Adolf. Yes; but you’re forgetting that she trained me, gave me new thoughts.
Gustav. I haven’t forgotten it. But tell me, how was it that she wasn’t able to succeed in educating the other man—in educating him into being really modern?
Adolf. He was an utter ass.
Gustav. Right you are—he was an ass, but that’s 3 fairly elastic word, and according to her description of him, in her novel, his asinine nature seemed to have consisted principally in the fact that he didn’t understand her. Excuse the question, but is your wife really as deep as all that? I haven’t found anything particularly profound in her writings.
Adolf. Nor have I. I must really own that I too find it takes me all my time to understand her. It’s as though the machinery of our brains couldn’t catch on to each other properly—as though something in my head got broken when. I try to understand her.
Gustav. Perhaps you’re an ass as well.
Adolf. No, I flatter myself I’m not that, and I nearly always think that she’s in the wrong—and, for the sake of argument, would you care to read this letter which I got from her to-day? [He takes a letter out of his pocketbook.]
Gustav. [Reads it cursorily.] Hum, I seem to - know the style so well.
Adolf. Like a man’s, almost.
Gustav. Well, at any rate, I knew a man who had a style like that. [Standing up.] I see she goes on calling you brother all the time—do you always keep up the comedy for the benefit of your two selves? Do you still keep on using the fig leaves, even though they’re a trifle withered—you don’t use any term of endearment?
Adolf. No. In my view, I couldn’t respect her quite so much if I did.
Gustav. [Hands back the letter.] I see, and she calls herself “sister” so as to inspire respect. [He turns round and passes the square table on ADOLF’S right.]
Adolf. I want to esteem her more than I do myself. I want her to be my better self.
Gustav. Oh, you be your better self; though I quite admit it’s less convenient than having somebody else to do it for you. Do you want, then, to be your wife’s inferior?
Adolf. Yes, I do. I find pleasure in always allowing myself to be beaten by her a little. For instance, I taught her swimming, and it amuses me when she boasts about being better and pluckier than I am. At the beginning I simply pretended to be less skillful and courageous than she was, in order to give her pluck, but one day, God knows how it came about, I was actually the worse swimmer and the one with less pluck. It seemed as though she’d taken all my grit away in real earnest.
Gustav. And haven’t you taught her anything else?
Adolf. Yes—but this is in confidence —I taught her spelling, because she didn’t know it. Just listen. When she took over the correspondence of the household I gave up writing letters, and —will you believe it?— simply from lack of practice I’ve lost one bit of grammar after another in the course of the year. But do you think she ever remembers that she has to thank me really for her proficiency? Not for a minute. Of course, I’m the ass now.
Gustav. Ah! really? You’re the ass now, are you?
Adolf. I’m only joking, of course.
Gustav. Obviously. But this is pure cannibalism, isn’t it? Do you know what I mean? Well, the savages devour their enemies so as to acquire their best qualities. Well, this woman has devoured your soul, your pluck, your knowledge.
Adolf. And my faith. It was I who kept her up to the mark and made her write her first book.
Gustav. [With facial expression.] Re-a-lly?
Adolf. It was I who fed her up with praise, even when I thought her work was no good. It was I who introduced her into literary sets, and tried to make her feel herself in clover; defended her against criticism by my personal intervention. I blew courage into her, kept on blowing it for so long that I got out of breath myself. I gave and gave and gave—until nothing was left for me myself. Do you know—I’m going to tell you the whole story—do you know how the thing seems to me now? One’s temperament is such an extraordinary thing, and when my artistic successes looked as though they would eclipse her—her prestige—I tried to buck her up by belittling myself and by representing that my art was one that was inferior to hers. I talked so much of the general insignificant role of my particular art, and harped on it so much, thought of so many good reasons for my contention, that one fine day I myself was soaked through and through with the worthlessness of the painter’s art; so all that was left was a house of cards for you to blow down.
Gustav. Excuse my reminding you of what you said, but at the beginning of our conversation you were asserting that she took nothing from you.
Adolf. She doesn’t—now, at any rate; now there is nothing left to take.
Gustav. So the snake has gorged herself, and now she vomits.
Adolf. Perhaps she took more from me than I knew of.
Gustav. Oh, you can reckon on that right enough—she took without your noticing it. [He goes behind the square table and comes in front of the sofa.] That’s what people call stealing.
Adolf. Then what it conies to is that she hasn’t educated me at all?
Gustav. Rather you her. Of course she knew the trick well enough of making you believe the contrary. Might I ask how she pretended to educate you?
Adolf. Oh—at first— hum!
Gustav. Well? [He leans his arms on the table.]
Adolf. Well, I
Gustav. No, it was sh—she.
Adolf. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t say which it was.
Gustav. You see.
Adolf. Besides, she destroyed my faith as well, and so I went backward until you came, old chap, and gave me a new faith.
Gustav. [He laughs.] In sculpture? [He turns around by the square table and comes to ADOLF’S right.]
Adolf. [Hesitating.] Yes.
Gustav. And you believed in it?—in that abstract, obsolete art from the childhood of the world. Do you believe that by means of pure form and three dimensions —no, you don’t really—that you can produce an effect on the real spirit of this age of ours, that you can create illusions without color? Without color, I say. Do you believe that?
Adolf. [Tonelessly.] No.
Gustav. Nor do I.
Adolf. But why did you say you did?
Gustav. You make me pity you.
Adolf. Yes, I am indeed to be pitied. And now I’m bankrupt, absolutely—and the worst of it is I haven’t got her any more.
Gustav. [With a few steps toward the right.] What good would she be to you? She would be what God above was to me before I became an atheist—a subject on which I could lavish my reverence. You keep your feeling of reverence dark, and let something else grow on top of it—a healthy contempt, for instance.
Adolf. I can’t live without someone to reverence.
Gustav. Slave! [He goes, round the fable on the right.]
Adolf. And without a woman to reverence, to worship.
Gustav. Oh, the deuce! Then you go back to that God of yours—if you. really must have something on which you can crucify yourself; but you call yourself an atheist when you’ve got the superstitious belief in women in your own blood; you call yourself a free thinker when you can’t think freely about a lot of silly women. Do you know what all this illusive quality, this sphinx-like mystery, this profundity in your wife’s temperament all really comes to? The whole thing is sheer stupidity; why, the woman can’t distinguish between A.B. and a bull’s foot for the life of her. And look here, it’s something shoddy in the mechanism, that’s where the fault lies. Outside it looks like a fifty-guinea hunting watch, open it and you find it’s tuppenny-halfpenny gun-metal. [He comes up to ADOLF.] Put her in trousers, draw a mustache under her nose with a piece of coal, and then listen to her in the same state of mind, and then you’ll be perfectly convinced that it is quite a different kettle of fish altogether—a gramophone which reproduces, with rather less volume, your words and other people’s words. Do you know how a woman is constituted? Yes, of course you do. A boy with the breasts of a mother, an immature man, a precocious child whose growth has been stunted, a chronically anaemic creature that has a regular emission of blood thirteen times in the year. What can you do with a thing like that?