II: An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and Its Details
II An Aesthetic Reading of the Novel and Its Details
In summarizing the content I have tried to bring out the main elements in the development of the story, but also to interweave into the account the essential mood of the novel and by interposing certain adjectives to bring to mind what the conversations between the various characters are about. Finally, in line with the story, I have tried all along to let the totality of the age provide an undercoating, as it were. For what distinguishes this from other novels is its more substantial grounding: each part its age in its specific difference. A novel usually has only the pictorial background, like the line the illustrator dashes off over which to draw a figure; the drawing itself is what is produced, while the ground merely prevents what is drawn from looking as if suspended in the air. In this case, however, the novel is more universally grounded in something that is even more essential than what is presented, while what is presented is meant only to provide the reflection [Gjenskinnet]. The novel has as its presupposition the distinctive totality of the age, and what is brought out is that age’s reflection [Reflex] in domestic life. After the presentation the mind turns back to the age’s totality as now also revealed in this reflection. But the age itself is something the author (according to the Preface) has not wanted to present; his novel lies midway between the age’s presupposed distinctiveness and that distinctiveness now illuminated in the reflection by the presentation.
The rule for the aesthetic critique, therefore, will not be whether or not you would find a girl like Claudine, a man like Lusard, like Dalund, etc., in our time. How unreasonable! The greatest departures can occur in any age; in ours there might be a man, for example, who could be said to belong really in the Middle Ages or in Greece. No, the critique’s question is: can a girl like Claudine typically occur just in that age? Similarly with Part Two. The question is not whether a girl like Mariane could have lived in the age of revolution, thinking, feeling and acting as she does. The question is: can such a feminine figure typically occur in the present age?
Aesthetically, it is particularly in Part Two that the author develops his mastery in portrayal and description, his powers of observation, the dignified balance in his faithful reproduction of reality, in which he knows how to preserve even the worst foibles and vulgarities in such a way that they remain what they are, triviality and rudeness, and with such truth that it becomes interesting for that very reason. Even the most insignificant minor character in Part Two, where really there is no important character at all, comes alive to the reader, becomes so transparent in the few lines of conversation that the detail and the whole, through the very realism and vividness, produce a striking likeness. Only this author’s sense of proportion, his interest in actual people in the context of the life-view, and his real concern, can explain what is so amazing: his ability to present all these characters in such a way as not for a moment to make one really laugh at them, even though most of them are such that they couldn’t help but appear comical in the light of a purely aesthetic standard,* and would in the light of a purely ethical notion have to be condemned, if I may so put it, as counterfeit editions of human beings.
If one were to speak, in the kind of objection a hasty critique promptly puts into circulation, of the author’s possible preference for one age over the other, closer inspection would on the contrary reveal a specific expression of impartiality. The author’s possible preference for the revolutionary age’s more animated life is balanced by the actual preference he has shown for the present age through his greater artistry in depicting it. In Part One the plot is as simple as possible. After a few episodes in the Waller home, the story so to speak emigrates with Claudine and gets lost along with her in idyll, advancing slowly in an epic narrative manner until the reunion with Lusard. The episode with the baron, even in terms of compositional ingenuity, is so unsurprising that it falls a bit flat, being the kind of dramatic collision in which even a beginner usually tempts his heroines. The dramatic element in Part Two, on the other hand, is far more prominent. Here there is greater change and variety in the more complex situations; the tension in the development is maintained to the last and deceptively prolonged by Lusard’s misapprehension of the relation between Arnold and Mariane, then cleverly brought to its resolution by an accidental event that lets Lusard in on the lovers’ secret; and finally, beautifully resolved by inserting a situation that makes use of something the reader knows from Part One, while Lusard, seeing that it is what he has wanted from the beginning, does not appear as a deus ex machina. So what we find here isn’t the usual financial help provided in novels, a rich uncle who gets killed off or most conveniently exchanges time for eternity, or same brought back with great speed from the East Indies, etc. On the contrary, the situation here can just as easily be reversed, and the problem is this: a noble man of means whose frame of mind is motivated by all of Part One, who seeks an object, and who in the story Guidance now helps to find the right two. Nothing is left unexplained, to foster doubt – no residual debt that can only be covered by a poetic advance from the huge relief fund of imagination. On the contrary, the mood at the point of resolution becomes a union of the outburst that marvels lyrically at the ways of Guidance and of the acquiescence of the understanding, which says: it could not be otherwise.
Another specific expression of impartiality is that the characters of Part Two stand out far more clearly, audible in the cues that their lines give, visible in the character sketches, and easily recognizable from life, while the characters in Part One are more hidden in the inwardness of a more universal passion. Although this has a deeper basis, the author’s mastery consists precisely in his ability, in presenting them, to give difference its due – yet unobtrusively, never saying directly what he intends but knowing quite well what he has done. And what he has done the critique can straightforwardly state. The difference expresses in essence the relation between inwardness and the weakness for showing off, a malady of which the present age is often accused. It is a psychological principle on whose accuracy I am sure anyone of experience will agree with me, that in the presence of a genuine passion expressing itself in word and deed, the expression itself so captures attention as to make one forget the outer appearance; similarly, the person who genuinely experiences passion forgets the object of his passion’s outer appearance. The ugliest person, if one is charmed by the warmth of his utterance, can make one entirely forget his external appearance. It was the irony of this contradiction that so gratified Socrates: when he spoke, when his listener Alcibiades’ ‘heart pounded violently, more violently than the Corybants’, while tears streamed from his eyes’,1 it was forgotten, eternally forgotten, that the speaker was the ugliest man in Greece – until he fell silent, and the ugliest man in Greece savoured the irony of it all. If you have listened properly to a sermon brim-full of inwardness, even if your gaze has been fixed on the pastor, you will find it impossible to describe the pastor’s appearance. Let a girl with heartache seek one’s confidence; let her, in the eternal remembrance, possess grief’s inwardness; on leaving her it is impossible to say how she looked, for the inwardness lets one forget in order to remember what is essential. Outwardness, on the other hand, forces itself upon one, making it impossible to forget because there is nothing to remember. A person really in love may for some time continue to be unable to explain just how his beloved looks; the superior power of his passionate inwardness makes him forget her appearance when he doesn’t see her, for the simple reason that it is his being in love that he remembers. And at the same time he can easily form pictures of all who belong to the loved one’s family and circle.
So it is with the characters in Part One of this novel. Practically all of them are in a state of passion, and for that reason stand out less sharply. Perhaps the most prominent in outward respects is Counsellor of Justice Waller, precisely because he is the least significant. The others are less clear to the degree in which they essentially possess the passion of an ideal, are absorbed in the universal life of a world-historical event, or concealed in the internal revelation of a self-generated passion. In Part Two, on the other hand, practically all the characters have some recognizable outer trait that appeals to the imaginative memory. So clearly are they presented in the few strokes in which they are sketched that one cannot possibly forget them, and one would undertake confidently to recognize them on the street, because they are true-to-type stage extras of outwardness who altogether lack what makes one who remembers forget how they look. There is a pastor whose outward appearance I shall never forget, not just because he was undeniably handsome, but because he preachified so much that there was nothing to draw attention away from his appearance. Isn’t this how it is? Imagine a fine lady who has taken special pains with her mourning preparations; one will be able to recall every fringe, every embellishment on her condolence-seeking countenance. But the young girl who really had the inwardness of sorrow – her appearance is something one could not recall.
Let us take Commercial Counsellor Waller.* He sits in the same office, at the same desk where his father sat before him, on a swivel chair, and ‘looks like someone pestered by a swarm of flies on a hot summer day’.2 Even if the author had presented him only once, we would never forget him, for his singularity is essentially outwardness. Let us take his lady Mrs Waller in her flirting, or when she comes on decked out in a bright shawl interwoven with gold. We don’t forget how she looked. We compare this with the festivities in Waller’s house, where Claudine appears wearing the tricolour sash,† and notwithstanding that this moment is frequently recalled, again we forget how she looked; convinced of her beauty, we glance indifferently at the finery and forget, because our attention rests primarily on the romantic enthusiasm of the girl’s youthful joy. Who remembers a gold case’s appearance when it includes some curious inner feature in its construction! But a presentation salver, a name-plate, has, on the contrary, the characteristic that if one forgets the appearance one has completely forgotten the object. Similarly here. Both Madame W. with the little tricolour emblem carefully concealed, and the blissfully happy Claudine festively wearing the ribbons of the revolution, are genuinely decked out. This is not the case, on the other hand, with the wife of the commercial counsellor, with her gold belt or her sleigh-ride shawl interwoven with gold. And yet the irony of it is that one forgets how the first two looked just as one continues to remember them, but one never forgets the counsellor’s wife with her belt – that is, if one does not forget her altogether.
Let us take Arnold and the scene (p. 262) where with his assumed ironical impertinence he insults the commercial counsellor in his own living-room; we compare it with the quarrel in Part One where Counsellor W. goes so far as to say: ‘Those are slanderous words you are using.’3 One forgets, beyond the significance of the topic, how the antagonists look; one forgives the impassioned man his violent outburst. But Arnold leaps out so clearly, one cannot be quit of him; there is nothing to help one forget, it all revolves around nothing and Arnold presents himself as the smug representative of emptiness and conceit whose irony is admired and prized by the commercial counsellor’s wife. Take the scene in the arbour in Part One where Ferdinand W. talks away cheerfully about the relationship between Madame W. and Dalund in the presence of Claudine and Lusard; we find it unseemly but forget it almost immediately just because there is something to remember. Ferdinand is impassioned, he is carried away, misled by his modern ideas. Claudine is not inquisitive but, in the passion of infatuation, a light that is both disquieting and tempting dawns upon her. We compare it with the scene in Part Two where Arnold brings an invitation to Mrs Waller and where her relation to the equerry becomes the subject of coquettish discussion. Yes, it cannot be helped, the whole situation thrusts itself upon our memory. But who deserves credit? Yes, the author, who knows what needs to be done and how to do it. For the scene in Part One is one that even a beginner could have presented. There is no dialogue; it is Ferdinand W. who enthusiastically unburdens himself. But in Part Two we find this mastery in reproducing the commonplace, these brief rejoinders, the constant interweaving of situation into the lines; this exactness in even the most casual gesture, this animation, this play of colours, even though it is all quite properly kept in the vacuous shade of triviality. Let us take Colette, Arnold, the equerry, all representatives of the present age, who all so clearly and unforgettably represent themselves.
Where essential passion is present in inwardness, the surroundings are forgotten. In Part Two, however, with trained hand the author shows great care (simply from a predilection for the task) in sketching the daily circumstances of the workaday world. Here there is no hurrying to the important festive occasion, here one does not shut oneself up idyllically together with an abandoned woman’s quiet inwardness. No, here everything is more or less equally important, making the rendition difficult, rather like painting without light and shade yet still producing an effect and a work of art. So we are not catapulted without further ado into the drawing-room, where flights of spirited talk and animated conversation and the good tone of cultured companionship bring pleasure – no, the author knows his job. From outside the drawing-room we hear the squabbling inside; we wait outside while the wife makes music; with one foot almost on the stairs the commercial counsellor’s wife already begins to scold the equerry; the maid joins in the act, then small children and a schoolgirl – just because no sense of decorum distances or separates, nothing sublime elevates or marks out; no great event stimulates or ennobles, no idea marshals the masses in picturesque harmony, or raises the individual to heroic stature – everything is betwixt and between.
Briefly, the author’s impartiality in relation to the two Parts might be put as follows: if Part One captivates more with the authenticity of great passions, then Part Two is more entertaining, especially the more one reads it.
So much for the impartiality. Another question is just how far this novel subscribes to the same conception of human existence as belongs essentially to A Story of Everyday Life. The latter’s view lies, as was mentioned before, midway between the aesthetic and the religious. Let us, then, consider the relationships to existence of the main characters in the novel to hand. In Part One, the turn of the plot in the relationship between Claudine and Lusard is constructed romantically through perseverance; she bears up and gets Lusard. And her perseverance is in the main a natural endowment, a matter of immediacy and romantic love; for the ethical, in the form of the notion that Claudine can save her honour only by honouring herself, and that every new association, every irregularity that diminishes inwardness, is therefore a judgement upon herself, plays no decisive supporting role. Hers is a straightforward romanticism, not one transformed and sanctified by the ethical. The separation from Lusard puts her in a state of suspension, a state in which she remains at the romantic front and heading in Lusard’s direction; she does not, by an ethical deepening within herself, raise herself above the relationship with Lusard while still holding the romantic desire’s course towards the reunion with him. In Part Two, the turn of the plot in the relationship between Mariane and Ferdinand is developed romantically with the help of fate: Lusard comes along with financial assistance. The only question is whether it would have been closer to the spirit of the older story of everyday life to portray the baron (in Part One) a little differently and then have him united with Claudine; and have Mariane suffer the pain of separation, then to provide her with a new consolation.
But this comment, even if its correctness is conceded, in no way counts as an objection, since what the author is doing is rendering the two ages. Even less can one charge the author with trying, in the relation between Madame W. and Dalund in Part One, to give the natural side of the relationship the upper hand over the ethical, as though staying true in an impermissible relationship could make it permissible; nor can one object to the author’s making the relationship look as if it even had an ennobling effect on Madame W. in her conjugal life with her husband, for this after all is a rendering of the special character of the age. Likewise when, in Part Two, breaking an engagement for fear of financial difficulties is made to seem a legitimate expression of passion. Ethically, the former must be regarded as reprehensible and the ennobling as an illusion; for no entitlement in any relationship can be acquired on the basis of what is forbidden – and the age of the offence is only its being repeated – because ennoblement through depravity is like the noblemindedness shown by a man who cannot get along without money, acquires his wealth unlawfully, and then does a lot of good with it. Aesthetically, the latter must be interpreted as comical. In Part Two, the present age too passes judgement on the relationship between Madame W. and Dalund, while the author is prevented by the nature of his task from disclosing his own views. Had there been yet another age it is not inconceivable that, in a rendition of it, that age would have seen Bergland’s intended flight from marriage as comical.
I shall now, in an attempt to convey the author’s splendid characterization, follow the development in the several main figures psychologically, showing how and to what extent crucial events turn on their basic individual outlooks, and allowing myself only a sideways glance at the age’s reflection. The next section [III] must be reserved in the main for stressing the special characteristics of the age. The critique must adopt the same dual approach through which the story has made its own task so difficult. Nothing of the age itself can be allowed by the author to have an effect on the individuals directly, for then he would overstep the limits of his task as novelist; he would be describing the age itself and illustrating it by examples instead of apprehending the reflection of it in domestic life and illustrating it through that.
Human exchange must always occur by way of the middle term of the individual’s psychology. For the author simply to say, ‘In the revolutionary age a woman was allowed, if she otherwise observed decorum, to have an illicit relationship with a man – that’s what I have presented in the relationship between Madame W. and Dalund’, would be wrong. The relationship between Madame W. and Dalund must be psychologically motivated, and only then can there be talk of the special character of the age influencing it by imparting this particular expression to it, and of it being the special nature of the age that makes finding it permissible possible. It can happen in any age that a young girl falls in love with a man from whom she hears nothing for a long time, so that she believes him lost, and then marries, until the object of her first love reappears – doubly dangerous because she does not feel happy. If this is the case, and if, besides, the characters are portrayed psychologically, then the distinctive character of the age can be decisive in determining what expression this collision acquires. In another age it might have been expressed, for example, by the marriage finishing up on the rocks, so that she could get her beloved, or by the unhappy lovers’ deciding in deference to the sanctity of marriage never to see each other again, etc. The author may not say, ‘The age of revolution was an age of romantic girls and I have presented this in Claudine.’ No, the author must motivate Claudine’s romanticism psychologically, and after that it can be the age that determines the particular direction it takes. A romantic girl similarly motivated in the Middle Ages would have entered a convent; in a prosaic age she would have sighed, and married; in the period of Louis XIV she might have become a dubious countess, etc.
Claudine. Prudishly brought up by Aunt Malfred and thus intellectually both backward and precocious, well-nigh cheated of any impression of life and now transplanted to the merchant Waller’s household, she has found the soil and season for her growth. What psychologically might have ended either in a stunting or in a despairing bursting of the bounds of the narrow-minded aunt’s tight-laced parlour, is now happily transformed into the full bloom of youthful joy under the most favourable conditions possible, even if they might be called dangerous. The freedom she enjoys in the Waller house, the joy so abundantly offered, the sympathy and solicitude, almost partiality, shown for the young girl, do not spoil her – because she has learned discernment – but refine her in her childlike gratitude ‘for all the blessings she enjoys in this dear household’.4 And when the double doors are opened upon the broad prospect of a world-historical event, when the French legation, the emissaries from that enchanted stage, appear in the Waller house and brush Claudine’s youthful mind magically with an idea, she is at her most sublime. The romantic is implicit in this brushing that coaxes the imagination. If Waller and his wife had travelled to Paris and taken Claudine with them, it wouldn’t have had nearly so great an effect on her as that glancing contact that doesn’t overwhelm with particulars but just totally inflames the imagination. So when Lusard, unseen by all those present and understood only by Claudine, kneels and kisses the hem of her dress – Lusard, a foreigner who belongs to little Denmark only through this symbolic act and through Claudine – this is the author’s ingenious way of expressing the romantic character of Claudine’s whole situation. If Lusard had taken her home to France as his bride, that would not have led to the same development in her as this romantic moment of contact, which is also the moment of parting. There are two things in one that a girl can demand in love if she demands all: that he is the beloved and that he has an Idea to give her into the bargain – then love’s equation is absolute and complete.
All passion is rather like sailing: the wind must be strong enough to fill the sails, uno tenore, with one gust; there must not be too much tacking and going about before reaching deep water, nor too many preparations or too many ship’s councils beforehand. It is a matter of passion gaining the power and authority to seize the unprepared in its almighty grasp. Thus Claudine stands alone with a world in her soul; then comes Lusard’s hint to her. This is the romantic factor in the author’s superbly planned situations. The power of infatuation is like the soaring of that winged steed5 – it is entire in itself. But for everyday purposes! Then come prior knowledge, and circumstances, and considerations, and friends and relations, the trappings, the congratulators – audacity’s triumphant enterprise is transformed into a bourgeois expedition: a carrier’s wagon with all the passengers shouting ‘Giddy-up’, and love is the patient beast supposed to drag all this along. But not for Claudine. Bereft of any prior knowledge and thus deserving of the initiation, not one consideration occurs to her; for her, Lusard is the beloved and through him she is touched by an idea. This, from a romantic point of view, is initiation’s supreme covenant.
This is how the beginning is arranged, but it is still a matter of the surroundings and circumstances again encouraging and psychologically supporting the romantic element. When two hefty fellows lead the snorting steed out for the race, what are they meant to do? They are meant to let go. Nothing else? That, after all, is easy enough. No, it is an art; they must know how to let go with passion; the slightest uncertainty or hesitation on their part will always hold the steed back a little; in letting go they must know precisely how to give it impetus. In pushing a boat off from the shore, the thing is to bend forward so as to add strength to the push and at the same time thrust oneself backwards to add to the impetus. As far as all passion is concerned, it is the case that all that the circumstances can do for one is to let go – with passion. But that is just how matters are arranged in W.’s house for Claudine, and the author’s ingenuity may with reason demand what is even rarer than a cheerful giver and a happy worker, namely a joyful critic; that is, one who takes pleasure in seeing what the author has done. Merchant Waller is immersed in politics. And far from incommoding Claudine with curiosity and sympathy, the rather secretive nature of the quietly pondering Madame W. is more apt temptingly to encourage the young girl’s secret love. Dalund spends his days absorbed in studying the expression of Madame W.’s mental states on her countenance (a study he continued as an old man by contemplating her portrait); but not the least inclined to track down other people’s love affairs, he seems more in fear of the Frenchmen on account of his own relationship. Claudine is solitary and isolated, without the sympathy that brings congratulation as when one compliments a person who has found something by crying, ‘Go halves!’, and which often does make falling in love into something shared. Ferdinand W., the only one who suspects the love affair, is an enthusiastic troubadour for the Frenchmen and Lusard.
This is how the love affair progresses. The author knows how to arrange things in a way that puts the romantic factor in charge. But there is still what in the great poet’s6 words is the crucial thing needed to bring out their love: the possibility of their meeting alone. And even if something else is denied them – ‘the moon shining through the branches of the beech tree in springtime’ – the author thinks it is September that should really be called the month of love. In pushing a boat off from the shore, the thing is to bend forward so as to add strength to the push and at the same time thrust oneself backwards to add to the impetus – and when someone secretly in love, in greater peril than her beloved, already believes him killed in a duel, the reverse thrust of this thought of death is the most powerful impetus for love.
The wounded Lusard is brought to the Waller country house and the opportunity is thereby given to the lovers. Without a single preconceived idea or any guidance whatsoever, other than the eccentricity of love and of the age, with no confidant but love, Claudine becomes a sacrifice to her love. The psychological premisses adequately motivate her lapse, just as in turn they motivate her perseverance, for her lapse and her virtue are essentially the same romanticism.
Another question is whether the ideas of the age might not have made Claudine clearer about the step she had taken than she later proves to be. The way her later rather naïve ignorance about the consequences of her relationship with Lusard is depicted seems borrowed from another kind of romanticism, the pastoral-idyllic. Typical of the age of revolution would be for Claudine to come to realize that her relationship with Lusard was what was ordinarily called marriage, except for the relationship’s natural side being emancipated from the ethically binding one, which was considered the antiquated aspect of marriage. Tender romanticism’s all too innocent ignorance is least of all appropriate in the revolutionary age, standing out as something accidental in the context of a rendition of the reflection of the age of revolution. Lusard understands the matter more correctly, and accordingly in one of his lines calls her ‘my little wife’.7 Claudine, on the other hand, is more a girl led astray in a quite normal way by her love rather than by the influence of modern ideas. For although it is true that she hears Ferdinand Waller discussing these ideas, and he informs her of the relationship between Madame W. and Dalund, there is no indication of the impression this has made on her, how she has understood its implications for herself; on the contrary, she later proves to differ in no way from what is conventionally labelled a girl gone astray in romantic infatuation.
Lusard is the ardent, smooth, cultivated Frenchman, excitable in any mood including sadness, made in every respect for just such a relationship as this one with Claudine, except that his perseverance bears little relation to his easy mobility – that is, although it is not impossible for someone like this to behave as Lusard does, it would also be understandable if he behaved differently. Though psychologically one would have every right to be astonished if Claudine were to be untrue to herself, she herself would have found it even forgivable in Lusard had he been untrue to her, and she would still have gone on loving him.
Madame Waller has been the object of Dalund’s love since she was quite young, but she misconstrued his silence and married while he was absent. Marriage has not improved her. Lacking inner contentment, ‘she pursued only empty pleasures, found her highest bliss in being flirted with,* and regarded her appearance as the matter of most consequence’ (cf. p. 37) – until the relationship with Dalund finally gives her refinement, a relationship to which Dalund considers himself to have a right, as his due, for so many years of fidelity and for a love such as his. Yet Madame W. is unable completely to master an inner voice that reminds her she is following a forbidden path, a voice that according to her own avowal becomes louder precisely because her improvement has let a light burst upon her that her neglected youth had failed to show her.† Meanwhile Dalund fights for the relationship even to the point of jealousy (for instance, of the Frenchmen), inspired as much by the formative and absolute influence he exerts by virtue of his masculine and personal superiority as by the ideas of his age.
Here again we have a difficulty. It is not in being seen to follow from, or in being borne out by, the idea of the age that the relationship between Madame W. and Dalund gives expression to that idea. Dalund champions the idea of the age in the relationship and consequently seeks to give new confirmation to an already existing relationship by securing for it the stamp of approval of the idea of the age. Purely personally, the relationship seems to have begun and to continue as the way in which these two have resolved a collision in their lives. The difficulty, then, is that something seems to be missing in respect of the reciprocal transparency demanded by the novel’s twofold task. The way the age is defined requires the middle term8 of the individuality, the way the individuality is defined requires the middle term of the age, and the task of this transparency is to present novelistically a reflection of the age in domestic life. Or if one wanted to say that the author only seeks to show how people judged such a relationship in a revolutionary age, the rejoinder must be that the task is then a unique one, since the judgement consisted precisely in ignoring it; and also that Ferdinand W. is the only person who mentions it, and we learn nothing at all about how much the others know about it; and, finally, that the relationship itself indeed is presented. What is questionable in all this is surely that the author in the Preface appears to have set himself a third task – a comparison of the two ages.9 Yet, superbly though the two Parts of the novel are arranged for the comparison, so, surely, should the author not have hinted at any such thing.
The remaining characters are less significant and do not lend themselves to special comment. Nor will I venture to mention or give examples of the many excellent details woven into the unfolding story: their presence is something we take for granted in the author of A Story of Everyday Life. One enjoys the reading, one doesn’t give oneself critical airs by reviewing a novel like this stingily, as though it were the work of a beginner where the problem would be, as they say, to find at least ‘something’ to praise.
Were I, on the other hand, to point out in Part One what appears at least to me to be a less felicitous detail, I would name the baron and particularly his venture into the demonic, apart from which one might also ask whether he isn’t limited to such a common type that the reflection of the age simply isn’t to be detected there. A frivolous and in addition half-drunk baron, who in shrewish ill-temper gets the notion of killing little Charles, arouses neither horror nor interest – that is, the grudging interest characteristic of the ambiguity of the demonic. He fails to arouse fear, because with a drunken man one’s first thought is that it will pass; and he fails to arouse interest, partly because he is drunk and partly because his frivolity is anything but masculine. Nor must it be made to look as though he terrified Claudine, for although this sort of thing may make him vile and disgusting in her eyes, it is not terrifying. And what is the psychological motivation for this strange episode? Even if we assume that once the possibility of a relationship with Claudine has been shattered, the baron reverts to his old ways, which only she would have the power to bend to the obedience of love, does it then follow that he can continue carrying on in this way? After all, he was originally good-natured, bore the outward marks of good breeding, and Claudine’s influence on him, even at such a moment, must have some psychological effect. To me the situation seems unbecoming and not really authentic either.
Now to Part Two. Mariane. Roused unfairly and all too early from youthful illusion and driven into the painful reality of pressing household tasks, vexed by daily insults, she humbly works out the bitter problem of being more or less a housemaid in her own parents’ house. All the haughty disdain and, on the other hand, foppish familiarities to which such a servant can be subjected are no strangers to her. And the bitterness is the greater that she is not only defenceless but has been thrown to the wolves – because she is the daughter. On the other hand, she very early gets into the habit of perfecting an incorruptible nature of quiet inwardness; she is particularly trained in preserving a secret understanding, since the whole reality of her circumstances is only a vexatious meaninglessness, for even with her father in her father’s house she maintains, qua daughter, a merely secret understanding, where only in the hall or in passing, or when no one can see them, dare the father speak to her in a fatherly way – in the way lovers who lack their parents’ consent contrive to see each other, to talk to each other in the hall when the parents in the living-room officially oppose the association. Were Mariane in love she would be forced to make a secret of it, or else it would be the signal for a new maltreatment: should someone love Miss Maren, should anyone want a ‘little slut’ like that, as her stepmother calls her,10 she would be liable to lose her position with the commercial counsellor’s lady, just so they’d be rid of this love nonsense.
And Mariane is in love. We will now follow the features of the author’s excellently constructed situation in order to explain her psychologically. These couldn’t be called harmful at the level of chatty sympathy, but neither are they favourable. They do not let go with passion, neither do they restrain by misconceived kindness and concern, yet they do vexingly exert restraint. No doubt it is true that the life of love is inwardness, and that inwardness is in itself just what it is and therefore may be the same whether, for instance, we are dealing with someone who goes out on a balcony to gaze at the starlit night or with a prisoner doing a life sentence who through a crevice steals a glance at a single star – though the latter’s inwardness is perhaps the greater; yet the point with love, just as with human birth, is nevertheless that the condition of things, the surroundings, exert their psychological predisposition, have a great influence on what transpires. Mariane wanted with the same inwardness as Claudine to be true to herself, and yet her love differed essentially in all eternity from Claudine’s.
Being in love is the culmination of a person’s purely human existence, which is a double existence, and for that reason it is at the same time just as much inwardness as a relationship outwards, towards actual life. Equilibrium in the relationship is happy love. Less inwardness and a preponderance in the relationship towards the actual is a less beautiful love; a preponderance of inwardness and less of a relationship to the actual tends towards unhappy love.
So it is with Mariane; she has become all too well acquainted with the misery of actual life, and the surroundings impress their vexations upon her daily. Instead of love’s victorious, all-conquering courage that, convinced in its enthusiastic ignorance that reality is the world where love has its home, dares in matters of love to demand everything of actual life – instead of that, she has something of love’s inner sadness. The inwardness can amount to the same thing, just as a retreat may be as great an achievement as the most brilliant victory, but the difference is essential. Instead of sensing her love as a vocation emanating from a world that wants compliance in all things, she has accustomed herself in her inwardness to comply in renunciation: her love is at the same instant in secret acquiescence with the fact that it, too, will become a repressed inwardness, a hidden life others know nothing of, and which will be at one and the same time a higher state of health and yet, speaking humanly, an infirmity. The inwardness can amount to the same thing, as it is an equally difficult task to die as to live. Inwardness is the real pearl, which is formed, as is known, inside the oyster by the absorption of dew. But according to an ancient author11 it is supposed to make a difference whether it is morning or evening dew; so too it makes a difference whether the genuine individuality of the love is formed with hope or with remembrance.
As with all passion, so with love: the one who receives the initiation is unimpeded in the initiated moment of falling in love, unobstructed on the foolhardy summit of illusion, freely and infinitely surveying the whole world; there must be no paltry sympathy, but also no teases that keep the light-armed one from scaling the dizzy heights, and who in that moment prevent the unimpeded one from catching the view. If everything is to turn out well, this protected moment must not be denied, this moment when all existence, enchanted, obeys every beck and call, when nothing, nothing, lessens love’s unbounded abandonment in illusion; and this is something other than all the lovers’ caresses and occurs privatissime, since it is the presupposition that unites the lovers, the precipitator, infinity’s advance payment on which they must live the many or the few years. This Mariane lacks.
The author has depicted all this superbly; and it is important for the relationship between Mariane and Bergland, seeing that it psychologically motivates, on her side too, the possibility of separation through fear of financial embarrassment. Mariane has none of love’s jubilant rapture to counterpose to Bergland’s discouragement; she does not have love’s triumphant courage to take feminine charge of the holy expedition of marriage when the beloved loses his composure. Psychologically, it would not be devoid of interest to imagine the relationship along those lines, although it would defeat the novel’s aim, which also has to do with the age. The author has understood this very well. Mariane is unable to muster any resistance; she herself is affected by a troubled reflection, and in her lines resounds a sad familiarity with actuality, a resignation regarding love itself and its claims to universal validity. But the inwardness is still there, just as eternal, and as life-long, as in the most rapturous infatuation, essentially as strong but differing essentially in its expression. Even if she is willing to give up Bergland, she will not take back her ring because she will not give up the love. ‘Neither will I give back yours. Like my love I have carried it secretly for three years, I will not give it up in the years left to me.’12 Here she is at her most sublime, yet the love is not a beckoning but a withdrawal into inwardness. Marked ‘by the quiet virtues’,13 her love’s inwardness is that of a girl who dedicates herself to suffering. She has suffered much from the actual world, but this blow seems decisive. So also Caesar remained erect when the conspirators plunged their daggers into him, but on seeing that Brutus was a party to it, he wrapped himself in his cloak and gave himself up to death with these words: ‘You too, Brutus, my son!’14 Troubled by reflection, the greatest resistance Mariane can muster against Bergland’s passion, in the passionate tension of impatience, is the provisional ‘that she will patiently wait’ (cf. p. 269), but even this resistance is in keeping with reflection.
How well arranged everything is here! The psychological portrait and the reflection of the age. The good, in the strident heyday of a jack-of-all-trades superficiality, must lead a cowed and clandestine life, in an ecclesia pressa,15 as Mariane does. On the other hand, in an age given to reflecting, even this deep intensity may not remain altogether untouched by reflection, even in relation to the one thing it possesses, an infatuation. A spontaneous, enthusiastic lover in Mariane’s position would consider Bergland mad; she would be utterly unable for the life of her to understand his financial worries; but neither would such another lover be able in the least to understand Mariane’s resignation. Such a situation could only be humorous and Bergland an essentially comic figure, representing as he does a rather prosaic point of view.
Ferdinand Bergland is an eccentric fellow who has lost his way along possibility’s bold antecedent in life, who has included a love affair in the multiplicity of his plans and studies, and is now about to run aground on the consequent.16 A marriage, which for him should be the hyphen, assumes a fearsome shape and he becomes diffident – a desperate once-for-all decision has to take the place of action and the continuity of an essential passion. The seeming strength involved in making the decision is really only the expression of impotence, and the reason he gives is therefore basically incidental. He could just as well have mentioned any other reason, because the real reason is the disproportion between possibility and actuality, which now grabs at this detail as though it were the reason. His desperate decision, and the action it gives rise to, are therefore meaningless – and a decision and action which, if things went as he wanted, would have essentially amounted to nothing. Deciding not to will to do this or that, neither more nor less than not willing in itself, is really deciding to become nothing. Unless the person deciding not to will enters at that very moment into the service of a higher idea, his decision and action are empty. It is this that determines the outcome of life’s collisions, and decides if the passion is justified or not. Ferdinand by making his decision has become essentially no clearer about himself than before, but has merely retreated headlong into darkness about himself; all he does is referre pedem,17 and in terms of the ideality of his own personality, in stepping backward there is no step forward. His worries about making a living, in that form, do not constitute a real view of existence; but anyone who takes it upon himself to manage, or at least disturb, another’s life on the scale that Ferdinand did, even though from an ethical point of view the intervention will always be a mistake, must at least have understood himself in the light of a more essential view of existence, in the light of an Idea to which his life can relate – precisely, when he breaks with Mariane.
How well arranged everything is here, too: the psychological portrait and the reflection of the age. In another age it might have ended with Mariane’s patience gaining at least an interim – until Ferdinand’s worries were dispelled. But from an inward and a romantic standpoint our own age, despite all its plans and anticipations and pronouncements and presuppositions, is essentially without passion. This is precisely why a sudden expression of despair appears again in a desperate action or decision, an alternation which is the lawless law for the extremes in such a way of life.
Mrs Waller, the commercial counsellor’s lady. If one might speak in the same way of composite human beings as one does in distinguishing between noble and base metal and those having something in between called ‘plated’, a composite that can be deceptive, then the lady of the house would be aptly so called. She has a plated virtuosity in being anything you like: at one moment charming and the next almost repulsive; lovable and yet tiresome in her bustling self-importance, decorative yet making a virtual exhibition of herself in her gilded attire, demure yet dallying, cultured and yet painful to the genuinely cultured, shrewd about life yet almost mindless, flirtatious from beginning to end. Her characterization cannot be anything other than this variegated description, because there is nothing essential in her and her outwardness must be described by enumerating items. The ostentatious virtuosity is consummated and turns back into itself in the smug conceit that she is what a woman of the world should be, which is why she proudly and calmly dares anything on the strength of her reputation. And yet her nature is in a profound sense equivocal, for as one of the Apostles (James) more or less puts it: purity of heart is to will one thing.18 Even Madame W. in Part One is in a way less equivocal.
The mastery with which the author handles such a glittering and grotesque frailty is admirable, always conveying the impression of a fictitiously real character; likewise the ease with which the combinations of situation are invented, the naturalness with which the thread of continuity runs through the story,* constantly throwing light on the lady’s lack of character in the passing mirror of reflection, but fleetingly, for there is in fact nothing to dwell upon; yes, there must be no dwelling, for then Mrs Waller becomes someone else. The art lies in the fact that the presentation contains the repetition of the psychological construal, and just as the dallying demonstrates the unstable emptiness, so the wife throughout the novel is in a state of unstable bustle, shown in this transitory relation to older and younger men, to her own children, to her husband, to Mariane, to the maid. Especially superb is the proportioning of the relationships between the five female characters: the wife’s demonstrative maternalism in relation to the two little darlings who are already trained to be ‘respecters of persons’, the parody’ in Colette’s copying her mother, which has perhaps contributed to the mother’s becoming bored with her,* and finally, the profound satire upon the wife implicit in Mariane’s quiet nature.
If in describing a person’s essential nature one recalls Pliny’s famous words, omnia ad conscientiam, nil ad ostentationem,19 one need only reverse those words (omnia ad ostentationem, nil ad conscientiam) and you have a description of this lady’s nature, which is to be the inside out, or a contrary being. But to be reminded once again, as it befits a critic to be true to the richness in the author’s portrayal: it takes far more skill to present such a character than to describe a person with an essence. Some may even find my remarks about this character quite suggestive. Yes, these days it isn’t unthinkable that someone be stupid enough to find my account in its brevity more exhaustive than the author’s. This, alas, is a great misunderstanding people have come by only in our declamatory age, and by doing so they do disservice to every work of art. For there is an infinite leap from this brevity to the trick of being able to present such a character. Criticism in our time is like so many people – it is constantly letting itself be duped by abstract possibility and foreshortened perspective, which are anything but creative, and by great projects and summary surveys, which are anything but fruitful. No, whatever one thinks about presenting an age in a feminine figure like this, one thing is certain: the character is a masterpiece of the portrayal of triviality, a masterpiece all the way down to the most trivial detail, yes, to the tip of the rosy tongue she sticks out at her husband – a quick and secret response to an unspoken accusation (p. 216).
Counsellor Dalund. A venerable old man is in himself pleasant to behold, but Dalund has the added interest for the reader that we know him from the days of his youth. Of course, any biography can in a sense produce the same effect; but only in a sense, for it produces no illusion as the novel does, letting us become contemporary with Dalund not just straightforwardly, young then old, but making him our contemporary in two different eras.
But does the character remain psychologically consistent? Undoubtedly. But where does the satirical trait that was not really noticeable in his youth, and which the author didn’t allow to come out either, come from? In Part One he is basically the young commonsensical man with the intelligent face, the talented lawyer who will not allow himself to be carried away by factions, even though the divisive power crucially estranging people from one another in heated partisanship is a world-historical event. He retains his equilibrium, mainly level-headed and rhapsodic only in his relation to Madame Waller. Now, good sense, neutrality and legal acuteness are essential to a satirist; but it doesn’t follow that wherever these elements are present there is a satirist. Times, however, have changed, and have changed him a little likewise. There is a psychological consistency in the fact that in this change he should become satirical. Neutrality is really only conceivable when the factions are of some significance, when it is truly an idea that separates them. If, however, the times are without significance, and the factional disagreement a kind of theatrical pretence of merely playing at revolution, then the person who in the time of the upheavals was neutral will become a satirist. Neutrality consists in a positive recognition of the respective validity, valore intrinseco,20 of each of the factions. Take away this precondition of the relation of neutrality and eo ipso the neutrality is negatively qualified as satire, because to be neutral with regard to a chimerical either/or means either one is a fool, since the neutrality is just as foolish as the trifling parties in relation to which it negatively defines itself, and so it is a possibility only for a trifling person; or, by essentially being something, one is eo ipso satirical. The man is, then, essentially the same: the change is merely a reflection of the change in the times.
Dalund has also mellowed.* This too is quite as it should be, and not just because it is the reward that a gifted man has coming to him in his old age, while only a person of less consequence gets peevish when elderly. But isn’t this too a reflection of the changing times? He feels exceptional, this old man stricken in years yet who belonged to a more significant age, and essentially does belong to it – it is exactly this that is the mellowing factor, the firmness of bearing that makes him gentle through the secret communication of remembrance with the past. As an old man he belongs in the passage of time to two ages. He is thus bifrontal: mellow when he looks back, and on turning towards the present age a little satirical – for everyday purposes the lovable old man. He is not dull in his mind, and perhaps also because he still has something to fight for, since the love affair lives on in his soul, he battles still with the enemy – the uncertainty of illicit possession – and against doubt: the question is whether fidelity does indeed atone for guilt, whether fidelity might win for him a reunion with his heart’s desire. For just as once Madame Waller’s lawful husband stood in the way, now eternity might seem to be doing the same thing.
Charles Lusard. The novel is two ages. The two Parts are distinct, and yet there is still a connecting link, a transition that ingeniously joins them. This is the figure of Charles Lusard. He doesn’t belong to the past, he is too young for that, and he is not entirely unaffected by the reflectiveness of the present age. His is a personality that has remained constant, and here again we have the unity of psychological outlook and a reflection of the age. His childhood impressions and, later, the singular ceremoniousness that hovered over his parents’ domestic life must naturally arouse a certain wistful rhapsodizing in his soul, which has quite naturally been exhausted in foreign travels and in a conscious striving that has failed to bring him into a personal relationship with anyone, whatever youthful cravings his soul harboured, precisely because his wistful side had an isolating effect.
This is how a rhapsodic reserve splits a young man’s soul. The youth’s need for comradeship goes unfelt because already he is living in remembrance. Not even love’s season has a chance, since he is already betrothed in inwardness. The solitary youth’s outwardly directed endeavours are aimed at external enterprises that can keep him busy without his getting essentially involved with anyone, without his missing anyone – precisely because in remembrance he does miss someone. In this fashion he has travelled both in the Old World and the New, and then returned to his estate. His is an individuality that has, that is to say, stayed constant. But this also calls for an element of reflection and of self-reflection, and this again is, on the other hand, a reflection of the age, which, itself indecisive, has not had the power over him to sweep him along. So really he belongs to neither age. The idea he represents – having renounced his own life in order to make a few people happy – doesn’t really belong to either of them. Charles Lusard, precisely through being constant, is the transition. In a revolutionary age an individual of this kind would no doubt become partisan; in the present age he may not have attained the harmonious and thoroughly cultured equilibrium that distinguishes his noble and independent bearing, even though his soul follows pensively on the heels of a memory. For an unhappy individual (as we must call someone whom no contemporary age or life-situation motivates for the future), he is happy, but his is still not a happy individuality.
What is amazing about this novel is that everything is so true to the category,21 while when in reading it the whole seems so unpretentious that the cursory reader – if he should happen to see this review – might be taken aback and think I find more in it than there is to be found, etc. Alas, I cannot accept that reader’s compliment but must pass it on to the proper person, the author, who even if I had understood it all is still, after all, first the inventor and then, secondly, also the one who with his art could again conceal it; and, finally, is perhaps privy to much in the novel that I have not been able to discover.
There is still another character in Part Two of the novel: Johannes Milner, the overseer of the estate, a jovial man who after a discouraging career crisis, without livelihood and suspected of an unstable temperament, found a position with Lusard that made him a happy man. In the owner’s absence he has managed the estate with care and wisdom, and now in his healthy joy in life occasionally entertains the wish to see Lusard settled in marriage. That Johannes Milner has been very active on the estate is clear, but in the novel he seems fairly unoccupied. Yet a friendship such as that between Milner and Lusard is not unimportant in throwing light on Lusard. Just such a friendship throws his loneliness into relief. It is not the unanimity of two like-minded people, nor attachment’s urge for the other’s confidence. Though so mollified and satisfied with life, with himself, his comforts and his marriage, Milner nevertheless finds something extinct and ruined, something that makes him sad to behold,22 in Lusard’s long trips abroad ‘all by himself’. Add to this the fact that Lusard is Milner’s benefactor, and however careful that noble, cultured man is about toning down any echo of disharmony in that relationship, it is still there, reinforcing the solitary one’s superiority and, again, distance.
It wouldn’t occur to me to cite examples of details in the second Part, because the details here are all totally significant. Just a single line of Lusard’s grated, on me at least, because I thought it unsuitable in his mouth when said to a lady.23 What he said may be altogether true; its questionableness lies in its relation to the speaker and the speaker’s situation.