Yet in any crucial choice a real woman chooses living rather than literature. My brain itself approves this yielding of intellect to emotions for the very simple reason that, if I don’t thus yield, the emotions denied will avenge themselves on the brain, and the book I write will be unnatural because I myself am unnatural.
Once I thought it impossible to write when people about me were in distress: I proposed to myself to wait until things should settle down. I perceived that things never do settle down; that for women who have human affections, there will always be somebody somewhere to worry about. It is rather inspiring to be a woman, because it is so difficult. With the winds blowing from every direction at once, one must somehow steer a course that will reveal alike to the reader who knows one’s book and to the friend who knows one’s heart, a halcyon serenity.
A relative detachment from her own living is as necessary for a woman writer as an absolute detachment is stultifying. Since for a woman expression is fused with experience, clean hands and a pure heart are for her the fundamental demands of art, and this fact means that she must be constantly scouring off her sense of humor with spiritual sapolio before she can effectively handle a pen. Be sure her philosophy will find her out in her book far more clearly than in a man’s.
The natural fusion of a woman’s brain with her emotions, resisted, leads to intellectual weakness; accepted, leads to intellectual strength. In the history of literature George Sand is the great example of a woman who won success by the masculine solution of detachment from experience, and Jane Austen, the great example of a woman who won success by the feminine solution of identification with her own dailyness.
I am inclined to think the latter by far the greater artist, just as I am inclined to think that in literature rather than in any other form of mental activity will always be found woman’s highest intellectual achievement, for the simple reason that woman’s genius consists in personality, and for the expression of personality words are the only adequate medium. Jane Austen’s example is the great encouragement for the woman who wishes to write without ceasing to be a simple everyday woman. Jane Austen was capable of a detachment that enabled her to write books that give no hint of the thunder of the Napoleonic wars even when she had two brothers on fighting ships. She was capable of an identification with her surroundings that enabled her to write novels of universal humanity and eternal artistry and to keep right on being everybody’s aunt at the same time. She was sane and humorous in her novels because she was sane and humorous out of them. She achieved fame because she had first achieved personality. Still, her fame is only a thin frail fire set beside the effulgence of a dozen men of her time.
Yet I would rather have been Jane Austen than Shelley or Wordsworth or Keats. It is perfectly just that men’s books should be greater than women’s, because men are willing to pay the price. Not to write “Macbeth” would I willingly give up an afternoon’s romp with a baby. As a woman I reckon my spirit’s capital, not in terms of accomplishment, but in terms of my own joy, and a baby brings me more joy than a book.
Men ought to write better than women because they care more; in a way women who write have the more impersonal outside-of-themselves impulsion, because inside of themselves they don’t care. I acknowledge the urge of writing and I am willing up to a certain point to pay by means of a vigorous mental discipline and a certain self-saving from useless self-spending, but I don’t pretend that writing satisfies me. Something descends upon me and says, “Write,” and shakes me like a helpless kitten until I do write; but it’s a relief when the shaking is over, and I am left to the merrier business of merely being myself. In other words, I am a writer because I can’t help it, but I am a woman because I choose to be.
XIV
Picnic Pictures
HER white house is the same, with a difference. It was always a house fitted to the person like a garment, a friendly house with peace in the corners, a house warm with sun or firelight; yet I think we always used the house merely as a starting-place for picnics, for running away into the out-of-doors with a well-stocked basket. We are at best only reformed dryads, my friend and I, and I am not even reformed. I think perhaps that it was in like manner that we used our two selves, merely as a starting-point for picnics, for the leap into the infinite, the challenging of space and time, the tossing of stars like play-balls from one to the other, always with the joy of the word shaping on the tongue to the gleam in a friend’s eye. We are lovers of words, I and she. True we also had talk in the library, dusked with books, dead men’s spirits packed shoulder to shoulder on the shelves. There was brave firelight in the library, and quiet candles, and there was also Xerxes. The great gray Persian curled on one corner of the big desk. Even asleep he dominated the home in his sole masculinity. Yet to me he was sexless and sphinxlike except when he forsook his Oriental calm for strange gambols in the white moonlight, a bounding gray shape of a tiger grace. Sometimes Xerxes rose and stretched as if our conversation bored him, sometimes his great purring drowned out the Occidental flippancy of our chat. He was more king than cat, and he always made me a little uncomfortable, that Xerxes. To-day he is not dead but deposed. His place on the desk is usurped by a sturdy box of cigars.
However happily we might talk in the library we always knew we were better without a roof, for in the blood of the born picnicker there is something that must always be running, dancing, flying. Out-of-doors, there were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk delved too deep, and the pine-tops to fill all pauses with quiet music. We were the better picnickers because we lived for the most part in life’s schoolroom. We counted our picnic days and sorted them into due order of excellence, some better, some not quite so merry, yet all very good. But lately I had begun to wonder about the picnics, for the difference in the white, hill-girdled house is a husband. When our friends marry we always wonder about the picnics, for sorrow is always a third comrade to hold two friends’ hands the tighter, and to keep their feet more closely in step; it is happiness that may sever and un-self people.