She condemns wholesale the music of Mendelssohn. Not for nothing did Will Owen Jones call her his “meat-ax girl.” Her judgments were extreme. Among actresses, Helena Modjeska was a divinity, Lillie Langtry couldn’t act at all. As for Lillian Russell, she “not only lacks the power to portray emotion of any kind; she has no sense of humor, she is utterly without enthusiasm, indifferent alike to her part and her audience, even to her own charms. She is a plastic figure . . . All these stories about her improvement in acting and singing are fairy tales.” Willa’s energetic pose is of the all-knowing connoisseur, her self-assurance and voluminous opinions a court of final appeal. In these brash columns she strives for a knowingness that has got in the way of knowledge, asserting a worldliness of which she’s uncertain. She is young and not immune to posing. That column on Wilde may be the worst thing she was ever guilty of. But near to it is the following boorish passage for a column in the Courier: “I have not much faith in women in fiction. They have a sort of sex consciousness that is abominable. They are so limited to one string and they lie so about that. There are so few, the ones who did anything worth while; there were the great Georges, George Eliot and George Sand, and they were anything but women, and there was Miss Brontë who kept her sentimentality under control, and there was Jane Austen who certainly had more common sense than any of them and was in some respects the greatest of them all. Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn or anything without wine, women and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.”
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