If we glance over the work of Ibsen’s life-time, we see that every single ideal of the day which he dealt with in his writings was by him destroyed. First came that absolute faith which was thefundamental Christian ideal inBrand: he destroyed it. Then came the romantic capriciousness of a bourgeois soul inPer Gynt: he destroyed that also. In his social dramas he dealt with the conventions of society, and them he also destroyed. Afterwards came woman....
Ibsen is not an erotic, and his instinct taught him very little about woman. As woman she has no attractions for him, she is nothing more to him than an idea—a figure in a game of chess. He began to push these figures backwards and forwards. His first women were ghostly dialecticians. He did not know woman sufficiently well to write of her according to his own perceptions, so he modelled her according to recognised literary forms,i.e.after the writings of former generations. This was the origin of the glorification of a mother’s love (Agnes) inBrand, and the glorification of waiting (Solveig) inPer Gynt, both of which are creations of undoubted poetical beauty, for Ibsen was a great poet in his youth.
His social dramas were the result of discontent, and he sought for and found the discontented woman. His method of creation is worthy of notice. His men differ, but with his women the course of development is always clearly discernible. InThe League of Youth, which is one of his earliest pieces, Selma already contains Nora in the bud, while Petra in one of his other dramas resembles a photograph of Lona; Dr Rank afterwards turns into Oswald; Fru Alving has thetemperament which develops into Rebecca and stands in doubt before the possibility of murder, Rebecca commits it, and both without moral compunction. Yet in spite of this, the glorification of woman reached its zenith in Fru Alving, and as formerly its tendency was to increase, so now it began to decrease. Rebecca is followed by the Lady from the Sea, and she in turn by Hedda—lower, ever lower. There is always one special peculiarity, as I have just signified, which Ibsen carries on from one character to the other, and which he either increases or destroys. For instance, Rebecca longs for life and is courageous, while Ellida thirsts for life but is not courageous, and Hedda is not courageous nor does she thirst for life, but is cowardly and inquisitive. In each piece he leaves a little bit of ideality to be dissected in his next work, and the last remnant of the ideal bequeathed by Hedda is “a beautiful death.” The Master Builder’s death is no longer beautiful.
Thus Ibsen’s constructive method is revealed.
Men always write about woman as they imagine her to be and as they desire her, and it is the same when a woman writes, she always pictures herself as man sees her. It is woman’s nature to mould herself after a form, and to desire a form in which she can mould herself. But of course this manner of speaking, thinking, acting always is and remains only a superficial form. There is something beneath it which follows other laws and is seldom revealed to the gaze of man. This is perhaps thereason why Ibsen, though he did not draw his women from nature, was destined in a few years’ time to meet his Lonas, Noras, and Rebeccas in real life. The Lonas founded high schools for the advanced education of women, became students themselves and educated others, the Noras became authoresses and produced a redundant literature dealing with morals, and the Rebeccas claimed the right of an unmarried woman of thirty to take possession of the man whom they considered worthy of being made happy.
When Ibsen reappeared on the scenes with hisMaster Builder, after an interval during which he had become celebrated, the physiognomy which he presented was one that was quite unexpected. He seems to be in the same predicament as “the old fellow who did not know how to help himself.” Everything goes round in a circle, as it did in Solness’s head before he fell from the tower. And if it is possible to find any meaning at all in this very obscure piece, it is that Ibsen had a presentiment that he was going to fall down off the height of his dialectic scaffolding, but that he was not able to give up his useless habit of climbing, which, for such an old man, was a very break-neck amusement.
This presentiment has been fulfilled, for inLittle Eyolfhe really did fall down and break his leg. And this leg-breaking is quite in keeping with the rest of Ibsen’s dramas. It is as naturalistic as it is symbolic, and its foundation is logical.
If we to-day glance back at Ibsen’s works, we can borrow the result of his quiet meditation and say: Henrik Ibsen is himself the little Eyolf of the middle class, begotten by the union of the Gallic formula of the rights of humanity with the Teutonic deterioration of race; compare Rita and Almers. And as soon as the parents had accomplished this, they attempted no more; again compare Rita and Almers. Their only achievement was a brain that developed itself in a logical manner.
From the beginning to the end of Ibsen’s work the one thing lacking is synthesis. Synthesis is one with personality, and Ibsen is not a personality; he is all brain. He has not, in any one of his books, the warmth and pulsation that belong to a complete nature; one feels something resembling warmth, yes, something very like fever-heat, in the passages where he describes cruelty; we need only recall the martyrdom of Agnes inBrand. He was a man of brains who composed; but the brain cannot compose. The blood composes, the soul composes, the nerves compose, but of all these he had very little—there was indeed a despairing lack of them in the year 1848 and thereabout. What did that period bring with it?A wordy warfare in which the logic of Judaism assumed the highest tone. Wherever this logic found its way, it imported debates upon problems, and Ibsen became the greatest of its pupils. He agitated, he “revolutionised,” he occasioned more than one act of momentary liberation. There was one characteristic which he retained from the days when he had been an apothecary’s apprentice, and that was an affection for acids. His entire authorship comes under the head of acids. He was never a psychologist, only a constructive agent, and sinceRosmersholmeven his constructive power has forsaken him; his men, Wangel, Tesmann, Solness, Almers are only variations of the same Rosmer. His women, Hedda, Hilda, Rita, are obvious derivations from the womanà laStrindberg. And now that he is nearing his end, he stands where his own Rita stands, whose last hope it is to make little civilised Eyolf-cripples out of the ragged, unmannerly, yet vigorous fisher class.
[1]See Ibsen’s Poems.
Björnstjerne Björnson
I saw Björnson for the first time in Paris in the spring of 1886, where he formed the centre of the entire Scandinavian population. He was living with his wife and daughters in a quiet side street not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in which he always took his morning walk. When I went to see him, his wife was the first to receive me; she was a dark-eyed native of Bergen, still pretty, with short-cut grey hair, and at first it seemed as though she meant to spend the customary quarter of an hour in conversation with me, as Björnson was at his work and might not be disturbed. Before long, however, the door into the adjoining room was opened, and a powerful, grey, bushy head was thrust through the aperture—a high forehead and little sharp eyes that sparkled behind a pair of spectacles, a large prominent hooked nose, and a pair of thin lips that quivered with anger and energy—but the next instant this menacing totality softened into a winning smile,and the whole man came in view, it was a bear-like figure, not above medium height, but with shoulders, arms and legs that gave one the impression of immense muscular strength. A man with this body and this temperament would require to lay about him in order to make life endurable, that was the first impression that one received, and the second was that this great muscular man was not created to understand the most subtle and hidden problems of human life. At the same time one understood his popularity. This genius of a bear had something about him that was irresistibly healthy, straightforward and convincing; he represented the primeval type of manhood, the leader whom the mass of the people follow like a flock of sheep, and at whose glance women turn hot and cold. Björnson’s is not a reserved nature—with such muscles there is no need of reserve—and owing to his communicativeness one gets to know him as well in a single day as any one else in a year. He invited me to join him in his morning walk in the Bois, and having first divested himself of a colossal Wagner cap, which seemed intended rather for adornment than for warmth, he stepped along with an elegance that would have done credit to a dandy, but which among German authors and thinkers is wholly unknown. The Scandinavians as a rule set a far greater value on dress than the Germans, and Björnson did not conceal his personal feelings in this respect, as displaying the silk lining of hisovercoat, he said: “You see I am fond of fine clothes; when I get a new suit from the tailor, I spend half the day in front of the looking-glass, but for all that I never for a single instant forget the great work of civilisation to which we must devote our whole energy.”
We crossed the Place de l’Etoile, and Björnson began to tell me about this same work. He spoke loud, and in a threatening voice, as though he were addressing a large audience. Omnibuses rattled by, light elegant carriages with india-rubber tyres flew past us, and riders came out of the Bois; it was necessary to concentrate one’s attention, to make room, to be careful, the crowd of foot-passengers was enough to confuse anybody; but Björnson behaved as though he did not observe it, he had grown excited in speaking, his voice quivered, his eyes shone with tears, and the passers-by stood still and stared at the strange bear-like figure with the broad, ruddy face appearing beneath the cylindriform hat and the brand new suit. But Björnson was too much accustomed to be stared at in his own country to allow himself to be disturbed by it. He shouted a few words of hearty greeting to a sad-looking little fellow countryman whom he caught sight of; and presently an English Bible-seller wandered by, who, hearing a foreign tongue, offered him the Word of God, whereupon Björnson recollected that he did not possess a Bible, and commenced a long altercation with the man, whichended by Björnson commissioning him to leave one at his house at the earliest opportunity. At last we reached the Bois. We walked among the fragrant acacias to the waterfall and past the winding lake, we walked and walked, surrounded by the spring magic of the half southern landscape, and imbued with the feeling of peaceful melancholy and comfortable exhaustion which the early spring in Paris brings with it. But Björnson felt neither melancholy nor exhaustion. Excited, and aglow with physical energy as though he contained the whole charge of an electric battery in himself, he spoke of the problem of how the relationship between men and women was to be remodelled. His great novel,Thomas Rendalen, had appeared not very long before, and he had just finished the first chapter ofIn God’s Way. He confessed that until lately he had not understood the importance of the subject, that he had not in fact possessed sufficient physiological knowledge. In all his former writings he had treated the relations between men and women in the old way, as something that is founded on a physical need. But the moderns will not have it so any longer. “No, they will not have it,” he said, in a voice that quivered with excitement. “They wish to get beyond that. The best men and the best women have other duties now, they recognise that it is their duty to work hand in hand towards the ennobling of the human race. What they want is a higher union. All the best men and womenare of one opinion in the matter, and the number of the best increases with increasing knowledge. The time will come when it will be natural to every high-minded man and woman to wish only for a spiritual union.”
I was dumbfounded. This doctrine did not please me, and proceeding from the lips of this robust giant it sounded, to put it mildly, somewhat strange. Björnson was silent for a few moments, we neither of us spoke. When the pause had elapsed—the pause which his listeners are wont to fill with a volley of applause—he began again in a condescending manner:
“I too used to think differently. In my youth I lived as others do; I knew no better. No one told me. But if I had known then what I know now, I should not have done it. I was in America a few years ago, and there they are further advanced than they are here; I spoke with some American lady doctors, and they explained it to me. They proved it to me on paper as clearly and plainly as possible. Strength goes here or there. In the brain or—in propagation. There is never more than a certain amount of strength, it only depends on where it is localised, whether for the highest purpose or the lowest—they explained it all. There is no ‘must’ about it, there is no natural necessity; that is deceptive nonsense. But women must make a beginning, they must oppose their degradation. Women must unite with women to give one another a hand. Youmust support each other, and then you will be able to dictate to men. The talk about not being able is all nonsense. For instance, you,” he said, turning suddenly on me, “have you ever had any difficulty of the kind?”
Of course I assured him that I never had; and I could do so with a good conscience, as he obviously alluded to a very material form.
Björnson took me back with him and gave me a copy of hisGauntletin Fräulein Klingenfeld’s German translation, which is a new and more severe edition of his former work. We often saw each other afterwards, but he never made me such a long speech again; I was not the right sounding-board for him. And here I must add, for the enlightenment of my possibly astonished readers, that conversations such as these were quite common at the time when the moral movement was raging in the north.
I happened to be in Copenhagen the following year when Björnson’s great moral tournament was announced. He spoke in one of the largest theatres in Copenhagen. Troops of “enlightened” peasants had come from the country to hear him; they looked strangely out of place with their black neckties and short whiskers as they pushed their way through the front seats, between Copenhagen elegants and worthy ladies of ripe years. The whole place was crowded to overflowing. I had a ticket for the evening reception which was given in honour of Björnson by a committee of thewomen “progressionists” of Copenhagen who formed the advance-guard of the emancipation movement, and I intended going there when the lecture was over.
Björnson appeared. A desk had been placed on the stage in front of the curtain, which was lowered. He mounted it, and stood looking like a righteous lion with a shaggy, grey mane, his eyes firmly closed, his lips compressed, the very incarnation of fanatical energy, “the man” for the masses. He began to speak. First he thundered, then he lowered his voice; first the words fell like hard stones, then his voice shook with emotion; he commanded, he entreated, he became by turns a man of learning, a pastor, a prophet and a jailor. But the effect produced upon the people of Copenhagen was not great. They applauded him very casually, the Danes—even in the lower stratum of society—are too æsthetic and critical, too conscious of being the possessors of an old and refined culture, to adopt the simple Norwegian modes of thought. Shortly afterwards Björnson visited the provincial towns and sowed his seeds throughout the whole of Scandinavia, where they took root.
I went home after the lecture feeling disappointed and depressed. It had sounded so hollow, and considering the past of this great writer and the future expectations of the three countries respecting him, it seemed to promise little for the hopes which the young generationhad fixed on him and on him only. It made me shudder to think of the speeches in which the representatives of a dozen old maids, and about as many discontented wives, would sing his praises in consequence of his words this day. The lecture, which was calledMonogamy and Polygamy, was the great divide between his yesterday and his to-morrow; it was then that the words were spoken: “So far and no further.”
He had been too crude and too pathetic for the people of Copenhagen. But the further he travelled into outlying districts, where culture was less advanced, the more this crudeness and pathos gained him influence, and as this tournament resulted in a change in the moral conceptions of Scandinavia which was destined to rule over family life as well as public life—a change which assumed the authority of a whole school of contemporary thought of which Björnson was the speaking trumpet, and as this school continues to gain ground in Germany the more surely, the more it becomes conscious of being the expression of the experience of a class, it deserves a more careful investigation.
What then was the subject of Björnson’s lecture?
It was a repetition of that speech of his in the Bois de Boulogne, only it was a larger and more detailed generalisation of the same, because in it he no longer dealt with noble-minded men and women, but with all men and all women. He had two fundamental doctrines which he used as hisstarting points: Woman’s complete equality with man respecting marriage, and the unconditional adaptive capacity of mammals.
Whether the latter doctrine is included in the German version ofMonogamy and Polygamy, I cannot say, as I have not got it by me. But with the exception of what the American lady doctors had told him, Björnson founded his argument in favour of the reform of the sexual relations on the following anecdote: He met a man who had a large cage in which he kept a dog, a cat, a rat, a mouse and a bird. He fed them well and taught them to overcome their natural instincts of enmity and to live peaceably together. “And they all prospered well, very well, and loved one another much, very much.” It evidently had not occurred to Björnson that the chief characteristic of this story is the parable of the cage and the domestic animals. It is a well-known fact, that in zoological gardens the ravenous animals are kept apart from the peaceful ones, as the latter are ready to die of fear and misery from the mere smell of the others, even without seeing them. But Björnson places the cage first as a matter of course—the great cage of society filled with domestic animals and house parasites which have been tame for generations, and are indolent and blunted in their instincts. Too satiated, too lazy and too degenerate to fight, the dear little creatures vegetate in close proximity to one another, which is exactly what well-fed domestic animals are in the habit of doing, evenwithout a cage. And then with a bold logical venture, he compared this state of things to the most central and most complicated of human relationships. If even the unreasoning animals are able to overcome their natural instincts, he argues, man also, after being sensibly reasoned with and encouraged by example, after many generations of training will be capable of adapting his strongest instinct to moral precepts and finally attain the ideal of pure sexlessness. Is not the daughter of the “educated classes” chaste? Have we not many millions of chaste old maids? Then why should not we have chaste old bachelors, and why cannot we have chaste young bachelors as well? Arise, you women! Strike! Refuse to be made “the laundry for unclean men”! Twice before he gave this lecture, Björnson had dealt with the same subject—inThomas Rendalenand inThe Gauntlet; the last of these two is the best known in Germany. In both works he declares that there should be only one moral standard for men and for women, and that this standard should be that of women.
The supporters of the movement in favour of the emancipation of women in Scandinavia baptised themselves into the name of Björnson, and adopted his confession of faith. The life, temperament, and superfluous energy of man was brought under the horizon of woman, and the eternal active was to allow itself to be remodelled by the eternal passive, because the latter was statistically in the majority.
At the time when Björnson was giving theselectures and writing these books, there was another movement which had just reached its zenith in the north, and which, by its opponents and by the emancipated daughters of the middle class, was known by the designation of “free love.” Its leaders were Arne Garborg and Hans Jaeger, who pleaded for the universal recognition of the socialist ideal as follows: That the conditions of society might be so ordered as to render prostitution unnecessary, by making early unions possible and marriage no longer a sacrament. Both parties were anxious to abolish prostitution, which is an evil that is not mentioned in Germany, although here also the emancipation movement (still in its infancy) is interested in it. It was the aim of Garborg and Jaeger to hasten its destruction by making it economically possible for early unions to be contracted in love, whereas Björnson and the women’s rights party sought another means,i.e.the mortification of the flesh.
No subject that has ever been discussed in the north has met with such an immense and lasting interest as this one. Beneath the pressure of Björnson the movement for the emancipation of women assumed a form of open enmity against man, and introduced a pietistic doctrine of the superiority of women into the literature and public life of Sweden. Should the movement ever force its way into the outposts of declining militarism in Germany, the signs are already to hand that there also the spirit of Björnson will rule.
How was it possible that this manly author with his impetuous and progressive nature should lose his way in the cul-de-sac of Christian asceticism—in the covert places of degeneration—and that having arrived at the time of life when a man’s opinions are matured, he did not find his way out again?
Here we come to the spot where the many conflicting threads of Björnson’s life are knotted together, from whence we arrive at the various stages of his creation, and from them find our way back again to the central point of his being.
A piece of contemporary history and class biography is unfolded in these numerous phases of Björnson’s life, reaches its climax here, runs its course and finds its ending. The political and social type of the ruling middle class is sharply outlined in him, and clearly stamped as though it were in a bronze medal.
But before we come to this chapter, we must examine the course of his development and the appreciation accorded him by his countrymen.
It cannot be said that Björnson meets with an unquestioning recognition in the middle classes. The influence of agitators is always most strongly felt by those who are a little below them in the social scale, that is perhaps the reason whyBjörnson has succeeded in exerting such a great influence upon the Scandinavian peasantry and upon women.
A few years ago I was travelling on foot through Norway, aided by the national means of locomotion, the “skyds.” It was slow work, but it afforded me numberless opportunities of coming in contact with the sons of the soil. On one occasion I met with a peasant on his way home from the “saeter,” who was content to be my guide for hours together, and he gave me some insight into his admiration for Björnson as a political speaker; another time, while I was waiting for horses in a “skyds station,” I examined a little book-case which was hanging over the writing table in the superintendent’s room, and there I found an almost complete set of Björnson’s works. And once it was the “skyds” boy himself who asked me if I knew Björnson. All the women teachers and book-keepers who, with knapsacks on their backs, wander across the mountains of their native land, carry his name upon their lips and his books in their hearts. High up at the foot of Skineggen in Jötunheimen, in the midst of eternal snow, I asked a haggard-looking old Valdres peasant who kept the tourist’s house there during the six weeks of summer, which was my nearest way to Björnson, and he answered with an approving smile addressing me in the second person singular: “Thou knowest Björnson, thou art an intelligent young lady. Trust me and I will tellthee all that thou wouldest know.” Whereupon he went indoors and fetched a large map of the Norwegian mountains, which he spread out on the short grass between us, and proceeded to point up and down with his finger into Gudbrandsdal and from thence to the south till he came to a spot where he stopped short, and said: “Here is Aulestad, Björnson’s place. Every one who wishes to go there may do so, thou also.” Then he began a long complicated account of the why and the wherefore Björnson is beloved by the peasant, said that he was a “homely man” who went “straight ahead”; and then he told me of the difficulties that he and his neighbours had encountered in order to hear him speak, and how they had gone long journeys to attend meetings in distant places.
Far from there, in comfortable Denmark, where the peasants are short and round but none the less zealous readers of newspapers and earnest politicians, I met a certain self-confident Sören Sörensen in a third-class railway coupé who bestowed on me the honouring epithet of “intelligent young lady,” because I let him know of my acquaintance with Björnson. Björnson’s name was a sure letter of recommendation among the peasantry of the three Scandinavian countries. It is not very long since he spoke in Jutland in favour of arbitration, universal disarm-ment and public peace, and with his usual cunning, called upon his old antagonists, the pastors, to help him in the name of their religion in the great work ofpeace. His name had been sufficient to collect around him no less than thirty thousand listeners, even in those years of the apathy and despondency of the Danish people. What is the cause of this immense influence?
I can explain it in two sentences. It is that in him the peasantry recognise their own flesh and blood, and that he stimulates the middle class.
The class distinctions of central Europe have simplified themselves in the north. There is scarcely any social democracy and no great industrial class, their place is occupied by the peasantry as a political power and by the provincial middle class as the rulers in business. Björnson himself was born a peasant, but became a bourgeois in his early youth. In the next generation the sons of peasants who became authors were careful to avoid the middle class. But on the other hand there is annually a by no means inconsiderable percentage of the peasantry who go over into the middle class because it is more highly educated. Among these are pastors, gymnasium teachers, doctors, lawyers, merchants—yes, and rich peasant proprietors as well. The provincialbourgeoisieof the north represents what is perhaps the purest type of that decadence of the middle classes which has declared itself throughout the whole of Europe; it is totally unlike the Scandinavian peasantry, which possesses a healthy strength, the reverse of social democracy, and embodies the power of a rising class. The greatEuropean upheaval of 1848 barely touched this Scandinavianbourgeoisiewith its narrow horizon, its commercial self-satisfaction, its snivelling morality, its mania for conventionalities, its love of stagnation, its small-minded, starved nature and hypocrisy against which Ibsen, the revolutionary bourgeois, has raised the scorpion whip, and Björnson, the peasant’s son, has preached in his reform writings, preached against it and its middle class views of life, though at the same time he always looked upon it as the highest normal condition.
Ibsen took Hedda Gabler, the daughter of an officer whom he describes with considerable humour, for the profession of commanding officer in Norway is the favourite resource of the superfluous sons of tradesmen, and it has of late been proved by the autumn manœuvres that the Norwegian peasant soldier can do everything, whereas his commanding officer can accomplish very little. Therefore Ibsen took this daughter of the upper commercial class with her superior morals, analysed her and proved her to be what she was—a sexless nonentity who stupidly sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring, and who retains nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire. He takes her and throws her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on her lips—takes her and permeates her entire being with that exhausted vitality which leads to suicidal mania. Björnson takes as hisheroine Svava, the daughter of a rich but very dissipated merchant, who falls in love with a young man while conversing with him on old-maidish and philanthropic topics, but throws her glove into his face in consequence of some backstair gossip through which she discovers that instead of living like herself, he has acted the part of Don Juan after the example of her father. Björnson contrasts the vulgar frivolity of the male bourgeois with the vulgar sexlessness of the superior girl, and he extols the latter as being the only salutary system of morals.
Of course Björnson’sGauntletwas received on the bourgeois stage with great pomp, but not so Ibsen’sHedda Gabler. And while the middle class was unanimous in regarding Ibsen with curiosity mingled with horror, as the angel of death whose sign is on his door, it greeted Björnson as a renowned and fashionable physician who is always able to effect a cure so long as the illness is not positively fatal.
The Scandinavian peasant does not let his hair grow grey over these discussions, and in general he is well disposed towards the emancipation of women. He has long been accustomed to see women work and earn wages like himself, for it is not at all unusual for his sisters and aunts to provide for themselves by becoming maid-servants. That the wife should have the right of disposal over her own dowry, should keep a sharp eye on all gains and expenses and should put in a word on all affairs ofhouse and home—to that also he is well accustomed, and the compliant son of the soil knows how to sing a song in praise of the matriarchy of the peasant mother. Matrimonial infidelity is to him an abomination, he does not envy the townsman that for which he personally has little opportunity, and he despises the attractions of the youthful life of the idle sons of the middle class, since he seldom transgresses with any save his future wife. And since he looks at everything from the utilitarian standpoint, it is natural that he should give his full approval when daughters not only cease to cost money, but are able to earn it and to lay by a store of fine dollars. As for their remaining unmarried—well, you can’t have your cake and eat it—they have got the money, what more do they want? The peasant does not look upon married life in the æsthetic manner that is common to the higher classes for whom it possesses a certain artistic value, to him it is as much of a business as milking, ploughing, manuring; and if the one is no longer necessary, the other can be dispensed with too. He has none of the prudery of the townsman who finds something offensive in a bold glance at nature, yet he too has his pruderies, and if the townsman evinces moral and æsthetic scruples against an open discussion or an undiluted song of love, so likewise the peasant will not read it in print because to him it represents the commonplace. This is how Björnson, with his doctrine of perfection, proved to be the right man both for themiddle class and the peasantry; his lectures were acceptable chiefly because they partook of the nature of a religious discourse or a Sunday sermon, to which a man listens when he is wearing his best clothes, but which he has no time to think about during the six remaining days of the week when he is busy and has to do his work.
No sooner had I reached Gudbrandsdal than I seemed to be standing on Björnson’s own territory. Everybody knew exactly how far it was to his place, and the last two hours of the way I was driven by a little girl who took me past wealthy two-storeyed farm-houses rising from the rich pasture land, drove me round a beautiful winding road, jumped down, opened the gate, sprang on to her seat again, and without consulting me, drove through the entrance and up the drive, stopping at the door of a large, low building which was Björnson’s country seat.
Outside, under the wide-spreading roof, sat his wife and daughters, surrounded by guests who were staying in the house. The author was writing, but he received me. He was sitting at his writing table in a large low room—a regular peasant’s room. His feet were resting on a polar bearskin which had been presented to him by a society of advanced women, and a gigantic vase filled with cut roses was placed on a pedestal beside him. He informed me that the house had been an old farm which he had bought and fitted with all the requirements of modern life. We partook of themidday meal in the old room that had formerly been the servants’ hall, and where now, instead of servant and maid, were assembled a large gathering of Danish, Swedish and Finnish “women’s rights women.” Having dined, we drank coffee in the drawing-room, which had been the ball-room, but was now furnished according to Parisian taste with flowers,chaises longues, cream-coloured curtains with red gauze linings,bibelotsand oil paintings. Presently an old lady entered; she had an aquiline profile and yellow waving curls over her ears, she was thick-set and broad-shouldered with a fresh red complexion and small sparkling eyes, one could see at once that she was a feminine Björnson. “My mother,” said he, “she is ninety years old.” And this giant’s mother, herself a giant, spoke and greeted us in as lively and hearty a manner as a person of sixty. When we had finished our coffee, Björnson led me out on to the new balcony which encircled the house. He glanced over the rising land with its luxuriant pasture. “Our people are being corrupted,” he said. “Our press and our life are full of lies. I am writing an article against lies, the lies with which we are being poisoned.” He made a gesture with his arm across the distant country, and exclaimed, “Lying must be abolished!”
I was obliged to go, as my little coachman was waiting. We retraced our steps through the old room with its low ceiling and exquisite Parisian furniture, and its glass cupboard filled with plate. I drove away meditating on the strange contrastbetween this farm house and its artificial fittings worthy of a town mansion, and I heard Björnson’s pathetic voice calling to his country, “Lying must be abolished!”
Björnson was the son of a peasant; it was only in later life that his father became a pastor, and from him Björnson has inherited a theological tendency. He is essentially a preacher and religious teacher, he is never happy unless he has something to proclaim. But as he is not one of those who enjoy self-denial, he prefers that those very contradictory truths, which he has preached during the course of years, should take the form of a manifestation of the joy of life.
This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise between the two.
Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales, followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with his earlier ones.
In 1869, Ibsen wroteThe League of Youth, which was the first of his social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I shall returnlater. Björnson’s next piece was calledA Bankrupt, and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s satire,i.e.the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons, and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.
The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and finally—but, as I think, chiefly—the example of Ibsen. Björnson, as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him, until one came who showed him the way.
Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house wasfollowed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated inThe Editor. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama entitledThe New System; while inLeonarda, the snivelling morality of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced views of the grandmother.
Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and amendment might ensue.
Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or economical question on which he had not a weighty—often an ominously weighty—word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new, brand new problem appeared above the horizon.
This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a human being and then awoman, it had been handled by Ibsen many years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s “works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered. Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity, her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries, mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and worshippedher intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics, bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they had succeeded in proving theirintellectual gifts, although in order to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians, superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts, and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children, and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry and expense.
Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never been the pioneerof any cause. It was only when the movement was well started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only too great a success.
The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved, and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds: freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness, the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.
It was in the year 1884 that the novel appeared which was intended to reform public morals, it was calledThomas Rendalen. The introduction is a kind of ancestral history of the hero’s family, and it may be counted as one of the greatest things that Björnson has ever written; its historical spirit and word-colouring are such that one might fancy it to be a genuine production of the latter half of the seventeenth century. The continuation of the story describes a model educational establishment founded on a new moral principle, and is the first of Björnson’s works which is written from anEnglish and American standpoint. A victorious warfare is waged against the stupid prejudices of society and the distorted and harmful system by which girls are educated. A dissolute man of the world who, with his hypnotic glances, has seduced a young girl of respectable family, afterwards forsakes both her and her child in order to marry a rich young lady who offers no objection in spite of possessing an accurate knowledge of the facts. The “fallen” girl with her child is honourably received into the model establishment. But the real hero is Thomas Rendalen, a youth of German extraction, who was begotten through violence and violation, but is rescued from this evil inheritance by a wise training, and later on by an equally wise system of self-training. His mother looks after him, she has been trained in England as a teacher of gymnastics and is superintendent of the model establishment, and on one occasion during her short married life she had a fearful tussle with her brutal husband in which she sufficiently proved her physical superiority. It is a novel on the training of the sexual impulse. The idea of the book, which is repeatedly illustrated by new examples, is to show that the union between man and woman is not a condition of the highest physical and spiritual welfare; that philanthropical works, and other more or less external diversions, are also very fine remedies. In the improved version ofThe Gauntlet, Björnson maintains that impurity is far worse than celibacy. A womanbeginning life is considered pure, unless she has been seduced; but a man is considered impure. Education is held to be the highest means and aim of life, and the union between man and woman, from being an eternal source of strength for both, is degraded into a temporary arrangement for the procreation of the race.Thomas Rendalenbecame the gospel of the school mistresses, teachers, telegraph clerks and other women who, on account of their position in life or their personal idiosyncracies, are debarred from marriage. It surrounded the compulsory spinsterhood of the feminine portion of our higher stratum of society with a halo of glory, and the hearts of the discontented women of the north—married and unmarried—were laid in thousands at the feet of Björnson.
This was all that he staked in the movement. While new wishes and new needs were being aroused in a multitude of women, among whom were the most refined, the most advanced, the most developed of their sex; while a new type of womanhood was being evolved which sought for emancipation and groped after it only to find it in an unsatisfying, stupid, and distorted form; he remained glued to the superficial, put boarding-school education in the place of domestic discipline, morality in the place of Christianity, and made woman a generous offer of independence and personal freedom in return for the renunciation of her sex. And as to men he had once uttered the celebrated cry, “Passion must be abolished:” so to womenhe says: “Sex is nothing, it is entirely a matter of secondary importance, the fruit of a poet’s debauched imagination. There are many joys, a teacher’s joys, a pastor’s joys, a student’s joys, which are far more natural to a woman’s nature than the artificial and overrated fiction of love.” And with regard to their intercourse with men, he carried his snivelling morality and unseemly enquiries as far as the bridal bed.
In his next and, so far, his last novel, Björnson wanderedIn God’s Ways.
The subject of it is the marriage between a young girl who is childlike in her ignorance and a man who has become blind and lame in consequence of his excesses. Their separation, combined with the subsequent re-marriage of the young woman, is regarded both by society and by her relatives as an act of adultery. She is unable to endure the accusation, and dies from the cruelty of her fellow creatures. The person of next importance in the book is a young man who cures himself of a secret vice by means of diligent duet-playing with this same young woman, and by a still more diligent practice of running on all fours and other gymnastic exercises.
Such is the nature of Björnson’s contribution to the psychology of sex.
With regard to the moral conclusions of his latter period, he takes his stand beside Tolstoy as an ascetic; and like Tolstoy, who has wasted a grand psychology, Björnson has squandered a richlyrical faculty on a mutilated ideal. Asceticism stands and falls with religious enthusiasm, and consists, in most cases, of nothing but religious enthusiasm; this is why, with Tolstoy, it went hand in hand with a return to positive Christianity; but Björnson, who became a religious freethinker at the same time that he became an ascetic, planted the moral that he preached on a far more slippery soil—on the soil of Degeneration.
* * * * *
In Ibsen’s first social drama,The League of Youth, he has drawn a satirical portrait of Björnson in the person of the central figure of the piece—Stensgaard, the adventurer and popular speaker. Hjalmar Christensen points out the likeness in his newly published work, calledNorthern Writers.
When we, at the end of Björnson’s career, examine the collected works of this celebrated author, we are impressed with the superficiality, the clap-trap precipitation and inward wavering which he displays whenever he takes part in the problems and social questions of the day. Every new book of his clearly proves to us that what he pathetically offers as gold is in reality nothing but dross, and in his last collection ofTalesthe tone of persuasion, which in old time so often won him the victory, sounds distressingly false. It was always his ambition to advance with the age, andhe has met with the fate that must ever be the experience of those who aim no higher. The age does not allow any one to keep pace with it for long, and he who is not in advance of it will soon find himself in the rear.
Leo Tolstoy
There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure, rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning. Working girls with handkerchiefs over their heads, round, red-cheeked, merry-faced girls with large hips, dressed in pink cotton skirts, their stockingless feet in high-heeled spatterdashes; little ladies with smiling eyes appearing under their flowered hats, and the large, well-developed figures of grown women kindly disposed, walking with indolent, matronly carriage—they pass us by one by one; we know their faces as little as we know their names, they vanish as quickly as they came, and like all the vague though memorableimpressions of our first childhood, they come softly as the twilight, and glide away like the image of a dream.
I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me, never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment.
There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver, when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. Nowhere as there, in those Russian wildernesses far removed from civilisation, does nature speak as clearly, and make humanity her mirror. Nowhere is happiness so careless and the heart so large, and nowhere does fear so clutch at the throat like invisible hands which grasp and then slacken their hold—slacken their hold, only to grasp the tighter....
At the moments when these impressions arise, I see behind them and through them something which resembles a large and powerful man’s head, with a broad forehead, and the dark, sparkling, deep-set eyes of a thinker and seer, eyes which seem as though they were trying to creep inwards. Sometimes this head is set on a uniform, and sometimes on a peasant’s smock; sometimes he is young with moustaches, and his hair is cut short; sometimes he is old with a wrinkled face, and the greasy, waving hair of a peasant, with a long Russian peasant’s beard; but the head always rests upon the same broad shoulders, the same giant’s body, and there is always the same shy, sombre gleam in his eyes, the cold gleam which betokens the lonely fanatic. The youthful head was the head of Tolstoy when he wroteThe Cossacks; the aged one belongs to the author ofThe Kreutzer Sonata.
In the interval between these two were produced works of such a deep and genuine character as have not been surpassed by any contemporary writer, I allude to the story calledFamily Happiness, and the novelsWar and PeaceandAnna Karenina.
A short time ago Tolstoy’s writings were the great literary event of Europe. His reformatory zeal moved and perplexed even the unbelievers; his confessions startled society; and his probing into all the layers of human nature, which had hitherto been ignored in accordance with a highly-respected custom, aroused the anxiety and excitement of all who had senses and nerves, especiallythose with a bad conscience who had suppressed their senses, and with ill-used nerves that sought vengeance.
Tolstoy writes from the moral standpoint—his own peculiar standpoint—of the man with a bad conscience.
The man with a bad conscience had long led a hidden existence as a church penitent when the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche discovered him and drew him into the light of day out of the darkness of life and of literature. Since then it has become possible to know him and to study his character.
But it is not often that this study possesses as many finger-posts to point the way, as many rifts in the veil, as are disclosed in the personality of Tolstoy.
His books are the personification of Russian nature with its golden laugh and soul-devouring melancholy; the healthy frivolity and spontaneity of the Russian woman and the self-tormenting sectarianism of the Russian man.
In all Tolstoy’s books there is an ever-recurring figure which is none other than himself, depicted in a manner that combines an intimate knowledge with perfect candour. This figure is connected throughout an extensive network of fine root fibres with the profoundest qualities of the Russians as a typical race. Concerning Tolstoy as a private individual, we are, so to speak, lacking in all psychological data, with the exception ofthose which he has himself given us in his various confessions, and which, for that very reason, are almost useless with regard to their psychology. But like all authors, great or small, he has unconsciously revealed himself in his novels, especially in those longer ones which he has since disowned; and now when theKreutzer Sonatahas fixed a boundary, behind which not even the most extreme moral severity can discover a second, and when the great life-painter has attained to the negation of life, there is a peculiar interest attached to the enquiry as to what were the national and individual circumstances which conducted him thither, and what were the stations on the road towards the crucifying of the flesh which are indicated in his books.
Three main points occur to my mind, although they are apparently quite unconnected with one another; these are:
A depth of intuition in his grasp and comprehension of woman which is unequalled by anything in the whole of European literature.
An everlasting bad conscience which wears a squinting expression of asceticism, and which, in all his writings, takes its stand between him and the woman and lies in wait for love’s sacrifice.
A secret hardness and spiritual reserve which acts like a bitter taste in the mouth, and gives the lie to the universal gospel of love in his later works and the craving for union with the woman in his earlier ones. With an evil-eyed love ofcruelty it attaches itself to the most private conditions of life, and rejoices when sweetness is turned to gall; it evinces a refined brutality in self-torture, a sensation of positive delight in the arousing and enduring of pain, all of which are national and psychological features in the spiritual life of the Russian race, and a key to the perversities of its countless religious sects.
At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he is, and lonely where he loves.
No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience; think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde, of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In Francea young girl’s life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature. In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer, with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved, and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half sorrowful individuality.
Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being, in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working under other aspects.
The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function—woman as a mother—is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.
The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance, no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety, she is more ofa natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than the woman of western Europe.
No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and not one has described it with greater intuition.
It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl inThe Cossacks, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of all.
This was the origin of that child-woman inWar and Peace; I think her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at all,—poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and arms of her mother—still a child, already a woman! This was also the origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek one another, play and dance together, and cannot behappy without one another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and truth of which is shown at a glance.
There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.
Then, for the third time, and this time the portrait is better executed and the likeness is more striking, the same young man steps forward as Lievin inAnna Karenina. He is tall and strong, honest, with the Gallic temperament, but awkward and somewhat clumsy in confiding his inner life; he belongs to the class of men whom women ignore, whose presence awakens a vague shyness in them. There is something in his nature which arouses a feeling of distrust and dislike in women. What is it? Can it be a want of feeling, an absence of sympathy? Or is it something in his person that is physically repellent? His first advances meet with no response, it is possible that they are misunderstood, and he is bitterly disheartened. Later on, when the young girl has herself undergone a disappointment in love, she expresses herself willing, and they marry. But here already, many years before the aged Tolstoy wroteThe Kreutzer Sonata, the first months of marriage are described as a torture. Lievin experiences a feeling of shame and disillusion. Theytry to avoid one another, to avoid being together; they have nothing in common. When they avoid each other, his conscience reproaches him; when they are together, his bad conscience is a torture to him. It is really nothing but a process of animal existence, represented as a psychological mystery. The husband goes on his way in careless indifference, and held fast by the circle of ideas belonging to society and the Church, becomes displeased and irritable. There are a number of men in whom the prudery of the spirit and the denseness of the perceptions never permit of that refinement of impulse which is love. It is merely a psychological peculiarity, and is neither moral nor immoral; but according to our ideas of morality, love must co-exist with marriage, and the thinker who realises that it is not there has a bad conscience. His bad conscience makes nature appear evil in his sight, and casts a halo over everything that might deliver him from it. Asceticism, as an eternally unsatisfied desire, possesses the extra advantage of being a never-ending delight, an inverted pleasure. This feature is deeply impressed on the character of the Slav; it is a combination of those two principal features of the Russian temperament—sensibility and passiveness. It is from this, the psychological standpoint, that we must view Tolstoy’s increasing moral rigour as displayed in his works. When we remember that it is a Russian author who chooses this problem for his motive, and that all great Russian writersare as admirable in their powers of observation as they are second-rate thinkers, as subtle in their psychology as they are helpless altruists—both indications of a young literature—then his obscure personality loses much that is incomprehensible and confusing.
At last Lievin finds rest for his conscience and satisfaction in his marriage through the birth of a child, which seems to bring a meaning into it and also, to a certain extent, an excuse. The other couple, Anna Karenina and Vronsky, cannot find either, because in their free union the child is no excuse, but only a burden. With an incomparable discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people; the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on injured morality.
But before the sinful relationship had begun—as long as love is nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the soul of Anna Karenina—what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman? With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the young girl inFamily Happinessisstill more worthy of admiration than that of the matured woman. There we have everything: the innocent sensuousness of the first awakening of womanhood in the child, the woman who is such a thorough woman, with her inexplicable attraction, her thoughtless impatience, and her active imagination which transforms the first man whom she meets intotheman, the beloved man, to whom she gives her whole affection.
There is a scene in the book after the young girl has had her hot Russian bath, when, with her hair still wet, she sits at the coffee table out of doors and turns the head of an elderly gentleman, who is her only male acquaintance; then there is a second scene where they both look for cherries on the trees—and such a description of pure sensuous delight on a warm, damp, dreamy summer’s day as I have never seen equalled anywhere.
And yet it was this same author who wrote the dangerous, poisonousKreutzer Sonata, and preached the doctrines of a misogynist on a basis of universal love for humanity, a love which was to end with the extermination of the human race.
The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked down with an evil eye upon thegreat natural basis of all love, love between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and through, heart and soul.