it myself to the public. This is all the more reason why justice should
be done to Karin Michaëlis. I have read no other book of hers except
_The Dangerous Age_; but in this novel she has in no way exceeded what a
sincere and serious observer has a right to publish. Undoubtedly her
book is not intended for young girls, for what the English call
"bread-and-butter misses." But nobody is compelled to write exclusively
for schoolgirls, and it has yet to be proved that there is any necessity
to feed them on fiction as well as on bread and butter.

_The Dangerous Age_ deals with a bold subject; it is a novel filled with
the "strong meat" of human nature; a novel which speaks in accents at
once painful and ironical, and ends in despair; but it is also a book to
which the most scrupulous author on the question of "the right to speak
out" need not hesitate to attach his name.

It is difficult for one who knows no Danish, to judge of its literary
value; and that is my case. In the German version--and I hope also in
the French--the reader will not fail to discern some of the novelist's
finest gifts. In the first instance, there is that firmness and solidity
of structure which is particularly difficult to keep up when a book
takes the form of a journal, of jottings and meditations, as does _The
Dangerous Age_. Then there are the depth of reflection, the ingenuity of
the arguments, the muscular brevity of style, the expression being
closely modelled upon the thought; nothing is vague, but nothing is
superfluous. We must not seek in this volume for picturesque landscape
painting, for the lyrical note, for the complacently woven "purple
patch." The book is rigorously deprived of all these things; and, having
regard to its subject, this is not its least merit.

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