Part 6

This is not only a new phase in the work of literary production, it is also a new phase in woman’s nature. Formerly, not only all great authoresses, but likewise all prominent women, were--or tried to be--intellectual. That also was an attempt to accommodate themselves to men’s wishes. They were always trying to follow in the footsteps of the man. Man’s ideas, interests, speculations, were to be understood and sympathized with. When philosophy was the fashion, great authoresses and intelligent women philosophized. Because Goethe was wise, Rahel was filled with the wisdom of life. George Eliot preached in all her books, and philosophized all her life long after the manner of Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. George Sand was the receptacle for ideas--men’s ideas--of the most contradictory character, which she immediately reproduced in her novels. Good Ebner-Eschenbach writes as sensibly, and with as much tolerance, as a right worthy old gentleman; and Fru Leffler chose her subjects from among the problems which were being discussed by a few well-known men. None of their writings can be considered as essentially characteristic of women. It was not an altogether unjust assertion when men declared that the women who wrote books were only half women.

Yet these were the best. Others, who wrote as women, had no connection with literature at all; they merely knitted literary stockings.

Mrs. Egerton and the author of “Dilettantes” are not intellectual, not in the very least. The possibility of being it has never entered their brain. They had no ambition to imitate men. They are not in the least impressed by the speculations, ideas, theories, and philosophies of men. They are sceptics in all that concerns the mind; the man himself they can perceive.

They perceive his soul, his inner self,--when he has one,--and they are keenly sensitive when it is not there. The other women with the great names are quite thick-headed in comparison. They judge everything with the understanding; these perceive with the nerves, and that is an entirely different kind of understanding.

They understand man, but, at the same time, they perceive that he is quite different from themselves, that he is the contrast to themselves. The one is too highly cultured; the other has too sensitive a nervous system to permit the thought of any equality between man and woman. The idea makes them laugh. They are far too conscious of being refined, sensitive women. They do not concern themselves with the modern democratic tendencies regarding women, with its levelling of contrasts, its desire for equality. They live their own life, and if they find it unsatisfying, empty, disappointing, they cannot change it. But they do not make any compromise to do things by halves; their highly-developed nerves are too sure a standard to allow of that. They are a new race of women, more resigned, more hopeless, and more sensitive than the former ones. They are women such as the new men require; they have risen up on the intellectual horizon as the forerunners of a generation who will be more sensitive, and who will have a keener power of enjoyment than the former ones. Among themselves these women exchange sympathetic glances, and are able to understand one another without need of confession. They, with their highly-developed nerves, can feel for each other with a sympathy such as formerly a woman only felt for man. In this way they go through life, without building castles in the air, or making any plans for the future; they live on day by day, and never look beyond. It might be said that they are waiting; but as each new day arrives, and the sand of time falls drop by drop upon their delicate nerves, even this imperceptible burden is more than they can bear; the strain of it is too much for them.

IV

I have before me a new book by Mrs. Egerton, and two new photographs. In the one she is sitting curled up in a chair, reading peacefully. She has a delicate, rather sharp-featured profile, with a long, somewhat prominent chin, that gives one an idea of yearning. The other is a full-length portrait. A slender, girlish figure, with narrow shoulders, and a waist, if anything, rather too small; a tired, worn face, without youth and full of disillusion; the hair looks as though restless fingers had been passed through it, and there is a bitter, hopeless expression about the lines of the mouth. In her letters--in which we never wholly possess her, but merely her _mood_--she comes to us in various guises,--now as a playful kitten, that is curled up cosily, and sometimes stretches out a soft little paw in playful, tender need of a caress; or else she is a worried, disappointed woman, with overwrought and excitable nerves, sceptical in the possibility of content, a seeker, for whom the charm lies in the seeking, not in the finding. She is a type of the modern woman, whose inmost being is the essence of disillusion.

When we examine the portraits of the four principal characters in this book--Sonia Kovalevsky, Eleonora Duse, Marie Bashkirtseff, and George Egerton--we find that they all have one feature in common. It was not I who first noticed this, it was a man. Ola Hansson, seeing them lying together one day, pointed it out to me, and he said: “The lips of all four speak the same language,--the young girl, the great tragedian, the woman of intellect, and the neurotic writer; each one has a something about the corners of the mouth that expresses a wearied satiety, mingled with an unsatisfied longing, as though she had as yet enjoyed nothing.”

Why this wearied satiety mingled with an unsatisfied longing? Why should these four women, who are four opposites, as it were, have the same expression? The virgin in body and soul, the great creator of the rôles of the degenerates, the mathematical professor, and the neurotic writer? Is it something in themselves, something peculiar in the organic nature of their womanhood, or is it some influence from without? Is it because they have chosen a profession which excites, while it leaves them dissatisfied, for the simple reason that a profession can never wholly satisfy a woman? Yet these four have excelled in their profession. But can a woman ever obtain satisfaction by means of her achievements? Is not her life as a woman--as a wife and as a mother--the true source of all her happiness? And this touch of disillusion in all of them--is it the disillusion they have experienced as _woman_; is it the expression of their bitter experiences in the gravest moment in a woman’s life? Disappointment in man? _The_ man that fate thrust across their path, who was their experience? And their yearning is now fruitless, for the flower of expectant realization withered before they plucked it.

Two of these women have carried the secret of their faces with them to the grave, but the others live and are not willing to reveal it. George Egerton would like to be as silent about it as they are; but her nerves speak, and her nerves have betrayed her secret in the book called “Discords.”

When we read “Discords” we ask ourselves how is it possible that this frail little woman could write such a strong, brutal book? In “Keynotes” Mrs. Egerton was still a little coquette, with 5¾ gloves and 18-inch waist, who herself played a fascinating part. She had something of a midge’s nature, dancing up and down, and turning nervous somersaults in the sunshine. “Discords” is certainly a continuation of “Keynotes,” but it is quite another kind of woman who meets us here. The thrilling, nervous note of the former book has changed into a clashing, piercing sound, hard as metal; it is the voice of an accuser in whom all bitterness takes the form of reproaches which are unjust, and yet unanswerable. It is the voice of a woman who is conscious of being ill-treated and driven to despair, and who speaks in spite of herself in the name of thousands of ill-treated and despairing women. Who can tell us whether her nerves have ill-treated this woman and driven her to despair, or whether it is her outward fate, especially her fate with regard to the man? Women of this kind are not confidential. They take back to-morrow what they have confessed to-day, partly from a wish not to let themselves be understood, and partly because the aspect of their experiences varies with every change of mood, like the colors in a kaleidoscope.

But throughout these changes, one single note is maintained in “Discords,” as it was in “Keynotes.” In the latter it was a high, shrill treble, like the song of a bird in spring; in “Discords” it is a deep bass note, groaning in distress with the groan of a disappointed woman.

V

The tone of bitter disappointment which pervades “Discords” is the expression of woman’s disappointment in man. Man and man’s love are not a joy to her; they are a torment. He is inconsiderate in his demands, brutal in his caresses, and unsympathetic with those sides of her nature which are not there for his satisfaction. He is no longer the great comic animal of “Keynotes,” whom the woman teases and plays with--he is a nightmare which smothers her during horrible nights, a hangman who tortures her body and soul during days and years for his pleasure; a despot who demands admiration, caresses, and devotion, while her every nerve quivers with an opposite emotion; a man born blind, whose clumsy fingers press the spot where the pain is, and when she moans, replies with coarse, unfeeling laughter, “Absurd nonsense!”

Although I believed myself to be acquainted with all the books which women have written against men, no book that I have ever read has impressed me with such a vivid sense of physical pain. Most women come with reasonings, moral sermons, and outbursts of temper: a man may allow himself much that is forbidden to others, that must be altered. Women are of no importance in his eyes; he has permitted himself to look down upon them. They intend to teach him their importance. They are determined that he shall look up to them. But here we have no trace of Xantippe-like violence, only a woman who holds her trembling hands to the wounds which man has inflicted upon her, of which the pain is intensified each time that he draws near. A woman, driven to despair, who jumps upon him like a wild-cat, and seizes him by the throat; and if that does not answer, chooses for herself a death that is ten times more painful than life with him, _chooses_ it in order that she may have her own way.

What is this? It is not the well-known domestic animal which we call woman. It is a wild creature belonging to a wild race, untamed and untamable, with the yellow gleam of a wild animal in its eyes. It is a nervous, sensitive creature, whose primitive wildness is awakened by a blow which it has received, which bursts forth, revengeful and pitiless as the lightning in the night.

That is what I like about this book. That a woman should have sprung up, who with her instinct can bore to the bottom layers of womanhood the quality that enables her to renew the race, her primæval quality, which man, with all his understanding, has never penetrated. A few years ago, in a study on Gottfried Keller’s women, I mentioned wildness as the basis of woman’s nature; Mrs. Egerton has given utterance to the same opinion in “Keynotes,” and has since tried to embody it in “Discords;” her best stories are those where the wild instinct breaks loose.

But why this terror of man, this physical repulsion, as in the story called “Virgin Soil”? The authoress says that it is because an ignorant girl in her complete innocence is handed over in marriage to an exacting husband. But that is not reason enough. The authoress’s intellect is not as true as her instinct. There must be something more. The same may be said of “Wedlock,” where the boarding-house cook marries an amorous working man, who is in receipt of good wages, for the sake of having her illegitimate child to live with her; he refuses to allow it, and when the child dies of a childish ailment, she murders his two children by the first marriage.

Mrs. Egerton’s stories are not invented; neither are they realistic studies copied from the notes in her diary. They are experiences. She has lived them all, because the people whom she portrays have impressed their characters or their fate upon her quivering nerves. The music of her nerves has sounded like the music of a stringed instrument beneath the touch of a strange hand, as in that masterpiece, “Gone Under,” where the woman tells her story between the throes of sea-sickness and drunkenness. The man to whom she belongs has punished her unfaithfulness by the murder of her child, and she revenges herself by drunkenness; yet, in spite of it all, he remains the master whom she is powerless to punish, and in her despair she throws herself upon the streets.

Only one man has had sufficient instinct to bring to light this abyss in woman’s nature, and that is Barbey d’Aurevilly, the poet who was never understood. But in Mrs. Egerton’s book there is one element which he had not discovered, and, although she does not express it in words, it shows itself in her description of men and women. Her men are Englishmen with bull-dog natures, but the women belong to another race; and is not this horror, this physical repulsion, this woman raging against the man, a true representation of the way that the Anglo-Saxon nature reacts upon the Celtic?

Two races stand opposed to one another in these sketches; perhaps the authoress herself is not quite conscious of it, but it is plainly visible in her descriptions of character, where we have the heavy, massive Englishman, _l’animal mâle_, and the untamable woman who is prevented by race instinct from loving where she ought to love.

In “The Regeneration of Two,” Mrs. Egerton has tried to describe a Celtic woman where she can love, but the attempt is most unsuccessful, for here we see plainly that she lacked the basis of experience. There are, however, many women who know what love is, although they have never experienced it. Men came, they married, but the man for them never came.

VI

There is a little story in this collection called “Her Share,” where the style is full of tenderness, perhaps even a trifle too sweet. It affects one like a landscape on an evening in early autumn, when the sun has gone down and twilight reigns; it seems as though veiled in gray, for there is no color left, although everything is strangely clear. Mrs. Egerton has a peculiarly gentle touch and soft voice where she describes the lonely, independent working girl. Her little story is often nothing more than the fleeting shadow of a mood, but the style is sustained throughout in a warm stream of lyric; for this Celtic woman certainly has the lyrical faculty, a thing which a woman writer rarely has, if ever, possessed before. There is something in her writing which seems to express a desire to draw near to the lonely girl and say: “You have such a good time of it in your grayness. In Grayness your nerves find rest, your instincts slumber, no man ill-treats you with his love, you experience discontent in contentment, but you know nothing of the torture of unstrung nerves. Would I were like you; but I am a bundle of electric currents bursting forth in all directions into chaos.”

Besides these two dainty twilight sketches, she has others like the description in “Gone Under,” of the storm on that voyage from America to England where we imagine ourselves on board ship, and seem to feel the rolling sea, to hear the ship cracking and groaning, to smell the hundreds of fetid smells escaping from all corners, and the damp ship-biscuits and the taste of the bitter salt spray on the tongue. We owe this forcible and matter-of-fact method of reproducing the impressions received by the senses to the retentive power of her nerves, through which she is able to preserve her passing impressions and to reproduce them in their full intensity. She relies on her womanly receptive faculty, not on her brain.

* * * * *

George Egerton’s life has been of the kind which affords ample material for literary purposes, and it is probable that she has more raw material ready for use at any time when she may require it; but at present she retains it in her nerves, as it were, under lock and key. She had intended from childhood to become an artist, and writing is only an afterthought; yet, no sooner did she begin to write than the impressions and experiences of her life shaped themselves into the form of her two published works. Until the publication of “Discords,” we had thought that she was one of those intensely individualistic writers who write one book because they must, but never write another, or, at any rate, not one that will bear comparison with the first; the publication of “Discords” has entirely dispelled this opinion, and has given us good reason to hope for many more works from her pen.

III

_The Modern Woman on the Stage_

I

A lean figure, peculiarly attractive, though scarcely to be called beautiful; a melancholy face with a strangely sweet expression, no longer young, yet possessed of a pale, wistful charm; _la femme de trente ans_, who has lived and suffered, and who knows that life is full of suffering; a woman without any aggressive self-confidence, yet queenly, gentle, and subdued in manner, with a pathetic voice,--such is Eleonora Duse as she appeared in the parts which she created for herself out of modern pieces. When first I saw her, I tried to think of some one with whom to compare her; I turned over in my mind the names of all the greatest actresses in the last ten years or more, and wondered whether any of them could be said to be her equal, or to have surpassed her. But neither Wolter nor Bernhardt, neither Ellmenreich nor the best actresses of the _Théâtre Français_, could be compared with her. The French and German actresses were entirely different; they seemed to stand apart, each complete in themselves--while she too stood apart, complete in herself. They represented a world of their own and a perfected civilization; and she, though like them in some ways, seemed to represent the genesis of a world, and a civilization in embryo. This was not merely the result of comparing an Italian with French and German, and one school with another,--it was the woman’s temperament compared to that of others, her acute susceptibility, compared to which her celebrated predecessors impressed one as being too massive, almost too crude, and one might be tempted to add, less womanly. Many of them have possessed a more versatile genius than hers, and nearly all have had greater advantages at their disposal; but the moment that we compare them to Duse, their loud, convulsive art suddenly assumes the appearance of one of those gigantic pictures by Makart, once so fiery colored and now so faded; and if we compare the famous dramatic artists of the seventies and eighties with Duse, we might as well compare a splendid festal march played with many instruments to a Violin solo floating on the still night air.

The pieces acted by Eleonora Duse at Berlin, where I saw her, were mainly chosen to suit the public taste, and they differed in nothing from the usual virtuosa programme. These consisted of Sarah Bernhardt’s favorite parts, such as “Fédora,” “La Dame aux Camélias,” and pieces taken from the _répertoire_ of the _Théâtre Français_, such as “Francillon” and “Divorçons,” varied with “Cavalleria Rusticana,” and such well-known plays as “Locandiera,” “Fernande,” and “The Doll’s House.” She did not act Shakespeare, and there she was wise; for what can Duse’s pale face have in common with the exuberant spirits and muscular strength of the women of the _Renaissance_, whose own rich life-blood shone red before their eyes and drove them to deeds of love and vengeance, which it makes the ladies of our time ill to hear described. But she also neglected some pieces which must have suited her better than her French _répertoire_. She did not give us Marco Praga’s “Modest Girls,” where Paulina’s part seems expressly created for her, nor his “Ideal Wife,” into which she might have introduced some of her own instinctive philosophy. Neither did she act the “Tristi Amori” of her celebrated fellow-countryman, Giuseppe Giacosa.

And yet, in the parts which she did act, she opened to us a new world, which had no existence before, because it was her own. It was the world of her own soul, the ever-changing woman’s world, which no one before her has ever expressed on the stage; she gave us the secret, inner life of woman, which no poet can wholly fathom, and which only woman herself can reveal, which with more refined nerves and more sensitive and varied feelings has emerged bleeding from the older, coarser, narrower forms of art, to newer, brighter forms, which, though more powerful, are also more wistful and more hopeless.

II

Eleonora Duse has a strangely wearied look. It is not the weariness of exhaustion or apathy, nor is it the weariness natural to an overworked actress, although there are times when she suffers from that to so great an extent that she acts indifferently the whole evening, and makes the part a failure. Neither is it the weariness of despondency which gives the voice a hollow, artificial sound, which is noticeable in all virtuosas when they are over-tired. Neither is it the utter prostration resulting from passion, like the drowsiness of beasts of prey, which our tragic actors and actresses delight in. Passion, the so-called great passion, which, according to an old legend recounted in one of the Greek tragedies, comes like the whirlwind, and leaves nothing behind but death and dried bones--passion such as that is unknown to Duse. Brunhild, Medea, Messalina, and all the ambitious, imperious princesses of historic drama are nothing to her; she is no princess or martyr of ancient history, but a princess in her own right, and a martyr of circumstances. Throughout her acting there is a feeling of surprise that she should suffer and be martyred, accompanied by the dim knowledge that it must be so--and it is that which gives her soul its weary melancholy. For it is not her body, nor her senses, nor her mind which give the appearance of having just awoke from a deep lethargy; the weariness is all in her soul, and it is that which gives her a soft, caressing, trustful manner, as though she felt lonely, and yearned for a little sympathy. Love is full of sympathy, and that is why Eleonora Duse acts love. Not greedy love, which asks more than it gives, like Walter’s and Bernhardt’s; not sensual love, nor yet imperious love, like the big woman who takes pity on the little man, whom it pleases her to make happy. When Duse is in love, even in “Fédora,” it is always she who is the little woman, and the man is for her the big man, the giver, who holds her happiness in his hands, to whose side she steals anxiously, almost timidly, and looks up at him with her serious, wearied, almost child-like smile. She comes to him for protection and shelter, just as travelers are wont to gather round a warm fire, and she clings to him caressingly with her thin little hands,--the hands of a child and mother. Never has woman been represented in a more womanly way than by Eleonora Duse; and more than that, I take it upon myself to maintain that woman has never been represented upon the stage until now--by Eleonora Duse.