Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

THE NEWEST WOMAN

T was the late George Meredith, if I mistake not, who was credited with bringing

I

women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion. He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the "veiled virginal doll." The jeune fille had, in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition. Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.

Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up to date with the fiction of the contemporary English school-even to the

last instalments of its serial novels-I sought out the most démodé of the English novelists. "Let me see," I murmured to myself, "just what it is that we have thought it worth while, at this expense, to escape." Accordingly, I procured all the volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than to go to Richardson; and, in all the work of Richardson, fairest, surely, to go to Sir Charles.

I have never known any one who was ashamed to confess that Sir Charles Grandison bored him. It is the last work which any defender of the old school of fiction would think of using as a basis for argument. And yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural note is not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron loved Sir Charles while he was still bound to the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with dignity when her friends cautioned her against her own feeling. "If this should end at last in love" (she writes), "and I should be entangled in a hopeless passion, the object of it would be Sir Charles Grandison: he could not insult me; and mean as the word pity in some cases sounds, I had rather have his pity than the love of any other man." Such a cry, even Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, could give us.

Yet we must give Meredith his due; and Meredith, on the whole, honestly surpasses these others in the shining list of his adoring

heroines adoring with such dominance in meekness, such gayety in surrender. Rose Jocelyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, Clare Doria Forey (let us write it in full, for so she liked it best), Cecilia Halkett, Janet Ilchester-it would be hard to match, within the century, that group of girls.

All these names have been recalled simply as witnesses to the fact that there is-in spite of the contentions of the contemporary novelists a perfectly consistent tradition, in English novels, of the frank young woman. It is of the first importance to establish this, for these contemporary authors are talking as if their Anns and Isabels and Hildas were the only jeunes filles who had ever dared, in literature, to love as spirited girls in life really do. Just here one quarrels with their pretensions. The Victorian convention may have given us Amelia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and Lily Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre, and Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing nothing new when they show us the jeune fille falling in love before she is proposed to; they are doing nothing new when they show us the jeune fille wishing, quite specifically, to be a wife; they are not even doing anything newrather, something quite dix-huitième and rococo-when they show us the jeune fille considering whether she will put up with being a

mistress. The jeune fille glorying in her choice of the illicit relation is something, let us grant them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, upon their peak in Darien!

No; these authors have not broken with the Victorian convention that simple acrobatic feat demanded of all beginners. But they have broken with the laboratory method. If they think that in Ann Veronica, in Hilda Lessways, in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate than their great predecessors, they are quite simply mistaken. I am not proposing to myself, or to any one else, to be shocked by these young women. Being shocked leaves one, in the world of criticism, with no retort. Whether or not one is shocked by them is quite another question, and one that does not come into this discussion. My own objection to the school of Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, is that their heroines are not convincing.

There is a great deal said and written, nowadays, about women as they are and as they ought to be; and very little of it is in the tone of Sesame and Lilies. We are told very contradictory things about our sex; and we are exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe each contradiction. We are jeered at for being Nietzschean Anns, embodying the ruthless lifeforce, pursuing the man that we may have children by him. We are also preached at for causing race-suicide. We must want children

more than anything else in the world; and we must want the state to take care of them for us after they are born. We must return to the Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, join the Fabian Society. We must submit to the intense conservatism of eugenics; but we must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, whenever we find it convenient, by taking lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to marry without assurance that our children will be physically perfect; but we may not expose them on a mountain top if by any chance they

are not.

Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), with his avowed power of sucking the truth simultaneously from two mutually exclusive hypotheses, could do all the things that, with authority, we are told to do. "Modern, indeed! She" (Ann Veronica) "was going to be as primordial as chipped flint." Yet, if we accept the chronologies of history (which seems sane enough) nothing could be more "modern" than Ann Veronica's way of being pre-historic. Perhaps the solution is for all women to become pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all this; and we wonder a little if the heart-breaking medley of preachments is not the fruit of that antique and unpardonable sin-mêler les genres. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be generally agreed on: women are, contrary to fusty tradition, very like men-whether like

« AnkstesnisTęsti »