Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century - Georg Brandes 3 стр.

In the beautiful and national play "Hans Lange," there is a scene which, when performed on the stage, holds the spectator in breathless suspense, and whose close always elicits tears from many eyes; it is the scene where the life of the young squire is at stake. He is lost if the horsemen surmise that it is he who, disguised as the son of the Jew, is lying on the bench. Then the head servant Henning is ushered in by a party of horsemen, who have heard him muttering in the stable that he knew very well how to solve the difficulty for them. Henning has been supplanted by the young squire; before the latter came to Lanzke, Henning was like a child of the house; now he has become less than a stepchild, and he has always owed a grudge to the man who has been thus preferred before him. With the most artistic skill, the scene is now so conducted that Henning, in spite of the entreaties and curses of those who are initiated into the secret, gives the surrounding group clearly to understand that he means to be revenged on the young squire, that he knows where he is, and that no power in the world will restrain him from betraying his enemy,  until he has heaped coals of fire on the head of the other; and then, contenting himself with the fright he has caused, finally speaks out plainly, in order to put the pursuers, who by this time, of course, blindly trust him, on the wrong scent.

And, finally, of precisely the same nature is the decisive and most beautiful scene in the patriotic drama "Colberg." A council of war is being held, and even the burghers are called upon to take part in it, for the importance of the crisis makes it desirable that every voice should be heard. All hope for the beleagured city seems to be gone. The French general has issued a proclamation, summoning Gneisenau to honorable capitulation. The entire corps of officers resolve forthwith that there can be no question of a surrender of the citadel, and Gneisenau thereupon lays before the citizens the proposal to entreat the enemy to grant them a truce in order that the burghers, their wives, and children, may leave the city, which is exposed to all possible horrors. Then the pedantic old pedagogue Zipfel, a genuine, old-fashioned German philologist, rises to act as spokesman for the burghers. With many circumlocutions, with Latin form of speech, he spins out his remarks, amid the impatience of all. He is interrupted; he is given to understand how very well known it is that he is only aiming at leaving the dangerous defence of the city to the commandant and the troops. Finally, he succeeds in making clear the object he had in view in his long narration about the great Persian war, and Leonidas with his Spartans; it was to give force to the opinion that it behooved them one and all to remain and die at their posts. This scene Heyse has written con amore. It embraces, so to say, his entire system. For nowhere does his good faith in humanity so triumph as in cases where, in the old fogy, he can reveal the hero, and, in the poor pedant, show the man of inflexible will, which no other has discovered him to be than the poet who so well knows that every one of his creations bears within the depths of its soul an indelible stamp of nobility.

IV

Those authors who, as Spielhagen, for instance, most frequently linger over the conflicts of consciousness and of the will, and are fondest of depicting great social and political conflicts, will as a matter of course have better success in portraying men than women. Such a male character as Leo, in the romance "In Reih und Glied" (In Rank and File), would seek in vain for its equal, but a female character of the same excellence Spielhagen has not drawn. Any one, on the other hand, whose spirit seeks the nobility and grace of the absolutely natural, of visible and spiritual beauty, will as a matter of course give the preference to women, and draw them better than men. Herein Heyse resembles his master, Goethe. In almost all of his productions the female characters are placed in the foreground, and the male forms serve mainly to render them prominent, or to develop them. As woman's nature unfolds its secret being, and shoots forth its fairest bloom in love, since in love, nature as nature, through a thousand illusions, becomes ennobled and spiritualized, so Heyse glorifies in an eminent way the love of woman. He renders homage to love, and he renders homage to woman; nevertheless, it is his greatest delight to represent these two great powers in conflict one with the other. For when love gains the victory, when it appears as the power to whose mandates the feminine heart may not bid defiance, it sparkles with radiance, vanquishing resistance, as though possessed of omnipotent might, and producing the effect that every woman under its influence, in defiance against it, in conflict with it, animated by it, rouses in all the pride of her sex, and is invested by love with that aristocratic beauty, which no one represents better than Heyse.

Inherent maidenly pride is to Heyse the most beautiful thing in nature. An entire group of his "novellen" might bear the title "Mädchenstolz" (Maidenly Pride) Kierkegaard somewhere calls the essence of woman "a surrender, whose form is resistance." This is an utterance as from Heyse's own heart, and it is this resistance which, as a token of the noble-born nature, interests and charms him. It is that eternally impenetrable stronghold in the feminine disposition which captivates him, the sphinx-like element of her nature, whose riddle he feels ever impelled to solve. The sweet kernel is doubly sweet in its hard shell, the fiery champagne doubly flaming in its surroundings of ice. The feminine natures which Heyse depicts (from L'Arrabbiata to Julie and Irene in his "Im Paradiese") are enveloped in a coat of ice-mail, which conceals, repels, misleads, breaks, and melts away. Woman asserts her nobility by refusing, as long as possible, to give her ego out of her own keeping,  by guarding and cherishing the treasure of her love. She maintains her nobility by placing her ego exclusively in the hands of one single person, and offering resistance to all the rest of the world. She is subject to no blind force. But once let her maidenly pride be broken, and conquered, she finds herself again on the opposite side of the gulf, and yields freely, I might almost say as freely as nature. A seduction never occurs among Heyse's creations; if such a thing be alluded to a single time, as a past event, as in "Mutter und Kind" (Mother and Child), it only serves to place in the sharpest possible light proud self-assertion and equally proud conscious self-surrender.

This self-assertion, this power of resistance (Rabbia), is portrayed by Heyse with manifold variations: Atalanta, in the drama "Meleager," possesses the entire untamed wildness of the Amazon type; she prefers life and sport amid the freedom of nature the race, feats of skill with the lance, and the occupation of the wildwood to effeminate luxury and flattering caresses; she would rather wear the crown of victory than the bridal wreath. In Syritha we see the first coyness, which, roused by marriage, flees; in "L'Arrabbiata," maidenly pride, which feels how close to the timid request, in the soul of man, lies coarse desire; in the maiden of Treppi, we have the instinctive refusal of maidenhood; in Marianne ("Mutter und Kind"), womanly pride which increases twofold in the so-called fallen woman, under her sense of unmerited shame; in Madeleine ("Die Reise nach dem Glück"), the sense of duty opposed to the conceptions of morality inculcated from childhood; in Lore ("Lorenz und Lore"), the feeling of shame of a young girl, from whose lips a confession of her love has escaped in the presence of death; in Lottka, the melancholy reserve caused by a sense of inherited degradation; in fair Kätchen, the indignant despair of a young girl at finding herself attractive to every one, which makes her wish all her admirers and her own beauty far away; in Lea, the aversion of a highly developed and reserved woman to allowing any one to have a suspicion of her weakness; in Toinette, the abhorrence of an ice-bound heart to feigning a passion it does not yet feel; in Irene, the strict conventionality of a little princess; in Julie, the coldness of a Cordelia nature until the supreme moment arrives when all these bonds are burst, when all these hearts are kindled, when the man-hatred of the Amazon, and the coyness of the young maiden, and the modesty of dawning womanhood, and the pride of the wife, and the sense of duty of those who have been strictly brought up, and the melancholy of those who have been humbled, and the mantle of the snow-queen, all, all flame up, like wood on one mighty funeral pyre, and ascend in sweet incense on the altar of the god of love.

This self-assertion, this power of resistance (Rabbia), is portrayed by Heyse with manifold variations: Atalanta, in the drama "Meleager," possesses the entire untamed wildness of the Amazon type; she prefers life and sport amid the freedom of nature the race, feats of skill with the lance, and the occupation of the wildwood to effeminate luxury and flattering caresses; she would rather wear the crown of victory than the bridal wreath. In Syritha we see the first coyness, which, roused by marriage, flees; in "L'Arrabbiata," maidenly pride, which feels how close to the timid request, in the soul of man, lies coarse desire; in the maiden of Treppi, we have the instinctive refusal of maidenhood; in Marianne ("Mutter und Kind"), womanly pride which increases twofold in the so-called fallen woman, under her sense of unmerited shame; in Madeleine ("Die Reise nach dem Glück"), the sense of duty opposed to the conceptions of morality inculcated from childhood; in Lore ("Lorenz und Lore"), the feeling of shame of a young girl, from whose lips a confession of her love has escaped in the presence of death; in Lottka, the melancholy reserve caused by a sense of inherited degradation; in fair Kätchen, the indignant despair of a young girl at finding herself attractive to every one, which makes her wish all her admirers and her own beauty far away; in Lea, the aversion of a highly developed and reserved woman to allowing any one to have a suspicion of her weakness; in Toinette, the abhorrence of an ice-bound heart to feigning a passion it does not yet feel; in Irene, the strict conventionality of a little princess; in Julie, the coldness of a Cordelia nature until the supreme moment arrives when all these bonds are burst, when all these hearts are kindled, when the man-hatred of the Amazon, and the coyness of the young maiden, and the modesty of dawning womanhood, and the pride of the wife, and the sense of duty of those who have been strictly brought up, and the melancholy of those who have been humbled, and the mantle of the snow-queen, all, all flame up, like wood on one mighty funeral pyre, and ascend in sweet incense on the altar of the god of love.

For not in resistance, which is only the form and the cloak, but in self-surrender, does Heyse see the essence of womanhood and woman's true nature; and adorer of nature as he is, he does honor to Eros as the irresistible one who breaks through all barriers. Woman never regrets having subjected herself to his power, but she may repent her defiance. Bettina, somewhere in her letters, makes about the following remark, "The strawberries I plucked I have forgotten; but those I left untouched are still branded on my soul." Heyse has made more than one variation on this theme; after the maiden of Treppi has repented her youthful coyness during seven long years, chance brings the object of her affections once more to her native village, and she overcomes, by virtue of an enthusiastic and superstitious conviction of the power and justice of her love, all external and internal obstacles, even the indifference and coldness of the returned wanderer himself. Madelina, in the "Reise nach dem Glück," as before mentioned, has driven her lover at night from her door, and having been compelled to ride away in the dark, he had a fall from his horse which killed him on the spot. Remorse for this defiance of love gives her no rest. "Of what avail was my virtue?" said she; "it was sound and whole, and by no means threadbare; and yet it chilled me to the innermost recesses of my heart."14 It is not enough, though, that she regrets having followed the dictates of conventional morality: the image of the deceased haunts her year after year; it seems to be jealously watching over her each time in her life that she thinks it possible to forget the past, and find happiness anew; she hears the finger of the dead man knocking at the door, as he knocked that night she drove him from her. Severe are the punishments of Eros for those who do not sacrifice on his altar. And Heyse in other of his creations still further amplifies this idea. Here the repulsed lover meets his death, simply as an accidental result of the rigor shown him by the being for whose presence he yearned so ardently. Let us suppose the case to be one where, instead of an humble petitioner, one who threatens violence approaches, and that the resistance of the proud woman be not based on a sense of duty that conquers temptation, but is merely self-defence at the time of a dreaded invasion, how then? Even then Eros bestows chastisement, as a zealous god. The drama "Die Sabinerinnen" (The Sabine Women) was evidently written by Heyse for the sake of one single character. How, otherwise, could it have occurred to him to choose for tragic treatment this purely burlesque material, so little adapted to tragedy. This character is Tullia, the Sabine king's daughter. Carried off by a Roman warrior, held captive in his house, she kills him, when, on the bridal night, he dares approach her. If a tragic woe should now befall the rash woman in order that the Roman might be avenged, no one would be surprised; but the psychological point is in harmony with Heyse's entire erotic system; for through the murder of her husband she endeavored to kill the awakening impulse of her own heart, and thus sacrilegiously rebelled against Eros.

Now left alone with her shattered soul, she recoils with horror at a deed which is so genuinely feminine, and in which she is so entirely justified. The apparition of the dead man haunts her wherever she goes, but still more than the aspect of his dead body, the remembrance of his caresses. "Only a day and a night have passed since that deed was accomplished," says she, "and yet it lies behind me as a thousand years and a thousand deaths. One thing alone is, and ever will be, present with me: his kiss upon my eyelids, his hand within my own." Toward the end she expresses to her sister the fundamental idea in these words:

Even the man that has approached her through violence, cannot be hated by the young virgin. He broke the peace; but what else does Love? He outwitted her; but is not Love crafty? He mocked; but does not Love scoff even at the most powerful and most free? In other words: is not Eros himself a worker of violence, without shyness or shame, a criminal who overleaps all customary bounds.

All? That is saying too much. Heyse has indeed sometimes, as in the instances cited, shown a tendency, reminding one of Kleist, for all purely pathological erotic problems; but his nature is entirely too harmonious, too mature, and by far too typically German, to admit of his describing passion as bursting all the law and order of society. He is developed enough to see clearly that the laws of passion and the laws of society are two wholly dissimilar things, which have very little in common; yet he pays the latter the respect it deserves, that is, a conditional one. From his earliest youth it has interested and pleased him to show how relative is the truth, and how limited the worth of these laws; to bring forward in his poetic creations instances where their boundaries are overstepped in such a way that the exceptions to the rule seem right, and even the most hardened and narrow-minded person would hesitate to condemn them. In his anxiety to do full, incontestible justice to the exceptional cases, Heyse has sometimes as in his first drama, "Francesca von Rimini," which is not included in his "Gesammelte Werke" sought out extremely quaint exceptions; but it is his universal endeavor so to enclose the case with palisades, that no assault of usual morality can cause the downfall of the barricade. When Goethe brings together Egmont and Clärchen, he does not present the case as though it required an apology; the beauty of the relationship is its defence. Heyse, the less grand poet, whose caution is quite equal to his daring, has always fixed an eye on conventional morality, and has continually endeavored to conciliate it, either by ceding the point to it, so to say, in all other cases but just this one where its infringement was unavoidable, or by so atoning for the offence that the individual who is guilty of it is allowed to purchase the forbidden happiness, with his eyes fully open, and of his own free will, at so high a price that it appears too costly to be alluring to any Philistine.