III
Another characteristic is beginning to make itself felt, which was bound to come at last. And that is an intense and morbid consciousness of the ego in women. This consciousness was unknown to our mothers and grandmothers; they may have had stronger characters than ours, as they undoubtedly had to overcome greater hindrances; but this consciousness of the ego is quite another thing, and they had not got it.
Neither of these women, whose books I have been reviewing, are authors by profession. There is nothing they care for less than to write books, and nothing that they desire less than to hear their names on every one’s lips. Both were able to write without having learned. Other authoresses of whom we hear have either taught themselves to write, or have been taught by men. They began with an object, but without having anything to say; they chose their subjects from without.
Neither of these women have any object. They do not want to describe what they have seen. They do not want to teach the world, nor do they try to improve it. They have nothing to fight against. They merely put themselves into their books. They did not even begin with the intention of writing; they obeyed an impulse. There was no question of whether they wished or not; they were obliged. The moment came when they were forced to write, and they did not concern themselves with reasons or objects. Their ego burst forth with such power that it ignored all outer circumstances; it pressed forward and crystallized itself into an artistic shape. These women have not only a very pronounced style of their own, but are in fact artists; they became it as soon as they took up the pen. They had nothing to learn, it was theirs already.
This is not only a new phase in the work of literary production, it is also a new phase in woman’s nature. Formerly, not only all great authoresses, but likewise all prominent women, were—or tried to be—intellectual. That also was an attempt to accommodate themselves to men’s wishes. They were always trying to follow in the footsteps of the man. Man’s ideas, interests, speculations, were to be understood and sympathized with. When philosophy was the fashion, great authoresses and intelligent women philosophized. Because Goethe was wise, Rahel was filled with the wisdom of life. George Eliot preached in all her books, and philosophized all her life long after the manner of Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. George Sand was the receptacle for ideas—men’s ideas—of the most contradictory character, which she immediately reproduced in her novels. Good Ebner-Eschenbach writes as sensibly, and with as much tolerance, as a right worthy old gentleman; and Fru Leffler chose her subjects from among the problems which were being discussed by a few well-known men. None of their writings can be considered as essentially characteristic of women. It was not an altogether unjust assertion when men declared that the women who wrote books were only half women.
Yet these were the best. Others, who wrote as women, had no connection with literature at all; they merely knitted literary stockings.
Mrs. Egerton and the author of “Dilettantes” are not intellectual, not in the very least. The possibility of being it has never entered their brain. They had no ambition to imitate men. They are not in the least impressed by the speculations, ideas, theories, and philosophies of men. They are sceptics in all that concerns the mind; the man himself they can perceive.
They perceive his soul, his inner self,—when he has one,—and they are keenly sensitive when it is not there. The other women with the great names are quite thick-headed in comparison. They judge everything with the understanding; these perceive with the nerves, and that is an entirely different kind of understanding.
They understand man, but, at the same time, they perceive that he is quite different from themselves, that he is the contrast to themselves. The one is too highly cultured; the other has too sensitive a nervous system to permit the thought of any equality between man and woman. The idea makes them laugh. They are far too conscious of being refined, sensitive women. They do not concern themselves with the modern democratic tendencies regarding women, with its levelling of contrasts, its desire for equality. They live their own life, and if they find it unsatisfying, empty, disappointing, they cannot change it. But they do not make any compromise to do things by halves; their highly-developed nerves are too sure a standard to allow of that. They are a new race of women, more resigned, more hopeless, and more sensitive than the former ones. They are women such as the new men require; they have risen up on the intellectual horizon as the forerunners of a generation who will be more sensitive, and who will have a keener power of enjoyment than the former ones. Among themselves these women exchange sympathetic glances, and are able to understand one another without need of confession. They, with their highly-developed nerves, can feel for each other with a sympathy such as formerly a woman only felt for man. In this way they go through life, without building castles in the air, or making any plans for the future; they live on day by day, and never look beyond. It might be said that they are waiting; but as each new day arrives, and the sand of time falls drop by drop upon their delicate nerves, even this imperceptible burden is more than they can bear; the strain of it is too much for them.