Do
you want to place yourself beneath your wife?

ADOLPH. Yes, I do. I take a pleasure in never quite reaching up to
her. I have taught her to swim, for example, and now I enjoy
hearing her boast that she surpasses me both in skill and daring.
To begin with, I merely pretended to be awkward and timid in order
to raise her courage. And so it ended with my actually being her
inferior, more of a coward than she. It almost seemed to me as if
she had actually taken my courage away from me.

GUSTAV. Have you taught her anything else?

ADOLPH. Yes--but it must stay between us--I have taught her how to
spell, which she didn't know before. But now, listen: when she
took charge of our domestic correspondence, I grew out of the
habit of writing. And think of it: as the years passed on, lack of
practice made me forget a little here and there of my grammar. But
do you think she recalls that I was the one who taught her at the
start? No--and so I am "the idiot," of course.

GUSTAV. So you _are_ an idiot already?

ADOLPH. Oh, it's just a joke, of course!

GUSTAV. Of course! But this is clear cannibalism, I think. Do you
know what's behind that sort of practice? The savages eat their
enemies in order to acquire their useful qualities. And this woman
has been eating your soul, your courage, your knowledge--

ADOLPH. And my faith! It was I who urged her to write her first
book--

GUSTAV. [Making a face] Oh-h-h!

ADOLPH. It was I who praised her, even when I found her stuff
rather poor. It was I who brought her into literary circles where
she could gather honey from our most ornamental literary flowers.
It was I who used my personal influence to keep the critics from
her throat. It was I who blew her faith in herself into flame;
blew on it until I lost my own breath. I gave, gave, gave--until I
had nothing left for myself. Do you know--I'll tell you everything
now--do you know I really believe--and the human soul is so
peculiarly constituted--I believe that when my artistic successes
seemed about to put her in the shadow--as well as her reputation--
then I tried to put courage into her by belittling myself, and by
making my own art seem inferior to hers. I talked so long about
the insignificant part played by painting on the whole--talked so
long about it, and invented so many reasons to prove what I said,
that one fine day I found myself convinced of its futility. So all
you had to do was to breathe on a house of cards.

G