Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

“ I CAME into the world in the year 1830. My mother, who died a few days after my birth, was the only daughter of Baron Vockel, a Saxon, and I have always looked upon it as a bit of good fortune that some Saxon blood runs in my veins. My father, a quick-tempered, mobile man, having been wounded in the campaign against Napoleon, was obliged to quit the service of the army, and married again ; so that I received, in addition to the sister I already had, two sisters and three brothers more. We composed a company of seven sworn allies, among which there were three inordinately ambitious souls, two of my brothers and myself. They thought of reforming the world ; I, of reforming the theatre. To this day I can recall the hour when my ambition became a consecrated resolve. The spot was the fir heath described in Lotti the Watchmaker. My age was thirteen years. Since then over thirty years have gone by, and I have striven through most of them to fulfill the dream of my childhood. My industry has been sufficient; it is in talents that I am wanting.

“ The least unsuccessful of my attempts at dramatic composition are, perhaps : Mary Stuart in Scotland, a tragedy in five acts, published in 1860 ; Marie Roland, a tragedy in five acts, of the date 1867 ; Violets, a comedy in one act, written in 1870 ; and Dr. Ritter, a dramatic poem in one act, printed in 1872. The censure which my Woodmaid met with at the hands of the critics, upon its appearance on the boards of the Stadt Theatre of Vienna in 1873, cured me forever of my wish to work for the stage. I expressed a little of what I suffered at the time in the tale Born Too Late, which was published in 1875, with a few other short stories, and which won success. The year after, my novel Bozena was published by Cotta, and in 1880 a volume of Aphorisms; while in 1881 New Stories came out in print under the ægis of F. Ebhard, in Berlin. A volume of Tales of Castle and Cottage followed in 1883, the publishers being Paetel Brothers, of Berlin.

“ In conclusion, I have to relate that in my eighteenth year I became the wife of my cousin Moritz, Baron Ebner, who was then a captain, and is now a pensioned lieutenant-marshal of the Austrian army. We live during the winter in Vienna; in the summer we retire to our old nest Zdislavic, in the country.”

Such are the biographical details that the author confided in a letter to Herr Paul Heyse, in 1884, to he used at his discretion in one of his prefaces for the Neuer Deutscher Novellen Schatz ; while a letter to me, written four years later, mentions Mrs. Wister, of Philadelphia, as the translator of her Aphorisms. This volume, so far as I know, is the only one of her works that has been made into English, and made well. Meanwhile, Two Countesses, New Tales of Castle and Cottage, The Ward of the Parish, and two volumes of short stories have appeared ; her latest publications are the hooks¹ that fall within the present review.

This begins as it does with a muster of all her productions because Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach is a new comet, comparatively, in the sky of literary criticism, a knowledge of whose origin and trail, so to speak, can hardly be taken for granted as yet on the part of the reviewer. Moreover, the characteristics that first attract attention in the fiction of the author may be best explained by a reference to her dramatic writings. These came short of success themselves, but aided in procuring it for the tales that followed, by virtue of the discipline which their composition had imposed ; short-story writing being analogous to the art of the playwright in several fundamental traits. Economy in space is required by the circumscribed nature of one species of composition as well as by that of the other; then, too, there is in both the like limitation set (by the necessity of being brief) to the number of personages introduced; and both, finally, are under the same restriction as to the quality of these personages. The characters in short stories, like those in dramas, must be fully developed natures, for the reason that adolescent, undeveloped natures demand a space for the delineation of the successive stages of their growth, stretching far beyond that which can safely be given up to mere description in short works. The substructure of the plot, in both kinds of writing, must be made, furthermore, of similar plain material, and the development of the plot, if it is to be successful, must be comparatively direct and simple. To practice the composition of dramas holds one, in a word, to requirements which agree precisely with the features of Marie von Ebner’s works. Significantly enough, therefore, all are on the same level technically. There is no period of imperfect methods, or of inferior, tentative work, in her past as a writer of tales.

Her short stories are always short. Her personages are few. Her heroes and heroines are adult, sharply individualized men and women. Her plots are carried forward to the end with utmost simplicity of means, and with a suave firmness of touch that is classical, and which has never yet been so fully acquired save where the writer’s pen has been trained in the severe drill of metrical composition and dramatic condensation, then exercised upon broader and freer tasks. In truth, if Marie von Ebner had a sufficient number of peers, German short stories would soon rise above their present reputation of uncouthness, and be placed by common accord in the fore ranks of polished fiction.

The long paragraphs that are still favored by such of her contemporaries as Paul Heyse, Gustav Freytag, and Spielhagen become condensed in her pages. Sentences take the place of lengthy strings of adjectives, and, in like manner, the long-winded predicates of old-style writers are broken up into separate, independent descriptions. The grammatically correct, involved phraseology that stands for conversation in the typical romances of the Fatherland changes, in her transcriptions from life, into the shortbreath utterances of actual talk. When a moral is inculcated, it is wrought into the structure of the tale, and, like the marrow of the human skeleton, is diffused throughout the whole frame; nowhere appearing, excrescence-like, upon the surface of the narrative in the form of didactical remarks.

The sole resemblance to a fault of this kind, in the books under review, occurs on pages 21 and 22 of Margarete. Here, for once, the author’s idea of the altruistic duty of maintaining silence in cases where outspokenness can wound, but not benefit, — an idea that is very successfully transfused throughout Unsühnbar, — becomes suddenly over-urgent, and the unartistic temptation to moralize is given way to; so that we have a sermon on the use of silence under the transparent disguise of a description of Countess Priska Vohburg’s forbearance with Robert.

A defect or two of this sort, however, can hardly impair the impression of Marie von Ebner’s works being eminently free from turgidness of every kind, of style as well as of sentiment. Their very distinction consists in the lack of turgidity. Each book, each tale, each chapter, each sentence, is like a trained race horse, distinguished by an absence of bulk, and an affluence of the keenest, finest vitality.

As for Unsühnbar,² the first novel in the list under review, it is, I think, taking it all in all, a good specimen of her longer stories. If it shows fewer plastic, large touches than Bozena, or The Ward of the Parish, or Margarete, it affords, on the other hand, a problem a good deal more complex and subtle than the problems treated in these. Margarete, as a heroine, stands out in her physical splendor in strongest contrast to the refined, dull aristocrats that move and have their being in the background of her life ; whereas Countess Maria, the heroine of Unsühnbar, is one of her own kind, and moves amongst her fashionable associates as undistinguishable at first as is one Byzantine figure from the others on their golden background. For the representation of the personage Margarete, single, passionate strokes were necessary, an artist’s heart and hand ; for the portrayal of Countess Maria, on the other hand, great intellectual penetration was required. Margarete is remarkable for its contrasts, while Unsühnbar excels in nuances.

Both novels open with scenes in the streets of Vienna. In Unsühnbar it is a night in winter, and the Opera House is emptying its audience into the square. Snow has fallen, and the gang of men who are shoveling it off the pavement step aside as the brougham of the Wolfsbergs approaches. One man — a fellow better featured, but worse clad than the others — raises his snow - shovel to his shoulder in mock salute to the vehicle, as it passes, and grins familiarly and maliciously at old Countess ’Dolph Wolfsberg within. To the mind of ’Dolph’s niece the man is a Socialist. She is terrified and shocked, yet she concedes to herself, high spiritedly, that his embittered feeling is quite warranted.

“ Poh! ” is ’Dolph’s comment. “ He has brandy in his belly. He ’s warmer than I am.” And when Maria comes back to the subject again, the gruff old countess reprimands her sharply, saying it is faulty breeding to think of a disagreeable thing twice. In time Maria does succeed in forgetting the scene; but it is not before she is at home, seated with her father in her boudoir, over a cup of tea, and listening as usual with devotion to his nonchalant, witty chat. A young acquaintance has come to him that day, asking if he might pay visits at the house. Can she guess who it was ?

“ Felix Tessin ! ” Maria replies, with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

“ Tessin has his affections engaged elsewhere,” is the diplomat’s cool response. “ It is Count Hermann Dornach who wishes to come.”

Maria makes answer coldly, “ What an honor ! ”

Yet as Hermann Dornach is really the excellent man that society takes him to be, she gives way to his persistence, and to the wishes of her family and of the dowager Countess Dornach, and marries him ; but not, however, before she tells him that her feeling is an idea that she may come to love him for his goodness, rather than any present sentiment of love. As for the old dowager, it is a matter of indifference to her whom her son marries, — provided, naturally, that his wife be high born, —and she dampens Maria’s gratitude by observing that her presents are to the future Countess Dornach ; her person has little to do with them. She is made to understand that Hermann is the last Dornach of the old, rich line of Dornachs. If he should die, therefore, without marrying, Dornach would revert to Squire William Dornach, of the younger line, — a man who has committed the imprudence of bringing seven or eight children into the world. ’Dolph laughs cynically enough when he writes congratulating Hermann on his engagement. Maria unconsciously is much influenced by the laugh, so much so that she feels actually surprised when she sees nothing but pellucid depths of good will in the big squire’s blue eyes, when she meets him, later, in Dornach.

For that matter, however, everything in Dornach strikes her as being good. The villagers, she thinks, must have been treated with systematic kindness by generation after generation of benevolent masters like Hermann, for they are all well to do in means and well disposed in mind; whereas the pauper tenants of Wolfsberg return the relentless severity of her father with hatred or shameless hypocrisy. What a difference, too, between the tidy homes of Dornach and the damp huts that lie at the foot of Castle Wolfsberg! Her riding-horse and its groom have come one morning from Wolfsberg, so she is reminded more than ever of her old home, and is thinking of it, when, suddenly, the man of the street scene stops her way. His dress is fashionable this time, but his face is the same, and wears the same expression of insolence as on the night of the opera. Maria asks him, imperiously, whether he does not know that this portion of Dornach Park is forbidden to intruders, when the fellow’s face falls into a threatening scowl. She would do better, he says, to use him respectfully. He is no tramp. He had dressed like one, and resorted to the dodge of shoveling snow, to get some money from their aunt ’Dolph or their distinguished father. If he had succeeded, he would have been spared the exertion of coming to her in Dornach. She could see for herself his health was hardly up to traveling.

Maria, indeed, does see : his whole aspect is that of a man in the last stage of consumption. But the story against her father, the implication, — it is all too outrageous. She tells him to be gone, and she does so with a ring in her voice that sets her hounds growling.

She does not believe a word of the man’s account, but in the course of time she is forced by circumstances to concede the truth of it. Hermann harbors him in a house on the estate, sends him the Dornach family physician, and urges Maria, when Wolfi grows better in health, to comply with his request, and play for him while he lies on a lounge in a pavilion near by. Hermann, in fact, treats him almost fraternally, whereas she cannot see him without experiencing mortification and sickness and revolt of soul. Her feelings recoil from her father without swinging nearer to the victim of his vices. She dreads seeing her parent face to face again ; so much, indeed, that Count Hermann thinks it wise at last to write to Wolfsberg and make an easy way for him to excuse himself from visiting Dornach. The court minister, however, comes to the baptism of the new-born heir, precisely as he had intended. His art of pleasing is consummate, and he practices it to win back Maria’s admiration; she possesses the finest discrimination for elegance of manner and proofs of good taste. And really, from being gratified with her father’s demeanor, Maria conies to forgiving him. But she does not forgive Princess Alma, a former flame of his. When they arrive in town, later, for the winter gayeties, she cuts the princess.

As for Prince Felix, a nephew of Princess Alma, on whom Maria had ineffectively expended her maiden love, he holds aloof of his own accord. Maria remarks this fact, and remarks it at first with grim satisfaction. When, however, Felix continues to ignore her throughout the entire season, she is filled with an increasing unrest. One evening, Felix tells her, at an unexpected moment, that he is going away on a foreign mission ; he goes because of her, because she spurned him by giving him no answer to his suit, because he is a man made desperate by a hopeless love. The scene is her own salon. But to Maria the world is changed. Her emotion threatens to overcome her. Education, however, acts at this crisis like a mechanic force in reserve, and enables her to find words to repulse the prince with due conventional severity. This lifting of the veil from his heart, and of the weight of humility from hers ; this hearing of the tardy news that her maiden love was reciprocated, that but for her father, who had suppressed it, she would have received an offer from the man who had won her heart, — all this leaves her like a bark unanchored, lightened, and adrift upon a tumultuous sea. She prays Hermann, in consequence, to take her with him into the country; and she feels safe from herself only when he complies by leaving her at Dornach, while he pursues his way to his mother in Dornachthal. Yet it is here in Dornach that her fate overtakes her ; for Prince Felix, with the connivance of Wolfi, who was his schoolmate once, gains access to Maria’s presence. Maria, confused and overwhelmed, struggles with her will to leave him this time again, as she had left him in Palace Dornach. But nature, like an enemy within her own breast, yields to him. Two intoxicated souls forget honor, duty, the earth.

Wolfi’s dragging his enfeebled limbs into the chamber brings Maria to herself. He has accompanied Felix to the village stagecoach, and sinks into a seat exhausted. Will she call him Brother now ? he asks, and he insists upon the question with a malicious revengefulness even while bleeding to death from the lungs. Nor does he cease demanding until Maria drops her proud head and repeats meekly the word Brother. That night he expires, and his final agony is so harrowing that the doctor assures Count Hermann, when he returns a few weeks later, it is the sole cause of the countess’s strange state. She is nervous from having seen Mr. Wolfi die ; she will recover soon,—he will give his word for it. And indeed the good man is perfectly sure his diagnosis is right, so that Hermann, who has implicit faith in him, looks infinitely relieved, and Maria, who contemplates both men, feels her resolution to confess the real truth melt quite away. There is a spot below the tower on the hill where the river banks form a deep ravine, and the river becomes a foaming torrent that sends up columns of tormented water against opposing boulders, then screws itself downward into a sucking maelstrom. She thinks of this as the proper place for atonement, and goes to it from day to day without finding courage to throw herself in, until the time arrives when she becomes aware that if she kills herself two lives will be destroyed. How will God receive a murderess ? she then asks distractedly. And the naming of the new crime drives her back to her first resolve. She will confess to Hermann. She will say to her husband, "You know now what I am. Treat me as I deserve.”

“ But while she spoke to him mentally in this fashion, her common sense was all the while exclaiming, ‘ What hypocritical stuff! You know he will not cast you off. He will be wounded to the quick ; but he will treat you as he has always done, and require the world to. You will lose absolutely nothing by confession. On the contrary, you will gain, — gain peace of mind. It is only he who will lose by it.’ ”

This synopsis must be somewhat inadequate through the omission of all mention of Maria’s nurse. The normal, every-day, healthy air that breathes from the original pages is compounded of the humor of this querulous, amorous personage in the country, and, as the tale proceeds, of that of personages from the court circle in town. For, after the birth of the gentle child Erich, Countess Maria is impelled to distract herself incessantly in the fashionable society of Vienna, — a society which, as all readers of Motley know, is one of the most polished, but at the same time one of the most delightfully ignorant of any on the continent of Europe. The author’s own social position as a countess by birth, and consort, by marriage, of an excellency of the empire, makes her knowledge of this exclusive set very intimate, while her insight and talent render her passing delineation of its refreshing types quite inimitable.

It is one of Maria’s idle friends from town that brings about the catastrophe, — the death of Hermann and their child in the maelstrom, — which composes at once the dramatic climax and the tour de force of the book. The reader is put into an impassiveness similar to that which the actors of the story were in, that he may be as suddenly terrified as were Dornach’s guests. Flaubert was wont to bring about the like sort of shock of surprise by mentioning the deaths of personages of his novels in an offhand fashion, or by having some character speak in such a way. This last kind of stroke, indeed, is nearly always effective. Marie Ebner herself has used it, and used it with success. But in this ambitious work she sees fit to resort to the old method of employing contrasts to obtain effect, so before a scene of disaster she paints a scene of dullest insouciance. She even ventures to be dull, introducing, in the face of Voltaire and all authoritative censure to the contrary, long pages of the genre ennuyant. For dullness, she seems to say to them, and to all critics who think it praise to declare “ there is not a dull page in the book,” dullness may have great value as a literary foil, in pieces otherwise du genre amusant throughout. The reader is as unprepared for a sedative in such works as is an habitual water-drinker for a dose of heavy grog. Hence he succumbs unconsciously to its influence by sinking into passivity, when he is in precisely the right mental condition to be greatly shocked by an untoward accident.

The closing scene of Unsühnbar is that of Maria’s death. It wears a somewhat melodramatic air of exaggerated pathos. Perhaps this is because of the association which it suggests with similar scenes upon the stage. It could hardly be expected, of course, with the novelist’s bent towards depicting and dramatizing. that she would relate the event in detail. Yet if it were narrated, the pages might gain in sincerity, things being as they are. The times of Dumas and Sarah Bernhardt are not easy times for the successful treatment of death scenes of frail women in epic. The competition of playwrights is not only very great in this particular, but the boards have all the prestige that goes with past successes. Nevertheless, it is to be remarked of this scene, otherwise unsatisfactory, that the touch is given therein which lifts the dolorous story out of the depressing swamp of pessimistic literature and above the production of the modern stage. Maria, in dying, lays the education of Erich in the hands of William Dornach ; and in so doing she relieves the minds of the readers of her story by the justifiable hope that the imbruted villagers of Wolfsberg will receive a new kind of master some day in the person of this boy. The heroines of the French drama die without offspring, and hence one great and efficient cause why, with all their naturalness, they still are quite unlike life in affecting the mind with hopelessness instead of joy. Life which knows no “finis” appears ever like the dream of Alnaschar to mankind: it goes on and on, and by going on creates a compensation somewhere for every fault. So stories are not pessimistic because their atmosphere is brutal or sad and the writing unflinching, but because they come to an end. Unsühnbar closes, but does not end.

Margarete, the central character of the story next on our list, is a most opulent figure: Juno-like in stature; endowed with artistic tastes ; superbly passionate ; a sister, in literature, of a brilliant heterogeneous group of robust and sumptuous heroines. Shakespeare, simple-minded monarchist that he was, saw her prototype, very naturally, in an Oriental queen ; the romanticists Grillparzer and Hawthorne conceived her as a rich poetess ; while the Republican Gottfried Keller, for his part, detected her unmistakably in the person of a rural pastor’s sister. In our day of socialistic propaganda, Marie Ebner has found her at last in an attic of the proletariat. Judith, Sappho, Zenobia, Cleopatra, Margarete the seamstress, — one sees, by the mere mention of the names of these heroines in their chronological order, in what way a poetical ideal becomes varied and changed through successive epochs of history. The change consists more in outward circumstances than in the inner natures of the characters ; grand passions being brought by poets, as was fire by Prometheus, from a high sphere ever and again to a lower human level. All these women of story love exuberantly, all despair, and all, save Judith, end their lives by an act of violence. What is new in Margarete is the widening of the space of history portrayed so as to include the bit of her existence that precedes her fatal love affair. We see her for a moment virtuous, her large heart filled by her boy. The central scene, then, has to do with her love affair, and the short final scene is that of her passionate death.

As for the volumes that follow, Drei Novellen, Parabeln, Märchen und Gedichte, and Glaubenslos, they are all much lighter undertakings than the two novels that have been dwelt on. The fables, in the collection of poems and fables, concern themselves with art, genius, and war. Some of the allegories are even political in tendency. Only a single poem is dedicated to a flower, and very few verses are exalted flights to the regions of cloudland, or recordings of what the stars rehearse. As a whole, the poetry of Marie von Ebner wears the stamp of intellectuality rather than of sentiment, and has divination for its source oftener than inspiration. The folk of allegory whom she employs to be the bearers of the torches of metaphor that illumine the sharp points of her morals are all chosen, very characteristically, from the statuesque deities of classic song. Never does she admit the chameleon-like kobolds and unshapely gnomes of German romantic literature into her creations.

A few short pieces are delightfully culminative in effect, as in the triplets entitled

EIN KLEINES LIED.

Nowhere among the poems is there a masterpiece, perhaps, but in recompense we find a little biography, a few confidential disclosures from Marie Ebner the woman. Such are the verses called, humorously. The Blue Stocking and St. Peter, and the earnest lines entitled That’s the Whole Case. These afford the reviewer the opportunity of pointing to the final distinction of the author, which is her uncommon personality. She is a realist in style and method of working, but by nature she, like most authors worthy the name, belongs to the idealists. A clarified wisdom and tenderness distinguish all she writes, a sincerity which has not been common in fiction since the death of George Eliot. The latter swept over broader and more varied fields of life in her mental surveys. Marie Ebner, on the other hand, gives us more wit and Attic grace in the conversations which she transcribes. Between the lines of both, however, different as they are in content and aspect, there breathes one and the same rare spirit of moral earnestness.