o 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?

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.