A Feminist of a Hundred Years Ago

Margery Currey

Rahel Varnhagen: A Portrait, by Ellen Key. Translated from the Swedish by Arthur G. Chater; with an introduction by Havelock Ellis. (G. P. Putman’s Sons, New York.)

For certain distinctive women Rahel Varnhagen lived; for the same women Ellen Key has written this appreciation of Rahel. By the woman to whom fine freedom of living and fearlessness and directness of thought are the only possible terms on which she may deal with the social situation in which she finds herself this book will be read and re-read, and pencil-marked along the margins of its pages.

The rare woman, here and there, who worships simple, direct thinking (which, after all, takes the most courage) will know how to value Rahel. Always she thought truthfully. The woman who has been filled with joyful new amazement on finding that her only reliance is on herself—that she may not depend upon this person or that convention to preserve her happiness—will know how to value her. Just so far as any woman of today has become interested in her own thoughts and work, is the originator of ideas, and knows the joy of making or doing something that more than all else in the world she wants to make or do, so far she is nearer to becoming of the size of this great woman.

Such a woman will share with Rahel Varnhagen the certainty that higher morality is reached only through higher liberty; such a woman must demand, as did Rahel, periods of that recuperative and strengthening solitude, both of thought and mode of living, which only the self-reliant and fearless can endure. She knows that she herself, not convention, must furnish the answer to questions of right and wrong by earnest, free inquiry and by testing every experience. The acceptance of no convention was inevitable to Rahel, as she thought of it. She put it to the best of scrutiny. What value was there in it? It was not violating conventions which she set out to do, but meeting them with a quiet, sincere inquiry of the reason and truth they contained.

Rahel Varnhagen lived in Berlin a hundred years ago and was probably the most beloved and much-visited woman of those whose salons attracted the notable men of the day—Fichte, Hegel, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Fouqué, the Humboldts, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, and other giants of the time. Rahel was a woman—the lamentable rarity of them!—whose influence was not through her literary work (her letters to friends are all that we have of her writing), not through brilliancy of speech alone, nor through her munificent patronage of the artists and literary men of her day (she was not rich, and we read of the garret in which she entertained her friends), but through the richness of her personality, the glowing warmth of her sympathy, her understanding, and the wisdom of her heart.

And the value of Rahel to us lies in the calm directness, the “innocence,” as she herself calls it, of her thinking. To her went the acclaimed wise men of the day for the comfort of her fearlessness and simplicity of thought upon their questions. She was said to be brilliant. She was not brilliant in the sense of being learned, or of being capable of mere intellectual jugglery and fantastic adroitness of thinking; she was brilliant in the crystal clearness and the sure rapidity of her thinking. The unexpectedness and strangeness of the simple truth she spoke bewildered people. For this reason she could say, “I am as much alone of my kind as the greatest manifestation here on earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me.”

This passion for truth in her own thinking was the origin of her social value. Its stimulus to others was immediate, and her recognition through it of the important things in life made her detect at once those people and things that were original and valuable in themselves.

“Rahel’s most comprehensive significance,” writes Ellen Key, “lay in augmenting the productiveness, humanity and culture of her time by herself everywhere seeking and teaching others to seek the truth; by everywhere encouraging them to manifest their own culture; by imparting to others her profound way of looking at religion, men and women, literature and art; by judging everything according to its intrinsic value, not according to its deficiencies; by everywhere understanding, because she loved, and giving life, because she believed in liberty.”

Think always, ceaselessly!—this was Rahel’s cry. This, she said, is the only duty, the only happiness. To a young friend she wrote, begging that he keep ploughing through things afresh, telling him that he “must always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought—one that might have stood for life—if honesty demands it.” And so, having thought out things in the most utter freedom, unhampered by old preconceptions, and finally unafraid of the starkness of the truths which she faced, she let nothing prescribed be her unchallenged guide or stand as a substitute for her own vigor and hardness of thinking. This is why she said that she was revived by downright brutality, after being wearied by insincerity.

A virtue, so called, had to give a very good accounting of itself to Rahel. She demanded that it answer a certain test before it could be called a piece of goodness. For instance, in many cases she recognized in “performance of duty” mere acquiescence—a laziness of mind which does not bestir itself to ask what right this duty has to impose itself. Patience to her was often lack of courage to seize upon a situation and change it to suit the imperative demand to express oneself. “The more I see and meditate upon the strivings of this world,” wrote Rahel, “the more insane it appears to me day by day not to live according to one’s inmost heart. To do so has such a bad name, because simulacra of it are in circulation.” Of these “simulacra” we are familiar in every age—the amazing antics of certain self-styled “radicals,” the unaccountable manifestations of those who, while professing liberality of view, seem to have no standards of values in their extravagances of living. Rahel could understand every nature except the insincere and unnatural.

While we mourn or exult over the eager efforts of women in our day to evolve completely human personalities, it is interesting to read Rahel’s summing-up of the feminist movement: “Has it been proved by her organization that a woman cannot think and express her ideas? If such were the case, it would nevertheless be her duty to renew the attempt continually.” “And how,” exclaims Ellen Key, “would Rahel have abhorred the tyrannical treatment of each other’s opinions, the cramping narrow-mindedness, the envious jostling, the petty importance of nobodies, which the woman’s cause now exhibits everywhere, since, from being a movement for liberty in great women’s souls, like Rahel’s own, it has become a movement of leagues and unions, in which the small souls take the lead.”

Since it is reality and not appearance that alone could stand before Rahel’s devastating scrutiny of human things, and since to her the highest personal morality consisted in being true, coercive marriage seemed to her the great social lie. How could one of her simple clarity of thinking be anything but outraged by the vulgarities of an average marriage? “Is not an intimacy without charm or transport more indecent than ecstasy of what kind so ever?” she demands. “Is not a state of things in which truth, amenity, and innocence are impossible, to be rejected for these reasons alone?” Of the evils in Europe she cries, “Slavery, war, marriage—and they go on wondering and patching and mending!” Rahel believed that in the existing institution of marriage it was almost impossible to find a union in which full, clear truth and mutual love prevailed.

Of Rahel’s nature, warm, richly exuberant with a healthy sensuousness and desire for sunlight, Jean Paul’s letter to her gives us the essence. “Wingéd one—in every sense—” he wrote, “you treat life poetically and consequently life treats you in the same way. You bring the lofty freedom of poetry into the sphere of reality, and expect to find again the same beauties here as there.”

Biographical facts are negligible here. Even comment on the interpretive insight of Ellen Key seems not to be essential, though without it this book could not be. It is the personality of Rahel Varnhagen that matters, and the influence of that personality on the men of her day.

Rahel is distinctive as a challenger of the worn-out social and ethical baggage that somehow, in all its shabbiness, has been reverently, with ritual and with authority, given into our keeping by those who were as oppressed by it as we in turn are expected to be. With the simplicity of her questioning the honesty of these conventions, Rahel has made worship of some of them less inevitable.