So wrapt in vile falsehoods and conventions are we. So far have we
travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie
to our children--in the interests of morality.
After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work
and nursing Alan's baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel.
It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That
is every woman's native idea of literature. It reflects the
relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence
of women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times
out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that
interests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novels
have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and
have only fallen back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as
a means of livelihood. But when a woman tells you she wants to
write a book, nine times out of ten she means she wants to write a
novel. For that task nature has most often endowed her richly.
Her quicker intuitions, her keener interest in social life, her
deeper insight into the passing play of emotions and of motives,
enable her to paint well the complex interrelations of every-day
existence. So Herminia, like the rest, wrote her own pet novel.
By the time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it.
It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one
creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl
yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul,
"O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill.
Ignore the maimed lives, the stricken heads and seared hearts,
the reddened fangs and ravening claws of nature all round thee."
Pessimism is sympathy. Optimism is selfishness. The optimist
folds his smug hands on his ample knees, and murmurs contentedly,
"The Lord has willed it;" "There must always be rich and poor;"
"Nature has, after all, her great law of compensation." The
pessimist knows well self-deception like that is either a fraud or
a blind, and recognizing the seething mass of misery at his doors
gives what he can,--his pity, or, where possible, his faint aid, in
redressing the crying inequalities and injustices of man or nature.
All honest art is therefore of necessity pessimistic. Herminia's
romance was something more than that. It was the despairing
heart-cry of a soul in revolt. It embodied the experiences and
beliefs and sentiments of a martyred woman. It enclosed a lofty
ethical purpose. She wrote it with fiery energy, for her baby's
sake, on waste scraps of paper, at stray moments snatched from
endless other engagements. And as soon as it was finished, she sent
it in fear and trembling to a publisher.