10. Rosa Mayreder

Ellen Key, the subtle psychologist, aptly pointed out in her book "Essays" (Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag, 1899) the deep meaning behind the catchphrase "The freedom of personality" that is so often heard today. "How many really know what it costs to strive hour after hour, day after day, year after year to realize the content of these words?" Away from the circles that seek new figureheads and hierarchies of intellectual life in Vienna, there lives an artist who fights the battle of the soul that Ellen Key points to: Rosa Mayreder. She has emerged as a writer and painter in recent years. Three years ago, her first collection of novellas "Aus meiner Jugend" (From my youth) was published, soon followed by the other, "Übergänge, Novellen" (both published by Pierson, Dresden [1896 and 1897]), and more recently "Idole", the "Geschichte einer Liebe" (Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag 1899). In the psychological sketches collected in the first two volumes, deep problems of the soul are unrolled; in the last work, the more one delves into it, the more one admires a developed connoisseurship of human nature and a mature art in the depiction of what goes on in the grounds and undergrounds of the mind. Anyone who judges Rosa Mayreder's short stories on first impression can easily come to the conclusion that they are a poem of social struggle, a rebellion against the prejudices with which education and society hold back the free development of our soul life. For a large part of these stories depict personalities who live out their lives in an unnatural way, because misguided upbringing and social perversity have turned them into completely different people than they would have been if they had developed in the air of freedom and freedom from prejudice. But anyone who immerses himself more thoroughly in these small works of art will find that the poet is not concerned with this struggle at all, but with finding artistic means to bring the processes of the human soul to light in their full truth, regardless of whether these processes are brought about by life within an inverted social order or by the natural dichotomies in human nature itself. Rosa Mayreder has a profound urge for knowledge and a strong interest in delving deeper into the essence of man. And the love of liberating the personality is at the center of her emotional life. As an artist, she is not interested in expressing her thoughts as such, nor in portraying her love of freedom. Anyone who still doubted this after the publication of her first collections of novellas must have been swayed by "Idole". All of Rosa Mayreder's ideas about human nature have been incorporated here in a poetic and imaginative way. Sharp observations and deep thoughts have flowed completely into the vivid processes. One must admire this purely artistic expression of the poet all the more because she completely dispenses with the older means of narrative art. Anecdotal stylization of external events is completely alien to her. She does not believe that art must transcend nature in order to depict a higher truth, a special "beauty". She is full of the belief that truth is to be sought within nature alone. But at the same time, it is deeply imbued with the realization that art cannot copy nature, but that its ways and means are something independent, something that must be grasped in its own way if it is to depict the truth of nature. For the painter, color and form are a world of their own. From their essence, he must create something that appears as true as nature, even though nature produces the object he is depicting by means other than color and form alone. The incessant immersion in the means of artistic expression is characteristic of Rosa Mayreder's soul life.

This characteristic of hers comes to the fore most clearly in her last work. Gisa loves Doctor Lamaris. She tells how this love arose from the unfathomable depths of her soul when she saw this man for the first time, and how she seized it with magical power. "When this man entered, indeed as soon as I saw him for the first time, he seemed so strangely familiar to me, as if I had known him for a long time. And after he had spoken to me for a few minutes, polite, meaningless words, as every young man addresses them to every young girl, I suddenly got the impression that I was having a very pleasant conversation, that the whole company, who were standing and sitting around in a rather leathery way, were animated as never before." Love fertilizes Gisa's imagination. And this forms an image of Doctor Lamaris, to whom the girl looks up as if to an ideal. And we get an idea of this image when we hear Gisa's concept of the ideal man: "A man with a woman's heart! That is the highest, that is perfection! A man who has everything that characterizes men, all strength, all will, all knowledge, and who is at the same time full of devotion, full of tenderness, full of kind intimacy, who understands everything because he experiences it in himself, who has nothing foreign, who has no unresolved residue in his heart." How different Doctor Lamaris turns out to be when Gisa gets to know him in his true essence! "The idea of a luminous inner life often returned later, but never in his presence. It did not tolerate any contact with reality. Reality stared at me with hurtful impressions that dug into my soul like pinpricks." Gisa thought she saw in Doctor Lamaris a man whose soul contained the most beautiful human inclinations and whose existence consisted of the all-round living out of an elemental personality. In reality, she was confronted by a man who only wanted to see life according to the principles that the science of the doctor provides. An abstract medical idea of the world, embodied in a human being, stands before Gisa, while she thought she had her ideal man before her. The doctor believes that a girl should be pious because that is the best way for her to adapt to life. Gisa is of the opinion: "One is a believer or an unbeliever from an inner state; but not because one should or should not. So what does that mean, a girl should be pious?" Lamaris replies: "It means that it is not beneficial for a woman's psyche to do without the help that religion provides." Medicine incarnate therefore wants "religion to be considered from the point of view of a diet for the soul, of psychological hygiene". For "cultural mankind will have to learn, if it is not to fall into complete ruin, to regard life exclusively from this point of view; it will have to evaluate all affects from this point of view ... Even love, and love first and foremost. For since it is love that usually decides the weal and woe of the future generation, it happens only too often that the union of two people made on the basis of a love affection represents something downright sacrilegious. It is a sentimental aberration to present love as the most desirable basis of marriage. The illusory character of this affectation makes the person afflicted by it quite incapable of making his choice on rational grounds, namely in the sense of racial improvement." - Like Gisa with Doctor Lamaris, he also has a deep affection for the girl. He does not follow this choice. His medical point of view makes it necessary for him to make his choice in the interests of racial improvement. He comes from a family that includes mentally deranged people among its members; he has a profession that makes use of the mind at the expense of the body. Gisa is a girl who also tends to live in the spiritual sphere. He marries a girl from the "sheltered classes".

In this "story of love", two people are seen standing opposite each other. There is no real common ground between them. Because two idols intervene between their personalities. Gisa believes she loves Doctor Lamaris. She loves an idol of his that came before her soul when she came into contact with him. The real Doctor Lamaris cannot have anything attractive for her soul. Doctor Lamaris really loves Gisa; but as an idol of the mind, he places his medical views between himself and his beloved. - This is the intellectual element of the story. Nowhere does it intrude in a pale intellectual form, but it is absorbed by the artistic view. Gisa's character and the nature of her experiences mean that the narrative of the facts is constantly interspersed with the communication of the feelings and reflections that are linked to the events in this girl's psyche. For these inner processes in a girl's soul are the actual content of the story. This soul can only reveal itself in its true form, with all its intimate nuances of thought and feeling, when it speaks. That is why the form Rosa Mayreder has chosen is the only possible one for her task. It can be called a stylized diary. And given Gisa's character, we certainly believe that this is how she puts her experiences before her soul. We can see how the art form corresponds to the poet's inner need for truth.

The more you delve into the story, the more this need for truth becomes apparent. These are things of such a subtle nature that our ideas, which strive for straightforwardness and sharp outlines, can easily destroy the intimacy of the experiences. Rosa Mayreder finds the artistic means to depict this intimacy in the contexts of things and personalities. Any sharp conceptual interpretation of the reasons why Gisa forms her idol could only show the unconscious forces at work in a coarsened form. In her characterization of Doctor Lamaris, Rosa Mayreder hints at an idea that awakens a mystical, symbolic sense of the subtle relationships that prevail here. "The only thing that was completely beautiful about him were his hands, slender, white, well-groomed doctor's hands, which possessed an extraordinary capacity for expression. - There was so much soul in their movements that one almost got the impression of a facial expression. There was something serious and loving about them; they seemed to reveal the most hidden qualities, everything that remains unacknowledged in a person for the longest time, secret benefits, secret sacrifices, tender feelings, that shy nobility of feeling that is carefully concealed under a mask of taciturn reserve." In organs that are little subject to arbitrariness, to reason, the real soul of this man is expressed, which seems to have become completely unfaithful to itself through the medical world view in the area of consciousness. Another feature of the story is fully consistent with this characteristic of the hands. The woman from a "protected social class" whom Doctor Lamaris has chosen bears a striking resemblance to Gisa: "She is like a healthy translation" of Gisa. The soul forces operating below the threshold of his consciousness have thus taken Lamaris down a path that his mind would not allow him to follow. Rosa Mayreder aptly finds the external means of representation that bring our contemplative imagination into the same waters in which our faculty of ideas moves when we contemplate the unconscious background of the conscious processes of the soul. It may be said that in this poetry the intellectual element appears to us completely dissolved in the artistic style. And the unity of this style is preserved throughout the work. We encounter a figure, the old Miss Ludmilla. One of those personalities that life has always pushed into a corner, a shy, withdrawn, old-fashioned creature. When Gisa once handed the old lady a sprig of lilac during a visit, she took it and "inhaled the scent with a long, trembling breath". She whispered: "Oh God! Oh God!" and tears flowed down her cheeks. Gisa would have loved to know the images that ran through Aunt Ludmilla's soul when a branch of lilac in bloom came before her eyes. She never got around to asking the question. "It was perhaps the most beautiful moment of her life, the only moment of happiness, of rising above the commonplace - but if she had told it with her staid remarks and philistine turns of phrase, it would have been spoiled for ever. She had told it as she wept silently over the blossoming branch." In any case, this way of telling Ludmilla's life secret is the one required by the style in which the "Idols" are written.

The two main characters in the story, Gisa and Lamaris, are juxtaposed with others whose characters significantly heighten the impressions made by the former through contrast. Lieutenant von Zedlitz forms a complete contrast to Lamaris, a man of spirit and intellect, a witless renominee who wants to endear himself to everyone and says silly flattery to all the girls. By describing the impression this character makes on Lamaris and Gisa, the poet sheds light on relationships that are relevant to the character portraits she creates. The doctor speaks about the first lieutenant with the words: "He is the type of a healthy, well-developed person! ... His physique is of a perfection that has unfortunately become rare: he must come from a very healthy family. Not a trace of hereditary strain!" And Gisa says: "These banal muscles in an eternal parade posture, these thoughtless hands -." The antithesis of Gisa is her friend Nelly. She is one of those natures who, thanks to the superficiality of her character, easily jumps over the gulf that separates the idol from reality. She also has her idol of a man: "It would have to be a man, a whole man, before whom everyone trembles and bows down, a man with a strong arm who could protect and shield me in all situations in life, a man with a powerful will who could make me his slave with a wave of his eyebrows." - This "idol" is blown away into empty air when her parents choose a man for her who lacks all these qualities but is a "good match".

Psychological problems are Rosa Mayreder's artistic domain. The novellas and sketches in her first two works should also be seen as psychological studies. In one of her first stories, "Die Sonderlinge" ("From My Youth"), this basic character of her work is immediately apparent. The human being, who is merely an imprint of the social conditions from which he has emerged and the profession into which he has grown, stands here alongside the person who stubbornly, ruthlessly wants to live only according to his nature. And the latter is again shown to us in two shades: in the selfish, tyrannical personality and in the devoted idealist.

Rosa Mayreder traces the manifold forms that the mysterious thing we call the human soul takes; and everywhere she looks for the reasons why this being is of this or that kind, and what suffering and joys life imposes on it because it has received a certain imprint. The typical contrast between intellectual and intuitive natures runs through a number of her stories like a basic motif. The cold souls, dominated by reflection, and the emotional and imaginative people, who draw their impulses from the immediacy of their nature, repeatedly become a problem for the poet. This contrast is particularly stark in the sketch "Klub der Übermenschen" (in "Übergänge"). The relationship between two people is portrayed here, one of whom is entirely sentimental, the other entirely intellectual. The stories that describe the struggle into which the individual soul is driven by the fact that it cannot find a balance within itself between reflection and emotion, reason and passion are particularly appealing. "Lilith and Adam", "His Ideal", in the "Transitions", are captivating depictions of this struggle. This artist knows how to characterize the many-branched currents into which the psyche is torn and which determine the inner fate of a human life from a deep observation. "Das Stammbuch" ("Transitions") depicts one such current in the relationship between a man and a married woman.

Whoever gets to know Rosa Mayreder as a painter will notice how she follows the same paths in this art as in her poetry. In the latter it is the psychological, in painting the coloristic problem that she pursues. She seeks to eavesdrop on the secret of the colors, through which we can express what nature speaks to us. She does not see Cornelius and Kaulbach as painters in the true sense of the word, for they merely used colors and forms to give visible expression to their abstract world of ideas. The eye alone has to judge, not the intellect, when it comes to the world of shapes and colors.

Rosa Mayreder's art was born out of an intense urge to familiarize herself with the contexts of reality, out of the need to solve the riddles of her own existence as well as those of the phenomena that penetrate our senses. And the little stories in which she expresses the highest questions of knowledge in the form of fables bear witness to the depths of this urge. One of these fables is told in this booklet. The higher the thought rises, the less the processes that express it in the outer symbol can lead an independent life. However, Rosa Mayreder must be conceded that she has succeeded in finding such symbolic events for the embodiment of great worldview issues that the ideal is completely absorbed in the image; and that this image does not work like a wooden allegory, but like a symbol in which the thought is clothed without constraint, as if by its own will for illustration. It is as if the poet had not put the thought into the picture, but had taken it out of it.

Rosa Mayreder reveals the same side of her nature in her sonnets. One senses everywhere the necessity with which a stanzaic form expresses a thought structure. A basic idea is divided into two parts, which find their harmonious union again in a comprehensive higher idea. The first two four-line stanzas belong to the first two elements of the idea, the last two three-line stanzas to the overarching idea.

Rosa Mayreder shows us on every page she has written that she has expended considerable energy to discover the organs within herself that show her the world and life in a way that satisfies her. As a result, however, a peculiar atmosphere emanates from all her achievements, which bears witness to the great style of her view of things.