ge, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands
more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw
would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of
love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment.
The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only
women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose
development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but
without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about
things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing
about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest
from feeling. Now with women of the "Bovary" type, this relaxation
and recreation is impossible. They are not critics of life, but, in
the most personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions
through the fancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and
passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor,
neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better
things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For
these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of
the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas' great creation,
"Marguerite Gauthier." These people really expect the passion of
love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only
intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon
making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art,
expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite
variety, pleasure and distraction, to contribute to their lives what
the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less
limited and less intense idealists. So this passion, when set up
against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have
staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the
blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves
up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation
is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every
sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get
even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes.
Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to "Emma
Bovary," sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police
station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads.
"Edna Pontellier," fanciful and roma