Ivory, Apes and Peacocks

by James Huneker

XVIII

THREE DISAGREEABLE GIRLS

I

HEDDA

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 Valérie 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 Dostoïevsky'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, Valérie, 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 Lövborg 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 Prévost. 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, Lövborg. 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 mésalliance. 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?