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?
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 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.
III
UNDINE
Perhaps there is more than a nuance of caricature in the choice of such a name as "Undine Spragg" for the heroine of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. Throughout that book, with its brilliant enamel-like surfaces, there is a tendency to make sport of our national weakness for resounding names. Undine Spragg--hideous collocation--is not the only offence. There is Indiana Frusk of Apex City, and Millard Binch, a combination in which the Dickens of American Notes would have found amusement. Hotels with titles like The Stentorian are not exaggerated. Miss Spragg's ancestor had invented "a hair waver"; hence the name Undine: "from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping," as the simple-hearted mother of the girl explained to a suitor. Mrs. Wharton has been cruel, with a glacial cruelty, to her countrywomen of the Spragg type. But they abound. They come from the North, East, South, West to conquer New York, and thanks to untiring energy, a handsome exterior, and much money, they "arrive"
sooner or later. With all her overaccentuated traits and the metallic quality of technique in the handling of her portrait, Undine Spragg is both a type and an individual--she is the newest variation of Daisy Miller--and compared with her brazen charmlessness the figures of Hedda Gabler and Mildred Lawson seem melting with tenderness, aglow with subtle charm and muffled exaltation. Undine--shades of La Motte Fouque--is quite the most disagreeable girl in our fiction. She has been put under a glass and subjected to the air-pump pressure of Mrs.
Wharton's art. She is a much more viable creature than the author's earlier Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth. At least Undine is not sloppy or sentimental, and that is a distinct claim on the suffrages of the intelligent reader. Furthermore, the clear hard atmosphere of the book is tempered by a tragic and humorous irony, a welcome astringent for the mental palate.
In Apex City Undine made up her mind to have her own way. She elopes and marries a vulgar "hustler," but is speedily divorced. She is very beautiful when she reaches New York. No emotional experience would leave a blur on her radiant youth, because love for her is a sensation, not a sentiment. By indirect and cumulative touches the novelist evokes for us her image. Truly a lovely apparition, almost mindless, with great sympathetic eyes and a sweet mouth. She exists, does Undine. She is not the barren fruit of a satirical pen.
Foreigners, both men and women, puzzle over her freedom, chilliness, and commercial horse-sense. She doesn't long intrigue their curiosity, her brain is poorly furnished and conversation with her is not a fine art. She is temperamental in the sense that she lives on her nerves; without the hum and glitter of the opera, fashionable restaurants, or dances she relapses into a sullen stupor, or rages wildly at the fate that made her poor. She, too, like Hedda and Emma, lives in the moment, a silly moth enamoured of a millionaire. Mildred Lawson is positively intellectual in comparison, for she has a "go" at picture-making, while the only pictures Undine cares for are those produced by her own exquisitely plastic figure. No wonder Ralph Marvell fell in love with her, or, rather, in love with his poetic vision of her. He was, poor man, an idealist, and his fine porcelain was soon cracked in contact with her brassy egotism.
He is of the old Washington Square stock, as antique--and as honourable--as Methuselah. Undine soon tires of him; above all, tires of his family and their old-fashioned social code. For her the rowdy joys of Peter Van Degen and his set. The Odyssey of Undine is set forth for us by an accomplished artist in prose. We see her in Italy, blind to its natural beauties, blind to its art, unhappy till she gets into the "hurrah" of St. Moritz. We follow her hence, note her trailing her petty misery--boredom because she can't spend extravagantly--through modish drawing-rooms; then a fresh hegira, Europe, a divorce, the episode with Peter Van Degen and its profound disillusionment (she has the courage to jump the main-travelled road of convention for a brief term) and her remarriage. That, too, is a failure, only because Undine so wills it. She has literally killed her second husband because she wins from him by "legal" means their child, and in the end she again marries her divorced husband, Elmer Moffatt, now a magnate, a multimillionaire. She has at last followed the advice of Mrs. Heeny, her adviser and masseuse. "Go steady, Undine, and you'll get anywheres." We leave her in a blaze of rubies and glory at her French chateau, and she isn't happy, for she has just learned that, being divorced, she can never be an ambassadress, and that her major detestation, the "Jim Driscolls," had been appointed to the English court as ambassador from America. The novel ends with this coda: "She could never be an ambassador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests, she said to herself, that it was the one part she was really made for." The truth is she was bored as a wife, and like Emma Bovary, found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
You ask yourself, after studying the play, and the two novels, if the new woman is necessarily disagreeable. To my way of thinking, it is principally the craving for novelty in characterisation that has wrought the change in our heroines of fiction, although new freedom and responsibilities have evolved new types. Naturally the pulchritudinous weakling we shall always have with us, ugly girls with brains are a welcome relief from the eternal purring of the popular girl with the baby smile. But it would be a mistake to call Hedda, or Mildred, or Undine, new women. Mildred is the most "advanced," Hedda the most dangerous--she pulled the trigger far too early--and Undine the most selfish of the three. The three are disagreeable, but the trio is transitional in type. Each girl is a compromiser, Undine being the boldest; she did a lot of shifting and indulged in much cowardly evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster.
Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three. She got what she wanted for she wanted only dross. Ibsen's Button-Moulder will meet her at the Cross-Roads when her time comes. Hedda, like Strindberg's Julia, may escape him because, coward as she was when facing harsh reality, she had the courage to rid her family of a worthless encumbrance. If she had been a robust egoist, and realised her nature to the full, she would have been a Hedda Gabler "reversed," in a word, the Hilda Wangel of The Master Builder. But with Mildred she lacked the strength either to renounce or to sin. And Undine Spragg hadn't the courage to become downright wicked; the game she played was so pitiful that it wasn't worth the poor little tallow-dip. What is her own is the will-to-silliness. As Princess Estradina exclaimed in her brutally frank fashion: "My dear, it's what I always say when people talk to me about fast Americans: you're the only innocent women left in the world...." This is far from being a compliment. No, Undine is voluble, vulgar, and "catty," but she isn't wicked. It takes brains to be wicked in the grand manner. She is only disagreeable and fashionable; and she is as impersonal and monotonous as a self-playing pianoforte.