_INTRODUCTION TO THE FRENCH EDITION By MARCEL PRÉVOST_
Here is a strange book. A novel from the North, its solid structure, its
clear, unadorned form are purely Latin. A woman's novel, in its integral
and violent sincerity it can only be compared to certain famous
masculine confessions.
The author, Karin Michaëlis, a Dane, is not at all known in France. _The
Dangerous Age_ is not her first book; but it is, I feel sure, the first
that has been translated into French. Naturally enough the
Danish-Scandinavian literature is transmitted in the first instance
through newspapers and reviews, and through German publishers. This is
the result of local proximity and the affinity of language. Several
novels by Karin Michaëlis were known to the German public before _The
Dangerous Age_; but none of them had awakened the same keen curiosity,
provoked such discussion, or won such success as this book. In all the
countries of Central Europe the most widely read novel at the present
moment is _The Dangerous Age_. Edition succeeds edition, and the fortune
of the book has been increased by the quarrels it has provoked; for it
has been much discussed and criticised, not on account of its literary
value, which is incontestable, but because of the idea which animates
it.
Shall I confess that it was just this great success, and the polemical
renown of the novel, that roused my suspicions when first I chanced to
see the German version of it? Contrary to the reputation which our
neighbours on the other side of the Vosges like to foist upon us, French
literature, at the present day, is far less noisily scandalous than
their own. It is only necessary to glance over the advertisements which
certain German publishing firms issue at the end of their publications
in order to be convinced of this. It is amusing to find every kind of
"puff" couched in the exaggerated style which the modern German affects.
It was with some bias and suspicion, therefore, that I took up _Das
gefährliche Alter_. When I started to read the book, nothing could have
been further from my mind than to write, a French version and to present
it myself to the public. This is all the more reason why justice should
be done to Karin Michaëlis. I have read no other book of hers except
_The Dangerous Age_; but in this novel she has in no way exceeded what a
sincere and serious observer has a right to publish. Undoubtedly her
book is not intended for young girls, for what the English call
"bread-and-butter misses." But nobody is compelled to write exclusively
for schoolgirls, and it has yet to be proved that there is any necessity
to feed them on fiction as well as on bread and butter.
_The Dangerous Age_ deals with a bold subject; it is a novel filled with
the "strong meat" of human nature; a novel which speaks in accents at
once painful and ironical, and ends in despair; but it is also a book to
which the most scrupulous author on the question of "the right to speak
out" need not hesitate to attach his name.
It is difficult for one who knows no Danish, to judge of its literary
value; and that is my case. In the German version--and I hope also in
the French--the reader will not fail to discern some of the novelist's
finest gifts. In the first instance, there is that firmness and solidity
of structure which is particularly difficult to keep up when a book
takes the form of a journal, of jottings and meditations, as does _The
Dangerous Age_. Then there are the depth of reflection, the ingenuity of
the arguments, the muscular brevity of style, the expression being
closely modelled upon the thought; nothing is vague, but nothing is
superfluous. We must not seek in this volume for picturesque landscape
painting, for the lyrical note, for the complacently woven "purple
patch." The book is rigorously deprived of all these things; and, having
regard to its subject, this is not its least merit.
* * * * *
When a woman entitles 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 Michaëlis 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 Comédie-Française--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 Michaëlis 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 Michaëlis 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 rêve divin,
Sur le bord du plus frais de tes lacs, ô Norvège!
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 épaule,
Et, de leur transparence argentant leurs cils longs,
Ses yeux out la couleur des belle nuits du pôle.
Et le gardien pensif du mystique oranger
Des balcons de l'Aurore eternelle se penche,
Et regarde passer ce fantôme léger
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 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.
* * * * *
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'mère" in Béranger'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.
* * * * *
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 I am far from
denying the merits--has really told us nothing new about the soul of
woman. A strange result is that not a single woman writer of the present
day is known as a specialist in feminine psychology.
Karin Michaëlis has been inspired to write a study of womankind without
trying to interpose between her thought and the paper the mind and
vision of a man. The outcome is astonishing. I have said that the
construction of the novel is solid; but no man could have built it up in
that way. It moves to a definite goal by a sure path; yet its style is
variable like the ways of every woman, even if she be completely
mistress of herself.... Thus her flights of thought, like
carrier-pigeons, never fail to reach their end, although at times they
circle and hover as though troubled by some mysterious hesitancy or
temptation to turn back from their course....
Elsie Lindtner's journal shows us many examples of these circling
flights and retrogressions. Sometimes too we observe a gap, an empty
space, in which words and ideas seem to have failed. Again, there are
sudden leaps from one subject to another, the true thought appearing,
notwithstanding, beneath the artificial thought which is written down.
Sometimes there comes an abrupt and painful pause, as though somebody
walking absent-mindedly along the road found themselves brought up by a
yawning cleft....
This cinematograph of feminine thought, stubborn yet disconnected, is to
my mind the principal literary merit of the book; more so even than its
strength and brevity of style.
* * * * *
For all these reasons, it seemed to me that _The Dangerous Age_ was
worthy to be presented to the public in a French translation. The _Revue
de Paris_ also thought it worthy to be published in its pages. I shall
be astonished if French readers do not confirm this twofold judgment,
offering to this foreign novel the same favourable reception that has
already been accorded to it outside its little native land.