Part 5

To young girls especially man offers a perpetual excuse for a laugh, and a secret shudder. When men find a group of women laughing among themselves, they never suspect that it is they who are the cause of it. And that again is so comic! The better a man is, the more he is in earnest when he makes his pathetic appeal for a great love; and woman, who takes a special delight in playing a little false, even when there is no necessity, becomes as earnest and solemn as he, when all the time she is only making fun of him. A woman wants amusement, wants change; a monotonous existence drives her to despair, whereas a man thrives on monotony, and the cleverer he is the more he wishes to retire into himself, that he may draw upon his own resources; a clever woman needs variety, that she may take her impressions from without.

... The early blossoms of the cherry-tree shudder beneath the cold rain which has burst their scales; this shudder is the deepest vibration in Mrs. Egerton’s book. What is the subject? A little woman in every imaginable mood, who is placed in all kinds of likely and unlikely circumstances: in every story it is the same little woman with a difference, the same little woman, who is always loved by a big, clumsy, comic man, who is now good and well-behaved, now wild, drunk, and brutal; who sometimes ill-treats her, sometimes fondles her, but never understands what it is that he ill-treats and fondles. And she sits like a true Englishwoman with her fishing-rod, and while she is waiting for a bite, “her thoughts go to other women she has known, women good and bad, school friends, casual acquaintances, women-workers,--joyless machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling maids grown old in the endeavor to get settled, patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent husbands until they wear out,--a long array. She busies herself with questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for excitement, for change, this restless craving for sun and love and motion? Stray words, half confidences, glimpses through soul-chinks of suppressed fires, actual outbreaks, domestic catastrophes,--how the ghosts dance in the cells of her memory! And she laughs--laughs softly to herself because the denseness of man, his chivalrous conservative devotion to the female idea he has created, blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex nature, ... and well it is that the workings of our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning enough or _great_ enough to seem to be what they would have us, rather than be what we are. But few of them have had the insight to find out the key to our seeming contradictions,--the why a refined, physically fragile woman will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions, and love him; the why strength and beauty appeal more often than the more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart; the why women (and not the innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard to forgive in their fellows. They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman. Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns, an untamable quantity that may be concealed, but is never eradicated by culture,--the keynote of woman’s witchcraft and woman’s strength.”

They are not stories which Mrs. Egerton tells us. She does not care for telling stories. They are keynotes which she strikes, and these keynotes met with an extraordinary and most unexpected response. They struck a sympathetic chord in women, which found expression in a multitude of letters, and also in the sale of the book. An author can hope for no happier fate than to receive letters which re-echo the tune that he has discovered in his own soul. Those who have received them know what pleasant feelings they call forth. We often do not know where they come from, we cannot answer them, nor should we wish to do so if we could. They give us a sudden insight into the hidden centre of a living soul, where we can gaze into the secret, yearning life, which is never lived in the sight of the world, but is generally the best part of a person’s nature; we feel the sympathetic clasp of a friendly hand, and our own soul is filled with a thankfulness which will never find expression in words. The dark world seems filled with unknown friends, who surround us on every side like bright stars in the night.

Mrs. Egerton had struck the fundamental chord in woman’s nature, and her book was received with applause by hundreds of women. The critic said: “The woman in ‘Keynotes’ is an exceptional type, and we can only deal with her as such.” “Good heavens! How stupid they are!” laughed Mrs. Egerton. Numberless women wrote to her, women whom she did not know, and whose acquaintance she never made. “We are quite ordinary, every-day sort of people,” they said; “we lead trivial, unimportant lives; but there is something in us which vibrates to your touch, for we, too, are such as you describe.” “Keynotes” took like wildfire.

There is nothing tangible in the book to which it can be said to owe its significance. Notes are not tangible. The point on which it differs from all other well-known books by women is the intensity of its awakened consciousness as woman. It follows no pattern and is quite independent of any previous work; it is simply full of a woman’s individuality. It is not written on a large scale, and it does not reveal a very expansive temperament. But, such as it is, it possesses an amount of nervous energy which carries us along with it, and we must read every page carefully until the last one is turned, not peep at the end to see what is going to happen, as we do when reading a story with a plot; we must read every page for its own sake, if we would feel the power of its different moods, varying from feverish haste to wearied rest.

II

Nearly a year afterwards, a book was published in Paris by Lemerre, called “Dilettantes.” Instead of the author’s name there were three stars, but a catalogue issued by a less illustrious publisher is not so discreet. It mentions the bearer of a well-known pseudonym as the author of the book; a lady who first gained a reputation by translating Hungarian folk songs into French, for which she received an acknowledgment from the _Académie Française_, and who afterwards introduced Scandinavian authors to Paris, thereby deserving the thanks of both countries. She has also made herself a name in literary circles by her original and clever criticisms. Those who are behind the scenes know that the translator’s pseudonym and the three stars conceal a lady who belongs to the highest aristocracy of Austria, and who is herself a “dilettante,” inasmuch as she writes without any pecuniary object, and that, quite independent of her public, she writes and translates what she pleases. Her social position has placed her among intellectual people; on her mother’s side she is descended from one of the foremost families among the Austrian nobility, and she has lived in Paris from her childhood, where she has enjoyed the society of the best authors, and acquired a French style which, for richness, beauty, and grace, might well cause many an older French author to envy her. It is in this French, which she finds more pliable than the homely Viennese German, that this curious book is written.

I search high and low for words in which to describe the nature of this book, but in vain. It is womanly to such an extent, and in such a peculiar way, that we lack the words to express it in a language which has not yet learned to distinguish between the art of man and the art of woman in the sphere of production. It has the same effect upon us as Mrs. Egerton’s “Keynotes.”

The same reason which makes it difficult to understand this Celtic woman with the English pseudonym, makes it equally difficult to draw an intelligible picture of this French-writing Austrian, with the Polish and Hungarian blood mingled in her veins. But it is not the cross between the races, nor, we might add, is it any cross between soul and ideas which makes these two women so incomprehensible and almost enigmatical; one is twice married, the other a girl, although she is perhaps the more wearied and disillusioned of the two,--and yet it is not the outer circumstances of their lives which render both what they are, it is something in themselves, quite apart from the experience which beautifies and develops a woman’s character; it is the keynote of their being which retreats shyly to the background as though afraid of the public gaze. It is the beginning of a series of personal confessions at first hand, and forms an entirely new department in women’s literature. Hitherto, as I have already said, all books, even the best ones, written by women, are imitations of men’s books, with the addition of a single high-pitched, feminine note, and are therefore nothing better than communications received at second hand. But at last the time has come when woman is so keenly alive to her own nature that she reveals it when she speaks, even though it be in riddles.

I have often pointed out that men only know the side of our character which they wish to see, or which it may please us to show them. If they are thorough men, they seek the woman in us, because they need it as the complement to their own nature; but often they seek our “soul,” our “mind,” our “character,” or whatever else they may happen to look upon as the beautifying veil of our existence. Something may come of the first, but of the last nothing. Mrs. Egerton interpreted man from the first of the above standpoints; she wrote of him, half in hate and half in admiration; her men are great clowns. The author of “Dilettantes” wrote from the opposite point of view; her man is the smooth-speaking _poseur_, of whom she writes with a shrug of the shoulders and an expression of mild contempt.

Both feel themselves to be so utterly different from what they were told they were, and which men believe them to be. They do not understand it at all; they do not understand themselves in the very least. They interpret nothing with the understanding, but their instinct makes them feel quite at home with themselves and leads them to assert their own natures. They are no longer a reflection which man moulds into an empty form; they are not like Galatea, who became a living woman through Pygmalion’s kiss; they were women before they knew Pygmalion,--such thorough women that Pygmalion is often no Pygmalion to them at all, but a stupid lout instead.

It is a fearful disappointment, and causes a woman--and many a womanly woman too--to shrink from man and scan him critically. “You?” she cries. “No, it were better not to love at all!” But the day is coming--

And when the day has come, then woman will be as bad as Strindberg’s Megoras, or as humorous as a certain poetess who sent a portrait of her husband to a friend, with this inscription: “My old Adam;” or else she may meet with the same fate as Countess Resa in the anonymous book of a certain well-known authoress. She will commit suicide in one way or the other. She will not kill herself like Countess Resa, but she will kill a part of her nature. And these women, who are partly dead, carry about a corpse in their souls from whence streams forth an odor as of death; these women, whose dead natures have the power of charming men with a mystery they would gladly solve,--these women are our mothers, sisters, friends, teachers, and we scarcely know the meaning of the shiver down our backs which we feel in their presence. A very keen consciousness is needed to dive down deep enough in ourselves to discover the reason, and very subtle, spiritual tools are necessary to grasp the process and to reproduce it. The Austrian authoress possessed both these requisites. But there is also a third which is equally indispensable to any one who would draw such a portrait of themselves, and that is the distinguished manner of a noble and self-confident nature, in which everything can be said.

She has something besides, which gives the book a special attraction of its own, and that is her extremely modern, artistic feeling, which teaches how the laws of painting can be brought to bear upon the art of writing, and gives her a keen appreciation of the value of sound in relation to language.

There is a picture by Claude Monet,--pale, golden sunshine upon a misty sea. There is scarcely anything to be seen beyond this faint golden haze, resting upon the shimmering, transparent water, painted in rainbow colors, pale as opal. There is just a faint suggestion of a promontory, rising up from the warm, southern sea, and something which looks like a squadron of fishing boats in the far distance. It is not quite day, but it is already light,--one of those cool mornings which precede a dazzling day. It is years since last I saw this picture, but it charmed me so much that I have never forgotten it. It is in consequence of this same sense for fine shades of color, applied in this instance to the soul, that “Dilettantes” was written.

It is a very quiet book, and just as there is not a single strong color in Monet’s picture, so there is not a single high note in this book. We feel like gazing down into the water which glides and glides along, carrying with it seaweed, dead bodies, and men, but always in silence,--a most uneventful book. But beneath this almost lethargical stillness is enacted a tragedy in which a life is at stake, and the stake is lost, and death is the consequence. The deadliest blow against another’s soul is caused, not by words, but by deafness and indifference, by neglect at the moment when the heart yearns for love, and the bud is ready to blossom into flower beneath a single breath of sympathy. Next morning, when you go to look at it, you find it withered; it is then too late for your warm breath and willing fingers to force it open; you only make it worse, and at last the buds fall to the ground.

The famous unknown has called her book “Dilettantes,” although there is but one lady in it to whom the name applies. Can it be that, by her use of the plural, she meant to include herself with the heroine? The supposition seems not unlikely.

She introduces us to a colony of artists in Paris, amongst whom is Baron Mark Sebenyi, an Hungarian magnate, who is a literary dilettante. At the house of the old Princess Ebendorf he makes the acquaintance of her niece, Theresia Thaszary, and feels himself drawn towards her as his “twin soul.” During the Princess’s long illness, they become engaged, and when the Princess dies he continues his visits to the Countess as though her aunt were still alive, and he spends his hours of literary work in her house, because, as he says, her presence is an indispensable source of inspiration to him. Countess Resa is one of those whom a life of constant travel has rendered cosmopolitan. Her life is passed in a state of mental torpor which is more general, and, I should like to add, more normal, among young girls than men imagine or married women remember; she was neither contented nor discontented while she lived with her aunt, and she continues the same now, with Mark continually beside her. She is glad to have him with her; she feels a certain attraction in his manly and sympathetic presence, and his behavior towards herself is so decorous that it seldom happens that so much as a pressure of the hand passes between them. She knows that Mark has relations with other women, but that fact does not enter into her womanly consciousness at all.

All goes well until a fashionable friend of hers, a rather vulgar lady, asks her when she means to marry Mark, and persuades her to go into society, although she has no desire to do so, and is perfectly content with the sameness of her life. In society she finds that her friendship with Mark attracts observation, and this is the first shock which leads to an awakening. In the long winter hours, while she is sitting still in the room where he is writing, she suddenly realizes the situation, and feels that it is like a lover’s _tête-à-tête_. His behavior in society irritates her in a hundred little ways, because she knows that he is not true to his real nature, and that he gives way to his vanity as an author and poses in public. Mark has no intention of marrying her; he is quite content with matters as they stand. Cold-hearted, and probably aged before his time, he feels drawn towards her by a kind of distant, erotic feeling, and he seeks her society for the sake of the drawing-room where he can make himself thoroughly at home and bring his artist friends; he likes her because he is not bound to her, and he has never tired of her because she was never his.

Spring comes. They make expeditions round about Paris, and are constantly together; she is in a state of nervous excitement, and the more she feels drawn towards him the more she tries to avoid him. There are moments when he too feels his hand tremble, if by chance it comes into contact with hers. Their friendship with one another has become a hindrance to any greater friendship between them; and he is too much taken up with himself, too accustomed to have her always busily attending to him, to notice the change which is gradually taking place in her. Her love dwindles beneath the cold influence of doubt, which increases the more as she feels herself rejected by the man she loves. Ignorant though she be, she is possessed of an intuitive knowledge which is the heritage of many generations of culture, which enables her to read him through and through, until she conceives an antipathy for him,--the man whose love she desires,--an antipathy which makes him appear contemptible and almost ridiculous in her sight. Still she clings to him. She has no one else; she is alone among strangers. He belongs to her and she to him. This fact of their belonging to each other makes her tire of his company, and one day, when he and his literary friends are preparing to hold lectures in her drawing-room, she flies from the house to escape from their æsthetic chatter.

At last she can stand it no longer, and whilst her guests are engaged in discussing a work of Mark’s, she goes downstairs and out into the night. She scarcely knows what she is doing; her pulse beats feverishly, her nerves are quite unstrung. She walks down the street towards the Champs Elysées, and there she meets a man coming towards her. She perceives that she is alone in the empty street, and she is overcome with a nameless fear. Seized with a sudden impulse to hide herself, she jumps into the nearest cab, which is standing at the door of a café. The driver asks, “Where to?” and when she does not reply, he gets angry. At this juncture the man appears at the door of the carriage, and she recognizes Imre Borogh, a friend of Mark’s, who was on his way to call on her. She still cannot say where she wishes to go, but feeling herself under the protection of a friend, she allows him to get in. They drive and drive. She perceives the compromising nature of the situation, but is too stupefied to put an end to it. He talks to her after the manner of an emotional young man, whose feelings have gained the mastery over him. At last he tells the driver to stop in front of a café. She is half unconscious, but he assists her to get out. And the nervous strain of these many long months results in a misunderstanding with this stranger, even greater than would have been the case with Mark.

She comes very quietly home. She takes hold of Mark’s portrait, as she has so often done before, and compares it with her own image in the looking-glass. She throws it away. She burns his letters and all the little mementos which she has of him, then--while she is searching in her drawers--she comes upon a revolver....

Mark was very much moved at the funeral, and he cherished her memory for long afterwards.

Nowhere in the book is there any attempt made to describe men. The authoress only shows them to us as they are reflected in her soul. In this she not only shows an unusual amount of artistic talent, but also a new method. Woman is the most subjective of all creatures; she can only write about her own feelings, and her expression of them is her most valuable contribution to literature. Formerly women’s writings were, for the most part, either directly or indirectly, the expression of a great falsehood. They were so overpoweringly impersonal, it was quite comic to see the way in which they imitated men’s models, both in form and contents. Now that woman is conscious of her individuality as a woman, she needs an artistic mode of expression; she flings aside the old forms, and seeks for new. It is with this feeling, almost Bacchanalian in its intensity, that Mrs. Egerton hurls forth her playful stories, which the English critics judged harshly, but the public bought and called for in fresh editions; and this was how the Austrian lady wrote her story, which has the effect of a play dreamed under the influence of the sordine. Both books are honest. The more conscious a woman is of her individuality, the more honest will her confession be. Honesty is only another form of pride.

III

Another characteristic is beginning to make itself felt, which was bound to come at last. And that is an intense and morbid consciousness of the ego in women. This consciousness was unknown to our mothers and grandmothers; they may have had stronger characters than ours, as they undoubtedly had to overcome greater hindrances; but this consciousness of the ego is quite another thing, and they had not got it.

Neither of these women, whose books I have been reviewing, are authors by profession. There is nothing they care for less than to write books, and nothing that they desire less than to hear their names on every one’s lips. Both were able to write without having learned. Other authoresses of whom we hear have either taught themselves to write, or have been taught by men. They began with an object, but without having anything to say; they chose their subjects from without.

Neither of these women have any object. They do not want to describe what they have seen. They do not want to teach the world, nor do they try to improve it. They have nothing to fight against. They merely put themselves into their books. They did not even begin with the intention of writing; they obeyed an impulse. There was no question of whether they wished or not; they were obliged. The moment came when they were forced to write, and they did not concern themselves with reasons or objects. Their ego burst forth with such power that it ignored all outer circumstances; it pressed forward and crystallized itself into an artistic shape. These women have not only a very pronounced style of their own, but are in fact artists; they became it as soon as they took up the pen. They had nothing to learn, it was theirs already.