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.
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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.