Hazlitt tells us in a delightful essay about the whimsical notion of
Charles Lamb that he would rather see Sir Thomas Browne than
Shakespeare. A pleasant recreation is this same picking out "of
persons one would wish to have seen." Causing great annoyance to
Ayrton at an evening party, Lamb rejected the names of Milton and
Shakespeare, selecting those of Browne and Fulke Greville--the friend
of Sir Philip Sidney. For the prince of essayists there was mystery
hovering about the personalities of this pair. I have often wondered
if the most resounding names in history are the best beloved. Or in
fiction. What is the name of your favourite heroine? Whom should you
like to meet in that long corridor of time leading to eternity, the
walls lined with the world's masterpieces of portraiture? I can answer
for myself that no Shakespearian lovely dame or Balzacian demon in
petticoats would ever be taken off the wall by me. They are either too
remote or too unreal, though a word might be said for Valerie
Marneffe. In the vasty nebula of the Henry James novel there are
alluringly strange women, but if you summon them they fade and resolve
themselves into everlasting phrases. In a word, they are not tangible
enough to endure the change of moral climate involved in such a game
as that played by Charles Lamb and his friends.
But Emma Bovary might come if you but ardently desired. And the
fascinating Anna Karenina. Or Becky Sharp with her sly graces. Perhaps
some of Dostoievsky's enigmatic, bewildering girls should be included
in the list, for they brim over with magnetism, very often a malicious
magnetism, and their glances are eloquent with suffering, haunt like
the eyes one sees in a gallery of old masters. I do not speak of
Sonia, but of the passionate Natasia Philipovna in The Idiot, or
Aglaya Epanchin, in the same powerful novel, or Paulina in The
Gambler. However, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of so many
favourites, even if they are only made of paper and ink. I confess I
am an admirer of Emma Bovary. To the gifted young critics of to-day
the work, and its sharply etched characters, has become a mere
stalking horse for a new-fangled philosophy of Jules Gaultier, called
Bovarysme, but for me it will always be the portrait of that unhappy
girl with the pallid complexion, velvety dark eyes, luxuriant hair,
and languid charm. Anna Karenina is more aristocratic; above all, she
knew what happiness meant; its wing only brushed the cheek of Emma.
Her death is more lamentable than Anna's--one can well sympathise with
Flaubert's mental and physical condition after he had written that
appalling chapter describing the poisoning of Emma. No wonder he
thought he tasted arsenic, and couldn't sleep. Balzac, Dickens, and
Thackeray were thus affected by their own creations, yet Flaubert is
to this day called "impersonal," "cold," because he never made
concessions to sentimentalism, never told tales out of his workshop
for gaping indifferents.
As for Becky Sharp, that kittenish person seldom arouses in me much
curiosity. I agree with George Moore that Thackeray, in the interests
of mid-Victorian morality, suppressed many of her characteristics,
telling us too little of her amatory temperament. Possibly, Mr. Moore
may err, Becky may have had no "temperament," notwithstanding her
ability to twist men around her expressive digits. That she was
disagreeable when she set herself out to be I do not doubt; in fact,
she is the protagonist of a whole generation of disagreeable heroines
in English fiction. Bernard Shaw did not overlook her pertness and
malevolence, though all his girls are disagreeable, even--pardon the
paradox--his agreeable ones. But they are as portraiture far too
"papery," to borrow a word from painters' jargon, for my purpose.
They are not alive, they only are mouthpieces for the author's rather
old-time ideas.
I mention the four heroines of a former period, Valerie, Becky, Emma,
Anna, not because they are all disagreeable, but because they are my
pets in fiction. Thoroughly disagreeable girls are Hedda Gabler,
Mildred Lawson, and Undine Spragg. Of course, in a certain sense old
Wotan Ibsen is the father of the latter-day Valkyrie brood. The
"feminist" movement is not responsible for them; there were
disagreeable females before the flood, yet somehow the latter part of
the last and the beginning of the present century have produced a big
flock in painting, music (Richard Strauss's operas), drama, and
literature. Hedda boldly carved out of a single block stands out as
the very Winged Victory of her species. In her there is a hint of Emma
Bovary; both are incorrigible romanticists, snobs, girls for whom the
present alone exists. She is decadent inasmuch as her nerves rule her
actions, and at the rising of the curtain her nerves are in rags.
Henry James finds in Ibsen a "charmless fascination," but by no means
insists on the point that Hedda is disagreeable. Nor is he so sure
that she is wicked, though he admits her perversity. The late Grant
Allen once said to William Archer that Hedda was "nothing more nor
less than the girl we take down to dinner in London, nineteen times
out of twenty," which, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The
truth is, Hedda is less a type than a "rare case," but to diagnose
her as merely neurasthenic is also to go wide of the mark. Doubtless
her condition may have added bitterness to her already overflowing
cup; nevertheless Hedda is not altogether a pathological study.
Approaching motherhood is not a veil for her multitude of sins. How
soon are we shown her cruel nature in the dialogue with devoted Thea
Rysing, whose hair at school had aroused envy in Hedda! She pulled it
whenever she got a chance, just as she pulled from its hiding-place
the secret of the timid Thea. Simply to say that Hedda is the
incarnation of selfishness is but a half-truth. She is that and much
more.
Charmless never, disagreeable always, she had the serpent's charm, the
charm that slowly slays its victim. Her father succumbed to it, else
would he have permitted her to sit in corners with poet Eiljert
Loevborg and not only hold hands but listen to far from edifying
discourses? Not a nice trait in Hedda--though a human, therefore not a
rare one--is her curiosity concerning forbidden themes. She was sly.
She was morbid. Last of all she was cowardly. Yes, largely cerebral
was her interest in nasty things, for when Eiljert attempted to
translate his related adventures into action she promptly threatened
him with a pistol. A demi-vierge before Marcel Prevost. Not as
admirable as either Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler married
George Tesman for speculation. He had promised her the Falk
villa--the scene plays up in Christiania--and he expected a
professorship; these, with a little ready money and the selflessness
of Aunt Julia, were so many bribes for the anxious Hedda, whose first
youth had been heedlessly danced away without matrimonial success.
Mark what follows: Ibsen, the sternest moralist since old John Knox,
doesn't spare his heroine. He places her between the devil of Justice
Brack, libertine and house friend, and the deep sea of the debauched
genius, Loevborg. To make a four-square of ineluctable fate she is
flanked on either side by her mediocre husband and the devoted bore,
Thea Rysing--Elvsted. Like a high-strung Barbary mare--she was of good
birth and breeding--her nerves tugging in their sheaths, her heart a
burnt-out cinder, Hedda saw but one way to escape--suicide. She took
that route and really it was the most profound and significant act of
her life, cowardly as was the motive. She was discontented, shallow,
the victim of her false upbringing. In a more intellectual degree
Eiljert, her first admirer, is her counterpart. Both could have
consorted with Emma Bovary and found her "ideals" sympathetic. Emil
Reich has called Hedda Gabler the tragedy of mesalliance. It is a
memorial phrase. George Tesman and Charles Bovary are brothers in
misfortune. They belong to those husbands "predestined" to betrayal,
as Balzac puts it. Councillor Karenin completes the trio and Anna
hated his large ears; but before Karenin, Charles Bovary was despised
by Emma because of his clumsy feet and inexpressive bearing, and his
habit of breathing heavily during dinner. George Tesman with his
purblind faculties, amiable ways, and semi-idiotic exclamations will
go down in the history of fiction with Georges Dandin, Bovary, and
Karenin. As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In
Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically
sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells
of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down
in the ferment of self." Imperfect sympathies, misplaced egoism--for
there is a true as well as a false egoism--a craze for silly
pleasures, no matter the cost, and a mean little vanity that
sacrificed lives when not appeased. She is the most disagreeable
figure in modern drama. Were it not for her good looks and pity for
her misspent life and death she would be absolutely unendurable. The
dramatic genius of Ibsen makes her credible. But what was the matter
with George Tesman?
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 sex
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?