Sincerity, what an enormous unreasonable demand, if it is a question of
woman! Those most praised for their candor were nevertheless comedians,
like the weeping Marceline, an actress moreover who wept through
her life, as in a role, with the consciousness which the plaudits
of the public give. Since women have written, not one has had the
good faith to speak and confess themselves in bold humility, and the
only ideas of feminine psychology known to literature must be sought
in the literature of men. There is more to learn of women in _Lady
Roxanna_ than in the complete works of George Sand. It is not perhaps
a question of untruthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to
think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and
not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when they ingenuously
write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god
reading--perhaps--over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman,
to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even a higher
genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous
works of men are often superior to the men themselves, the finest works
of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced
them.
This incapacity is not personal; it is generic and absolute. It is
needful, then, to compare women exclusively with themselves, and not
scorn them for whatever of egoism or personality is lacking: this
fault, outside of literature and art, is generally estimated as equal
to a positive virtue.
Whether they essay their charms in perversity or candor, women will
better succeed in living than in playing their comedy; they are made
for life, for the flesh, for materiality,--and they will joyfully
realize their most romantic dreams if they do not find themselves
arrested by the indifference of man whose more sensitive nerves suffer
from vibrating in the void. There is an evident contradiction between
art and life; we have hardly ever seen a man live in action and dream
at the same time, transposing in writing the gestures that first were
real: the equivalence of sensations is certain and the horrors of fear
can better be described by whosoever imagines them than by the man that
experiences them. On the contrary, the predominance in a temperament of
tendencies to live, dulls the sharpness of the imaginative faculties.
With the more intelligent women, those best gifted for cerebral
pursuits, the impelling motivation will most easily be translated into
acts than into art. It is a physiological fact, a state of nature it
would be as absurd to reproach women with as to blame men for the
smallness of their breasts or the shortness of their hair. Moreover,
if it is a question of art, the discussion, which touches such a small
number of creatures, has for humanity, like all purely intellectual
questions, but an interest of the steeple or the street corner.
All this, then, being admitted, and it also being admitted that
_l'Animale_ is Rachilde's most singular book (although not the most
ambiguous) and that _le Démon de l'Absurde_ is the best, I will
willingly add, not for the sole pleasure of contradicting myself and
destroying the virtue of the preceding pages, that this collection
of tales and imaginative dialogue proves to me a realized effort at
true artistic sincerity. Pages like _la Panthère_ or _les Vendanges
de Sodom_ show that a woman can have phases of virility, to write,
careless of necessary coquetteries or customary attitudes, make art
with nothing but an idea and from words, create.