Fru Leffler to Sonia is like comparing a nine days’ wonder to an
eternal phenomenon. One is an ordinary woman with a carefully
cultivated talent, while the other is one of those mysteries who, from
time to time, make their appearance in the world, in whom nature seems
to have overstepped her boundaries, and who are created to live lonely
lives, to suffer and to die without having ever attained the full
possession of their own being.
In the year 1888, at the age of thirty-eight, Sonia learned for the
first time to know the love which is a woman’s destiny. M. K. was a
great, heavy Russian boyar, who had been a professor, but was dismissed
on account of his free-thinking views. He was a dissipated man and
rich, and had spent his time in travelling since he left Russia. He
was no longer young, like the Duke of Cajanello. A few years older
than Sonia, he was one of those complacent, self-centred characters
who have never known what it is to long for sympathy, who are totally
devoid of ideals, and are not given to vain illusions. Comparatively
speaking, an older woman always has a better chance with a man younger
than herself, and there was nothing very surprising in the love which
the young and insignificant Duke bestowed on Fru Leffler. With Sonia
it was quite different. The boyar had already enjoyed as many of the
good things of this world as he desired; he was both practical and
sceptical, the kind of man whom women think attractive, and who boast
that they understand women. I am not at liberty to mention his name, as
he is still alive and enjoys good health. He was interested in Sonia,
as much as he was capable of being interested in any one, because she
was a compatriot to be proud of, and he also liked her because she was
good company, but Sonia never acquired all the power over him which
she should have had. He was not like a susceptible young man who is
influenced by the first woman who has really given him the full passion
of her love. The long-repressed love which was now lavished upon him
by the woman who was no longer young had none of the surprise of
novelty in it, not even the unexpected treasure of flattered vanity. He
accepted it calmly, and never for a moment did he allow it to interfere
with his mode of life. Even though he had no wife, his bachelor’s
existence had never lacked the companionship of women. Sonia should
occupy the position of wife, but an ardent lover it was no longer in
his power to be.
The conflict points plainly to a double rupture between them,--the one
internal and the other external,--both brought about by the spirit of
the age.
Sonia’s womanhood had awakened in her the first time they met, and he
became her first love. She loved him as a young girl loves, with a
trembling and ungovernable joy at finding all that had hitherto been
hidden in herself; she rejoiced in the knowledge that he was there,
that she would see him again to-morrow as she had seen him to-day, that
she could touch him, hold him with her hands. She lived only when she
saw him; her senses were dulled when he was no longer there. It was
then that Stockholm became thoroughly hateful to her; it seemed to hold
her fast in its clutches, to crush the woman in her, and to deprive
her of her nationality. He represented the South,--the great world of
intellect and freedom; but above all else, he was home, he was Russia!
He was the emblem of her native land; he had come speaking the language
in which her nurse had sung to her, in which her father and sister and
all the loved and lost had spoken to her; he was her hearth and home in
the dreary world. But more than all this, he was the only man capable
of arousing her love.
But if she took a short holiday and followed him to Paris and Italy,
his cold greeting was sure to chill her inmost being, and instead of
the comfort which she had hoped to find in his love and sympathy, she
was thrown back upon herself, more miserable and disappointed than
before.
Her spirits were beginning to give way. It seemed as though the world
were growing empty around her and the darkness deepening, while she
stood in the midst of it all, alone and unprotected. But what drove
matters to a climax was that their most intimate daily intercourse took
place just at the time when she was in Paris working hard, and sitting
up at nights. When she was awarded the _Prix Bordin_ on Christmas Eve,
1888, in the presence of the greatest French mathematicians, she forgot
that she was a European celebrity, whose name would endure forever
and be numbered among the women who had outstripped all others; she
was only conscious of being an overworked woman, suffering from one
of those nervous illnesses when white seems turned to black, joy to
sorrow,--enduring the unutterable misery caused by mental and physical
exhaustion, when the night brings no rest to the tortured nerves. As
is always the case with productive natures under like circumstances,
her passions were at their highest pitch, and she needed sympathy from
without to give relief. It was then that she received an offer of
marriage from the man whom she loved; but she was too well aware of
the gulf which lay between his gentlemanly bearing and her devouring
passion to accept it, and determined that since she could not have
all she would have nothing. It may be that she was haunted by the
recollection of her first marriage, or she may have been influenced by
the woman’s rights standpoint which weighs as in a scale: For so and
so many ounces of love, I must have so and so many ounces of love and
fidelity; and for so and so many yards of virtuous behavior, I have a
right to expect exactly the same amount from him.
It happened, however, that the man in question would not admit of such
calculations, and Sonia went back to Stockholm and her hated university
work with the painful knowledge of “never having been all in all to
anybody.” After a time she began to realize that love is not a thing
which can be weighed and measured. She now concentrated her strength in
an attempt to free herself from her work at Stockholm, which had been
turned into a life-long appointment since she won the _Prix Bordin_;
she longed to get away from Sweden, where she felt very lonely, having
no one to whom she could confide her thoughts. She had some hopes of
being given an honorary appointment as a member of the Imperial Russian
Academy, which would place her in a position of pecuniary independence,
with the liberty to reside where she pleased. But when she returned
to her work at Stockholm in the beginning of the year 1891, after a
trip to Italy in company with the man whom she loved, it was with the
conviction, grown stronger than ever, of not being able to put up with
the loneliness and emptiness of her existence any longer, and with the
determination of throwing everything aside and accepting his proposal.
She came to this decision while suffering from extreme weariness. Her
Russian temperament was very much opposed to the manner of her life
for the last few years. Her spirits, which wavered between a state of
exaltation and apathy, were depressed by a regular routine of work and
social intercourse, and she was never allowed the thorough rest which
she so greatly needed. In one year she lost all who were dear to her;
and though dissatisfied with her own life, she was able to sympathize
deeply with her beloved sister Anjuta, whose proud dreams of youth were
either doomed to destruction, or else their fulfilment was accompanied
with disappointment, while she herself was dying slowly, body and soul.
Life had dealt hardly with both these sisters. When Sonia travelled
home for the last time, after exchanging the warm, cheerful South for
the cold, dismal North, she broke down altogether. Alone and over-tired
as she always was on these innumerable journeys, which were only
undertaken in order to cure her nervous restlessness, her spirits were
no longer able to encounter the discomforts of travel, and she gave
way. The perpetual changes, whether in rain, wind, or snow, accompanied
by all the small annoyances, such as getting money changed, and
finding no porters, overpowered her, and for a short time life seemed
to have lost all its value. With an utter disregard for consequences,
she exposed herself to all winds and weathers, and arrived ill at
Stockholm, where her course of lectures was to begin immediately. A
heavy cold ensued, accompanied by an attack of fever; and so great was
her longing for fresh air, that she ran out into the street on a raw
February day in a light dress and thin shoes.
Her illness was short; she died a couple of days after it began. Two
friends watched beside her, and she thanked them warmly for the care
they took of her,--thanked them as only strangers are thanked. They had
gone home to rest before the death-struggle began, and there was no one
with her but a strange nurse, who had just arrived. She died alone,
as she had lived,--died, and was buried in the land where she had not
wished to live, and where her best strength had been spent.
VII
There is yet another picture behind the one depicted in these pages. It
is large, dark, and mysterious, like a reflection in the water; we see
it, but it melts away each time we try to grasp it.
When we know the story of a person’s life, and are acquainted with
their surroundings and the conditions under which they have been
brought up; when we have been told about their sufferings, and the
illness of which they died, we imagine that we know all about them,
and are able to form a more or less correct portrait of them in our
mind’s eye, and we even think that we are in a position to judge of
their life and character. There is scarcely any one whose life is less
veiled to the public gaze than Sonia Kovalevsky’s. She was very frank
and communicative, and took quite a psychological interest in her own
character; she had nothing to conceal, and was known by a large number
of people throughout Europe. She lived her life before the eyes of the
public, and died of inflammation of the lungs, brought on by an attack
of influenza.
Such was Sonia Kovalevsky’s life as depicted by Fru Leffler, in a
manner which reveals a very limited comprehension of her subject; the
chief thing missing is the likeness to Sonia.
This sketch was afterwards corrected and completed with great sympathy
and delicacy by Ellen Key, but she has also failed to catch the
likeness of Sonia Kovalevsky.
And mine--written as it is with the full consciousness of being better
able to understand her than either of these two, partly on account of
the impressions left by my own half-Russian childhood; partly, too,
because in some ways my temperament resembles hers--my sketch, although
it is an analysis of her life, is not Sonia Kovalevsky.
She is still standing there, supernaturally great, like a shadow when
the moon rises, which seems to grow larger the longer one looks at
it; and as I write this, I feel as though she were as near to me as
a body that one knocks up against in the dark. She comes and goes.
Sometimes she appears close beside me sitting on the flower-table, a
little bird-like figure, and I seem to see her quite distinctly; then,
as soon as I begin to realize her presence, she has gone. And I ask
myself,--Who is she? I do not know; she did not know it herself. She
lived, it is true, but she never lived her own, real, individual life.
She remains there still,--a form which came out of the darkness and
went back into the same. She was a thorough child of the age in every
little characteristic of her aimless life; she was a woman of this
century, or rather, she was what this century forces a woman to be,--a
genius for nothing, a woman for nothing, ever struggling along a
road which leads to nowhere, and fainting on the way as she strives
to attain a distant mirage. Tired to death, and yet afraid to die,
she died because the instinct for self-preservation forsook her for
the space of a single instant; died only to be buried under a pile
of obituary notices, and forgotten for the next novelty. But behind
them all she stands, an immortal personality, hot and volcanic as the
world’s centre, a thorough woman, yet more than a woman. Her brain
rose superior to sex, and learned to think independently, only to be
dragged down again and made subservient to sex; her soul was full of
mysticism, conscious of the Infinite existing in her little body, and
out of her little body again soaring up towards the Infinite,--a one
day’s superficial consciousness which allowed itself to be led astray
by public opinion, yet possessing, all the while, a sub-consciousness,
which, poetically viewed, clung fast to the eternal realities in her
womanly frame, and would not let them rise to the brain, which, freed
from the body, floated in empty space. Hers was a queenly mind, feeding
a hundred beggars at her board,--giving to all, but confiding in none.
Ellen Key once said to me: “When she shook hands, you felt as if a
little bird with a beating heart had fluttered into your hand and out
again.” And another friend, Hilma Strandberg, a young writer of great
promise, whose after career belied its commencement, said, after her
first meeting with Sonia, that she had felt as though the latter’s
glance had pierced her through and through, after which she seemed
to be dissecting her soul, bit by bit, every bit vanishing into thin
air; this psychical experience was followed by such violent bodily
discomfort that she almost fainted, and it was only with the greatest
difficulty that she managed to get home.
Both these descriptions prove that Sonia’s hands and eyes were the most
striking part of her personality. Many anecdotes are told about her
penetrating glance, but this is the only one which mentions her hands,
although it is true that Fru Leffler remarked that they were very much
disfigured by veins. But this one is sufficient to complete a picture
of her which I remember to have seen: she has a slender little child’s
body, and her hands are the hands of a child, with nervous, crooked
little fingers, anxiously bent inwards; and in one hand she clasps a
book, with such visible effort that it makes one’s heart ache to look
at her.
The hands often afford better material for psychological study than
the face, and they give a deeper and more truthful insight into the
character because they are less under control. There are people
with fine, clever faces, whose hands are like sausages,--fleshy
and veinless, with thick stumpy fingers which warn us to beware of
the animated mask. And there are round, warm, sensuous faces, with
full, almost thick lips, which are obviously contradicted by pale,
blue-veined, sickly-looking hands. The momentary amount of intellectual
power which a person has at his disposal can change the face, but
the hands are of a more physical nature, and their speech is a more
physical one. Sonia’s face was lit up by the soul in her eyes, which
bore witness to the intense interest which she took in everything that
was going on around her; but the weak, nervous, trembling little hands
told of the unsatisfied, helpless child, who was never to attain the
full development of her womanhood.
II
_Neurotic Keynotes_
I
Last year there was a book published in London with the extraordinary
title of “Keynotes.” Three thousand copies were sold in the course
of a few months, and the unknown author became a celebrity. Soon
afterwards the portrait of a lady appeared in “The Sketch.” She had a
small, delicate face, with a pained and rather tired expression, and
a curious, questioning look in the eyes; it was an attractive face,
very gentle and womanly, and yet there was something disillusioned and
unsatisfied about it. This lady wrote under the pseudonym of George
Egerton, and “Keynotes” was her first book.
It was a strange book! too good a book to become famous all at once. It
burst upon the world like the opening buds in spring, like the cherry
blossom after the first cold shower of rain. What can have made this
book so popular in the England of to-day, which is as totally devoid of
all true literature as Germany itself? Was it only the writer’s strong
individuality, which each successive page impressed upon the reader’s
nerves more vividly and more painfully than the last? The reader, did
I say? Yes, but not the male reader. There are very few men who have
a sufficiently keen appreciation for a woman’s feelings to be able to
put their own minds and souls into the swing of her confession, and to
accord it their full sympathy. Yet there are such men. We may perhaps
come across two or three of them in a lifetime, but they disappear
from our sight, as we do from theirs. And they are not readers. Their
sympathy is of a deeper, more personal character, and as far as the
success of a book is concerned, it need not be taken into consideration
at all.
“Keynotes” is not addressed to men, and it will not please them. It is
not written in the style adopted by the other women Georges,--George
Sand and George Eliot,--who wrote from a man’s point of view, with the
solemnity of a clergyman or the libertinism of a drawing-room hero.
There is nothing of the man in this book, and no attempt is made to
imitate him, even in the style, which springs backwards and forwards as
restlessly as a nervous little woman at her toilet, when her hair will
not curl and her stay-lace breaks. Neither is it a book which favors
men; it is a book written against them, a book for our private use.
There have been such books before; old-maid literature is a lucrative
branch of industry, both in England and Germany (the two most
unliterary countries in Europe), and that is probably the reason why
the majority of authoresses write as though they were old maids. But
there are no signs of girlish prudery in “Keynotes;” it is a liberal
book, indiscreet in respect of the intimacies of married life, and
entirely without respect for the husband; it is a book with claws and
teeth ready to scratch and bite when the occasion offers,--not the
book of a woman who married for the sake of a livelihood, but the book
of a devoted wife, who would be inseparable from her husband if only
he were not so tiresome, and dull, and stupid, such a thorough man,
insufferable at times, and yet indispensable as the husband always is
to the wife.
And it is the book of a gentlewoman!
We have had tell-tale women before, but Heaven preserve us! Fru Skram
is a man in petticoats; she speaks her mind plainly enough,--rather
too plainly to suit my taste. “Gyp,” a distinguished Frenchwoman, has
written “Autour du Mariage,” and she cannot be said to mince matters
either. But here we have something quite different; something which
does not in the least resemble Gyp’s frivolous worldliness or Amalie
Skram’s coarseness. Mrs. Egerton would shudder at the thought of
washing dirty linen in public, and she could not, even if she were to
force herself, treat the relationship between husband and wife with
cynical irony, and she does not force herself in the very least.
She writes as she really is, because she cannot do otherwise. She has
had an excellent education, and is a lady with refined tastes, with
something of that innocence of the grown woman which is almost more
touching than a girl’s innocence, because it proves how little of his
knowledge of life in general, and his sex in particular, the Teutonic
husband confides to his wife. She stands watching him,--an eating,
loving, smoking organism. Heavens! how wearisome! So loved, and yet
so wearisome! It is unbearable! And she retreats into herself, and
realizes that she is a woman.
It is almost universal amongst women, especially Germans, that they
do not take man as seriously as he likes to imagine. They think him
comical,--not only when they are married to him, but even before
that, when they are in love with him. Men have no idea what a comical
appearance they present, not only as individuals, but as a race. The
comic part about a man is that he is so different from women, and that
is just what he is proudest of. The more refined and fragile a woman
is, the more ridiculous she is likely to find the clumsy great creature
who takes such a roundabout way to gain his comical ends.
To young girls especially man offers a perpetual excuse for a laugh,
and a secret shudder. When men find a group of women laughing among
themselves, they never suspect that it is they who are the cause of it.
And that again is so comic! The better a man is, the more he is in
earnest when he makes his pathetic appeal for a great love; and woman,
who takes a special delight in playing a little false, even when there
is no necessity, becomes as earnest and solemn as he, when all the time
she is only making fun of him. A woman wants amusement, wants change;
a monotonous existence drives her to despair, whereas a man thrives
on monotony, and the cleverer he is the more he wishes to retire into
himself, that he may draw upon his own resources; a clever woman needs
variety, that she may take her impressions from without.
... The early blossoms of the cherry-tree shudder beneath the cold
rain which has burst their scales; this shudder is the deepest
vibration in Mrs. Egerton’s book. What is the subject? A little woman
in every imaginable mood, who is placed in all kinds of likely and
unlikely circumstances: in every story it is the same little woman
with a difference, the same little woman, who is always loved by a
big, clumsy, comic man, who is now good and well-behaved, now wild,
drunk, and brutal; who sometimes ill-treats her, sometimes fondles
her, but never understands what it is that he ill-treats and fondles.
And she sits like a true Englishwoman with her fishing-rod, and while
she is waiting for a bite, “her thoughts go to other women she has
known, women good and bad, school friends, casual acquaintances,
women-workers,--joyless machines for grinding daily corn, unwilling
maids grown old in the endeavor to get settled, patient wives who bear
little ones to indifferent husbands until they wear out,--a long array.
She busies herself with questioning. Have they, too, this thirst for
excitement, for change, this restless craving for sun and love and
motion? Stray words, half confidences, glimpses through soul-chinks of
suppressed fires, actual outbreaks, domestic catastrophes,--how the
ghosts dance in the cells of her memory! And she laughs--laughs softly
to herself because the denseness of man, his chivalrous conservative
devotion to the female idea he has created, blinds him, perhaps
happily, to the problems of her complex nature, ... and well it is that
the workings of our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning
enough or _great_ enough to seem to be what they would have us, rather
than be what we are. But few of them have had the insight to find out
the key to our seeming contradictions,--the why a refined, physically
fragile woman will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive
passions, and love him; the why strength and beauty appeal more often
than the more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart; the why women
(and not the innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard
to forgive in their fellows. They have all overlooked the eternal
wildness, the untamed primitive savage temperament that lurks in the
mildest, best woman. Deep in through ages of convention this primeval
trait burns, an untamable quantity that may be concealed, but is never
eradicated by culture,--the keynote of woman’s witchcraft and woman’s
strength.”