Part 13 (1/2)

We cannot help noting that wherever the feminine preponderates, whether in art, politics, religion, society, there is a corresponding diminution of force in the moral and physical character of the Eternal Masculine. In the Ibsen dramas this is a recognised fact. Therefore, Strindberg called Ibsen an old corrupter. What is the matter with the men nowadays? Hadn't they better awaken to the truth that they are no longer attractive, or indispensable? Isn't it time for the ruder s.e.x to organise as a step toward preserving their fancied inalienable sovereignty of the globe? In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: ”Thou goest to women. Remember thy whip.” But Nietzsche, was he not an old bachelor, almost as censorious as his master, that squire of dames, Arthur Schopenhauer?

II

MILDRED

While Hedda Gabler is ”cerebral” without being intellectual, you feel that she is more a creature of impulse than Mildred Lawson, who for me is George Moore's masterpiece in portraiture. Hedda is chilly enough, Mildred is distinctly frigid, yet such is the art of her creator that she comes to us invested with warmer colours; withal, about as disagreeable a girl as you may encounter in the literature of to-day.

Now Mr. Moore is an outspoken defender of the few crumbling privileges of man at a time when the ”ladies” are claiming the earth and adjacent planets. Yet I don't believe he wrote Mildred Lawson (in the volume ent.i.tled Celibates) with malice prepense. Too great an artist to use as a dialectic battering-ram one of his characters, for all that he makes Mildred very ”modern.” She doesn't despise men, nor does she care much for the ideas of her dowdy friend the ”advanced” Mrs.

Fargus; on the contrary, she makes fun of her clothes and ideas, though secretly regretting that she hadn't been sent by her parents to Girton College. Like Hedda she is ambitious to outs.h.i.+ne any circle in which she finds herself. Modern she is, not because of her petty traits, but simply because Mr. Moore has painted a young woman of the day, rich, and so selfish that at the end her selfishness strangles the little soul she possesses. Her brother Harold, a sedate business man, is also a celibate whose ambition in life seems to be the catching of the 9:10 A.M. train to Victoria Station and the return to his suburban home on the 6 P.M. (He is not unlike a fussy little man, w.i.l.l.y Brooks, in the same Irish writer's early novel, Spring Days.) A rejected but ever hopeful suitor of Mildred's about comprises her domestic entourage.

She is ambitious. She hates the ”stuffy” life of a hausfrau, but marriage makes no appeal, since the breaking of her engagement with Alfred--who is also a man with punctual business habits. She despises conventional men, and is herself compact of conventionality. In her most rebellious moods the leaven of Philistia (or the British equivalent, Suburbia) comes to the surface. She dares, but doesn't dare enough. ”It needs both force and earnestness to sin.” As in the case of Hedda Gabler, it is her social conscience that keeps her from throwing her bonnet over the moon, not her sense of moral values; in a word, virtue by sn.o.bbish compulsion. One thinks of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the searing irony of his sonnet, Vain Virtues. The virtue of Mildred Lawson is vanity of vanities and the abomination of desolation.

She often argued that ”it was not for selfish motives that she desired freedom.” Her capacity for self-illuding is enormous. She didn't love her drawing-master, the unfortunate Mr. Hoskin, who had a talent for landscape, but no money, yet she allowed the man to think she did care a little and it sent him into bad health when he found she had fooled him. The scene in the studio, where the dead painter lies in his coffin, between Mildred and his mistress--a model from the ”lower”

ranks of life--is one of the most stirring in modern fiction. The ”lady” comes off second-best; when she begins to stammer that she hoped the dead man hadn't suggested improper relations, the unhappy girl turns on her: ”I dare say you were virtuous more or less, as far as your own body is concerned. Faugh! women like you make virtue seem odious.” Mildred, indignant at such ”low conversation,” makes her escape, slightly elated at the romantic crisis. A real man has died for her sake. After all, life is not so barren of interest.

She goes to Paris. Studies art. Returns to London. Again to Paris and the forest of Fontainebleau, where she joins a student colony and flirts with a young painter; but it all comes to nothing, just as her work in the Julian Studio has no artistic result. Mr. Moore, who is a landscape-painter, has drawn a capital picture of the forest, though not with the fulness of charm to be found in Flaubert's treatment of the same theme in Sentimental Education. The little tale is a genuine contribution to fiction in which art is adequately dealt with. When Celibates appeared, Henry Harland said that Mildred Lawson was worthy of Flaubert if it had been written in good English, which is a manifest epigram. The volume is a perfect breviary of selfishness.

Tiring of art, Mildred takes up society, though she gets into a rather dubious Paris set. A socialist deputy and his wife protect her and she becomes a brilliant contributor--at least so she is made to believe--to a publication in which is eventually sunk a lot of her money. Her brother has warned her, but to no avail. At this juncture the tale becomes slightly mysterious. Mildred flirts with the deputy, his wife is apparently willing--having an interest elsewhere--and suddenly the bottom drops out of the affair, and Mildred poorer, also wiser, returns to her home in England. She has embraced the Roman Catholic religion, but you do not feel she is sincerely pious. It is one more gesture in her sterile career. At the end we find her trying to evade the inevitable matrimony, for she is alone, her brother dead, and she an heiress. Suspicious of her suitor's motives--it is the same faithful Alfred--she wearily debates the situation: ”Her nerves were shattered, and life grows terribly distinct in the insomnia of the hot summer night.... She threw herself over and over in her burning bed, until at last her soul cried out in lucid misery: 'Give me a pa.s.sion for G.o.d or man, but give me a pa.s.sion. I cannot live without one.'” For her ”mad and sane are the same misprint.” And on this lyric note the book closes.

I believe if Hedda Gabler had hesitated and her father's pistol hadn't been hard by, she would have recovered her poise and deceived her husband. I believe that if Emma Bovary had escaped that snag of debt she would have continued to fool Charles. And I believe Mildred Lawson married at last and fooled herself into the belief that she had a superior soul, misunderstood by the world and her husband. There is no telling how vermicular are the wrigglings of mean souls. Mildred was a sn.o.b, therefore mean of soul; and she was a cold sn.o.b, hence her cruelty. That she was an eminently disagreeable girl I need hardly emphasise. Nevertheless the young chaps found her dainty and her poor girl friends, the artists, envied her pretty frocks. She had small sh.e.l.l-like ears, ears that are danger-signals to experienced men.