“Choose,” commanded my mother, “will you have a new dress this winter or ‘St. Nicholas’ for next year?” I was stung at the implication that for such as me there could have been a doubt of the choice. “St. Nicholas,” of course! A magazine doth not wax old as doth a garment, and besides, is not reading more than raiment? Alas for the high intellectuality of eight years old! If the choice lay now between the dress and the book, would I hug the volume and walk among my fellows gladly shabby? I would not.
About at this same period we were visited by a family of strange little girls. There were three of them; they stayed three days, they changed their dresses three times a day, and they never wore the same dress twice. We regarded them as we might have regarded the fauna of Mars,—they were an utterly new thing. It was wonder at first, then pity, then wonder again, for we found that they liked it! Being little human animals even as we, they would rather be tricked out in fresh frocks than play tag! What were we going to wear that evening, they asked. Why, how in the world should we know? Something clean, of course. Our visitor’s bits of frocks were embroidered, beribboned, bevelveted in a manner simply incomprehensible. What in the world happened when they got dirty? That visit filled me with prophetic misgivings; some day I should have to wear stuff goods. In a vision I saw the great gulf that separates the grown-up who cannot be put through the wash-tub from the child who can. Horror of the unwashable! “Shades of the prison-house,”—Oh, no!
Just here the retrospect reaches the place where the road turned; I do not say, forked, for it was not a question of alternatives; I was a woman-child, and I had to keep on in the only way. Hitherto my clothes had been as much or as little myself as the down of the chick, or the fur of the rabbit. Providence and my parents had provided my apparel without the faintest solicitude on my part, leaving me free to attend to my body and soul. This could not long endure. It is the era of Mother Hubbards that bridges together the old time and the new. The Mother Hubbard was so noteworthy, so startling, in fact, after the trimness to which we were accustomed, this
It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation like the pictures in the mythology. I first admired, then coveted, then teased my mother into making me one. It was finished just after dinner, and though it was yet early for dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon the street, which, to my disappointment, was empty of children. There I strutted, and swelled, and waited for the others to come and see, and was exalted, not recognizing the first shackles of my slavery. Now, first, I become acquainted with Fashion; now, first, I regard other people’s clothes as the most important factor in the production of my own. Too truly it is the close of the first chapter, the end of innocence, the end of joy, the end of sexlessness. I am irrevocably a woman: imitation and emulation are henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume. Now, first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and then I look a little higher to see that face and that mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what colors best suit them. I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they tell me, and I wonder what external clothes and conduct are most becoming to those eyes and to that inner meshed personality they reveal. What is becoming! The word is epitome of all that the grown-up is and the child is not.
The period of my teens was the period when my wardrobe was continually in abeyance upon the higher claims of my education. It was not possible simultaneously to beautify my brain and my body. I acquiesced in the circumstance, for the most part, with occasional fits of passionate revolt, and more or less constant misanthropy. I blush to recall that at one time the light which was in me turned to darkness for a year or more, and all on account of my clothes. I found myself at a great city school, I a shy little country waif, most curiously clad. I looked at the clothes of my compeers, and I locked my lips and my heart against all converse with my fellows, and I walked to the top of my classes in a desolation of spirit that was tragic. I would have exchanged my monthly reports with those of my most addle-pated classmate if I could have had her clothes. Never since have I approached the intellectual achievement of fourteen; but the shabbiness of my motives was greater than that of my costume. The effect was not wholly evil, but I here confess that I never should have learned Latin rules if I had been prettily dressed. I wanted to show those stylish misses that there was no backwoods brain under my backwoods hat—that was all! I attributed to others a snobbishness wholly my own, and for that once clothes came perilously near costing me all human joy in human friendship. If my wardrobe had never bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,—and incidentally have furnished meteoric display for a dozen universities. My clothes improved; I am not friendless, but dull and illiterate, and all through the shaping destiny of dress.
This paragraph in my history yields me this much of philosophy as regards the influence of clothes on the social relations. My dress, so long as it be not conspicuous for disorder, disruption, or display, has much less effect on others than on myself. But as for myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained of fate that I be forever subdued to what I wear, I shall never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed, be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the level gaze of conscious equality which alone gains friendship. No woman was ever so proud as not to cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so happy as not to be made unhappy by her clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to the breezes,—there is no exaltation like that of knowing one’s costume stylish, becoming, and, if possible, expensive. Only by recognizing our limitations may we women successfully cope with them; one’s own respect is surest guarantee of other people’s; for women self-respect is soonest secured by clothes: therefore, O women, dress!
I have digressed from the contemplation of my girlhood, but I have not exhausted that time, for I have not touched upon second-hand clothes or long dresses. As a girl I was perpetually made over. I came to regard fresh material as something almost sacrilegious. Of all gift-horses, clothes are the most difficult not to criticize, and especially old clothes. My prosperous cousins did not possess my complexion, my tastes, or my figure, and yet I inevitably succeeded to their clothes, so that I came to watch their expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were severely strained by “a lively sense of favors yet to come.” In such circumstances it is well to have in the family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all in one, for only such a combination of inspiration and devotion could have kept my head up in those days when I was always second-hand.
To be honest, am I anything else now? What else is it to be fashionable? With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other people’s clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker’s brain, but what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn. What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman? Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,—dear me, how second-hand we women are!
The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life when dress becomes an ecstasy—as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but the working of natural laws; in the spring do not the very trees prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming? Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my cheeks,—Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at last,—it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen’s. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. The princess is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor—“I am all dressed for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!”
But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way. The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world, so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end.
What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keeping our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air,—what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on the part of the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts the entire menagerie through their tricks. No, I would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let me at this business of dressing, pluckily.
Women are nobler than men; it is because we are purified in the fires of more severe temptation. Man does not encounter the demoralizing influence of the dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave words. To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced to get our own way with the dressmaker, seeing with what delight and dexterity she lifts her spurning foot against our desires! Do we presume to know what we want to wear?—alternately she sporteth and scorneth—and yet we lift not against her her proper scissors. She practices dark arts; she runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no more seen—until the dress comes home. Lies are about her head. Her promises are vanity, and her bills elastic as a fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity alone can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend a wedding in twenty minutes; even now the caterer “hath paced into the hall”; or we leave for California in an hour, and even now our sleeper paws the track. By the ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and yet so signal is female virtue that after centuries of dressmakers we are still unscathed in our integrity, and are still the church-goers of the species.
There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to dress,—to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the æsthetic. That is what our dressing is to us,—an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the world?
For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,—our invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross—a black coat and trousers an insincerity—for the hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
Verily, “my soul on its lone way” has traveled far from the days of babyhood, kicking against all wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when personality exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves and shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality and the outer layer of costume have become cosy and comfortable, so that by no means do I wish to lay them aside.
What next? Some day I shall be given into the hands of those who
Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me, of skyey tissues and opalescent tints? Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again be slowly subdued to the clothing and conventions of another world?
Or when I pop up the lid of this upholstered bone-box, my body, shall my soul be then and there set free,—escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind or moonshine, having cast from it—one by one as a garment—age, sex, race, creed, and culture? But what if in this off-shedding I strip from me my personality, myself? This involuted wrapping in which I am duly done up and ticketed and passed about among my acquaintance,—what if to rend this were to leave me in the shivering nakedness of the impersonal?
PEOPLE and periods sometimes think strange things about themselves. I am constantly astounded by the contrast between my view of my friend and his view of himself. Tact is the bridge that spans the chasm between a man’s opinion of himself and his neighbor’s opinion of him. In truth each opinion suffers from the lie of the label. There is nothing so volatile as human personality, yet it has a passion for ranging itself in bottles on a shelf, each with its little gummy ticket. If the peril of the pigeon-hole is great for the individual, it is even greater for a whole period, which is but the aggregate of personalities, each of them only a breath, a vapor, the shaping of a cloud.
One of the largest, loudest labels with which we placard the present age is its irreligion. Because we don’t build cathedrals? But let any one of us look about into the hearts of say twenty of his immediate friends: are there no churches building there? As for me, I am quite dinned by their hammers, and often, when I want to steal into some one’s soul, for a little quiet communion, I am incommoded by the obtrusive scaffolding. No religion? Never so many religions, and from that very fact, never so genuine. Obviously, if you make a religion yourself, it’s your business to believe it. There is an analogy between clothes and creeds: you wear with a different air those your father has bought for you and those you have earned for yourself.
I do not find people indifferent to religion, I find them profoundly responsible for it; my friends stand each at the door of a temple exacting tribute, although there is not one who would not be horrified by the blatancy of the metaphor. They do not call themselves religious, but they do call to me to come in. The trouble perhaps is with my listening ear. I was born with it, and without my will, or knowledge, it has become an inconveniently obvious appendage. It takes a great deal of time to have a listening ear. It has heard so many creeds of late that I must perforce counter-label this irreligious age devout. I am not inventing the list, and I do not believe the variety among my acquaintance exceptional,—Neo-Hellenic, Neo-Hebrew, Catholic, Christian Scientist, Episcopal, high, hot, and holy, Episcopal, low, hot, and holy, Swedenborgian, Baptist, Presbyterian, and, latest, a sect that scorns a name, but that I would call Destinarian. Miss Sinclair is of this communion, for, in “The Three Brontës,” does she not call upon Destiny to account for every mystery of those three strange lives? The religion of the Destinarian consists in not having one, yet not one of my friends pronounces so reverently the name of deity as my friend of this no-faith murmurs the word, Destiny. “It is ordained,” she says of some circumstance, and says it with awe, the humility before omniscience with which the Hebrew prophets spoke his name Jah.
There they stand, my twenty men and women, beckoning me to the doors of their temples; and yes, of course, I go in; it saves argument. I go into each and each friend is so busy pointing out the architecture that no one ever notices when I slip out, out into the open. When one stops to think of it, it is curiously old-fashioned and orthodox, the open, whether it is sea or sun. The planets are conspicuously conservative, but the morning stars still sing together.
Now, not one of my friends here listed is that good old-fashioned work of God, a shouting Methodist, and yet, in effect, there is not one of them who is not exactly this. As a child, I attended camp-meetings, I heard people testify. The tendency to testify is older than camp-meetings, and it will outlast them. Today, though long grown-up, I find my friends still shouting their experiences, I find myself still the shy and wondering congregation. As in the word “camp-meeting” there is military reminiscence, so the “professor” is lineal descendant of miles gloriosus, his survivor in the church militant. A puzzling number of people still like to exhibit their scars; a larger number like to exhibit the particular philosophic armor by which they—by implication—win in the battle of life still ever merrily waging. But he who shows a scar deserves another, and no sword ever equally fitted two hands.
It is the implication that I resent in all testifying,—super-sensitive doubtless. I do not want to be converted. I grow shy and secret when I suspect my friend of wanting to remodel me to the pattern of his creed. The most perilous thing in friendship is to let a friend know that we want to reform him. The very essence of friendship is in the lines,—
and in a recent dedication to one who was “Guide, philosopher, but friend.” In all testifying, there is an implied “Copy me,” which our own skittish ego resents. We all incorporate in ourselves our friends’ virtues, but only those of which they are most unconscious; whereas people are always conscious of their battles; they always want to talk about them; and yet how many different ways there are of winning the same battle. If I admire your bravery, I may copy the creed that created it, but you need not hold up that creed for my inspection, for it is you yourself who are under my inspection. You are your sole argument, you need no testifying.
I have been much talked to of late, and much talked at. I have seen the fanatic spark in eyes that would have been aghast to know its presence there. Once upon a time there was only one church, and excommunication from that was a simple and straightforward matter; it can hardly be an irreligious age when one can feel, in listening to the testimony from the score of temples one’s friends have built, that one is in danger of being excommunicated from all twenty. But better excommunication than that, entering and accepting, I, too, might feel called upon to testify.
I, too, could testify,—I, a mere sunworshiper. I could point out the vaulted sky of my private chapel, most ancient and most orthodox. I could repeat for you the liturgies the wind has made, much the same that it chanted for Moses on Sinai; for are any of your creeds so new, my friends? I could point out to you altar-lights genial and tolerant, the taper-flames of stars. There was once One long ago who went to the mountain for prayer, for there is nothing new about the temple of out-of-doors; but if I, its worshiper, do not carry forth some peace from its great silence, some joy from its godly mirth, then would not even my infinite temple shrink to the size of words, if I should testify?
IT is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is a bygone art. Arguments for this opinion point to the array of picture-cards expressing every sentiment known to experience, and saving, by the neatness and dispatch of their machine-made couplets, all the fumbling effort we used to expend in saying thank you to a hostess, bon voyage to a friend, or even in offering sympathy to one bereaved. The night-message also seems to indicate a sorry substitution for the formality of the post. The truth is that the picture-card, by doing the work of the duty letter, clears the way for the real letter, so spontaneous that it can’t help being written; while the night-message contributes to epistolary art a terseness and vigor that should not be undervalued. While we continue to look back at the voluminous eighteenth century and to regret the decay of letter-writing, we are every one of us every week receiving from a dozen different correspondents letters vibrant with personality, vivid, readable, inviting preservation. Far from not writing letters, people never wrote more letters than they do to-day, nor better ones; if ours are not so long as the letters of the past, they are far livelier. Both in theory and in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted to be epistolary.
If each one of us will examine that packet of letters we are loath to destroy because they have made us see pictures or think thoughts or chuckle with appreciation, we shall pause to ponder how diverse in character are the authors. One missive, guiltless of grammar, is racy with backwoods wisdom; another shows the rapier wit and apt allusiveness of the Hellenist; another is as crisp and keen as the typewriter that clicked it forth; still another peals with freshman skylarking. It is not at first easy to perceive underlying all the variety the essential characteristics which belong alike to all these correspondents and which differentiate that happily constituted being, the born letter-writer; man or woman, young or old, educated or illiterate, certain qualities he must inalienably possess.
The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never grow stale for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if across a painter’s canvas, and its commonplace roof-line must keep always its quaintness and its quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd his day, he must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive the color of hair and the cut of clothes and the connotation of attitudes as vividly as if he were always seated before a rising curtain. This freshness of vision varies in different people. It is always found in every good letter, but of the writers, some require the stimulus of an unusual scene; while they have not the power to see or to paint the pictures of Dulltown Center, they can portray Tokio or Archangel till it glows on the wall before the reader’s eye; others, more really gifted, see drama everywhere, even if they have never been twenty miles from their own farm and forest. Whether our correspondent is stay-at-home or traveler, he must so combine his gift of observation with his gift of representation that his angle of vision is unique. We have all of us received narratives of travel that were colorless as guide-books and narratives of a village sewing society that were palpitant with portraiture. The true letter-writer makes us feel not only that we have been present at a scene but that we have been present with him.
The genuine epistolary endowment shows qualities in pleasant poise. A letter should be personal, but not over-personal. A self-analyst may cover many pages of notepaper, but we read him only under protest, and drop him promptly into the waste-basket. We enjoy the record of personal observation just so long as it is balanced by detachment. We like to see our friend moving across the scene he describes, but we don’t want to see him bulking large in his own landscape. In a well-penned letter the people written about stand forth as vividly as does the author. It is this power of amused detachment that makes all true letter-writers true humorists as well.
To write letters it is not enough to be observant, objective, humorous: one must have the impulse to express the observation and the fun. This impulse is, of course, the literary will to write, but there is a sharp distinction between the littérateur and the letter-writer. The latter does not merely wish to write, he wishes to write to somebody. He is not lyric, for it is not enough for him to burst into song unheard; he is not a diarist, for it is not enough for him to talk to himself; he is not a genius, for it is not enough for him to talk to a vast, formless creature called the Public. A letter-writer is one who finds life so entertaining that he must talk about it to a friend. Never a self-sufficient person, he is as genial as he is shy; it would therefore no more occur to him to pour himself out upon paper that nobody was to read than to pour himself into print that everybody was to read. He has the literary impulse without the literary ambition. He must be sure of his auditor before his pen will move, and yet when it once begins to gambol, it carries him off and away, after the manner of all pens, until the friendly listener becomes idealized from homely reality into very quintessence of sympathy.
The individual auditor is not only the first requisite for the letter-writer, but the determining influence that gives to letters themselves the qualities which distinguish them from other forms of literature. Letters stand halfway between the formlessness of conversation and the formality of essay or fiction. A letter to a friend has this advantage over a chat with him, that you can choose the impression you wish to make and make it without interference from the interlocutor’s telepathy, or interruption through his rejoinders. Conversation gives and takes, but a letter only gives, and gives exactly what it wishes, no more. In a letter one employs words, weaving them happily to one’s will, but it is a mistake to suppose that conversation is much concerned with words. It is a far more shifting and subtle thing than that, for mere speech is constantly supplemented or corrected or contradicted by the twinkle in our eyes, the tautness or tremor in our voice, the twisting of our lips. The attention of the listener is diverted by watching all these manifestations. While it has all the camaraderie of chat, the letter, in the clarity and singleness of its impression, is distinctly different from talk.
The epistolary form differs as much from the memoir as it does from conversation. The diarist is a self-important person, talking to himself and to the future, and conscious of his effect upon both. If he is great enough, that effect is worth making, and we read his account of himself and his times with the reverence we accord to history. We do not read, however, with the pleasant personal warmth with which we peruse a letter, for we know the diarist is not speaking as comrade to comrade. We know and he knows that he is speaking to posterity.
The letter has the advantage of not belonging at all to conscious or commercialized literature. It is not written to be seen of men, nor yet to be sold to them. It is literature intimate, unintentional, overheard. In so much as it is personal expression, plus detachment but minus self-importance, and also in so much as it endeavors to adapt itself sympathetically to another person’s interest and point of view, the letter strikes through the merely individual and touches deep and universal feeling, thus in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient dictum for art. The letter-writer, scribbling himself forth merely to please himself and his friend, is not constrained by servility to the public taste; his medium allows him ease, fluidity, and a happy inconsequence, vital artistic qualities impossible to literature written to meet the market.
Its spontaneity gives the letter scope for its particular achievements. Being written by friend to friend, it is free from both shyness and stiffness: it may laugh or cry, be sagacious or absurd, in full confidence of being understood. It rings true in its directness and intimacy, and yet never descends to the morbidness that sometimes stains the revelations of the journal. The letter is intimate, but at bottom decorous. In a letter one wears one’s old clothes in comfort, but one does not undress as in a diary. The presence of a friend to whom one may open one’s heart is both invitation and wholesome restraint.
The letter as literature is particularly adapted to description made piquant by personal perception of lights and shades. The letter is especially fitted for quick portraiture, for flashing forth a face in an adjective, for touching off a character in the quirk of a phrase. Incidents also stand out by their very compression. Brevity is the soul of a letter, which is not saying that a letter may not be long. A letter can afford to be long, it can never afford to be diffuse. In the nature of things a good letter never flags because it is written by one possessing intensified vision and a vibrant pen. Such a person knows enough to stop before he is tired. The description, incident, comment of a letter are forced to a concentration that gives them an advantage over more formal and expansive writing. People who are interesting enough to wish to write letters, people who are interested enough to wish to read them, must by necessity of character have much else to occupy their time beside their correspondence. The value of epistolary writing lies in the fact that it is not a grave concern, but an inviting side issue. Letters, like friendship, lose their charm when one makes a business of them.
It is the greatest mistake to think that our hurried age is alien to the composition of letters. Haste is the best thing that can happen to a letter; it enforces compression. Actually our own time is peculiarly adapted to produce letters. Its very hurry is inimical to sustained writing. Thinking people may put themselves into letters when they have no time to put themselves into books. Not only the rapidity of the present but its intensity stimulates letter-writing. Even the most commonplace people are quickened to observation and to thought at a time when tragedies are being unrolled before the dullest of us, and when every day is fateful with pity and fear for even the most obscure. Personal reaction to the portents of the present is not to be escaped, for never in history was there so much to see and to feel.
As never before was there so much to see, so never before was there such an impulse to say something about it; but the immensity of our time prevents our speaking in any finished and final form. Our day is too vast for comment. All that we can record is our daily impressions; and how much more readily these fall into letter shape than into treatise or play or novel or poem! These four forms necessitate structure, analysis, synthesis; they presuppose penetration into the significance back of events. The letter is free from all these requirements, and therefore is better fitted to express our times than, for example, the poem, which to-day, false to its old high calling, deliberately avoids all divination, all guesses at the ultimate and the infinite.
The letter, always humble, informal, inconsequent, need not strain to recount any but an individual reaction and interpretation. It aspires to no universal wisdom, and by its very modesty and sincerity may perhaps for the future furnish the truest historical record obtainable of a period too terrible to understand itself.
One would naturally expect letters to be produced in an age which, bewildered as it is, is singularly articulate in regard to all its puzzles and its pain. Ease of expression was never so general as now. More people are able to say what they have to say than ever before, and more people are able to say it, too, with facility and with force. The newspapers are crowded by letters tingling with penetration, often memorable in phrasing, written by men and women in every class and place. The level of intelligence and of expression was never so high. People are writing not only to the press but to each other better letters than ever before. Impressions are so intense that they compel utterance. One proof of the prevalence and popularity of letter-writing to-day is in the many books and articles that are the chance discoveries of the mail box. For such revelations, such unintentional literature, every editor is on the alert. The history of our time is being everywhere written to-day in the best letters that were ever penned; but for one such collection discovered, how many are fated to be fugitive always and unpreserved?
WE come into life handicapped by many a tyranny, but by none heavier than the insolence of that particular ability packed into our still imperfect cranium. Although one may observe in rare individuals the exhibition of a fine independence that from infancy to age consistently refuses to develop the dominance of some obvious talent, for the most part we yield to the conventional views that defy such despotism, and to our own delight in that little toy, success, which the autocrat dangles before our eyes. The only people never disillusioned are the unsuccessful. Every time we succeed we take a tuck in a dream. Of all domains, the most desirable is the kingdom of dreams, and the only people who never lose it, who, rather, reinherit it from day to day, are the people who consistently and conscientiously fail.
There are, however, only an enviable few of us who are not able to do some one thing well. It does not need, of course, to be anything notable. We need not be the fools of fame, in order to taste all the depths of success. We may merely be able to tie up parcels with neatness and dispatch,—rest assured we shall be enforced to tie up everybody’s parcels until we totter into our graves. Most households can boast a member with an ability to find things; the demands upon the time and the resourcefulness of such a professional finder prevent her ever finding peace (a finder is, of course, always feminine). One could multiply indefinitely examples from immediate experience that prove the argument for inefficiency.
The tyranny of talent has beset our path with many little proverbs that bark at our lagging heels. “Nothing succeeds like success” has hounded many a man to a desolate eminence. “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well” is a maxim that we allow to control our activities as thoroughly as we refuse to allow it to convince our intelligence: for obviously whatever is worth doing is not worth doing well; on the one hand the statement may authorize a wasteful and indiscriminate energy; and, far worse, it is manifestly false, because everything that gives you joy is worth doing, and ten to one the thing that gives you most joy in the doing, is the thing that you do very ill indeed.
Superficially considered, success appears to be a consequence of self-expression necessarily gratifying; intimately experienced, success is found to be a consequence of self-repression most painful. The trouble is that one never knows in time. Often one goes gambolling into success unwittingly as a young animal, only to have one’s first joyous neigh, or bray, of achievement cut short by feeling sudden hands bind one to a treadmill—the treadmill that impels one to grind out similar achievements, tramp-tramp-tramp, all the rest of one’s life. The worst is that no one ever suspects the excellently efficient middle-aged nag of still sniffing a larking canter through the mad spring meadows of the unattempted. Our best friends suppose the treadmill contents us. Yet we are always cherishing our own little dreams of a medium of expression better suited to our individuality than that skill with which nature has endowed us. Browning acknowledges the phenomenon in “One Word More,” in noting the dissatisfaction of the artist with his proper medium:—
The psychological experience described is more fundamental than its application in the poem merely to love and a lady.
The harshness of a controlling talent is severe in restricting us not alone to what we can do well, but to what we can do best. If we paint, we must not only not write a poem, but we must not attempt a picture different from our best; if we write, we must continue to write in the type and the tone of our first successful experiment. The chef may long to be an astronomer, but not only must he stick to his flesh-pots, but if, in the gusto of some early egg-beating, he has stumbled upon the omelet superlative, he must continue to furnish the world with omelets, no matter if eggs become for him an utter banality, and no matter how his fancy be seething with voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or super-sheep.
The world is too much against us if we try to lay down the burdens the task-master Talent has imposed. The successful man belongs to the public: he no longer belongs to himself. Talent, tried and proved and acclaimed, is too strong for us; we continue its savorless round, against all our inward protest. We are its slaves, and through the amiability ineradicable in most bosoms, the slaves also of our admiring kinsfolk and friends and public; most of all, perhaps, the slaves of our own self-doubt, for possibly after all they are right, possibly we are justly the chattels of Talent, and not of that whispered self of the air, taunting, teasing us, “What you have done is sordid, is savorless! Come with me to attempt the unexplored!” This desire denied is both acknowledgment that all our lordly labeled triumphs may have had a false acclaim, and is also a protest against all mundane and mortal valuations. Our unshackled ego, scorning things done that took the eye and had the price, seems to have the truer voice. Is not art itself the assurance that we are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of a serene domain where the unaccomplished is forever the only thing worth accomplishing?
I OFTEN wonder how other women write. Workers in art material are chary of revealing processes that might save other workers wasted effort and vain experiment, or, better yet, provoke challenge still more conducive to success. I venture to believe that any woman’s literary product is a matter of constant, and often desperate, compromise between writing and living; and some examination into the wherefore of this fact may throw light on the nature of writing processes, if not also on the nature of woman processes. Since there are scant data for analyzing the methods of other women writers, I give only my own, the experiment and experience of a woman who has chosen to earn a living as a literary free lance.
Such conclusions must necessarily be personal and practical, pretending to no theories except those made by immediate need. Driven to earn to-day’s bread and butter, I really have no time to study the superiority of prehistoric woman in the struggle for existence. Nor can I give undivided attention to the achievements of my sex as promised by the feminist millennium, when my 9 A.M. problem is to write a story that shall please some editor, presumably male. I do not know whether or not woman’s intellect is the equal of man’s; I know only that mine is not.
While observation teaches me that every woman worker may gain by adopting to a certain degree the methods of men, the feminist promise of an eventual equal productiveness is to me a promise barren, if true. So far as I can see, individual men and women have, alike, just so much vitality. If women devote this vitality to doing what men do, they will have just so much less to devote to being what women are. As a writer I aspire to write a book; as a woman I shall forever prefer to be a person rather than a book.
In an examination into the psychology and methods of the woman writer, two things should be clearly kept in mind. The first is that of all professions open to both sexes, writing should furnish the most reliable conclusions in regard to the relative accomplishment of men and women; for from Sappho’s day to ours a woman has been as free to write as a man. Life is the only university in which a writer can be trained, and that university has always been strictly coeducational. Neither have there ever been any restrictions, commercial or social, to bar a woman’s way to the literary career. It follows that any restrictions that exist must be imposed, not from without, but from within, must be due to the nature of the creature, physical, mental, and spiritual.
The second fact not to be forgotten is that of all the professions practiced by women writing is the one most intimately affected by a woman’s personal life and philosophy. It is far easier to detach yourself from your own dailyness for the purposes of music, painting, or science, than to separate yourself from the book you are writing, which is necessarily self-expressive. Consequently a woman’s literary productiveness is far more precariously dependent upon her peace of mind than any other form of professional activity. There are too many mute Miltons, too easily silenced, among my sex; but on the other hand—a fact equally due to the feminine fusion of living and writing—history has shown, perhaps will always show, that woman’s most valid intellectual achievement is in literature.
As a writer-worker, I have found no way of getting even with my limitations except by frankly shouldering them. The body my soul bears upon its back is a heavier burden to carry than a man’s, and I find I cannot accomplish the pilgrimage if I give up my own little jog-trot for a man’s stride. All that happens is that I lose my breath, and break my back, and have to lie down by the roadside to be mended. But when I do keep my own small pace, I have time and strength to pick a few fence-row flowers, too fine and frail and joyous for any striding man to notice.
I turn sharply from my own figures of speech to Mr. W. L. George’s airier fancies, to the most vital facts of feminine existence brushed so lightly by the masculine intelligence that it can say, “in passing, that we do not attach undue importance to woman’s physical disabilities.... I suspect that this is largely remediable, for I am not convinced that it is woman’s peculiar physical conditions that occasionally warp her intellect: it is equally possible that a warped intellect produces unsatisfactory physical conditions. Therefore if, as I firmly believe that we can, we develop this intellect, profound changes may with time appear in these physical conditions.”
My own warped intellect, belonging to a woman who must write stories for a living, points out that, if it has taken æons of differentiation under the guidance of Dame Nature to accomplish my own personal physical disabilities, I can hardly afford to wait for æons of differentiation under the guidance of Mr. George to accomplish my own personal physical freedom.
Looking at things as they are, I find my body constantly pushing upon my work; but it is possible to treat a body with a certain humorous detachment. It is possible to say to yourself, this is a headache that you have, don’t do it the honor of letting it become a heartache, your own or—far more fateful peril—your heroine’s. It is quite practicable for a woman to live apart from her body even when it hurts, quite practicable to give it sane and necessary attention, while keeping the soul separate from it, exactly as if she were ministering to some tired baby; this course is one of the only two solutions I have ever discovered of the problem of preserving a worker’s spirit in a woman’s body. The other solution lies in the frank concession to certain physical incapacities as the price one pays for certain psychological capacities.
A woman’s talent both for being a woman and for being a writer is measured by the force and the accuracy of her intuitions. My intuitions in regard to the people about me, when duly transformed into story-stuff, have a definite market value. If I did not possess them, I could not conceive, make, or sell a single manuscript. Supersensitive impressions necessitate the supersensitive channels by which a woman’s outer world connects with her inner one. If I will have woman’s intuitions, I must have my woman’s nervous system. So long as I think telepathy the best of sport, I must consent to give house-room to its delicate machinery, even to the extent of keeping cool when that machinery gets out of order and buzzes with neuritis or neuralgia or insomnia. The additional fact is only superficially paradoxical, that when the woman worker takes the disorder of her nervous machinery thus philosophically, it is much less likely to have any disorder.
The fallibility of a woman’s body seems beyond disputing. If a man does dispute it, it is because he never had one; if a woman disputes it, well, personally, if I can’t be as strong as a man I should like to be as honest as one! The fallibility of a woman’s intellect is a little more open to argument, but only a little. I keep to my primary assumption that I am not trying to see further than my nose, or to voice any observations but my own. Among the men and women of history and among those of my vicinity, I cannot see that woman’s brain is the equal of man’s in originality, in concentration, or in power of sustained effort. As a worker, I find that I can write for only a few hours and no more: beyond that limit stands disaster for the woman, and, far more perilous, disaster for the writing. In regard to my brain as in regard to my body, the primary condition of doing my work at all lies in recognizing the truth that I can’t do so much work, or do it so well, as a man.
In all matters that can be weighed or measured, a man’s endowment is superior to a woman’s; but, on the other hand, a woman’s endowment consists in the quality and the quantity of an imponderable something that cannot be weighed or measured. The chief difficulty about analyzing a woman’s brain is that it is so hard to separate her brain from the rest of the woman, whereas men are put together in plainly discernible pieces—body, mind, and soul.
The perfection of a woman’s intellect depends upon the perfection of its fusion with her personality. A woman amounts to most intellectually when she amounts to still more personally. She cannot move in pieces like a man, or like an earthworm. It needs the whole woman, acting harmoniously, to write. A man can retire into his brain and make a book, and a good one, leaving all the rest of his personality in confusion; but a woman must put her whole house in order before she can go off upstairs into her intellect and write. It follows that a woman’s artistic achievement is for her a harder job than a man’s achievement is for him, which would make the other fact—namely, that the woman’s book when written is never so great as the man’s—seem additionally cruel, if we could not discern that the best of women writers have, in attaining that best, reached not one result but two: impelled to clean all her spirit’s house before she can feel happy to write in it, a woman writer achieves both a home that people like to visit and a book that people like to read. Is it not true of all the greatest women authors that we think of them as women before we think of them as authors?
Of fiction-makers in our own tongue the greatest man is Shakespeare and the greatest woman is Jane Austen. In personal revelation both were signally reserved, the woman the more so, seeing that she did not even burst into the hieroglyphics of a sonnet sequence; but of the two our first thought of the woman is “dear Jane,” and of the man, “dear Rosalind”—or Beatrice or Mercutio. A man, possessing a separable intellect and an imagination so original that it can sometimes create what he personally is little capable of experiencing, may sometimes write one thing and be another; but not so a woman. On the other hand, has any woman ever attained such greatness that, at the mention of her name, we think of the books she wrote before we think of the woman she was?
It is true that professional women who direct their toil on the conviction that a woman’s brain is of the same quality as a man’s sometimes produce work that approximates a man’s in quantity. But sober observation of such women does not make me want to be one. I see them too often paying the penalty of being lopped and warped. Again I cannot see that, while such women attain their Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and LL.D.’s, they ever attain the highest rank in literature. Imaginative writing seems to demand inexorably that a woman writer be inexorably a woman. On the other hand, I have reached as a brain-worker the conclusion that, while my head is different in substance from a man’s, I get most work out of it when I copy a man’s mental methods. My brain is a vague and volatile mass, shot through with fancies, whimseys, with flashes of intuitive and illuminative wisdom, and it is a task surpassingly difficult to hold all this volatility, this versatility, to the rigors of artistic expression, to the stern architectonics of fiction. To the degree that a woman shall succeed in imposing upon the matter of her intellect the method of a man’s intellect, to that degree shall her work show the sanity and serenity of universal, and sexless, art.
To impose upon a woman’s intellect a man’s discipline and detachment is excellent in theory; it is staggering in practice. Convention and his own will make a man’s time his own. A woman’s genius is for personality, or achievement within herself; a man’s is for work, or achievement outside of himself. Now it takes time to be a person, and it takes other people. A real woman’s life is meshed in other people’s from dawn to dark. These strands of other lives are to her so vital and precious that for no book’s sake will she ever break them, yet for any book’s sake she must disentangle them. A woman writer’s life is a constant compromise, due to the fact that if she does not live with her fellows, she will not have anything to write, and that if she does not withdraw from them, she will not have time to write anything. I do not know how other writing women manage their time. I know that to attain four hours a day at my desk means that I must be revoltingly stern with myself, my family, and my friends. One pays a price for retirement, but one need not pay too heavily. A solution lies in retaining those relations that mean real humanity, while cutting off those that mean only society: I do not play bridge, but I do play with children.
Of course, it always seems plausible to solve the problem of time to one’s self by running off to some strange place, but this never works very well. The reason is that such isolation is sure to prove evanescent, so that you have to keep packing your trunk and moving on to new exile, because human tendrils are so strong and stealthy that they push their way through the thickest walls you can build, and twine themselves, wherever you hide, about the fingers that want to write. In order to write a love-story of your own invention, you run away from some friend’s too insistent love-story at home, and the first thing you know you are deep in the love-affairs of your poor little chambermaid. You escape home worries only to have some stranger’s troubles batter down your hotel door. You might as well stay at home and put up with the truth, that if you care enough about people to wish to write of them, you will care enough for people to wish to live with them, abroad no less than at home. Besides, boarding is bleak and blighting. If I were a boarding woman, presently I should feel too chilly to wish to write; my fancies and my fingers would be too numb for expression. I need a home with its big warm peace and its little warm frictions before I can feel cozy enough to want to chat with a pen.
There is a somewhat different alternative to home existence; I have heard of communities duly arranged for the requirements of writers, where they enjoy a kind of clublike privacy and security from interruption. But are not such communities confined to the near-great? Are real writers any more than real persons attracted by such an abnormal existence? Writers who shun life and people are exactly the sort that life and people shun. Personally, I run away from an author whenever I hear one coming. Of the really great ones, I am desperately afraid, and of the not-so-great ones, far more so.
Writer communities imply too much of the placard. I wish I might never have to dangle my profession on a label. I am always embarrassed when I am forced blatantly to expose it—for example, to the frank questions of the doctor’s secretary, or of a customs official. “Profession?” they ask, and I cringe before the admission, “I am a writer.” I don’t feel ladylike when I say the words. On such occasions I would give my entire remuneration for an “Atlantic” essay to be able to say, “I am a laundress.”
Personally, I am only too glad to forget that I am a Grub-Streeter, if only other people would forget. No matter how obscurely one has ever appeared in print, one pays the penalty of the pinnacle ever after. Surely one is no more responsible for the tendency of one’s talents than for the color of one’s hair. I write because I have found it my best way of making a living,—and also because I can’t help it; therefore why cannot people accept me as simply as if I were a dressmaker? I should be embittered by the curious attitude of people toward the literary calling, if it were not as funny as it is puzzling. Once, at a tea, an imposing matron hurtled from the front door to my corner, crying out, “Can you talk as you write? If so, please do!” I was dumb with discomfort for the rest of the afternoon.
The subject of attitude toward the writer is worthy of digression and topical analysis, for there is a difference among friends, family, and general acquaintance. Now, it is not often that I wish to talk as I write, but the occasions when I do, while rare, are painful and urgent. It is precisely on these occasions that my friends fail me. Essays are a long while in being born, and while they are in process I would give much for some one with whom to talk them over. It is not after a thing is published that a writer needs appreciation: it is before, and especially before it is written. For twenty friends who will loyally enjoy anything I write, I cannot count three who will listen when I talk. Yet the ideas are exactly the same whether uttered by pen or tongue. No friend is so valuable as one ready to attend and sympathize during the incubation and parturition of an idea. And yet the majority, knowing too well the author’s temperamental uncertainties, are perhaps to be forgiven their preference to wait until the editorial christening. So much bigger to most minds is print than person. A writer’s best friends are prone to treat her with the affectionate inattention they would give to a Blind Tom. Yet I would rather my friends never listened to me, than that they always did; it is much cozier to be considered an idiot than an oracle.
If friends are prone to take the writing more seriously than they take the writer, her family, on the contrary, share her throes too intimately to take their poor sufferer lightly. Few authors experience the popular fallacy of a doting family audience. A shuddering apprehension of the potential effect upon editor and reader makes kinfolk intensely critical. The agonies to which any sympathetic household is subjected when one member of it is writing a book are such as to make them question whether any book is worth the price of its creation. A writer’s family also lives in the constant, but usually groundless, fear of being written up. There is both humor and pathos when dear Granny retires into a corner with some foible she knows you admired in infancy. Relatives are always a trifle uneasy in the presence of the chiel amang us takin’ notes. I doubt if any success quite compensates for the discomfort of being blood-kin to a writer. True, a family can sometimes be discovered passing the book or magazine around among the neighbors, but they don’t wish you to catch them with it in their own hands. Friends and family are alike in their complexity of attitude, being insistent that other people shall admire you, but afraid of making you conceited if they admire you themselves. The danger of conceit can be safely entrusted to editors and reviewers, not to mention the disillusion that sickens any author on comparing the finished book with the fancied one.
But if a writer is comfortably without honor among her intimates, she is more than honored by the attention accorded by chance acquaintance. The attitude of the average person toward print as print is enigmatic. Not all people place the pen on a pedestal, but all regard the penman as somehow different. I once essayed retirement at a little village hotel. I was promptly established in a room made sacred by the previous occupancy of another lady author. Her name I had never before heard, although I heard it daily during my sojourn. Her sole producible work was a railroad advertisement of some remote garden-spot in California, but it had been enough to confer a halo, as well as to win more substantial reward, for I afterwards found out that, solely for the literary aroma she diffused, the lady had been allowed to remain two years without paying a cent of board. Unfortunately I did not discover the fact until I had paid my own board for two months. The incident disproves the charge that the United States has no popular respect for the fine arts.
Print is prone to induce curious revelations from strangers. You write, perhaps, a story that tries to be true to simple human emotions, and the next thing you know, somebody in Idaho is writing you all about his wife or baby. It is touching, but quaint. I have come to be a little suspicious of letters from strangers that purport to be simple letters of appreciation. I used to be very much flattered by them until my brief notes of thanks drew forth such unexpected replies. It appeared that the writers of the letters were writers of other works as well; they were sending these to me forthwith; would I kindly read and comment? My experience is, I gather, not unique. A writer-friend, whose published poetry is marked by peculiar sanity, has received from more than one unknown source effusions so bizarre that they can emanate from nothing but a madhouse.
It is easy to silence by silence these unseen acquaintance, but others nearer by demand tact. Among these are people who tell me stories they want me to tell. They never can understand why I don’t use the material. As a matter of fact, raw romance striking enough to impress the lay mind is much too striking for a writer’s employment. Truth that is stranger than fiction is what every story-teller must avoid if he is to write stories true enough to be read.
What I more and more discover is that nine tenths of the people one meets want to write, that seven tenths of them have at some time tried, and that not more than one tenth of them perceive why they have failed. Since they think the impulse to write more distinctive than its accomplishment, and since they feel that they have the impulse in all its glory, they regard with a half-contemptuous envy the person who actually does write. They regard creation as purely inspirational, and look askance at a worker who goes to her desk every morning like a machine. For all I know, they are right. A good many people think that the only reason they are not writers is that they never tried to be. Others think they would have written if they had only been taught how, if they had had the opportunity of certain courses in college. Still others think there must be some charmed approach to an editor’s attention. Who introduced me, they frankly ask. When people talk like this it requires some self-control to repress my conviction that any person who could have written would have written, and my knowledge that the only introduction I ever had to any editor was made by my own manuscripts.
Friends, family, and general acquaintance have, I find, one impulse in common, the desire always to hound down the autobiographic. They read, beam brightly, look up at me, and say, “Oh, here is Aunt Sarah’s chicken-pen!” Actually it is an old well I once saw in Brittany. “Oh, here is the story of old Mr. Gresham at his grandnephew’s funeral. Don’t you remember I showed you Elsie’s letter about it?” I never saw the letter, never heard of old Mr. Gresham, and the chapter in question describes the antics of a four-year-old at his father’s wedding.
“Here is Saidie Lippincott to the life!”
I gasp, “Who is Saidie Lippincott?”
“Don’t you remember you met her at Rose Earle’s tea when you visited me four years ago?”
There is no possession people are so unwilling to let one have as an imagination. In private, friends will tear a book to shreds to discover some portrait they can recognize; and in the case of authors famous enough to be dead, critics rake the ground wherever they have trod in an effort to prove that the folk of their fancy were drawn from the earth rather than the air. There seems no means of convincing a reader that in a writer’s head are constantly a thousand faces he has never seen or heard of, all subtle with story, all begging for a book, and all so real that they often make his daily waking seem a dream.
There is no denying that there is autobiography in all fiction, but the relation of the two is not so superficial as the mere introduction of facts and of characters from one’s daily life. The actual relation of experience and its expression is deep and intricate, and, especially for the woman writer, pervasive. As one must adjust one’s work to a feminine body, to a feminine brain, and to distinctly feminine social relations, so one must take into account as still more determinative a woman’s spiritual characteristics. However potent the impulse to write, the impulse to live is deeper. I have dwelt on the negative side of this problem, the uselessness of fleeing to strange places to escape other people’s burdens; but it is impossible to over-emphasize the positive side, the difficulties of staying at home with the burdens that Providence has provided. However intense the joys and sorrows of the people the woman creates, the joys and sorrows of the people she loves will be still more intense. It needs both poise and vitality to be equal to the demands both of fancy and of fact. The mere external tangle of hours and seasons that any human relations necessitate is nothing compared with the spiritual tangle of one’s sympathies. The instinct to soothe and succor and the instinct to think and write meet in a daily, an hourly, variance. Heart and head are equally insistent in their demands, and equally vengeful if unsatisfied. Books cry to be written, and people cry to be loved, and to whichever one I turn a deaf ear, I am presently paying the penalty of a great unrest and discontent. To preserve the balance of attention between the needs of her head and the needs of her heart is the biggest problem any woman writer faces. I have discovered no ultimate solution; it is rather a matter of small daily solutions, in which at one time we sacrifice the friend to the book, and at another the book to the friend.
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.