The Dangerous Age | Page 3

memory invokes them all, and they reappear. We seem to take part in a strange, painful revel; a witches' revel of ardent yet withered sorceresses; a revel in which the modern demons of Neurasthenia and Hysteria sport and sneer.
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Let us not be mistaken, however. Elsie Lindtner's confession is not merely to be weighed by its fierce physiological sincerity; it is the feminine soul, and the feminine soul of all time, that is revealed in this extraordinary document. I think nothing less would give out such a pungent odour of truth. The Dangerous Age contains pages dealing with women's smiles and tears, with their love of dress and desire to please, and with the social relations between themselves and the male sex, which will certainly irritate some feminine readers. Let them try to unravel the real cause of their annoyance: perhaps they will perceive that they are actually vexed because a woman has betrayed the freemasonry that exists among their own sex. We must add that we are dealing here with another nation, and every Frenchwoman may, if she choose, decline to recognise herself among these portraits from Northern Europe.
A sure diagnosis of the vital conditions under which woman exists, and an acute observation of her complicated soul--these two things alone would suffice, would they not, to recommend the novel in which they were to be found? But The Dangerous Age possesses another quality which, at first sight, seems to have no connection with the foregoing: it is by no means lacking in emotion. Notwithstanding that she has the eye of the doctor and the psychologist, Elsie Lindtner, the heroine, has also the nerves and sensibility of a woman. Her daring powers of analysis do not save her from moments of mysterious terror, such as came over her, for no particular reason, on a foggy evening; nor yet from the sense of being utterly happy--equally without reason--on a certain autumn night; nor from feeling an intense sensuous pleasure in letting the little pebbles on the beach slide between her fingers. In a word, all the harshness of her judgments and reflections do not save her from the dreadful distress of growing old....
In vain she withdraws from the society of her fellow-creatures, in the hope that old age will no longer have terrors for her when there is no one at hand to watch her physical decay; the redoubtable phantom still haunts her in her retreat; watches her, brushes past her, and mocks her sincere effort to abandon all coquetry and cease "to count as a woman." At the same time a cruel melancholia possesses her; she feels she has become old without having profited by her youth. Not that she descends to the coarse and libertine regrets of "grand'm��re" in B��ranger's song, "Ah! que je regrette!" Elsie Lindtner declares more than once that if she had to start life over again she would be just as irreproachable. But the nearer she gets to the crisis, the more painfully and lucidly she perceives the antinomy between two feminine desires: the desire of moral dignity and the desire of physical enjoyment. In a woman of her temperament this need of moral dignity becomes increasingly imperious the more men harass her with their desires--an admirable piece of observation which I believe to be quite new. Moral resistance becomes weaker in proportion as the insistent passion of men becomes rarer and less active. She will end by yielding entirely when men cease to find her desirable. Then, even the most honourable of women, finding herself no longer desired, will perhaps lose the sense of her dignity so far as to send out a despairing appeal to the companion who is fleeing from her....
Such is the inward conflict which forms the subject of The Dangerous Age. It must be conceded that it lacks neither greatness nor human interest.
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I wish to add a few lines in order to record here an impression which I experienced while reading the very first pages of _The Dangerous Age_; an impression that became deeper and clearer when I had closed the book.
The Dangerous Age is one of those rare novels by a woman in which the writer has not troubled to think from a man's point of view. I lay stress upon this peculiarity because it is very rare, especially among the contemporary works of Frenchwomen.
The majority of our French authoresses give us novels in which their ambition to think, to construct and to write in a masculine style is clearly perceptible. And nothing, I imagine, gives them greater pleasure than when, thanks to their pseudonyms, their readers actually take them for men writers.
Therefore all this mass of feminine literature in France, with three or four exceptions--all this mass of literature of which