It was the late George Meredith, if I mistake not, who was credited
with bringing women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion.
He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the
“veiled virginal doll.” The _jeune fille_ had, in the course
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become
somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines
of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of
the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting,
tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding
day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition.
Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was
deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott
gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or
flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or
two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.
Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up-to-date with
the fiction of the contemporary English school--even to the last
instalments of its serial novels--I sought out the most _démodé_
of the English novelists. “Let me see,” I murmured to myself, “just
what it is that we have thought it worth while, at this expense, to
escape.” Accordingly, I procured all the volumes of _Sir Charles
Grandison_. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than to go to
Richardson; and, in all the work of Richardson, fairest, surely, to go
to _Sir Charles_.
I have never known any one who was ashamed to confess that _Sir
Charles Grandison_ bored him. It is the last work which any defender
of the old school of fiction would think of using as a basis for
argument. And yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural note is
not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron loved Sir Charles while he was still
bound to the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with dignity when her
friends cautioned her against her own feeling. “If this should end at
last in love” (she writes), “and I should be _entangled in a hopeless
passion_, the object of it would be Sir Charles Grandison: he could
not insult me; and mean as the word _pity_ in some cases sounds, I
had rather have his pity than the love of any other man.” Such a cry,
even Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, could give us.
Yet we must give Meredith his due; and Meredith, on the whole,
honestly surpasses these others in the shining list of his adoring
heroines--adoring with such dominance in meekness, such gayety in
surrender. Rose Jocelyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, Clare
Doria Forey (let us write it in full, for so she liked it best),
Cecilia Halkett, Janet Ilchester--it would be hard to match, within the
century, that group of girls.
All these names have been recalled simply as witnesses to the fact
that there is--in spite of the contentions of the contemporary
novelists--a perfectly consistent tradition, in English novels, of
the frank young woman. It is of the first importance to establish
this, for these contemporary authors are talking as if their Anns
and Isabels and Hildas were the only _jeunes filles_ who had
ever dared, in literature, to love as spirited girls in life really
do. Just here one quarrels with their pretensions. The Victorian
convention may have given us Amelia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and
Lily Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also Catherine Earnshaw, and
Jane Eyre, and Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing nothing new
when they show us the _jeune fille_ falling in love before she is
proposed to; they are doing nothing new when they show us the _jeune
fille_ wishing, quite specifically, to be a wife; they are not even
doing anything new--rather, something quite _dix-huitième_ and
_rococo_--when they show us the _jeune fille_ considering
whether she will put up with being a mistress. The _jeune fille_
glorying in her choice of the illicit relation is something, let us
grant them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, upon their peak in
Darien!
No; these authors have not broken with the Victorian convention--that
simple acrobatic feat demanded of all beginners. But they have broken
with the laboratory method. If they think that in Ann Veronica, in
Hilda Lessways, in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate than
their great predecessors, they are quite simply mistaken. I am not
proposing to myself, or to any one else, to be shocked by these young
women. Being shocked leaves one, in the world of criticism, with
no retort. Whether or not one is shocked by them is quite another
question, and one that does not come into this discussion. My own
objection to the school of Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, is
that their heroines are not convincing.
There is a great deal said and written, nowadays, about women as they
are and as they ought to be; and very little of it is in the tone of
_Sesame and Lilies_. We are told very contradictory things about
our sex; and we are exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe each
contradiction. We are jeered at for being Nietzschean Anns, embodying
the ruthless life-force, pursuing the man that we may have children by
him. We are also preached at for causing race-suicide. We must want
children more than anything else in the world; and we must want the
state to take care of them for us after they are born. We must return
to the Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, join the Fabian
Society. We must submit to the intense conservatism of eugenics; but
we must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, whenever we find it
convenient, by taking lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to marry
without assurance that our children will be physically perfect; but we
may not expose them on a mountain top if by any chance they are not.
Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), with his avowed power
of sucking the truth simultaneously from two mutually exclusive
hypotheses, could do all the things that, with authority, we are
told to do. “Modern, indeed! She” (Ann Veronica) “was going to be as
primordial as chipped flint.” Yet, if we accept the chronologies of
history (which seems sane enough) nothing could be more “modern” than
Ann Veronica’s way of being prehistoric. Perhaps the solution is for
all women to become pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all this;
and we wonder a little if the heart-breaking medley of preachments
is not the fruit of that antique and unpardonable sin--_mêler les
genres_. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be generally agreed
on: women are, contrary to fusty tradition, very like men--whether
like them according to _L’Age Dangereux_, or like them according
to the latest suffrage pamphlet. That is the only thing that we shall
unfailingly be told.
There is something in it. We _are_ more like men than Mrs.
Radcliffe would have believed. But the method chosen by these modern
heroines of being like men is chiefly, it would appear, to be more so.
They will not go half-way, but three quarters. The old-fashioned man
sometimes relented. The new-fashioned woman makes quick work of her
lover’s virtue. There is hardly a villain in an old play but would have
let the lady off, if she had pleaded with him as Capes pleads with Ann
Veronica. The qualms, the scruples, the regrets, are all the man’s:
the girl refuses utterly to indulge in anything so weak. Capes is
unfortunate enough to say something to Ann Veronica about honor. “Only
your queer code of honor--Honor! Once you begin with love you have to
see it through.” Away with inhibitions!
“But,” some one will object, “all this has been said before. And
literature is full of women who prey passionately on the men they say
they love. They are a recognized type.” Granted; but until now, the
passionate preying and the unsought soliciting have not been done
by the young unmarried girl of respectable traditions. The type is
represented, from Potiphar’s wife down, by the woman who is no longer
_jeune fille_. One has not traversed either literature or life
without hearing of exceptions. But they are exceptions. The point is,
not that young women have hitherto been restrained by religion and
convention, and that when they become free-thinkers and despise the
existing order, they express themselves as they really are. The point
is that they really are not, for the most part, like Ann Veronica and
Hilda Lessways.
I and my friends do not object to Ann and Hilda because we are afraid
that, if we do not, people will think that we are like that. We object
to them because we are told that they are normal, healthy-minded young
women who have led perfectly respectable lives on the borders, at
least, of gentility; and because we know that normal, healthy-minded
young women who have lived such lives do not approach their first love
affairs in the temper of these heroines. If you wish to say that the
authors are merely discussing pathological cases, you will to some
extent be letting them out, but they will not thank you for it. What is
perfectly clear is that they believe girls of eighteen or twenty are
like that. The last thing that they think, evidently, is that these
young ladies need any attention from physicians or alienists. They
think--God save the mark!--that they have described, in each case, a
really nice girl. Up to a certain point, Ann Veronica _is_ nice.
When she falls in love, her author goes back on her disgracefully. He
does not go back on her by making her horrid: he goes back on her by
destroying her actuality.
One is ready to grant, I say, that women are more like men than
some--not all--of the old-fashioned novelists would have had us
believe. Let us rail, by all means, at the “veiled virginal doll.” Let
us disagree with Tolstoï (it is always good to disagree with Tolstoï!)
when he says, in the _Sonate de Kreutzer_, “une jeune fille pure
ne veut pas un amant; elle veut des enfants.” Let us admit that the
modern girl really is frank with herself about her desire to marry the
man she has chosen. Indeed, I cannot think who will deny it. But there
our respect for realism bids us stop. It is a complex and misty matter,
this probing of the young girl’s secret attitude to life and her lover.
Perhaps the greatest blunder of the new realists is that they do
not see how complex and misty it is. The whole question is almost
impossible of discussion, it is so difficult and delicate. Record
the images in the girl’s mind, if you must--that is the exhaustive,
exhausting rule of realism. But for God’s sake, record them as vague,
since vague they are! These authors fail, precisely because they must,
at each instant, be vivid. One is tempted to recall to them Mr.
Chesterton’s difficulty with Browning’s biography: “One can make a map
of a labyrinth, but who can make a map of a mist?” Mr. Wells and Mr.
Bennett are, apparently, the successful cabmen who can. They offer to
take you anywhere you like in this London fog of the girl’s mind. Under
their fitful guidance, you will get somewhere; but it may not be the
address you gave them.
It is time to come to instances. Luckily for one’s contention,
the frank young feminine thing is, in spite of a few sentimental
aberrations of a century ago, in the great English literary tradition.
(What the new novelists have given us, one might remark, is more like
the frank young thing crossed with the highwayman.) No one need be more
explicit than Juliet in desiring possession of the man she loves, but
even Juliet does not find her passion for Romeo summing itself up in
Ann Veronica’s desire to kiss her idol’s feet because she is sure that
they must have the firm texture of his hands; nor is she overpowered
at every turn, like Hilda, by his “faint, exciting, masculine odor.”
And, surely, if any one were to bring up an explicit heroine, it would
be the Nurse! Romantic lovers have always prayed for union. Long
since, Sir Thomas Browne said, “United souls are not satisfied with
embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which, being impossible,
their desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of
satisfaction.” What lover has not known that hurt? What lover, man or
woman, has not welcomed marriage, and, at the same time, thought it a
_pis-aller_? The notion is not a new one. It has never been in the
greatest tradition of poetry or of life for the woman who loves to hold
back.
That is not our quarrel with these misrepresented heroines. Our quarrel
with them is that, being misrepresented themselves, they misrepresent
their prototypes. It is a matter chiefly, perhaps, of the actual
content of their minds. The visions of experience are not the visions
of inexperience; moreover, there is not one frank young thing in ten
thousand who does not wrap her ardor in a blessed cloak of vagueness.
She may laugh at her faint atavistic shiver; but she feels it. She
may immensely like the feeling of her lover’s arms about her; but she
does not instinctively set herself to imagining details that only the
slow processes of intimacy will normally familiarize her with. She may
glory in his total effect of physical perfection; but she does not go
over his “points,” as if she were buying a horse, or drawing an athlete
in a life-class. Imagine Chaucer’s feelings, if any one had tried to
confound Emilye with the Wife of Bath! Yet it is something very like
that which Mr. Bennet has done in his analysis of Hilda’s psychology
during the momentous half-hour before she becomes engaged to Cannon.
“But at the same time she was in the small hot room, and both George
Cannon’s hands were on her unresisting shoulders; and then they were
round her, and she felt his physical nearness, the texture of his
coat and of his skin; she could see in a mist the separate hairs of
his tremendous moustache and the colors swimming in his eyes; her
nostrils expanded in alarm to a faint exciting masculine odor. She was
disconcerted, if not panicstruck, by the violence of his first kiss;
but her consternation was delectable to her.”
Every woman and most men know, I fancy, that if Hilda’s first
proximity to the man who dominated her imagination was of precisely
that nature, her reaction was probably not precisely of that sort.
Even the impersonal machinery of the psychological laboratory would
have registered in her a distinct recoil. The microscope is not,
and never has been, the lover’s favorite instrument. It is doubtful
if even the man himself would have been allured by the accurate and
intimate perception of the coarseness of his beloved’s skin. One thinks
a little, in spite of one’s self, of Gulliver and Glumdalclitch.
Certain it is--and rather amusing, all things considered--that none
of the men in these novels indulges in the sensations that crowd the
heroines’ hours; though it is written of nearly all the heroes that
they had experienced matrimony, at the least. May it not be that the
authors know their own sex better than ours? Granted that women are
very like men: can one justly, on that hypothesis, show them as more
scornful of conventions, of codes of honor, of every reticence, moral,
intellectual, and physical, than these men whom they consider their
masters? It is in each case the man who has the bad quarters of an hour
over their common breaches, real or fancied, of loyalty and decency
and public opinion; the man who has, for his own peace, to find a
philosophy that justifies them both.
These authors are not alone among contemporaries in recording such
heightened moments of a girl’s life. One calls to mind, for the sheer
similarity of the mental plight, Elizabeth, in _The Iron Woman_.
Thus Elizabeth writes to David:
“‘Dear’ (she stopped to kiss the paper), ‘dear, I hope you won’t burn
it up because I am tired of waiting, and I hope you are too’;--when
she wrote those last words, she was suddenly shy; ‘Uncle is to give me
the money on my birthday--let us be married that day. I _want_
to be married. I am all yours, David, all my soul, and all my mind,
and all my body. I have nothing that is not yours to take; so the
money is yours. No, I will not even give it to you! it belongs to you
already--as I do. Dear, come and take it--and me. I love you--love
you--love you. _I want you to take me._ I want to be your wife. Do
you understand? I _want_ to belong to you. I _am_ yours.’”
“So she tried, this untutored creature, to put her soul and body into
words, to write the thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utterance
is silence.”
There is no need to follow further Mrs. Deland’s analysis of the
situation: the proud and practical reply from David, which the girl
considers a rebuff; her sudden marrying of the man she does not
love--as sheer expression of outraged modesty, and recoil from the man
who had not known how to treat her confession. There would be no wisdom
in comparing _The Iron Woman_, from any other point of view, with
the novels we have been mentioning. This one episode is interesting
simply as a different and more convincing record of the frank young
thing’s relation to her own frankness, and of the fiery limits of that
frankness; pages of racking accuracy, in which the girl nearly dies of
the memory of her own explicitness. One has not even power to protest
against Elizabeth’s tragic and foolish act in marrying Blair; it
follows upon that mood with the raw inevitability of life.
Some adherents of the new school may think it indelicate to base a
general accusation on the single point of the heroine’s psychology. In
the first place, the accusation is not so general as to preclude very
definite admiration of other aspects of the school’s achievement. There
is much in Mr. Wells’s _New Machiavelli_ besides the hero’s affair
with Isabel Rivers; much that goes to the mind and heart of all of us.
As for effectiveness of method and brilliancy of style--one simply
does not see the need of adding one piping voice to the harmonious and
already deafening chorus. Were there the need, one would do it.
But the contemporary school has set out to “do” a new type of woman: a
type which it considers important, if not dominant. It has even the air
of saying: “This is the kind of girl with whom intelligent men in the
immediate future will have overwhelmingly (and to their salvation!) to
deal. Behold the Newest Woman.”
The _crux_ in each book, for the average reader, is the maturing
of the relation between the man and the girl. The girl exists only, in
spite of her intellectual qualities, for the sake of that relation. In
each case, she is the ideal mate, the high exponent of her sex. She
deserves, and must bear, serious consideration from every point of
view. One has chosen the realistic point of view because realism is
the method these authors abide by. They aim at telling the truth as it
is; therefore, they stand or fall by the accuracy of their vivid and
multitudinous detail. We are not in the pulpit, but in the laboratory.
One’s honest impression is that the scientific observers have mixed
their slides.
It is one thing to make your heroine believe in free love--doubtless
many women do. It is pardonable to science to exhibit exceptions to
the feminine rule, in the person of the girl initially over-sexed or
neurotic: such cases are known to other scientists than these. But
it is quite another thing to insist on the niceness, the normality,
the uninterruptedly respectable and uneventful breeding of a girl--to
exhibit her as the type, in other words--and then credit her with
reactions that do not belong to the type.
There is no point in preaching against a modern spirit that is going to
develop Anns and Hildas and Isabels _ad libitum_. The conception
of them as heroines may be a sign of the times; but they themselves are
not yet numerous enough to be a sign of the times. It is even doubtful
if novelists can do in a decade what Nature has never shown any sign of
doing in all her lazy evolutionary progress: completely alter natural
feminine instincts. “But the worst of Ann Veronica is that she’s
_there_!” a friend complained to me, not long since. Everything
has always been there, one fancies. All one insists on is that neither
Ann Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal representative of the
sex. About the morality of Mr. Wells’s and Mr. Bennett’s books, there
are probably a hundred opinions. One’s own present quarrel with them is
not that they are bad morals, but that they are bad biology.