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 [Pg 319] 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 [Pg 320] 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 Fontain............