The Dangerous Age | Page 2

a book The Dangerous Age we may feel sure she does not intend to write of the dangers of early youth. The dangerous age described by Karin Micha?lis is precisely that time of life which inspired Octave Feuillet to write the novel, half-dialogue, half-journal, which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1848, was adapted for the stage, played at the Gymnase in 1854, and reproduced later with some success at the Com��die-Fran?aise--I mean the work entitled La Crise.
It is curious to compare the two books, partly on account of the long space of time which separates them, and partly because of the different way in which the two writers treat the same theme.
Octave Feuillet, be it remembered, only wrote what might be spoken aloud in the most conventional society. Nevertheless those who think the author of Monsieur de Cantors timid and insipid are only short-sighted critics. I advise my readers when they have finished the last page of The Dangerous Age to re-read La Crise. They will observe many points of resemblance, notably in the "journal" portion of the latter. Juliette, Feuillet's heroine, thus expresses herself:
"What name can I give to this moral discomfort, this distaste for my former habits, this aimless restlessness and discontent with myself and others, of which I have been conscious during the last few months?... I have taken it into my head to hate the trinkets on my husband's watchchain. We lived together in peace for ten years, those trinkets and I ... Now, I don't know why, we have suddenly fallen out...."
These words from La Crise contain the argument of The Dangerous Age.
And yet I will wager that Karin Micha?lis never read La Crise. Had she read it, however, her book would still have remained all her own, by reason of her individual treatment of a subject that is also a dangerous one. We have made considerable advances since 1848. Even in Denmark physiology now plays a large part in literature. Feuillet did not venture to do more than to make his Juliet experience temptation from a medical lover, who is a contrast to her magistrate husband. Although doctors come off rather badly in The Dangerous Age, the book owes much to them and to medical science. Much; perhaps too much. If this woman's work had been imagined and created by a man, no doubt he would have been accused of having lost sight of women's repugnance to speak or write of their physical inferiority, or even to dwell upon it in thought. Yet the name Karin Micha?lis is no pseudonym; the writer really is of the same sex as her heroine Elsie Lindtner.
Is not this an added reason for the curiosity which this book awakens? The most sincere and complete, the humblest and most moving of feminine confessions proceeds from one of those Northern women, whom we Latin races are pleased to imagine as types of immaterial candour, sovereign "intellectuality," and glacial temperament--souls in harmony with their natural surroundings, the rigid pine forests and snow-draped heathlands of Scandinavia.
A Scandinavian woman! Immediately the words evoke the chaste vision sung by Leconte de Lisle, in his poem "l'Epiphanie":
Elle passe, tranquille, en un r��ve divin, Sur le bord du plus frais de tes lacs, ? Norv��ge! Le sang rose et subtil qui dore son col fin Est doux comme un rayon de l'aube sur la neige.
Quand un souffle furtif glisse en ses cheveux blonds, Une cendre ineffable inonde son ��paule, Et, de leur transparence argentant leurs cils longs, Ses yeux out la couleur des belle nuits du p?le.
Et le gardien pensif du mystique oranger Des balcons de l'Aurore eternelle se penche, Et regarde passer ce fant?me l��ger Dans les plis de sa robe immortellement blanche.
"Immortellement blanche!" Very white indeed!... Read the intimate journal of Elsie Lindtner, written precisely by the side of one of these fresh Northern lakes. Possibly at eighteen Elsie Lindtner may have played at "Epiphanies" and filled "the pensive guardian of the mystic orange tree" with admiration. But it is at forty-two that she begins to edit her private diary, and her eyes that "match the hue of polar nights" have seen a good deal in the course of those twenty years. And if in the eyes of the law she has remained strictly faithful to her marriage vows, she has judged herself in the secret depths of her heart. She has also judged other women, her friends and confidants. The moment of "the crisis" arrives, and, taking refuge in "a savage solitude," in which even the sight of a male servant is hateful to her, she sets down with disconcerting lucidity all she has observed in other women, and in herself. These other women are also of the North: Lillie Rothe, Agatha Ussing, Astrid Bagge, Margarethe Ernst, Magna Wellmann.... Her