation has not spared the trouble to describe her character with many carefully studied details. She is the woman with a profession who “no longer wants man.”
In another passage, in theSeven Legends, he describes the learned woman who does not wish to have any dealings with men, who despises love, and makes copy out of her male companions.
She ends by becoming a monk and abbot in a monastery. But one day “she felt with a bitter sorrow that she was thrust out from a more beautiful world,” and if she, after having arrived at this understanding, did not share the same fate as Strindberg’sMiss Julia, she had only to thank the nobler character of the man whom she chanced to meet.
Keller speculated a great deal upon these hybrid beings. Not only on the turning of women into men by manly occupations, of which England andScandinavia have provided numerous instances during the last quarter of the present century, but he also touched upon a more profound, and as yet scarcely explored territory, the stages of transition between man and woman and the combination of the two characters in the same person. The anecdote of the Emperor Nero, who dressed himself like a woman, and insisted that he was going to have a child, gave him a great deal to think about. His poetic insight extended over the whole territory of organic phenomena, and his instinct was too true to dismiss that which might have a physical explanation with less thought than that which was a purely mental trouble. In those most precious pearls, hisSeven Legends, the relation of the sexes is the foundation for every single story. Every time it is a woman with a perverted soul, one who in consequence of some inward or outward influence has relinquished her feminine nature. A woman may err as much as she likes, provided she does it naturally, but should she act contrary to her nature as a woman, Keller will never forgive her. In every legend he introduces a Bible or Church tenet to which he gives a profane interpretation.
In this mischievous little book the Holy Virgin, contrary to all traditions, comes to the fore as an enthusiastic matchmaker, and disdains no means whereby she may bring together two silly people who do not know how to manage the matter for themselves. A pious monk is alienated from theChurch by a little girl who is desirous of marrying him. An hysterical saint makes a love-lorn youth as hysterical as herself; and even the muses go astray in Paradise and behave in such a manner that the Holy Trinity is obliged to silence them by a loud clap of thunder.
In the midst of these distorted elements, the history of the nun “who went out of the convent to quiet her longing” is great and strong as the everlasting evangel of the fulfilment of human love. In these stories we have human love itself in a plain but mighty symbol—spring with its storms bursting its obtruding bonds, summer with its hot raptures, autumn with its fruits, and winter with its calm.
Warmth, sunshine, peace, and a soft, fresh wind. The blunt peaks of the Bavarian mountains appear above the horizon with their hollows full of snow, the pale blue lake glistens with streaks of silver in the midday sun, and a soft, blue mist obscures the distant view. There is a gentle, monotonous sound of murmuring wind, the first flies of the year are buzzing on the window pane, and the buds on the trees are bursting their scales. The meadows are sparsely clothed in green and speckled yellow and white with cowslips and anemones. Everything is so still, so still that you can hear your own pulse beat, but presently you hear it no more—you are lifted up into the Infinite.
Still, quite still, a half-wakened, susceptible murmuring within, the soul enjoying its siesta and the mind at rest—such should be your mood ere you immerse yourself in Paul Heyse. You do not read him, you do not need to think about him, yet your pulse beats faster and your lungs breathe the pure air of the silent mountains, while somewhere in the distance you catch a murmuring sound as of the loud tumultuous world; or is it only the torrent that flows behind the house?
Paul Heyse’s best writings are only for those who are quite young or for those who are quite mature, for those who are still dreaming innocent dreams on the threshold of life, or for those who have dived down and emerged again from the dusty, gasping tumult, and who stand on one side, not wishing to enter again upon the “Steeplechase for life.”
This accounts for his unpopularity at the present time.
Outwardly he belongs to an older period which has long ceased to be, but inwardly he belongs to a new period which has not yet begun. He stands before the young people of our time as a classic and an Epigoni, a polished and well-preserved gentleman who contrasts unfavourably with their unbrushed coats, weak spines and sickly faces; he stands before them as an old gentleman who has gained an easy victory, whereas they are panting neurotics ruining themselves in the struggle after renown and the new culture, who grudge him his intuition and despise his old-fashioned methods.
There is a peculiarity about Paul Heyse which consists in its being almost impossible to remember his writings, there is so little material substance in them, they are not at all attractive at first, and virtue is seen too seldom to sit at table with him after crime has expended itself.
But we will now leave virtue for the residue, it is a moral necessity in which thejuste milieubetween socialists and anarchists is encountered.Paul Heyse would certainly never have lived to be sixty years of age, and a celebrated author into the bargain, if he had not made some concessions to respectable principles; but the manner in which he did it is very unsatisfactory. He does not pant beneath the burden of the moral law, nor does he quarrel with it, he merely avoids it mechanically, as one avoids a bailiff.
His best writings lie on the further side of the ten commandments, middle class decorum and the penal code. They are included in the mysterious province of instinct and impulse, and are sometimes so dreamy that one sees that they are the production of the writer’s intuitive nerves rather than the result of serious thinking.
It is this that distinguishes Heyse from the German authors of our day, and because his intuition is so fine, his susceptibility so delicately toned, he is one of the greatest diviners in the province of spiritualised sexuality that has ever been, or now is. And because he was always an intuitive physiologist, he was also a convinced fatalist. He, with his poet’s soul, had gazed beyond the accepted standard of good and evil long before Nietzsche, he had recognised the present type of emancipated womanhood long before the Woman’s Rights movement was in full swing. It was this delicate sensibility which put him in touch with every secret movement before it had gained ground and become universal, and it is because he possessed this finesusceptibility of the nerves that he became acknowledged as the only one among German authors who knew how to write about love.
Outside the birds are twittering, the torrent roars and the wind of early spring moans around the house, bringing a longing with it, a vague, restless longing for freedom and happiness, a longing to lose one’s self and to live one’s own life to a degree that is not possible on earth, a longing to shake off everything that holds one down and to be united to the Infinite....
It is the yearning of first youth, which returns again with passionate tears in last youth ... it is the yearning peculiar to Heyse, the longing of the awakened child-girl and the sorrowful desire of the matured woman, these are the two types of womanhood which he has divined as no one else has done, these are the two passionate ages, the beginning and the end, between which lies the much-trodden, phlegmatic middle path.
Woman is a revelation only in her youth and in her age, in her first blossoming and in the years when she begins to fade; all that lies between is merely education, common sense, discretion and that luke-warm temperament in which the majority of bourgeois marriages are contracted.
If we are matured women, we read Heyse as those who know; if we are child-women, we readhim as a guide. Heyse is not one of those who convey strong impressions to feed the hunger of impatient youth; the external events, the comings and goings of his heroes and heroines, and their names and destinies do not remain long in the memory. What does remain is an emotional feeling, something that words are powerless to describe, but which returns as often as we read him. And the day comes when an event in our lives causes it to return again with more force than before, and with advancing years it begins to personify womanly nature and to weigh good and evil according to an unknown standard; later on there comes again another day when this emotion comes forth from the unknown and reveals itself to consciousness, not to the consciousness of the mind, and not exactly to the consciousness of the soul, but to a corporeal consciousness, strange as it may sound. The time has now come when this consciousness must rule woman’s most private life in accordance with laws which do not appear in connection with the outer world, with impressions which custom has never foreseen, and with sensations of attraction and repulsion which no longer make themselves feebly felt as of old. Woman has become conscious of her own personality, she has become manifest to herself, she has attained the consciousness of her own nobility, she has discovered a foundation for the expression of her desire to love and be loved. This basis of the relations between man and womanis not an outward form, it is a physical condition, it is a sensitive expression of being, it is the greatness of the soul.
Paul Heyse is the only German author who has made this greatness of the soul in erotic matters the chief point in his philosophy of life, and he is the only one who has revealed it as the point of sensibility in the relations between man and woman.
It was owing to the fact that he introduced this characteristic into literature and into the consciousness of the period, thereby making it the foundation of an entire literature, that he became something more than a German author. He became a world-wide celebrity, one of the few through whom a new step in sensations has found expression, and through whom humanity has achieved a marked progress on the road to culture. I will not speak of all that Heyse has been to the best women. I will not speak of all that it signified to these women, when, on their spiritual and physical awakening in this world of barren conventions, they were met by a man who, with one stroke of the magic wand of his intuitive faculty for divining, awoke the hot spring which is woman’s one and only possession, the source of her genius and of her whole character, her spiritualised, harmonised sexuality. Where and in what other nation has there ever been a writer who awoke this spring? Not even the susceptible Paul Bourget, who has been feeling after it for so long, not even he found it, not one of the Englishmen and Englishwomenwho write so philosophically, humorously and sensibly, not even they discovered it, not even the otherwise so tender-hearted Dickens ever had the slightest suspicion of it. And as far as the Scandinavians are concerned—with one single exception—the Danes are the only ones who deserve any attention with regard to erotics, and even in the midst of their refined, purified tenderness, there is a cold spot, something which resembles a damp fog in the innermost heart of their susceptibility; for them love is always more or less of an artificial matter, an æsthetic satisfaction, a satisfaction or enjoyment which is self-analytical. But in Paul Heyse the nature of passion remains dark as the night in which one loves, unreflected as all spontaneous impulses, unconscious as the love in German folk-songs. Think of the tale ofLaurence and Laurawhich sounds like some primeval melody issuing from the soul of the German people. It contains nothing transcendental, for while we would speak of it with all tender respect, we must own that it is the expression of an entirely sensuous yearning. At a certain period of his authorship Heyse’s writings were as simple as these half-forgotten folk-songs; he explained, from the point of view of a noble nature, that eternal schism betwixt body and soul which has ever been the favourite subject of coarser writers, he has explained it as a peaceful, boundless and unconscious emotion whereby a person is transported into the love which hasneither beginning nor end, every phase of which and every form of expression—the purely spiritual as well as the purely physical—is equally sweet, equally refreshing, and is always the same breath of life which cannot be explained and cannot be imparted. The self-surrender is complete and unhesitating, because spiritual passion does not end with the physical purpose; the soul which exists only in the other is humble, as all that is noble must ever be in the presence of the Incommensurable—which is Love.
Love is the Incommensurable; who has ever said that before, who has ever felt it? In the early folk-songs it has been both said and felt, and Goethe has declared it in the loving and playful manner of the eighteenth century, but in our youngest literature, and not only in that of Germany, it is scarcely ever either said or felt. In its place we have free love, where they take one another on trial and end by settling down for convenience’s sake, after the third or fourth attempt. It is a practical and plebeian method, worthy of the age, but it is not love. What stolid minds and dense souls must they have who need first to take one another on trial! For these thick-skinned ones love is an intellectual partnership, or a partnership of interests; maybe they are two libertines who have come across one another in their search for satisfaction. Of course these forms are the most frequent, but they lie on the boundary between barbarism and decadenceand are constantly losing their balance on one side or the other.
The love which Paul Heyse saw and described is vitality itself. With him love is the essence of vitality, and as the entire philosophy of life is based on that which one feels to be the spark of vitality, so love is the central point in his philosophy. He always describes love as an extraordinary revelation of accumulated strength and power. Love does not hesitate, does not lead astray, does not diminish; as soon as love appears she makes straight for the beloved object whose presence she discerns amongst thousands the instant that he enters the circle of her atmosphere. No sooner does she find herself in the presence of the beloved, to whom she is thus sympathetically attracted, than she becomes the victim of a peculiar emotion which Heyse has never expressed in words, and which it would be very difficult to describe. It is an ardent yearning, a stretching of oneself like the plant to the sun, silent and not to be averted; all the activities of life concentrate themselves towards this one object, the attainment of which means a hitherto unknown force, while the reverse would mean decay. There is no alternative, it must be either an indescribable salvation, or else extinction. To be susceptible of this kind of love and, with the certainty of one who walks in his sleep, to discover the beloved as the one who is organically sympathetic amid thousands whom we either dislike or who areindifferent to us—is the sure sign of a very high culture and of a rare physical and spiritual purity. Just as the instincts of natural selection are being continually perfected together with more sensitive nerves and soul vibrations, just as the spiritual and sensuous needs attain a higher degree of intensity and importance in measure as they are purified and rendered more personal, so in like manner the unhesitating precision of the instinct of selection, which is the latest quality attained, is the first which the approach of degeneration causes to disappear. In the contemporary literature of Russia, France, and Scandinavia we possess a whole row of extraordinarily good, analytical sketches of these degenerates. The majority of the principal characters in these exquisite psychological studies are no longer able to love, and Paul Bourget has introduced a peculiar type to which these belong. Or else they are not yet able to love for want of spiritual and physical culture—Garborg and Strindberg have made these their special study. On the one side we have degeneration, on the other barbarism, and sometimes a mixture of both. Heyse is the only writer who has described the capacity and necessity for loving which are the organic conditions of love; but as he is not an analyst, and perhaps only an unconscious psychologist, he is not able to tell us why it is that his creations are so permeated with ardent love that his best characters are nothing else but love intensified and personified.
Does he really not know it? Or is it that he will not tell us? Perhaps it does not suit the technical method upon which his talent is formed. Deep though the analytical powers of our modern psychologists are, their human perception is shallow in the extreme. With him there is no analysis, but his perception is clear as truth itself. Our best modern Europeans have not yet got beyond realising the fact that love is a necessity which it is more or less difficult to satisfy; he leaves the necessity on one side as being too obvious to need exemplifying. He does not concern himself as to whether or not it is there, he asks how it can be satisfied, satisfied in that choice manner which a refined and spiritualised sensibility requires. From this point of view he is the most modern of modern writers, and for him love becomes the Incommensurable.
The question is now no longer whether it is or is not possible to live happily together, but whether the one finds that other with whom marriage means rapture and bliss. The union of souls must be complete, otherwise separation will ensue. These are the requirements of the highest culture, and of persons who are possessed of a truly noble personality.
Heyse never wearied of describing this noble personality from every possible point of view, and every time he did it with more or less success. He described it in the early dawn of day when the awakening senses are shy and reserved in thepresence of the strange mystical power which shall decide their fate. He has described it in the quiet, fatalistic waiting for the great revelation of life which may come, or may perhaps never come, since it is not in the power of man to force it. He has described it in that inner self-destruction when the soul, through its own fault or that of another, tarnishes its proud righteousness and can no longer be a law unto itself. He has described it in the evening glow, by which it lets itself be illuminated and consumed. And all these characters have the greatest self-sufficiency combined with the immutable conviction of their dependence on fate. There is a peaceful feeling about them all, a peace which results from the consciousness of a great, universal destiny; and there is a certain self-esteem about them too which comes from the knowledge that they are free from all outer circumstances, from all silly, trivial, commonplace bonds and conventions in the great hour of Eros. People have tried to see the Epigoni in Heyse, who, according to the old receipt, raised his people above their natural circumstances, and let them grow beyond their natural size. But I think they are mistaken. I would sooner believe that the studies in erotics which we have hitherto possessed, excellent and circumstantial though they be, are utterly worthless as regards their psychology. It depends on the writer, not on the things themselves. And I believe that Paul Heyse’s way of letting his peopleevolve out of a state of dependence—just as the kernel drops from the shell—shews a peculiarly deep psychology productive of a rich future. In my opinion psychology is now only in its first rude beginnings, and the deeper laws of the psycho-physiological life only casually appear above the surface as though by guesswork.
Generally speaking the best people are excessively reserved in their relations to one another, even when they are living under favourable conditions and are themselves highly cultured. Our likes and dislikes, our finest, most private and tender emotions are suppressed beneath the threshold of consciousness, while the greater part of what we do, feel, and think is not in the least natural, and is not at all the true expression of our nature. What I mean is that up till now there has only been a single point where we are able to break through that which we call our life, because it is only on this one central point that our real nature bursts through the numbness and coolness of the outer world. That is the apocalypse of love. But it is not at all to be despaired of, that with a more universal refining of mankind, this possibility may also be realised on other and more prominent points.
I think that Heyse’s way of expressing it is notat all idealistic or unreal. How many of love’s suicides has he not verified! How many of love’s suicides, of whom we read in the papers, have not afforded ample proof to the psychologists of that which Heyse’s more sceptical critics have accused as being a trick of the imagination. We read in hundreds of clever and stupid books of how Hans and Grete fight each other, but we never read of how Hans and Grete live the secrets of a happy love; we never read of life’s happy ones.
Why? Because it requires a far subtler and more delicate psychological touch to describe it. Even Heyse has not described it; even he has not given us a modern picture filled with the rich tones of life’s fleeting moments, with the magic of the varying lights upon it, such as an artist catches when he paints a landscape. He has always been content to make quite a plain little pencil drawing, in which the distinguishing features are only faintly outlined. The great service which he rendered was that he called attention to their existence.
In these little drawings we discern the psychological, fundamental law which has been almost forgotten amid the little world that surrounds us with its secondary laws; it is namely this: That in every particular individual there is a central point which, when set in motion, towers high above its surroundings, while as a natural consequence everything assumes a new aspect. The result of this aspect is that everything becomes of secondaryimportance if it has no connection with the one central point. This central point is the finer need of love, which no longer knows anything but itself when once a sympathetic presence has awakened it to its full strength.
We have now reached the second psychological consideration. Does a like sympathetic effect proceed from the one influenced? We are not asking whether the influence is more or less intense, but whether the effect is sufficiently powerful to raise the other tower-high above everything in view of new aspects? Because a refined instinct of natural selection must be able to alight on an equally high temperature, must be as unconditionally selected as it itself selects. Everything depends on this—the affirmation or negation of life—a compromise is impossible! How often, as inMemorable Words, Paul Heyse has underlined those seemingly insignificant details like a tone of the voice, a smile, a difference of opinion or a trivial expression which suddenly, no one knows how, acts as a stop to the current of sympathy which had just begun. The one frees himself, but the other is no longer able to do so, and the impulse of his heart overflows into chaos. Therefore love is the Incommensurable. Love cannot be acquired, cannot be earned, cannot be obtained by artifice, and it cannot be dispensed with. Paul Heyse describes how some noble-minded men and women remain alone, not from obtuseness of the instinct of natural selection,but from refinement, because they could not find all they wanted.
The third psychological consideration, and the sum of his entire philosophy of life, is his fatalism. That of itself would be sufficient to place Heyse apart, in these times when the ruling standard is that of the multitude. He has the proud submission of a profound insight which knows that, in the final instance and in the highest matters, we have nothing in our own power. That which we most earnestly desire comes, or it comes not, but we cannot do anything one way or the other. It is true that there is in us a mysterious impulse, as dark and unknown to ourselves as life itself, which drives us on to where our personal happiness is to be found, draws us into the Unknown and entices us until we are led towards that which is ours in life. But we know nothing of it at the time, and not in every one does it attain to development.
These three fundamental principles form the standpoint from whence Heyse regarded humanity. Humanity, did I say? I mean women, for he is essentially their author. He has been accused of writing for women only and not for men, and it is said that he cannot describe the latter. But with regard to that I should like to point out that he has been the teacher and model of some of thebest Scandinavian writers, and the only model which they found in Germany. The construction of his novels and the grace of his diction won him several followers in young Denmark, where his influence is clearly discernible, but in Germany he had no followers, for he is altogether inimitable; thus he remained alone in his home on the mountain of culture where, although he was much admired and much enjoyed, he was as a tower without access to the critical understanding and to the authors who succeeded him. As for the accusation of his being unable to describe men, the reason is probably this, that in comparison with the depth and directness of his comprehension of women, his men appear commonplace and uninteresting.
They nearly all seem a mere secondary consideration, and to exist only as the indispensable background and emotional force for woman. This gives one the impression that Heyse is not interested in man as a whole, but only in that side of him whereby his peculiar sensibility is brought into contact with woman, and through which his entire nervous system is set in motion. Paul Heyse’s man is seldom the one who makes the choice; it is nearly always the woman who gives the first impulse. The man usually remains long in a state of stupid wonderment, understanding nothing, while the woman who loves him has great difficulty in making herself understood.
This is an extremely delicate psychologicalfeature. For man the choice is not the matter of chief importance, but for woman it is. A man, however refined and cultured, could be quite happy with twenty or thirty women who were entirely different from one another, and he could feel himself warmly attracted by any one of them without his strongest emotions being stirred or his whole existence responding; but for a woman the absolute in love is the greatest, the only great event in her life. For this reason the superior woman will always be the chooser, she will always realise what the man is to her long before he knows it; her silent love will always be the first attraction and will bind him as it were with a thousand invisible cords, while the strange atmosphere which proceeds from her will wrap him round like the tremulous mist on a hot summer’s noon. Yet at first he does not, except under the most propitious circumstances, understand that this woman is sympathetic to him, but when the secret workings of organic attraction have completed themselves, he suddenly awakes to find that he is surrounded by a great and ardent love. In those rare cases when a man loves with the whole passion of his nature, and when his love is not, as it is oftenest described, and in our time of cultured barbarism too often is, a perverseness—i.e.love for a woman who has frequently experienced love already—in those rare cases it is always the woman who gives the first impulse, and in Heyse’s writings it is invariably the woman. In order to awake a deep,lasting and spiritual emotion in man, a woman needs more than mere physical attraction, she needs a spiritualised womanliness with all the enduring charm of its indestructible intensity. The Incommensurable in love is not a primeval quality in man as it is in woman; a man may have great nobility of soul and yet be able to exist without it, whereas a woman cannot. For her it is the primal condition of her being; for him it is an unexpected, charmed light, illumining his whole existence.
Henrik Ibsen
The artists and authors of our day have one peculiarity in common, which is that they, with one or two exceptions, have no idea of perspective either with regard to the future or the past. Their perspective in the past is shown by Ebers among the Pyramids, and Alma Tadema among the broken pots of Mycenæ. Their perspective in the future is an outlook into a cul-de-sac. The majority of authors in the latter half of this century have conducted their readers by a more or less roundabout path into a cul-de-sac, where they have left them; it has occurred so often that the reading public have begun to lose patience. This fondness for cul-de-sacs is clearly perceived in the drama of our time.
We will not concern ourselves with the lesser playwrights, for the utmost that they can do is to follow the example of their masters and parody them by their imitation. We will turn instead to one of the masters themselves, to one who is justly considered a great dramatist—Henrik Ibsen.
If we examine his entire life-work, piece bypiece, we shall arrive at the conclusion that it was a persistent wandering out of one cul-de-sac into the other.
It began withLove’s Comedy: Marriage is synonymous with stupefaction, not to marry is synonymous with theorising; remains the missing x, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; result: cul-de-sac.
It is continued inPer Gynt: Romantic imagination is synonymous with self-deception; school of life is synonymous with apathy; the missing x is synonymous with the result: cul-de-sac.
InBrandthe diagram is simpler: Excessive desire for moral perfection contra absolute religious indifference; result: cul-de-sac.
Whoever reads carefully these three great Speculative works of Ibsen’s will be astonished to find that it was by no means unconsciously that he ran into these cul-de-sacs; on the contrary, he steered straight for them, and the last sentences ofBrandread like a triumphal epigram.
But by this time the floor of universal speculation had become too hot for him, and he trod it no more. He turned to a more comprehensible genre—if one may so call the popular discussions on social morals and society problems.
Here it seemed that the author and the thinker might wander arm in arm towards a clearly perceptible goal. How far he attained is a question which we will leave for the next chapter.
Above my table hangs an old engraving after the portrait of a woman by the younger Holbein in the gallery at Windsor. It is a face of the Hedda Gabler type—Hedda Gabler three hundred years ago. Fair as a lily, dressed after the newest fashion of her day with a half aureole on her head, puffed sleeves and a high collar, everything fashionably squeezed and tight-laced, and added to this an inscrutable face with cold, veiled eyes, and a small mouth which promises nothing good. She is undoubtedly a well-bred lady of good family, who is not likely to relax her features or change her deportment, but who might possibly allow others to make advances to her. She looks so conscious of her innocence and so demurely attractive, that one thinks that she also may have had an Eckert Lövborg to initiate her theoretically into the lives of young men.
Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret structure of her soul. As one well versed in life and anxious to divert attention from the track which he was pursuing, Ibsen declared that this time it was only a psychological study, withno criticism of society and no wrathful pessimism. And so, dear society, good and bad, you may set yourself at rest!
But society was not at rest. This Hedda Gabler was a creature who displeased it. Nearly all women objected to her and declined to entertain such a moral monster at their tea-table, while all women-worshippers felt that through her the whole sex had been wronged, and finally the majority of men were opposed to her because they were not able to discover any traces of either manly or womanly psychology.
This was not only the case in Germany, and in England which is the home of emancipated women and the birthplace of moral zeal, but even in the author’s own Scandinavia they fought shy of her. The priests listened—they who guarded the sacred fire on the altars of the great mystery. “What is this?” they asked. “Is he beginning to speak with tongues?” And the chaste priestesses of the pure Ibsen cult maintained an ominous silence. Everywhere stillness ensued—the stillness of the storm when it rains hailstones.
Another author would have been made to suffer for it; but the great name of the great moralist held hands and tongues at bay.
Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the midst of aphlegmatic bourgeoismilieuput an end to all illusion. Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with or without vine-leaves in the hair!—Where, in the name of wonder, do people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they feel like it?
You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.
Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve, perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.
The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly this: the dissection of an ideal.
InNora, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; inHedda Gablerhe dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious work of digging. The miner[1]climbs down into the depths where he digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds.Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it, he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal.
Norais the rough diamond,The Lady from the Seais the rock-crystal,Hedda Gableris a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal too.
How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynistà laStrindberg?
“Man created woman—out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his god, the Ideal.”
It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung by man about woman.
All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all these man has immortalised in his songs on woman.
Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping sound like that of a little bird; in later times—in the times of the celebrated writers, GeorgeSand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler, etc.—they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of “women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition.
The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid. She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems....
Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul throughout all ages.
Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type of woman.
The superficial and excitable temperament of the French during the century has produced variations of the type of contriving, vivacious little coquettes; the two great German authors, Goethe and Keller, created the thoughtless, sensuous child of nature; John Bull has soconscientiously simplified himself since the Renaissance that he is no longer able to create any type of human womanhood, his women are elves and Medusas; and as for the women in the new Scandinavian literature, with the exception of Strindberg’s hyenas and Ibsen’s “thinking women,” they can hardly be said to occupy a very prominent position.
Strindberg’s fates are ghastly vampires who suck the blood of horror-stricken man. They are not to be described in words, it would require the art of a great painter to represent them as they appear in all the unreal reality of their being.—There still remains Ibsen’s woman.
Ibsen’s woman holds her sway throughout Europe, and that is in itself a sufficient reason for us to study her as she is represented in his works, and as she stands before us in real life.
“Hedda Gabler,” Ellida (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca (Rosmersholm), Gina, Hedvig (The Wild Duck), Fru Alving (Ghosts), Nora (The Doll’s House), Petra (An Enemy of the People), Selma (The League of Youth), Lona (The Pillars of Society), Solveig (Per Gynt), Agnes (Brand), Swanhild (Love’s Comedy)—here are the women whom Ibsen has created, since he became Ibsen, the seeker, the analyser, the doubter.
Their first and universal characteristic is that they are all misunderstood.
Their second and equally universal characteristic is that they are either unmarried or else unhappily married, the result in either case being discontent;ergowe have the thinking woman, the reading woman, the self-cultured woman, or in other words, thebourgeoisiewith plenty of spare time on her hands.
Ibsen’s earliest period belongs to the traditional historical drama, which owed its origin to Germany; the romantic, lyrical and dramatic poems,BrandandPer Gynt, thrust themselves between with their contingent of angel-women who acted as deliverers of men; and all his other productions as an author were the result of his criticisms of society, or more correctly, his criticisms of the middle class. He was the bourgeois who rebelled against his surroundings, who raised the scorpion scourge against the flesh of his people and the ideals of his world. In his writings the middle class saw themselves reflected as in a looking-glass.
Each one of his writings contains the dissection of a bourgeois ideal, and it is always through a woman of the bourgeois class that the result is seen.
The first piece in which he condemned society was that bitterest of all parodies that has ever been written on legitimate unions:Love’s Comedy. Never has the institution of marriage been made to appear more ridiculous, or the basis of bourgeoissociety,i.e.its respectability, been more unmercifully dissected. At the same time the Ibsen keynote of man’s relation to woman, or what is virtually the same thing, woman’s relation to man, is already struck, and struck with no uncertain sound. A woman cannot live with a man, with any man; Swanhild loves Falk, but she will not yield herself to him either for to-day or for ever, for fear lest their love should not endure. She marries an old prig instead, and Falk goes away deeply moved and sings a song on eternal youth.
This bourgeois piece is framed on the negation of life itself, and its subject is the unnatural one of a solitary being who desires to stand alone. It is a profound, psycho-physiological moment when sickness has declared itself. Who is to blame? Bourgeois society? The author? Or both?
ThePillars of Societyis the glorification of the woman who is able to stand alone—the old maid. There are two old maids in the piece, the one active, the other passive, and both are perfect providences on earth. It was really very pretty of Ibsen to have raised these much-neglected beings to the throne of honour. The principal old maid, Lona, who is an extraordinary specimen of emancipated womanhood, refuses to marry because she has had an unfortunate experience, and she dares not risk her happiness in that most terrible—also most glorious—of all games of chance, but prefers to stand on the shore and play providence. Selma (The League of Youth), Petra(An Enemy of the People), Gina, Hedvig (The Wild Duck), are four genuine examples of the bourgeois class. Selma—an ornamental little doll, a perfect Nora in the bud—is the poetry of a rich merchant’s home, poetry, that is to say, in the sense that the rich merchant understands it; she refuses to be poetry any longer and acquaints her husband with the fact that love and marriage must terminate because he has not “allowed her to take part” in his business troubles. Petra is the wage-earning daughter in an impecunious bourgeois home, a poor neutral creature who has forgotten that she is a woman, and in whom men forget it too. Gina, in Ibsen’s deepest piece, is a young lady housekeeper who is allowed to sit at dessert with the boarder, and the anæmic, hysterical, romantic Hedvig is her child; both are genuine portraits and equally genuine negations of womanhood in the heart of woman’s being. Finally Nora and Fru Alving, the two great progenitors of the entire race of thinking and reading women. Nora is a double being, in whom the author’s observation and reflection grow up side by side like two divided stems; and Fru Alving is Ibsen himself in the disguise of a woman. These pieces one and all describe the liberation of the housewife, the conventional table-cloth on the bourgeois table, the obvious corruption of bourgeois marriages, noble women who would be ruined by their contact with bad men, if it were not that they are the strong women who shake off the weak men,but who, in consequence of their unnatural behaviour, are changed into neutral beings in their flight before marriage, just as Daphne, in olden time, was changed into a laurel when on her flight before the god.
Hitherto Ibsen’s writings have had two sides which are directly opposed to one another: the one negative, pessimistic, direct, which served as so many leaves in the school-book of thebourgeoisieas the class of society which is the ruling class, but which is, by reason of its moral bankruptcy, doomed to immediate destruction. The scene of action is always an imaginary one, with a cosmopolitan colouring; it is not Ibsen’s fault if, on the Continent, his characters are looked upon as essentially Norwegian, he tried, to the best of his limited power, to render them cosmopolitan. The other side of his writings is quite positive, quite creditable as regards its starting-point and its aim: the glorification of woman as a vessel of good, as a saviour of society, as the conscience of man.
Then cameThe Wild Duck, which contained the most characteristic personalities upon the most ricketty foundation. One wondered what the old man was about.—Gregers Werle, who runs with moral precepts into the dwellings of day-labourers; and the lies of life, which also have their moral significance—it was Ibsen himself who held judgment upon Ibsen. And like a visage, reflected and distorted in muddy water, the figures of Gina and Hedvig glide past like so many poor,tormented, guilty or guiltless people with no ideals, no moral trumpets.
A couple of years laterRosmersholmappeared. It startled the whole circle of flattering women and their flatterers. No more censuring of society, no more glorification of woman! The bourgeois centre no longer takes the first place, it fades into a decorative background; the entire space is absolutely filled by two people, a man and a woman, who are engaged in a battle against one another. The man is a noble creature, weak but refined; the woman is a plebeian by birth and soul, coarse-grained and selfish, one whom nature has designed for a criminal. Here we also have a weak man and a strong woman, but the lights and shadows fall quite differently.
There is one thing which the author throws into the balance in the woman’s favour, and that is that the woman is brave and fit for life, while the man is cowardly and unfitted for it.
The next to appear wasThe Lady from the Sea.
People were astonished and asked what it was.
“It is a piece in praise of true marriage,” replied Ibsen’s women admirers, and they wept.
What of this hysterical Fru Ellida who waits expectantly for some one else, who lives on Platonic terms with her husband and ends by sending her—very grown-up—stepdaughter into an educational establishment? What does Fru Ellida do? She indulges in bold fancies andexalted dreams, and when the subject of her dreams stands before her, and when the great happiness comes, which is always equally the great danger—she does not recognise him, she is afraid of him, and she takes refuge with her safe and trustworthy spouse, the patient Wangel.
Can’t we see Ibsen’s eyes twinkling behind his spectacles?
One of the first principles, on which Ibsen’s glorification of woman rests, is that woman is noble.
Nora is noble, but Rebecca is not.
Another of his principles is that woman is courageous and well fitted for life.
Rebecca is courageous, but Ellida is cowardly.
... Let us turn to Hedda Gabler. She is what used, in older days, to be called a “dragon.” All that she says and does, all her smiles and her kisses are wicked, she is tormented by a love of mischief, she is filled with an impotent, cowardly greed which incessantly turns to an envious hatred of all things living, extending even to her own offspring.
But she is something more, she is a symbol.
Ibsen has resumed the thread which he allowed to drop since the appearance ofThe Wild Duck. Hedda Gabler is a daughter of the upper middle class, the class whose moral bankruptcy hasafforded a subject for his social dramas. Hedda Gabler has the courage and the soul of the bankrupt daughter of a race of bankrupts, whose only rule of life is a hollow form, and she, in the guise of a woman, represents the unfruitfulness of this exhausted class.
But Hedda Gabler is something more. She is the reverse of Fru Alving. Fru Alving is a good woman destined to be ruined by men, Hedda Gabler is a bad woman by whom men are ruined.
There is yet another point about her. She is the destruction of the “ideal” in woman, the ideal which Ibsen incarnated in woman as the absolutely good, strong, clever, pure, courageous, etc.; in her he repudiates the worship of woman; in her he repudiates the vanguard of women who were armed by himself, the women’s rights women and opponents of men; all the deformities of the modern woman are concentrated in Hedda, who hates and rejects her own offspring.
This accounts for the mysterious silence which pervaded the north when the great prophet, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” began to speak with tongues.