Being written by friend to friend, it is free from both shyness and
stiffness: it may laugh or cry, be sagacious or absurd, in full
confidence of being understood. It rings true in its directness and
intimacy, and yet never descends to the morbidness that sometimes stains
the revelations of the journal. The letter is intimate, but at bottom
decorous. In a letter one wears one’s old clothes in comfort, but one
does not undress as in a diary. The presence of a friend to whom one may
open one’s heart is both invitation and wholesome restraint.
The letter as literature is particularly adapted to description made
piquant by personal perception of lights and shades. The letter is
especially fitted for quick portraiture, for flashing forth a face in
an adjective, for touching off a character in the quirk of a phrase.
Incidents also stand out by their very compression. Brevity is the
soul of a letter, which is not saying that a letter may not be long. A
letter can afford to be long, it can never afford to be diffuse. In the
nature of things a good letter never flags because it is written by one
possessing intensified vision and a vibrant pen. Such a person knows
enough to stop before he is tired. The description, incident, comment of
a letter are forced to a concentration that gives them an advantage over
more formal and expansive writing. People who are interesting enough
to wish to write letters, people who are interested enough to wish to
read them, must by necessity of character have much else to occupy their
time beside their correspondence. The value of epistolary writing lies
in the fact that it is not a grave concern, but an inviting side issue.
Letters, like friendship, lose their charm when one makes a business of
them.
It is the greatest mistake to think that our hurried age is alien to
the composition of letters. Haste is the best thing that can happen to
a letter; it enforces compression. Actually our own time is peculiarly
adapted to produce letters. Its very hurry is inimical to sustained
writing. Thinking people may put themselves into letters when they
have no time to put themselves into books. Not only the rapidity of
the present but its intensity stimulates letter-writing. Even the most
commonplace people are quickened to observation and to thought at a
time when tragedies are being unrolled before the dullest of us, and
when every day is fateful with pity and fear for even the most obscure.
Personal reaction to the portents of the present is not to be escaped,
for never in history was there so much to see and to feel.
As never before was there so much to see, so never before was there such
an impulse to say something about it; but the immensity of our time
prevents our speaking in any finished and final form. Our day is too
vast for comment. All that we can record is our daily impressions; and
how much more readily these fall into letter shape than into treatise or
play or novel or poem! These four forms necessitate structure, analysis,
synthesis; they presuppose penetration into the significance back of
events. The letter is free from all these requirements, and therefore
is better fitted to express our times than, for example, the poem,
which to-day, false to its old high calling, deliberately avoids all
divination, all guesses at the ultimate and the infinite.
The letter, always humble, informal, inconsequent, need not strain to
recount any but an individual reaction and interpretation. It aspires to
no universal wisdom, and by its very modesty and sincerity may perhaps
for the future furnish the truest historical record obtainable of a
period too terrible to understand itself.
One would naturally expect letters to be produced in an age which,
bewildered as it is, is singularly articulate in regard to all its
puzzles and its pain. Ease of expression was never so general as now.
More people are able to say what they have to say than ever before,
and more people are able to say it, too, with facility and with force.
The newspapers are crowded by letters tingling with penetration, often
memorable in phrasing, written by men and women in every class and
place. The level of intelligence and of expression was never so high.
People are writing not only to the press but to each other better
letters than ever before. Impressions are so intense that they compel
utterance. One proof of the prevalence and popularity of letter-writing
to-day is in the many books and articles that are the chance discoveries
of the mail box. For such revelations, such unintentional literature,
every editor is on the alert. The history of our time is being
everywhere written to-day in the best letters that were ever penned; but
for one such collection discovered, how many are fated to be fugitive
always and unpreserved?
XII
_The Tyranny of Talent_
We come into life handicapped by many a tyranny, but by none heavier
than the insolence of that particular ability packed into our still
imperfect cranium. Although one may observe in rare individuals the
exhibition of a fine independence that from infancy to age consistently
refuses to develop the dominance of some obvious talent, for the most
part we yield to the conventional views that defy such despotism, and
to our own delight in that little toy, success, which the autocrat
dangles before our eyes. The only people never disillusioned are the
unsuccessful. Every time we succeed we take a tuck in a dream. Of all
domains, the most desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the only
people who never lose it, who, rather, reinherit it from day to day, are
the people who consistently and conscientiously fail.
There are, however, only an enviable few of us who are not able to
do some one thing well. It does not need, of course, to be anything
notable. We need not be the fools of fame, in order to taste all the
depths of success. We may merely be able to tie up parcels with neatness
and dispatch,--rest assured we shall be enforced to tie up everybody’s
parcels until we totter into our graves. Most households can boast a
member with an ability to find things; the demands upon the time and the
resourcefulness of such a professional finder prevent her ever finding
peace (a finder is, of course, always feminine). One could multiply
indefinitely examples from immediate experience that prove the argument
for inefficiency.
The tyranny of talent has beset our path with many little proverbs
that bark at our lagging heels. “Nothing succeeds like success” has
hounded many a man to a desolate eminence. “Whatever is worth doing is
worth doing well” is a maxim that we allow to control our activities as
thoroughly as we refuse to allow it to convince our intelligence: for
obviously whatever is worth doing is not worth doing well; on the one
hand the statement may authorize a wasteful and indiscriminate energy;
and, far worse, it is manifestly false, because everything that gives
you joy is worth doing, and ten to one the thing that gives you most joy
in the doing, is the thing that you do very ill indeed.
Superficially considered, success appears to be a consequence of
self-expression necessarily gratifying; intimately experienced, success
is found to be a consequence of self-repression most painful. The
trouble is that one never knows in time. Often one goes gambolling into
success unwittingly as a young animal, only to have one’s first joyous
neigh, or bray, of achievement cut short by feeling sudden hands bind
one to a treadmill--the treadmill that impels one to grind out similar
achievements, tramp-tramp-tramp, all the rest of one’s life. The worst
is that no one ever suspects the excellently efficient middle-aged nag
of still sniffing a larking canter through the mad spring meadows of the
unattempted. Our best friends suppose the treadmill contents us. Yet we
are always cherishing our own little dreams of a medium of expression
better suited to our individuality than that skill with which nature has
endowed us. Browning acknowledges the phenomenon in “One Word More,” in
noting the dissatisfaction of the artist with his proper medium:--
“Does he paint? He fain would write a poem,--
Does he write? He fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist’s,
Once and only once, and for one only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.”
The psychological experience described is more fundamental than its
application in the poem merely to love and a lady.
The harshness of a controlling talent is severe in restricting us not
alone to what we can do well, but to what we can do best. If we paint,
we must not only not write a poem, but we must not attempt a picture
different from our best; if we write, we must continue to write in the
type and the tone of our first successful experiment. The chef may long
to be an astronomer, but not only must he stick to his flesh-pots, but
if, in the gusto of some early egg-beating, he has stumbled upon the
omelet superlative, he must continue to furnish the world with omelets,
no matter if eggs become for him an utter banality, and no matter how
his fancy be seething with voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or
super-sheep.
The world is too much against us if we try to lay down the burdens
the task-master Talent has imposed. The successful man belongs to the
public: he no longer belongs to himself. Talent, tried and proved and
acclaimed, is too strong for us; we continue its savorless round,
against all our inward protest. We are its slaves, and through the
amiability ineradicable in most bosoms, the slaves also of our admiring
kinsfolk and friends and public; most of all, perhaps, the slaves of
our own self-doubt, for possibly after all they are right, possibly
we are justly the chattels of Talent, and not of that whispered self
of the air, taunting, teasing us, “What you have done is sordid, is
savorless! Come with me to attempt the unexplored!” This desire denied
is both acknowledgment that all our lordly labeled triumphs may have had
a false acclaim, and is also a protest against all mundane and mortal
valuations. Our unshackled ego, scorning things done that took the eye
and had the price, seems to have the truer voice. Is not art itself the
assurance that we are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of a
serene domain where the unaccomplished is forever the only thing worth
accomplishing?
XIII
_The Woman Who Writes_
I often wonder how other women write. Workers in art material are chary
of revealing processes that might save other workers wasted effort and
vain experiment, or, better yet, provoke challenge still more conducive
to success. I venture to believe that any woman’s literary product is a
matter of constant, and often desperate, compromise between writing and
living; and some examination into the wherefore of this fact may throw
light on the nature of writing processes, if not also on the nature of
woman processes. Since there are scant data for analyzing the methods of
other women writers, I give only my own, the experiment and experience
of a woman who has chosen to earn a living as a literary free lance.
Such conclusions must necessarily be personal and practical, pretending
to no theories except those made by immediate need. Driven to earn
to-day’s bread and butter, I really have no time to study the
superiority of prehistoric woman in the struggle for existence. Nor can
I give undivided attention to the achievements of my sex as promised by
the feminist millennium, when my 9 A.M. problem is to write
a story that shall please some editor, presumably male. I do not know
whether or not woman’s intellect is the equal of man’s; I know only that
mine is not.
While observation teaches me that every woman worker may gain by
adopting to a certain degree the methods of men, the feminist promise
of an eventual equal productiveness is to me a promise barren, if true.
So far as I can see, individual men and women have, alike, just so much
vitality. If women devote this vitality to doing what men do, they will
have just so much less to devote to being what women are. As a writer I
aspire to write a book; as a woman I shall forever prefer to be a person
rather than a book.
In an examination into the psychology and methods of the woman writer,
two things should be clearly kept in mind. The first is that of all
professions open to both sexes, writing should furnish the most reliable
conclusions in regard to the relative accomplishment of men and women;
for from Sappho’s day to ours a woman has been as free to write as a
man. Life is the only university in which a writer can be trained, and
that university has always been strictly coeducational. Neither have
there ever been any restrictions, commercial or social, to bar a woman’s
way to the literary career. It follows that any restrictions that exist
must be imposed, not from without, but from within, must be due to the
nature of the creature, physical, mental, and spiritual.
The second fact not to be forgotten is that of all the professions
practiced by women writing is the one most intimately affected by
a woman’s personal life and philosophy. It is far easier to detach
yourself from your own dailyness for the purposes of music, painting,
or science, than to separate yourself from the book you are writing,
which is necessarily self-expressive. Consequently a woman’s literary
productiveness is far more precariously dependent upon her peace of mind
than any other form of professional activity. There are too many mute
Miltons, too easily silenced, among my sex; but on the other hand--a
fact equally due to the feminine fusion of living and writing--history
has shown, perhaps will always show, that woman’s most valid
intellectual achievement is in literature.
As a writer-worker, I have found no way of getting even with my
limitations except by frankly shouldering them. The body my soul bears
upon its back is a heavier burden to carry than a man’s, and I find I
cannot accomplish the pilgrimage if I give up my own little jog-trot for
a man’s stride. All that happens is that I lose my breath, and break my
back, and have to lie down by the roadside to be mended. But when I do
keep my own small pace, I have time and strength to pick a few fence-row
flowers, too fine and frail and joyous for any striding man to notice.
I turn sharply from my own figures of speech to Mr. W. L. George’s
airier fancies, to the most vital facts of feminine existence brushed
so lightly by the masculine intelligence that it can say, “_in
passing_, that we do not attach undue importance to woman’s physical
disabilities.... I suspect that this is largely remediable, for I am
not convinced that it is woman’s peculiar physical conditions that
occasionally warp her intellect: it is equally possible that a warped
intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions. Therefore if,
as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this intellect, profound
changes may with time appear in these physical conditions.”
My own warped intellect, belonging to a woman who must write stories
for a living, points out that, if it has taken æons of differentiation
under the guidance of Dame Nature to accomplish my own personal physical
disabilities, I can hardly afford to wait for æons of differentiation
under the guidance of Mr. George to accomplish my own personal physical
freedom.
Looking at things as they are, I find my body constantly pushing upon
my work; but it is possible to treat a body with a certain humorous
detachment. It is possible to say to yourself, this is a headache that
you have, don’t do it the honor of letting it become a heartache, your
own or--far more fateful peril--your heroine’s. It is quite practicable
for a woman to live apart from her body even when it hurts, quite
practicable to give it sane and necessary attention, while keeping
the soul separate from it, exactly as if she were ministering to some
tired baby; this course is one of the only two solutions I have ever
discovered of the problem of preserving a worker’s spirit in a woman’s
body. The other solution lies in the frank concession to certain
physical incapacities as the price one pays for certain psychological
capacities.
A woman’s talent both for being a woman and for being a writer
is measured by the force and the accuracy of her intuitions. My
intuitions in regard to the people about me, when duly transformed into
story-stuff, have a definite market value. If I did not possess them, I
could not conceive, make, or sell a single manuscript. Supersensitive
impressions necessitate the supersensitive channels by which a woman’s
outer world connects with her inner one. If I will have woman’s
intuitions, I must have my woman’s nervous system. So long as I think
telepathy the best of sport, I must consent to give house-room to
its delicate machinery, even to the extent of keeping cool when that
machinery gets out of order and buzzes with neuritis or neuralgia or
insomnia. The additional fact is only superficially paradoxical, that
when the woman worker takes the disorder of her nervous machinery thus
philosophically, it is much less likely to have any disorder.
The fallibility of a woman’s body seems beyond disputing. If a man
does dispute it, it is because he never had one; if a woman disputes
it, well, personally, if I can’t be as strong as a man I should like
to be as honest as one! The fallibility of a woman’s intellect is a
little more open to argument, but only a little. I keep to my primary
assumption that I am not trying to see further than my nose, or to voice
any observations but my own. Among the men and women of history and
among those of my vicinity, I cannot see that woman’s brain is the equal
of man’s in originality, in concentration, or in power of sustained
effort. As a worker, I find that I can write for only a few hours and
no more: beyond that limit stands disaster for the woman, and, far
more perilous, disaster for the writing. In regard to my brain as in
regard to my body, the primary condition of doing my work at all lies in
recognizing the truth that I can’t do so much work, or do it so well, as
a man.
In all matters that can be weighed or measured, a man’s endowment is
superior to a woman’s; but, on the other hand, a woman’s endowment
consists in the quality and the quantity of an imponderable something
that cannot be weighed or measured. The chief difficulty about analyzing
a woman’s brain is that it is so hard to separate her brain from the
rest of the woman, whereas men are put together in plainly discernible
pieces--body, mind, and soul.
The perfection of a woman’s intellect depends upon the perfection of
its fusion with her personality. A woman amounts to most intellectually
when she amounts to still more personally. She cannot move in pieces
like a man, or like an earthworm. It needs the whole woman, acting
harmoniously, to write. A man can retire into his brain and make a book,
and a good one, leaving all the rest of his personality in confusion;
but a woman must put her whole house in order before she can go off
upstairs into her intellect and write. It follows that a woman’s
artistic achievement is for her a harder job than a man’s achievement is
for him, which would make the other fact--namely, that the woman’s book
when written is never so great as the man’s--seem additionally cruel, if
we could not discern that the best of women writers have, in attaining
that best, reached not one result but two: impelled to clean all her
spirit’s house before she can feel happy to write in it, a woman writer
achieves both a home that people like to visit and a book that people
like to read. Is it not true of all the greatest women authors that we
think of them as women before we think of them as authors?
Of fiction-makers in our own tongue the greatest man is Shakespeare
and the greatest woman is Jane Austen. In personal revelation both
were signally reserved, the woman the more so, seeing that she did not
even burst into the hieroglyphics of a sonnet sequence; but of the two
our first thought of the woman is “dear Jane,” and of the man, “dear
Rosalind”--or Beatrice or Mercutio. A man, possessing a separable
intellect and an imagination so original that it can sometimes create
what he personally is little capable of experiencing, may sometimes
write one thing and be another; but not so a woman. On the other hand,
has any woman ever attained such greatness that, at the mention of her
name, we think of the books she wrote before we think of the woman she
was?
It is true that professional women who direct their toil on the
conviction that a woman’s brain is of the same quality as a man’s
sometimes produce work that approximates a man’s in quantity. But sober
observation of such women does not make me want to be one. I see them
too often paying the penalty of being lopped and warped. Again I cannot
see that, while such women attain their Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and LL.D.’s,
they ever attain the highest rank in literature. Imaginative writing
seems to demand inexorably that a woman writer be inexorably a woman.
On the other hand, I have reached as a brain-worker the conclusion
that, while my head is different in substance from a man’s, I get most
work out of it when I copy a man’s mental methods. My brain is a vague
and volatile mass, shot through with fancies, whimseys, with flashes
of intuitive and illuminative wisdom, and it is a task surpassingly
difficult to hold all this volatility, this versatility, to the rigors
of artistic expression, to the stern architectonics of fiction. To the
degree that a woman shall succeed in imposing upon the matter of her
intellect the method of a man’s intellect, to that degree shall her work
show the sanity and serenity of universal, and sexless, art.
To impose upon a woman’s intellect a man’s discipline and detachment is
excellent in theory; it is staggering in practice. Convention and his
own will make a man’s time his own. A woman’s genius is for personality,
or achievement within herself; a man’s is for work, or achievement
outside of himself. Now it takes time to be a person, and it takes other
people. A real woman’s life is meshed in other people’s from dawn to
dark. These strands of other lives are to her so vital and precious that
for no book’s sake will she ever break them, yet for any book’s sake she
must disentangle them. A woman writer’s life is a constant compromise,
due to the fact that if she does not live with her fellows, she will not
have anything to write, and that if she does not withdraw from them, she
will not have time to write anything. I do not know how other writing
women manage their time. I know that to attain four hours a day at my
desk means that I must be revoltingly stern with myself, my family, and
my friends. One pays a price for retirement, but one need not pay too
heavily. A solution lies in retaining those relations that mean real
humanity, while cutting off those that mean only society: I do not play
bridge, but I do play with children.
Of course, it always seems plausible to solve the problem of time
to one’s self by running off to some strange place, but this never
works very well. The reason is that such isolation is sure to prove
evanescent, so that you have to keep packing your trunk and moving on
to new exile, because human tendrils are so strong and stealthy that
they push their way through the thickest walls you can build, and twine
themselves, wherever you hide, about the fingers that want to write. In
order to write a love-story of your own invention, you run away from
some friend’s too insistent love-story at home, and the first thing you
know you are deep in the love-affairs of your poor little chambermaid.
You escape home worries only to have some stranger’s troubles batter
down your hotel door. You might as well stay at home and put up with
the truth, that if you care enough about people to wish to write of
them, you will care enough for people to wish to live with them, abroad
no less than at home. Besides, boarding is bleak and blighting. If I
were a boarding woman, presently I should feel too chilly to wish to
write; my fancies and my fingers would be too numb for expression. I
need a home with its big warm peace and its little warm frictions before
I can feel cozy enough to want to chat with a pen.