“Keynotes” is not addressed to men, and it will not please them. It is not written in the style adopted by the other women Georges,—George Sand and George Eliot,—who wrote from a man’s point of view, with the solemnity of a clergyman or the libertinism of a drawing-room hero. There is nothing of the man in this book, and no attempt is made to imitate him, even in the style, which springs backwards and forwards as restlessly as a nervous little woman at her toilet, when her hair will not curl and her stay-lace breaks. Neither is it a book which favors men; it is a book written against them, a book for our private use.
There have been such books before; old-maid literature is a lucrative branch of industry, both in England and Germany (the two most unliterary countries in Europe), and that is probably the reason why the majority of authoresses write as though they were old maids. But there are no signs of girlish prudery in “Keynotes;” it is a liberal book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and entirely without respect for the husband; it is a book with claws and teeth ready to scratch and bite when the occasion offers,—not the book of a woman who married for the sake of a livelihood, but the book of a devoted wife, who would be inseparable from her husband if only he were not so tiresome, and dull, and stupid, such a thorough man, insufferable at times, and yet indispensable as the husband always is to the wife.
And it is the book of a gentlewoman!
We have had tell-tale women before, but Heaven preserve us! Fru Skram is a man in petticoats; she speaks her mind plainly enough,—rather too plainly to suit my taste. “Gyp,” a distinguished Frenchwoman, has written “Autour du Mariage,” and she cannot be said to mince matters either. But here we have something quite different; something which does not in the least resemble Gyp’s frivolous worldliness or Amalie Skram’s coarseness. Mrs. Egerton would shudder at the thought of washing dirty linen in public, and she could not, even if she were to force herself, treat the relationship between husband and wife with cynical irony, and she does not force herself in the very least.
She writes as she really is, because she cannot do otherwise. She has had an excellent education, and is a lady with refined tastes, with something of that innocence of the grown woman which is almost more touching than a girl’s innocence, because it proves how little of his knowledge of life in general, and his sex in particular, the Teutonic husband confides to his wife. She stands watching him,—an eating, loving, smoking organism. Heavens! how wearisome! So loved, and yet so wearisome! It is unbearable! And she retreats into herself, and realizes that she is a woman.
It is almost universal amongst women, especially Germans, that they do not take man as seriously as he likes to imagine. They think him comical,—not only when they are married to him, but even before that, when they are in love with him. Men have no idea what a comical appearance they present, not only as individuals, but as a race. The comic part about a man is that he is so different from women, and that is just what he is proudest of. The more refined and fragile a woman is, the more ridiculous she is likely to find the clumsy great creature who takes such a roundabout way to gain his comical ends.
To young girls especially man offers a perpetual excuse for a laugh, and a secret shudder. When men find a group of women laughing among themselves, they never suspect that it is they who are the cause of it. And that again is so comic! The better a man is, the more he is in earnest when he makes his pathetic appeal for a great love; and woman, who takes a special delight in playing a little false, even when there is no necessity, becomes as earnest and solemn as he, when all the time she is only making fun of him. A woman wants amusement, wants change; a monotonous existence drives her to despair, whereas a man thrives on monotony, and the cleverer he is the more he wishes to retire into himself, that he may draw upon his own resources; a clever woman needs variety, that she may take her impressions from without.
... The early blossoms of the cherry-tree shudder beneath the cold rain which has burst their scales; this shudder is the deepest vibration in Mrs. Egerton’s book. What is the subject? A little woman in every imaginable mood, who is placed in all kinds of likely and unlikely circumstances: in every story it is the same little woman with a difference, the same little woman, who is always loved by a big, clumsy, comic man, who is now good and well-behaved, now wild, drunk, and brutal; who sometimes ill-treats her, sometimes fondles her, but never understands what it is that he ill-treats and fondles. And she sits like a true Englishwoman with her fishing-rod, and while she is waiting for a bite, “her thoughts go to other women she has known, women good and bad, school friends, casual acquaintances, women-workers,—joyless machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling maids grown old in the endeavor to get settled, patient wives who bear little ones to indifferent husbands until they wear out,—a long array. She busies herself with questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for excitement, for change, this restless craving for sun and love and motion? Stray words, half confidences, glimpses through soul-chinks of suppressed fires, actual outbreaks, domestic catastrophes,—how the ghosts dance in the cells of her memory! And she laughs—laughs softly to herself because the denseness of man, his chivalrous conservative devotion to the female idea he has created, blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex nature, ... and well it is that the workings of our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning enough or great enough to seem to be what they would have us, rather than be what we are. But few of them have had the insight to find out the key to our seeming contradictions,—the why a refined, physically fragile woman will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions, and love him; the why strength and beauty appeal more often than the more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart; the why women (and not the innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard to forgive in their fellows. They have all overlooked the eternal wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the mildest, best woman. Deep in through ages of convention this primeval trait burns, an untamable quantity that may be concealed, but is never eradicated by culture,—the keynote of woman’s witchcraft and woman’s strength.”
They are not stories which Mrs. Egerton tells us. She does not care for telling stories. They are keynotes which she strikes, and these keynotes met with an extraordinary and most unexpected response. They struck a sympathetic chord in women, which found expression in a multitude of letters, and also in the sale of the book. An author can hope for no happier fate than to receive letters which re-echo the tune that he has discovered in his own soul. Those who have received them know what pleasant feelings they call forth. We often do not know where they come from, we cannot answer them, nor should we wish to do so if we could. They give us a sudden insight into the hidden centre of a living soul, where we can gaze into the secret, yearning life, which is never lived in the sight of the world, but is generally the best part of a person’s nature; we feel the sympathetic clasp of a friendly hand, and our own soul is filled with a thankfulness which will never find expression in words. The dark world seems filled with unknown friends, who surround us on every side like bright stars in the night.
Mrs. Egerton had struck the fundamental chord in woman’s nature, and her book was received with applause by hundreds of women. The critic said: “The woman in ‘Keynotes’ is an exceptional type, and we can only deal with her as such.” “Good heavens! How stupid they are!” laughed Mrs. Egerton. Numberless women wrote to her, women whom she did not know, and whose acquaintance she never made. “We are quite ordinary, every-day sort of people,” they said; “we lead trivial, unimportant lives; but there is something in us which vibrates to your touch, for we, too, are such as you describe.” “Keynotes” took like wildfire.