That is what I like about this book. That a woman should have sprung up, who with her instinct can bore to the bottom layers of womanhood the quality that enables her to renew the race, her primæval quality, which man, with all his understanding, has never penetrated. A few years ago, in a study on Gottfried Keller’s women, I mentioned wildness as the basis of woman’s nature; Mrs. Egerton has given utterance to the same opinion in “Keynotes,” and has since tried to embody it in “Discords;” her best stories are those where the wild instinct breaks loose.
But why this terror of man, this physical repulsion, as in the story called “Virgin Soil”? The authoress says that it is because an ignorant girl in her complete innocence is handed over in marriage to an exacting husband. But that is not reason enough. The authoress’s intellect is not as true as her instinct. There must be something more. The same may be said of “Wedlock,” where the boarding-house cook marries an amorous working man, who is in receipt of good wages, for the sake of having her illegitimate child to live with her; he refuses to allow it, and when the child dies of a childish ailment, she murders his two children by the first marriage.
Mrs. Egerton’s stories are not invented; neither are they realistic studies copied from the notes in her diary. They are experiences. She has lived them all, because the people whom she portrays have impressed their characters or their fate upon her quivering nerves. The music of her nerves has sounded like the music of a stringed instrument beneath the touch of a strange hand, as in that masterpiece, “Gone Under,” where the woman tells her story between the throes of sea-sickness and drunkenness. The man to whom she belongs has punished her unfaithfulness by the murder of her child, and she revenges herself by drunkenness; yet, in spite of it all, he remains the master whom she is powerless to punish, and in her despair she throws herself upon the streets.
Only one man has had sufficient instinct to bring to light this abyss in woman’s nature, and that is Barbey d’Aurevilly, the poet who was never understood. But in Mrs. Egerton’s book there is one element which he had not discovered, and, although she does not express it in words, it shows itself in her description of men and women. Her men are Englishmen with bull-dog natures, but the women belong to another race; and is not this horror, this physical repulsion, this woman raging against the man, a true representation of the way that the Anglo-Saxon nature reacts upon the Celtic?
Two races stand opposed to one another in these sketches; perhaps the authoress herself is not quite conscious of it, but it is plainly visible in her descriptions of character, where we have the heavy, massive Englishman, l’animal mâle, and the untamable woman who is prevented by race instinct from loving where she ought to love.
In “The Regeneration of Two,” Mrs. Egerton has tried to describe a Celtic woman where she can love, but the attempt is most unsuccessful, for here we see plainly that she lacked the basis of experience. There are, however, many women who know what love is, although they have never experienced it. Men came, they married, but the man for them never came.
VI
There is a little story in this collection called “Her Share,” where the style is full of tenderness, perhaps even a trifle too sweet. It affects one like a landscape on an evening in early autumn, when the sun has gone down and twilight reigns; it seems as though veiled in gray, for there is no color left, although everything is strangely clear. Mrs. Egerton has a peculiarly gentle touch and soft voice where she describes the lonely, independent working girl. Her little story is often nothing more than the fleeting shadow of a mood, but the style is sustained throughout in a warm stream of lyric; for this Celtic woman certainly has the lyrical faculty, a thing which a woman writer rarely has, if ever, possessed before. There is something in her writing which seems to express a desire to draw near to the lonely girl and say: “You have such a good time of it in your grayness. In Grayness your nerves find rest, your instincts slumber, no man ill-treats you with his love, you experience discontent in contentment, but you know nothing of the torture of unstrung nerves. Would I were like you; but I am a bundle of electric currents bursting forth in all directions into chaos.”
Besides these two dainty twilight sketches, she has others like the description in “Gone Under,” of the storm on that voyage from America to England where we imagine ourselves on board ship, and seem to feel the rolling sea, to hear the ship cracking and groaning, to smell the hundreds of fetid smells escaping from all corners, and the damp ship-biscuits and the taste of the bitter salt spray on the tongue. We owe this forcible and matter-of-fact method of reproducing the impressions received by the senses to the retentive power of her nerves, through which she is able to preserve her passing impressions and to reproduce them in their full intensity. She relies on her womanly receptive faculty, not on her brain.