center Imre Madách On Woman, Considered Especially from the Aesthetic Standpoint Inaugural Address to the Academy center “When the honored Academy received me into its illustrious circle, the act struck my own conscience — conscious as I am of how little I have earned it — rather as an advance extended to good will and zeal on the credit of the future than as an over-generous reward for the slight day-labor that my powers have so far permitted me in the field of the mother tongue and of aesthetics. And yet it was the cultivation of that dear mother tongue and of aesthetics that laid this welcome debt of honor upon me; and so, when the mother tongue brought woman to mind, and aesthetics, by its close kinship, brought woman to mind again, a most natural chain of ideas led me to the subject of my inaugural address.” — For God’s sake! — someone may exclaim — why woman again? Is she not already the subject of nine books out of ten; have we not heard enough of her already, in prose and in verse, glorified and reviled, sung and sneered at, by the learned and the ignorant alike? What new thing could this subject still yield? But to his mind it is precisely this manifold conception of her, this perpetual return to her, that proves the subject inexhaustible, like the charm of spring, like the depths of the sea. And if I do not succeed in drawing from it something new and pleasing, the fault lies not in the barrenness of the subject but in my own unfitness for it. The great division of humankind into the two sexes reaches far more deeply into a person’s being, whether physical or moral, than any intelligent creature might suppose who, remote from our earthly bonds and our sexual relations, sought to arrive at a knowledge of them by cold reasoning, or by induction drawn from the other phenomena of living nature. Woman is not simply a human being who also happens to be female, as cold logic would dictate, but to her very last fiber a peculiar something — specifically woman. And while analysis shows, throughout all living nature, that with its gradual perfecting the sexual element is forced more and more into the background — for in the plant, for instance, it plays the leading part as the flower, lending the plant the crown of its existence, whereas in the bird it declares itself only in song and in the splendor of plumage; and in the most developed conditions the two sexes become almost equal, so that in the shrewd pointer, the steel-muscled horse, the bloodthirsty tiger it scarcely declares itself in anything beyond a shade of difference in strength — yet man, who comes next in the series, at once displays that consistent inconsistency of great nature which protests so forcefully against every confinement in a rigid system, against every cataloguing; and the difference between the two sexes steps forth more strongly than fails to surprise us. The average circumference of the male brain in the Caucasian race is nearly two inches greater than that of the female brain. It is remarkable that this difference, established only by recent science, was already sensed by ancient art, which possessed so unsurpassably fine a feeling for idealization, so that on every ancient Greek statue of Venus one finds the head reduced below the ordinary proportion. I could cite countless further examples of the happy instinct for idealization in ancient art, but as they do not belong strictly to my address I will single out only two. Again it was only recent science that established how the facial angle widens across the whole animal kingdom in proportion to the intellectual standing of each species, until in man it most nearly approaches the right angle. And behold, on the ancient statues we find the right-angled profile carried to its boldest extreme — one line further exaggerated would lead to monstrosity, but over that line the genius keeps watch, to whom alone it is permitted to take so daring a liberty. Furthermore, the proportion of the human limbs cannot have been unknown to the ancient artists, and when they portrayed human beings they kept to it strictly; but in their standing statues of gods we consistently see the lower leg somewhat lengthened, and this small license, in the interest of idealization, loses none of its proper effect. But let me return to my subject. From the skeleton of what animal species, other than man, can one determine its sex? And this great difference, which begins in the two most notable parts of the organism, the brain and the skeleton, runs through the whole. A proportionally far greater part of woman’s body is fashioned for sexual ends. Her blood is more abundant in relation to her body weight, her circulation swifter, her temperature higher, her constitution more nervous. It is most natural that this difference, lodged so deep in her organism, pervading woman’s whole inner life, should determine her sphere of ideas and her activity differently from man’s. And so it is by no means an empty phrase to say that woman thinks through her heart. Woman develops early, but never attains full manly maturity; she grasps and learns more easily, but, lacking creative genius, she does not rise among the guiding spirits of humankind. She always represents only the suffering, never the penetrating element; and hence, while she supplies the dearest contingent to dilettantism, she has never essentially advanced art or science. This irrefutable fact we cannot ascribe to an upbringing of the opposite tendency. The greater part of those men whom genius possessed broke their way toward their calling from the most contrary paths of all — and prevailed, because the spirit is stronger than every earthly obstacle. The beautiful and the extraordinary move woman more strongly, and so she also kindles to them more readily than man does. Therefore, where the power of the moment decides, there woman stands ready for self-sacrifice — where enduring struggle is demanded, the man holds his ground. Every persecuted new religious sect has its inspired women martyrs, every popular uprising its tigress-women. At every dreadful spectacle and execution they are present in great numbers, seeking the excitement; yet woman will also go to the bedside of the plague-stricken, from which the deliberate man recoils. With bare hands she batters at the gate of the Bastille, but to the toilsome conduct of war — whose ardor the disagreeableness of the weather cools, whose poetic enamel the natural obstacles and the discomforts of privation rub away — only the man is equal. The Maid of Orleans too carried out her part with the rapture of inspiration up to the king’s coronation; from there her glory peeled away. Rare is the woman who would give herself to the unbreakable, zealous labor of the missionary, more frightened by a single tedious day of monotonous wandering in the wilderness than by the bayonet piercing her heart amid the sweet intoxication of zeal. On woman’s finer bodily frame — in contrast to the male forms that bristle with strength and run to angles — the serpentine line, or what Hogarth calls the line of beauty, is the ruling one. Her whole shape breathes grace. Therefore, where Greek sculpture portrays female acrobats, strength is only the ground that serves to bring out the grace, whereas on the male statues grace is shown only as the noble companion of strength. Therefore the ancient architect, where he wishes to bring out the magnitude of a weight, employs atlases to support it; where he wishes to refine it, to make it as it were airy, caryatids. Woman’s subordinate bodily and spiritual strength seeks protection and tending, and in the soul of the stronger man it stirs the very feelings stirred by the abandoned child, the wilting flower, the numbed bird, and all that, as if pleading, lifts its eyes to us as though it said: see, you are powerful — I am weak — under your care I revive, without you I am lost — and scent, song, prayer, enamel, all that is mine shall be your reward. And the awakened consciousness turns to good will, and this, on the stairway of esteem, leads upward toward idealization and toward a nobler aesthetic enjoyment, until love unfolds into its full plenitude. Yes, woman is the incarnation of love, and the wildest man bows to her rose-switch; he is gentled, as the bloodthirsty beast is gentled by the helpless child; for we go around even the flower that opens in our path, and do not tread on the writhing little beetle. Samson lays his head in Delilah’s lap, Hercules sits down at the distaff, and this momentary self-forgetting is the less shameful the truer the man who commits it. A moment, and the man comes to himself again, while in woman the preponderance of her sexual relations makes love so essential a part of her whole sphere of life that it is able to fill the entire course of her existence. There can be a woman who in her whole life did nothing but love; now as child, now as wife, now as mother; whereas in a man’s life love can fill only a very small void, and that man indeed looks back on a barren life who did nothing but love. Even female beauty keeps pace with sexual development, and the flowering of both coincides, whereas male beauty attains its fullness in the time of vigor and spiritual maturity. But from these things it follows of itself that every aberration of the consciousness of one’s destiny for beauty and love is also a pre-eminently female trait. Vanity carried to the utmost can declare itself only in an Erzsébet Báthori, the gone-wild lust for pleasure only in a Lucrezia Borgia. Only a Mary Stuart could dress herself before the mirror as she stepped onto the scaffold. Already the ancient mythology personified every charm, and every enchantment of love, in women, just as it set before us the patterns of the desolate in the female figure stripped of these sacred things. There we find Venus, the Graces, the Horae — while facing them stand the Bacchantes, the Furies, the Harpies. Again it is not some conventional arrangement, but her sexual relations, that make woman the founder of the family, the binder-together of the domestic circle. For attaining the great ends of nature she uses means that are stronger than all reasoning. Who reflects that food is necessary for the sustaining of our body? We grow hungry, we seize the food, and we eat. Of the oxidation of the blood we gained a notion only after millennia, when already for millennia we had been drawing the fresh air into our lungs with a sense of delight. Who reflects on the coming generation while he sighs for the object of his love? And when nature destined man for social development, she placed woman at the center of the family, and entrusted to her the guarding of the domestic altar, and bound her to all this with a far stronger bond than any brilliant dialectic or any philosophico-moral reasoning could supply. How much greater a ruin does one faithless desertion of her womanly duties bring upon the whole life of the family than the man’s misstep. The bond of parent to child is so infinitely stronger in the mother than in the father, and through the trinity of mother’s milk, mother tongue, and maternal teaching she not only lays the foundations of the family, but plants in the soul of the human being waking to consciousness the seed of all that piety, tender attachment, and sacred idea whose natural guardian is woman. And the echo of those prayers which, with hands clasped, in half-consciousness, we heard from our mother, accompanies us through life, and our heart feels those ideas, because they were born with us, and the holier because they have no name, their ground obscure — but the more strongly do they work for that, even though cold reason, unable to dissect them, would christen them prejudices. And the image of woman too remains forever before us, like a lodestone that draws the freely roving man back again and again to the domestic altar. And this influence overflows the family circle, to the noblest root of national existence; and therefore the poet, contemplating the sinking of his people, justly broke out into this cry of grief: “Degenerate was his mother’s blood!...” Thus woman works quietly, noiselessly, in her modest domestic circle, and yet with immense effect upon the whole. Like the coral-making insect that brings whole quarters of the world into being; like the surging air, which we do not even notice, but whose absence would suddenly be conspicuous together with our destruction. The girl-child can scarcely move before she tends her doll, plays at housekeeping, sets things in order and adorns them from the equator to the poles; while the boy fights and wrecks. The bird, the flower: the girl’s favorites; the dog, the horse: the boy’s. And we find the acknowledging apotheosis of this vocation of woman in the most ancient times. In Rome as the Vestal Virgins, in newly discovered Mexico as the Sun-maidens, they guard the sanctity of the domestic altar. At the altar of Nehalennia of the northern peoples the bride received into her hand the consecrated distaff as the emblem of her vocation. And the pure protection of the holy pieties the old tragedians glorified not in a man but in an Antigone. After the day of mourning at Mohács, too, the men continued their savage labor, driven by party passion, tearing and gnawing at one another’s breast. — It was a woman who thought even of the dead and laid them to rest. But just because she is such — the guardian of those sanctities, tender as the enamel of the flower — once woman is torn from her appointed sphere, once she has stripped off the feelings of piety, and, setting herself above the dear prejudices, wishes by reasoning to dissect all that she ought only to feel, she sinks far deeper, and is more rarely able — not to say never able — to raise herself again morally, than we see the man do in countless cases. Her lesser spiritual strength and her greater passionateness work together in this; and so, just as woman furnishes the ideal images of the morally and aesthetically beautiful, so too only woman is capable of producing the utmost of the morally and aesthetically ugly. A remarkable psychological proof of this is the belief in witchcraft, which not only prevailed among us but is at home in the northernmost parts of Asia, among the Tunguz, just as among the Pehuenche savages of South America. Everywhere it is ascribed to woman alone that, for the ruin of humankind, she can enter into a league with the evil spirits — perhaps for the very reason that happiness too can be stolen down from heaven for us only by woman. To woman’s eye is ascribed the power by which she can blast her enemy — because they feel the spell with which she pours out bliss. Only of woman is it supposed that she can league with the devil — she who perhaps came down from heaven as an angel. From all this, I believe, it follows that the philosopher who, setting out from the abstract concept of the human being and regarding sexual difference as something quite subordinate, proclaims the equal standing of man and woman in society — so-called female emancipation — acts very mistakenly, and renders scarcely any good service to those he wishes to favor. He who is not content that the swaying branch of the rosebush bears a fragrant flower, but wants it at the same time to furnish mighty beams — who demands of the proud oak that it at the same time fill the air with surging flower-scent — does not know nature. True, the principle grows stronger every day according to which, in nature, there are no rigid ruptures, no contrasts without transition. Even the newest geology explains many a formation, hitherto ascribed to violent, suddenly occurring revolutions, by a chain of continuous, slow effects and transitions. So between man and woman too this rigid partition wall is wanting. There are slow transitions between these two characters; but these neither the social philosopher nor the aesthetician takes as the object of his study, where it is the sound whole that is in question — just as the natural scientist does not take the welter of hybrid plants or mongrel animals, but at most registers them. But if now and then a meteor flares up, and a woman is born who, inspired by a lofty spirit, rises above the limits of her sex, then despite all our reasoning she makes herself the equal of man; and let her do so, for she has bought this place dearly enough, since for it she has assuredly renounced all those advantages of her sex which in that direction would have made her radiant and happy. A Shakespearean genius is never hindered in its emergence by the rules of Aristotle. Galileo proclaimed the turning of the earth in defiance of the contrary articles of faith. But it is not the pale theory of female emancipation held by the scholar who knows nothing of cheerful life that could endanger the conception of woman’s natural place in the future. So too that perverse situation of woman which, all through the historical past, ruled so harmfully over woman, sprang from a quite different source. There is in man a certain inclination: to observe, to develop, to magnify every trifle that nature indicates. The wellspring of this inclination is everything beautiful and great, but at the same time everything bad and ugly that man has ever brought about. It is this that spied out, in the barely usable original form of the cereals and domestic animals, that germ apt for development which later made them our most useful instruments of life. It is this that taught us to subdue the natural forces one by one to our service. It is this that is the mother of every art... displaying for art the principle of idealization in magnification. But on the other hand there is scarcely an absurd folk custom, perverse principle, or sinful social relation that this same inclination would not have engendered. This holds from slavery to lawful murder, from tattooing to the crinoline. The former are far grander and more serious subjects than that I should enter even incidentally upon their discussion in an address of another tendency. It was enough to have marked them; the thoughtful reader will recognize in them the applicability of my principle. Of the latter kind I will adduce a few, because they are the results of an immediate but lopsided observation of the human body and of sexual relations, and lead of themselves to setting forth the broader application of similar lopsided conceptions concerning the standing of woman. The man of the savage people, for whom existence and struggle are one, very naturally sets great store by valor. But there is in us the artistic inclination, which makes a simple thing more pleasing, furnishes it with ornament, and the ornament becomes a symbol. The symbols of valor serve to terrify the enemy — and there on the skin of the Indian stands a whole heroic epic. If then his wife likewise desires this living picture-chronicle, so that she too may visibly display the virtues of her circle, who will be astonished at it? And the rational history of tattooing stands before us. The racial mark of one people is the long, narrow head; of another, the broad nose or the swollen lip. Everyone would like to possess this national feature as fully as possible; but thousands possess it, and man, by his inclination to magnify, is not content with the common property: he wants something distinguished. He presses the child’s head between boards so that it may be still longer and narrower; he widens the lip, the nose, with artificial pendants — but this does not remain one person’s secret, and the absurd procedure becomes a folk custom. We know that hair-powder was created by the coquetry of a graying favorite, the crinoline by a vanity in some woman stronger than the feeling of maternal dignity — and the principle of “regum ad exemplum” for a time raised it to law. The tasteless philosophy of China regarded that one side of woman’s destiny which makes her the keeper of the domestic hearth and the representative of family stability, and so that she might fulfill this more easily, not carried away by the temptation of free movement: it crippled her feet. From a still more shameful standpoint another Chinese school of philosophy regards woman, the head of which, Lao-tse, speaks thus: three kinds of flesh are needed for my happiness: pork for the table, mule-flesh for the journey, woman-flesh for the bed. With such principles, then, that country in which the husband first sees his wife when she is brought into his house; where bigamy prevails, and children are exposed: though it contains a third of humankind, has never yet recorded a single ideal of woman; it stagnates and grows torpid, because it itself shuts out from its circle the geniuses of beauty, inspiration, and life. Ancient Sparta, that magnificent barracks, regarded woman only insofar as it had need of her, that she might bring its heroes into the world; but it withdrew even their upbringing from her. To exchange wives, to expose girl-children, was permitted. And this perverse conception avenged itself here too. Never in Sparta could true family life, gentler morals, and ennobling art take root. In Athens more was already taken into account of woman’s many-sided vocation, and with how surprisingly brilliant a result. Yet the gynaeceum here too drew certain limits around her — it shut off the flower-scent-like charm of female conversation from the world of men; and this one void also, which, as strongly as we feel it, we have just as little been able to explain by reasons, sought in how strange a manner to fill itself through the peculiar institution of the hetaerae. And how consistent the result. The greater part of their distinguished women who have come down to us, the Aspasias and the Sapphos, were either of the class of the hetaerae, or were taken over by their poets from that half-fabulous heroic age in which woman still moved, amid a society of simple morals, with a freedom answering almost to our present conception. Certain Scythian peoples burned out the right breast of their daughters, that at the drawing of the bow the quiver might have a firmer support. This one custom characterizes well enough the whole situation of woman, whom, transforming her by force into a man, they left only so much of her womanhood as was just necessary for the race to breed on. Of the womenfolk of these peoples a few mannish queens are then all that defied oblivion. The Jews regarded women for the most part from the standpoint of their motherhood. This was undeniably a higher standpoint, and gave birth to nobler results, than the conception of many another people — but the contempt for the barren woman, the practice of concubinage, the man’s one-sided right to thrust away his spouse, are all so many shameful degradations of woman. Jewry too, then, did not remain free from the influence of Eastern ideas; but on the other hand we also meet with traces of conceptions that breathe the present appreciation of woman’s standing. And from the books of the Old Testament there step before us women so distinguished in form that they inspire artist and poet equally to this day. In the other Eastern countries woman’s lot was truly pitiable, almost animal, and, alas, for the most part remains so to this day. There the more sensual man debases woman into the mere instrument of his lust for pleasure. He gives and takes her like an article of merchandise, whose value is determined only by her material charms. Penned up in crowds, he guards her jealously, in the feeling of the insufficiency of his own worth, and together with the free air keeps far from her every sphere of activity and every spiritual elevation. In India he takes her with him into the grave, like his dear household utensils. In Damascus he has her set before the door, sends her out to meet misery, since her charms can serve him no longer. This was woman’s standing in the vanished great Eastern empires, just as among the ancient Arab, who nonetheless exposed his girl-child to the wild beasts rather than let her fall a victim to misery or disgrace. What a strange cry of pain this is of outraged nature! What a peculiar reservation of woman’s natural sphere, that those debased, penned-up creatures busied themselves just as much with their trinkets, painted their faces, decked themselves out, as the European lady of today who hunts freely for conquest. That their names were Sobeiha (dawn), Zahra (flower), Nariha (lovely), Saida (fortunate), Amida (faithful), and the like, as if they could have been lovely, could have wakened a dawn, could have been faithless or fortunate. And there beside them we find the poet too, in the long line of the Hafizes and Saadis, who sang songs of love just as sentimental and true, paid homage to woman just as purely, as if love could have existed — and there had been one who could deserve his homage. This sad picture even the religion of Mohammed could little change. He too admits only four women from the members of his own family into the men’s paradise; the rest have their own separate paradise, where their reward is half as great as that of slaves. The most of them descend into hell. The men, on the contrary, will each have the strength of a hundred men, and the houris who serve their pleasure are Allah’s separate, ever-youthful creatures. Yet here and there a more correct conception of woman’s situation nonetheless flashes up in the Koran. It restricts unlimited polygamy to four, which indeed the permitted concubinage undoes again. In one place it speaks thus: “Strive as you may, you cannot love your wives equally; strive at least to give none a particular preference.” And in the seventh chapter it commands men to love women, and to have regard for their weaknesses. After all this we cannot wonder that the whole East, from Semiramis and Rhodopis down to the sultanas-mother, immortalized not a single woman for womanly virtues. All those who survived either rebelled against their sex and for a time played, well or ill, a man’s part — creatures of doubtful worth — or were wretches plying the intrigues of the seraglio. From the West a more smiling picture opens before us. The poison of polygamy does not wither at the root the whole nobler existence of woman. Every advantage that the man ascribes to himself rests in the consciousness of his strength, who, as the lord of nature, wishes to stand above his wife as well. In Rome marriage was ceremonious from the beginning, and represented the violent abduction, as if it would say: the weaker owes obedience. And indeed, the husband held a guardian’s power over his wife; but the very first Romans bound themselves not to put their abducted Sabine women either to the mill or to other servile labor. If a man took a slave-woman to wife, she at once became free; and with a tender allusion, during the marriage ceremonies, the bridegroom drew the ring — that emblem of slavery — onto the fourth finger of his bride, from which, according to an old Egyptian legend, a little vein leads straight to the heart. The use of the Christian ceremonies was permitted only under Julian. But woman always moved with full freedom in society, and she directed the first upbringing of their children. True, the institution of concubinage existed throughout the Roman Empire — and in its eastern part only Leo the Wise, in the western only the eleventh century, abolished it: but the concubine held a position as lawful as the wife, only with somewhat more restricted rights, and so it was brought about rather by faulty social relations than by contempt for woman. In its later periods the woman’s dowry secured for woman in ancient Rome too an ever more independent standing toward her husband, as Cato the Censor and the comic playwrights did not fail to scourge with mockery. At last Justinian made woman the equal in rights of man. In consequence of these more favorable relations there appears already in Roman history a whole series of model distinguished mothers, faithful wives, virtuous daughters, down to the age of the corruption of public morals, on which we shall later cast a glance. The introduction of the modern reverence for woman, in place of the old perverse conception, is commonly ascribed to the Germanic races, but with scarcely sufficient right. They too bought their wives from their parents, just as their other contemporaries did, under the various titles of morgengabium, mundium, faderfium. They too exercised a guardian’s power over them. Infidelity they regarded from that same standpoint, attentive only to the consequence, as all peoples did until the development of Christian morals; while the wife was not permitted to complain of her husband’s infidelity, he was free to thrust his wife away. Finally, woman too was esteemed at little, except for her motherhood. Among the Germans, for example, the killing of a woman capable of becoming a mother was fined six hundred solidi, and only two hundred for one still immature or barren. Among the Franks the fine for a mature, child-bearing woman ran to twenty-four — for one with child, twenty-eight — for a barren one, eight thousand denarii. But what kind of things, indeed, we find in their surviving laws concerning women! Truly we do not know whether to deplore rather the limited horizon of the lawgiver or that womanly virtue, so utterly devoid of all foundation, which required such protection. Here are a few examples: the free Lombard who squeezes the finger of a free woman pays six hundred denarii — if her arm, as much again. Above the elbow, fourteen hundred; for the breast, eighteen hundred. — By Bavarian law he pays twelve solidi who tears out a woman’s comb. Their countless surviving female figures fall mostly already within the age of woman-idolatry, and come forth in connection with it. To this period the women of the Nibelung legend would most belong; but I confess I am unable to find among them either any model ideal that would stand, in aesthetic interest, above the women of any half-savage people. I will not, however, enter upon a fuller analysis, wishing to treat the said poem elsewhere and more thoroughly. Of the conception held by the Magyar race of woman’s standing, if we knew nothing else, we could proudly adduce this one appellation: feleség. The husband never exercised a guardian’s power over his wife; on the contrary, the girl became her own mistress in law by the very act of her marriage; and her husband was regarded only as her natural deputy. Right up to the age of the Anjous, when feudalism came into our country too, the son and the daughter shared the inheritance equally. And that worthy standing which our laws secure to the widow — conferring upon her even the exercise of her husband’s political right — bears witness enough to the chivalrous nation’s conception, in many things outstripping its contemporaries, of woman’s nobler standing — clean and clear. The Magyar history can then exhibit a row of distinguished women such as any nation might be proud of. Not with borrowed manly qualities, but with true womanly virtues do they shine, as apostles of faith, patrons of learning, loving mothers, faithful wives. And if one or another, like Mária Szécsi, attempts even to break out of her sex’s sphere, she reconciles us with herself as soon as she bows of her own accord to the rose-switch of love. Truly I do not know where a woman would have been raised to so colossal a height by the virtues purely of her sex as was Ilona Zrínyi. If the men of my nation were not strong enough to maintain the honor of the Magyar name, this one woman would be enough that it should survive for millennia. I will not multiply the pictures drawn from different climates and centuries; that would only lead to repetitions. Humanity is so unchangeably one — human nature remains, in its chief features, so similar through all centuries and all civic stations — that we can study through the whole past all the peoples of every age with a living eye in the peoples of today who stand at a similar degree of culture and live under roughly similar influences. Homer’s heroes and women, with their natural, simple world-view, will come alive before us in the sober, healthy middle class of the Magyar race. There Odysseus and his Penelope will stand before us, perhaps in some well-to-do tenant-farmer of the plain. Paris, in a younger brother who has seen something of the world, and who, seeing through the world’s vanity, has drawn himself under the protecting wing of the elder brother who stayed to farm. And we shall find Helen too, who has seen better days but now resigns herself to her lot, and after the day’s toils lies down with a quiet conscience at her husband’s side; yet does not mind if her Menelaus reclaims her by force. And beside her will be Andromache, the domestic, dear woman who has not yet lost the tower of her village from her eye; and there will be everything else, only the walls of Troy are wanting. Perhaps a peasant goodwife will make the book of Ruth intelligible to them; an honest farmer, some patriarch. We shall find the customs of the Germanic people among some Tatar people — for China and the East stand almost motionless anyway. But the testimony of all these pictures is, after all, only this: that all these ages and peoples grasped only one or another moment of woman’s magnificent vocation, and, developing and magnifying it, called forth perverse and painful situations. They shattered the mirror, that its single snatched-up fragments might throw back a distorted shape. They wrecked the statue, that its scattered limbs might rouse disgust in place of the admiration due to the whole. And so it went on, until Christianity, grasping woman’s vocation in its full plenitude, raised it to the place of honor that belongs to it. Let no one believe, however, that the purified conceptions of Christianity concerning woman’s situation stepped forth ready and armed, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. Just as little as did all its other great principles that pervade society, which developed to their fullness only slowly, and some of which, even after so many centuries, are still in travail to this day — to mention but one — the abolition of slavery. Christianity in general did not fling into the world one compact, sealed-off whole, standing wholly anew from its alpha to its omega; it would hardly have had so prodigious a vital force, which later filled the world. No. Christianity gathered into a camp the warriors of humankind who for centuries had been bleeding here and there, isolated and with little success, and gave them a camp-watchword, that they might know one another. It observed the cry of woe that brute force had drowned out, and gave the idea a consecrated banner, that it might carry on its fight. Of the reverence for woman too we find an example here and there already in the remotest ages, among the least civilized peoples. Thus among the savage peoples of America, where polygamy never prevailed, and though they bought their wives like the Germans, or the poorer served for them like the Jewish patriarchs, woman always held an honorable, free standing. The following is especially characteristic. At the discovery of America the natives were waging wars of extermination against one another, but from old time there stood a compact among them that they regarded the Delaware nation as a woman, that it was not permitted to mix in the quarrels, and that every party was bound to bear itself toward it with the greatest reverence and forbearance. Though we — so they said — destroy one another, let the Delawares remain, that they may maintain our race. But such examples occur only sporadically, and the appreciation of woman’s place — which always kept step with the people’s culture — was truly raised to real validity by Christianity alone. This made woman the equal in rank of man; in the judging of infidelity and other relations this set a moral foundation in place of the utilitarian one; and by uniting the two fairest flowers of womanhood — virginity and motherhood — it created in Mary so divine an ideal of woman, and raised it as a model into the heavens, as even the proud man might envy her. But it is well thus: let woman be equal to man in right, let her stand above him in honor. Who indeed would wish that violent barriers should hold her in her natural sphere? That would give birth to the feeling of slavery — but let that nameless something hold her back which, conceived in the very feeling of her right, ceaselessly whispers in her ear: it would not become you to enjoy your rights to the utmost; this surrender of the extremes is only a dear return for that homage with which the man has raised you above himself. The men of the most democratic states least of all exercise their freedom to the utmost toward others. Decorum and piety hold them back — woman’s two pre-eminent feelings. The most honored people most modestly strive to turn the incense away from themselves — and modesty, again, is a peculiarly womanly virtue. Reverence, moreover, resembles in much that credit of which a financier said to a friend who reproached him for not having exploited it better, since he possessed it in such boundless measure: “I possess it in such measure because I use it little; were I to draw upon it more strongly, it would cease.” Thus the giving of reverence and the demanding of it too have their limits. If someone holds out a hand to me, I believe he does it from the heart; if for some service he calls himself my debtor, that too I may accept; but if for a trifle he offers to give up his blood and his life, his eternity and his salvation for me, then I no longer have confidence that he would take upon himself the trouble of putting in a good word in my interest. While the Roman Caesar desired human homage, he could, by his conception, hold it earned; but when he proclaimed himself God, he was either raving or mocking. In the Christian conception too there lay such a germ of the reverence for woman as, in the receptive and romance-inclined temper of the barbarians beginning to be civilized, under the influence of the fermenting age and the feeling of youthful vigor, set out upon a gigantic development. In that age everything magnificent and extraordinary was ascribed to woman and to love. The castle hung on the steep cliff-wall was built by a woman, its bottomless well was dug by love. A woman raised the bold arches of the crumbling Roman aqueduct, and a love-struck devil tossed together the rock-masses of the highlands. The reverence for woman became idolatry, with no smaller harm to woman than the older crude conception had been. Woman was again torn from her natural sphere, and became like the quack who is at last himself compelled, for the sake of the deceived crowd, to believe in his own useless remedies, and who for his forced pathetic role secretly seeks compensation suited to his inclinations. And truly from no age has history preserved so many dreadful female figures as from precisely this period of the female ideals, among the Germanic peoples, with whose long line I will weary no one. This age too vanished, like everything against nature; that age in which men went pilgrim to the Holy Land in one woman’s colors, in which another’s lover played the hermit for thirty years gazing at her window, or for her glove went down among the lions. But the pale specter of this age, the more disgusting because its vital warmth has burned out, still walked long after, indeed in part still walks among us today. The comedy of madrigals and ritornellos, of etiquettes and courtships, which between the scenes least of all regards that woman before whom it kneels on the stage, flows on among us to this day with its sickly, perverse world-view. We hold it improper to call a single article of clothing by its own name, we recoil from the openness of Aristophanes or Shakespeare, with which their humor treats every thing alike — while we relish with delight the sugared double meaning, the veiled allusions to all those subjects we profess to find loathsome; and we do not even notice that this is precisely the foulest obscenity. In our declarations of love, in our songs, we say such colossal things that, had habituation not worn them out, our women would truly be obliged to laugh in our faces. For the price of one glance we promise away our salvation, but in ready cash it would probably stand considerably lower. We want to die for the not-sufficiently-gracious girl; but just then we are perhaps curing our cold. Nothing, we say, delights us anymore — and then we send for a ticket to the circus. In short, we have created in our works and in our own inner life such sickly world-views, such jarring social relations, as are neither fit nor proper for the man’s vocation. What an indeterminate world-weariness often steps before us out of the soul of a youth who stands but on the threshold of life; what a jarring struggle among feelings that true wisdom of life condemns; what a disgusting striving toward unattainable goals, instead of that quiet resignation which the aesthetic and the moral sense alike command! Let us not wonder, then, if nine-tenths of the unfortunate inmates of the madhouse were brought there by love and the apocalypse. In both they sought something that is not in them. How different the world-view of the old classics and the great masters concerning women and love. From Pindar to Horace, from Homer to Shakespeare. What simplicity in the grasp of relations, in the formulation of desires and wishes, and in resignation to unalterable fate. How different too is the conception of the common man of today. And therefore let us not believe that perhaps he does not even feel. He too has his heart’s grief, if he must part from his beloved; his heart too breaks just the same, but with less flaunting. And if he weathers the deadly trouble, he resigns himself to his lot, faithfully fulfills his new duties, and is silent. Whoever, then, wishes to sing a true human feeling, or to paint a true female figure, and from our social relations cannot separate the healthy from the sick, the genuine from the affected, let him turn to these pure sources. Let him read the folk song and the classics, let him look around among the living women of the people, and everywhere he will find the same — for he will find true human feelings welling up. The women of the Bible, of Homer, or of Sophocles feel exactly as those whom Shakespeare created; and just as the peasant girl or the high-born lady feels who moves before us; and if this latter professes otherwise, that is either affectation, or a sickly excrescence of our relations, which nature does not know. Only thus can we come to know woman’s true sphere and the specific female characters. And in our works of art we shall no longer fall into that very common error of being able to rechristen every woman of our work a man, every man a woman, without any conspicuous defect. An Esther, a Delilah, a Tamar — how specific the female characters, in good and bad alike. Can we imagine a man with the train of thought of Antigone, Clytemnestra, Deianira? How wholly otherwise Juliet loves than Romeo. How wholly different a murderer Lady Macbeth is than her husband. Lady Percy, Cleopatra, Portia — how various, and yet what a perfect portrayal of the one woman. Today, indeed, we have come so far as to regard Ruth or Lady Percy as a very ordinary woman — we do not find Juliet sufficiently in love — Antigone or Desdemona sufficiently long-suffering. There is not in all these that feverish agitation which burns on the cheeks of the Lady of the Camellias, that sickly nervousness which rouses interest in the writhings of the newer novel-heroine drawn onto the rack of our social relations. But there stands the ever-young nature; and if it no longer interests anyone, truly the fault does not lie in these models. I have set up the kaleidoscope of woman’s vocation and of woman’s character; many a motley, glittering, partly fantastic shape moves within it, presses forward in an inexhaustible series, and almost dazzles, confounds us. But the examining eye will recognize the few colored basic shapes out of which the whole dazzlement is modified. Such is woman with all her virtues and faults; such she must be. Let us not wish to improve upon her; a single quality taken away would spoil the plenitude of the whole. He would be a fool who said: it is good in fire that it warms, only let it not burn; it is dear in wine that it gladdens, only let it not intoxicate. Let us accept woman too, then, as God created her for us; only thus can her love also be such as Petőfi sang it: A single dewdrop of it is sweeter
Than a whole sea turned to honey;
But a single dewdrop of it is deadlier
Than a whole sea turned to poison. Let us not glorify her beyond her desert, nor look down on her; the self-respect of our manly dignity forbids both alike. If we overvalue her, we humble ourselves; for he alone deserves woman who feels that he is a man. The poet who sang: Honor the women! they braid and weave
Heavenly roses into earthly life. said also: I am a man! that is more. 4cm0.4pt To God’s fair likeness
Can I show the stamp. If, on the other hand, we look down on her, again we belittle ourselves; for so long as we do not renounce our manliness, and do not wish to become half-men, we are obliged to confess that woman will always remain the most pre-eminent and most legitimate object of our aesthetic and poetic world. Those relations which she weaves into our destiny gild the desert of our life, fill the void of our yearning soul; as the old Magyar poet already expressed it: A little love, a little wine:
Ambition — and at last dust. As the modern Heine sings it: And were there not that little bit of love,
There would be nowhere any hold. All this the singers of every age and clime proclaim in a thousand shapes. And truly, if we regarded the fairy of all these enchantments as so worthless a creature, so worthy of our contempt, we should give the greatest token of our own wretchedness. But if anyone, to avoid this alternative, professes himself a sufferer of blaséness, that fashionable malady, in which neither woman nor anything else inspires anymore — in which, with wise Solomon, we look on all things as the vanity of vanities, and in place of the serenity of joy a sneer sits on our lips over those innocents who still find something beautiful — to such as these I have no word; reflection helps not their trouble, for it lies in a deep moral corruption, engendered by that animal greed with which they fell upon pleasure. My pity, too, is not for them, but for the age in which they were born, should I see their number in considerable increase; for blaséness, joined with cynicism, like a poisonous boil on a corrupted organism, thrives only in such a time as has something rotting in the deepest part of its social relations. There it was in the age of Augustus, and under the emperors, when Horace’s satires arose, Juvenal cracked his whip, and Martial scattered his witticisms. Cicero’s relation with his daughter found believers. Cato sold his wife. The notables of Rome frequented Augustus’s banquets. Even the blood flowing in the circuses no longer stirred sufficiently. To Julia, Augustus’s daughter, a British woman who reproached her that she had to do with several men could answer: “You do it forbidden and in secret, what I do openly and freely.” And Metellus Numidicus the Censor spoke thus in the Senate: “If the human race could survive without women, I would gladly be rid of this great trouble — but as it is, it is everyone’s duty to sacrifice his own peace to the welfare of the state.” Single such unfortunates have appeared at all times. Wise Solomon too, after he had grown weary of his three thousand wives, and had written the Song of Songs and the preacher’s book of wisdom, composed under the influence of such a malady his last work, from which I quoted above. But the multitude has a good stomach; it consumes such single foci of disease, and I sound after them the words of a great man, Martin Luther’s: Who loves not woman, wine, and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.