Lastyear there was a book published in London with the extraordinary title of “Keynotes.” Three thousand copies were sold in the course of a few months, and the unknown author became a celebrity. Soon afterwards the portrait of a lady appeared in “The Sketch.” She had a small, delicate face, with a pained and rather tired expression, and a curious, questioning look in the eyes; it was an attractive face, very gentle and womanly, and yet there was something disillusioned and unsatisfied about it. This lady wrote under the pseudonym of George Egerton, and “Keynotes” was her first book.
It was a strange book! too good a book to become famous all at once. It burst upon the world like the opening buds in spring, like the cherry blossom after the first cold shower of rain. What can have made this book so popular in the England of to-day, which is as totally devoid of all true literature as Germany itself? Was it only the writer’s strong individuality, which each successive page impressed upon the reader’s nerves more vividly and more painfully than thelast? The reader, did I say? Yes, but not the male reader. There are very few men who have a sufficiently keen appreciation for a woman’s feelings to be able to put their own minds and souls into the swing of her confession, and to accord it their full sympathy. Yet there are such men. We may perhaps come across two or three of them in a lifetime, but they disappear from our sight, as we do from theirs. And they are not readers. Their sympathy is of a deeper, more personal character, and as far as the success of a book is concerned, it need not be taken into consideration at all.
“Keynotes” is not addressed to men, and it will not please them. It is not written in the style adopted by the other women Georges,—George Sand and George Eliot,—who wrote from a man’s point of view, with the solemnity of a clergyman or the libertinism of a drawing-room hero. There is nothing of the man in this book, and no attempt is made to imitate him, even in the style, which springs backwards and forwards as restlessly as a nervous little woman at her toilet, when her hair will not curl and her stay-lace breaks. Neither is it a book which favors men; it is a book written against them, a book for our private use.
There have been such books before; old-maid literature is a lucrative branch of industry, both in England and Germany (the two most unliterary countries in Europe), and that is probably thereason why the majority of authoresses write as though they were old maids. But there are no signs of girlish prudery in “Keynotes;” it is a liberal book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and entirely without respect for the husband; it is a book with claws and teeth ready to scratch and bite when the occasion offers,—not the book of a woman who married for the sake of a livelihood, but the book of a devoted wife, who would be inseparable from her husband if only he were not so tiresome, and dull, and stupid, such a thorough man, insufferable at times, and yet indispensable as the husband always is to the wife.
And it is the book of a gentlewoman!
We have had tell-tale women before, but Heaven preserve us! Fru Skram is a man in petticoats; she speaks her mind plainly enough,—rather too plainly to suit my taste. “Gyp,” a distinguished Frenchwoman, has written “Autour du Mariage,” and she cannot be said to mince matters either. But here we have something quite different; something which does not in the least resemble Gyp’s frivolous worldliness or Amalie Skram’s coarseness. Mrs. Egerton would shudder at the thought of washing dirty linen in public, and she could not, even if she were to force herself, treat the relationship between husband and wife with cynical irony, and she does not force herself in the very least.
She writes as she really is, because she cannotdo otherwise. She has had an excellent education, and is a lady with refined tastes, with something of that innocence of the grown woman which is almost more touching than a girl’s innocence, because it proves how little of his knowledge of life in general, and his sex in particular, the Teutonic husband confides to his wife. She stands watching him,—an eating, loving, smoking organism. Heavens! how wearisome! So loved, and yet so wearisome! It is unbearable! And she retreats into herself, and realizes that she is a woman.
It is almost universal amongst women, especially Germans, that they do not take man as seriously as he likes to imagine. They think him comical,—not only when they are married to him, but even before that, when they are in love with him. Men have no idea what a comical appearance they present, not only as individuals, but as a race. The comic part about a man is that he is so different from women, and that is just what he is proudest of. The more refined and fragile a woman is, the more ridiculous she is likely to find the clumsy great creature who takes such a roundabout way to gain his comical ends.
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 machinesfor 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 orgreatenough 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 ofconvention 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 exceptionaltype, 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.
Nearlya 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 theAcadémie 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, mightwell 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 anentirely 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-speakingposeur, 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 thevery 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 meaningof 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 inconsequence 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. Atthe 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’stête-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 notreply, 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 themost 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.
Anothercharacteristic 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 havehad 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 assoon as they took up the pen. They had nothing to learn, it was theirs already.
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 wroteas 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 compromiseto 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.
I havebefore 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 hermood—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 themouth 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 aswoman; is it the expression of their bitter experiences in the gravest moment in a woman’s life? Disappointment in man?Theman 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 otherslive 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, andpartly 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.
Thetone 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,choosesit 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 portrayshave 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.
Thereis 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 drawnear 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 hernerves, 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.