This admirable piece of observation deals with a section of women who have come into being through our industrial civilisation with its wrong ideals and stupid customs. Marcel Prévost[1] in his preface to the book, speaks of Elsie Lindtner’s confession as a revelation of the feminine soul of all time. With the latter part of this opinion I entirely disagree. Rather would I say that it is a revelation of the soul of woman as that soul has been evolved through the repression of natural instincts and the want of satisfying fields for the expression of energy, in an atmosphere which very surely gives birth to the modern demons of confused desires and unconscious unhappiness.
The title of the book is not, I think, well chosen. The Dangerous Age—Elsie Lindtner was forty-two when she wrote her confession—was dangerous because of the life which had preceeded it. There is, without doubt, a cleavage in life, which may be said to be marked by the diminishing of attraction towards the opposite sex. But this is common to men as well as to women. It belongs to no special age, and its proportion of danger to the individual rests, first on the fulness or poverty of experience before this period arrives, and secondly on the power to extract from the past the joyous impulse for continuous living. But to Elsie Lindtner, as to all women of such false and restricted experience, it was far more than a cleavage, and because she had never lived simply and completely, she experienced that emptiness which strikes the soul with death when the consciousness comes that the opportunities of life are passing.
The terror of approaching age robbed her of all her hope of future happiness, just because she had emptiness in her past.
It is easy to condemn her, to speak of her selfishness, her falseness, her colossal egoism—there are few adjectives of condemnation that I have not heard applied to the Elsie
Lindtner’s of life. Yet if we look at the matter rightly, rather ought we to admire her for the perfect self-sacrifice with which she pursued the one occupation.
II
The question at its root is one of right functioning. For mark the real point of Elsie Lindtner’s history is this: all her actions were based on search for pleasure. To gain the possessions of this world was the fixed aim for which she bartered her soul. What does she tell us in one of her letters? She is writing of her school-days. A class mate had said to her, “Of course, a prince will marry you, for you are the prettiest girl here.” She carried the words home to a maid who added to the poison:
“That’s true enough,” she said, “a pretty face is worth a pocketful of gold.”
“Can one sell a pretty face, then?” the child asked.