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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.
"There's nothing worth knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman." I don't know if old Tesman agreed with him or not, but he must have spoken about it, because, for a time, our man got the name of "Hard Facts." He had the singular good fortune that his sayings stuck to him and became part of his name.
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.
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.
The spectators would stop to ask themselves how he happened to have the weapon by him without their knowing it; and this self-muttered question would deaden the effect of the scene. The dénouement of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler requires that the two chief characters, Eilert Lövborg and Hedda Tesman, should die of pistol wounds.
The opening of Hedda Gabler, with its long conversation between Miss Tesman and the servant Bertha, comes as near as Ibsen ever did to the conventional exposition of the French stage, conducted by a footman and a parlour-maid engaged in dusting the furniture.
Örnulf, the aged father of a grim and speechless clan, is sorely wounded at the beginning of the play, but it makes no difference to him; no one binds up his arm, but he talks, fights, travels as before. We may see here foreshadowed various features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here is his favorite conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers like a Tesman.
In his early years, long before he got so becomingly bald on the top, he went to present a letter of introduction to Mr. Tesman of Tesman Brothers, a Sourabaya firm tip-top house. Well, Mr. Tesman was a kindly, benevolent old gentleman. He did not know what to make of that caller.
We said Sourabaya, of course, and took it for granted that he would stay with one of the Tesmans. One of us even wondered what sort of reception he would get; for it was known that Julius Tesman was unreasonably bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal fiasco. But Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the kind. Heyst went to stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch.
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.
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