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
entitled 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 outshine 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,
Willy 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 snobbish 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 passion for god or man, but give me a passion. 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
snob, therefore mean of soul; and she was a cold snob, 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
shell-like ears, ears that are danger-signals to experienced men.
When I reread her history I was reminded of the princess in the
allegory of Ephraim Mikhael, called The Captive. She was the cold
princess held captive in the hall with the wall of brass. Wherever she
turns or walks she sees a welcome visitor: it is always her own
insolent image in the mirrors on the walls. These mirrors make of
herself her own eternal jailer. When she gazes from the window of her
prison tower she sees no one. No conquering lover comes to deliver her
from the bondage of self. In the slave who offers rare fruits and
precious wines in cups of emerald she sees only a mockery of herself,
the words of consolation remind her of her own voice. "And that is why
the sorrowful Princess drives away the beautiful loving slave, more
cruel even than the mirrors." Egotist to the end, both Mildred and the
Princess see naught in the universe save the magnified image of
themselves.