BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [25 SEPT. 1917]
BRACERS 120470. MS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

What She Is and What She Might Become1 ^, 2 ^{, a}

The business with Maurice3 is the sort that results from a tangle in the soul, causing obscure suffering, wrongly diagnosed, and leading to desires for things that cannot satisfy.

Her nature is made up of elements which are not easy to harmonize. There is the side that was made happy by Carpenter4 and the N.C.F.;5 this is the side that loves freedom, hates cruelty, and wants a simple formula for making the world perfect. Morally, this is the best of her. But unfortunately she connects it very little with her own activity. The world is to be made perfect by other people — in the large, by a plan — while she looks on and gives them applause and love, but not help. For this reason, the best in her is not very operative. Until it becomes operative, the tangle in her soul will remain.^b

Partly because this side of her has no outlet in action, her soul is filled with a strange ill-understood hunger and despair, of a kind that produces frantic moods and acts of madness in the search for relief. A religion would cure this.

The next most important thing in her is energy. She has immense instinctive vital energy, of the kind that makes a dog run while his master walks, not of the kind that is directed by will and springs from a large passionate desire. It could be turned into this kind if there were some strong belief to direct her actions. Energy cannot be created by belief, but when it exists it can be made fruitful by belief.

Across these impulses come the closely allied impulses of vanity and sex. Her happiness demands an unusually large amount of sexual adventure: her nature has more real love to give than any except a very few women, and beside love it requires minor adventures for the satisfaction of sexual vanity. Her energy makes her enjoy an element of roughness and fierceness in love; this also appeals to her despair.

Her vanity is the worse side of her character. It is entirely crude, desiring the applause of all and sundry, seeking notoriety, preferring popular success to good work or the esteem of those who care for quality. This crudity she defends in her own thoughts as being democratic. At present, vanity is the dominant motive in the more important parts of her conduct: the purpose of her life is to become a well-known actress, not to act well or in good plays. In her work, she has no public object I view, but merely the acquisition of desirable things for herself.

Partly as the guerdon6 of success, and partly for the sake of luxury and physical comfort, she desires passionately to earn large sums of money, though she has enough for all legitimate wants. This leads her to commercialism, with all its attendant evils of competition, envy, shoddy work, and possibly prostitution. Her idealisms are kept remote from her work. If she were a politician, she would urge that the stage needed reforming, but would support the war. If she were in business, she would make money in shady ways, and devote a portion of the proceeds to socialist propaganda.

Her whole moral future depends upon her learning to do work for a public motive rather than a private one, for the good of the world rather than for personal success. If she does not learn this, the good elements in her character will be gradually obscured, and she will become gross and mercenary.

She is a present almost entirely destitute of self-control. Most of her impulses are good, but she yields to all, good and bad alike. She seems hardly even to know that it is possible not to yield to an impulse. Consequently, though her nature is full of kindness, she will do things that cause anguish to the people she cares most for. If she could learn the religion of love, it might make^c her feel^d that one ought not to cause unnecessary suffering, and lead her to acquire the rudiments of self-control and unselfishness. But she cannot learn this except by going through hell.

Notes

• 1

  [document] Document 200199.

• 2

  [date] Colette wrote “25 Sep. 1917” on the document. Colette also typed this statement adding it was by BR. She underlined in pen the word “energy”.

• 3

  Maurice Maurice Elvey (1887–1967), film director. For further information on him, see BRACERS 19056, n.5.

• 4

  Carpenter Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), author, socialist, and moral reformer. Openly homosexual, he advocated the reform of sexual relations in a number of pamphlets. He had been one of Colette’s heroes before she met Bertie. In After Ten Years (London: J. Cape, 1931) she said that after she got to know Bertie “I knew that Carpenter’s creed meant nothing to me any more” (p 109).

• 5

  N.C.F. No-Conscription Fellowship.

• 6

  guerdon The word is apparently unique in BR, though not in some of his favourite poets. Claudio states in Act 5, scene 3 of Much Ado about Nothing:

  Done to death by slanderous tongues
  Was the Hero that here lies.
  Death, in guerdon of her wrongs,
  Gives her fame which never dies.
  So the life that died with shame
  Lives in death with glorious fame.

• a

  Might Become written over illegible words

• b

  Until … remain. inserted

• c

  make written over illegible word

• d

  feel after deleted to