girl,--nervous, sensitive, with a sharp intellect and still sharper
tongue; she is very critical, very reserved, full of secret
aspirations, and very warm-hearted; her heart is capable of becoming
a world to the man she loves, but it needs a man’s love to develop
its power of loving. She loves an elegant, self-satisfied Swedish
lieutenant, who has served as a volunteer in Algiers, and has written
a book on military science; he is just an ordinary smart young man,
and he takes it for granted that she will accept him the instant he
proposes. But she refuses him. He is indignant and hurt; he cannot
understand it at all, unless she loves some one else. But no, she does
not love any one else. Then what is the reason? She is sure that he
does not care enough for her; there is such an indescribable difference
between her love for him, or rather the love that she knows herself
capable of feeling, and the affection that he has to offer her, that
she will not have him on any account, and looks upon his proposal
almost in the light of an insult. He goes away, and returns, soon
afterwards, engaged to a little goose.
Fru Edgren develops an elaborate theory, to which she returns again
and again. According to her, it is only the commonplace little girls
of eighteen, innocence in a white pinafore, with whom men fall in
love. I myself do not think that there is much in it: a dozen men
who are nonentities fall in love with a dozen young women who are
likewise nonentities. On the other hand, we have that numerous type,
which includes the modern girl, full of soul, originality, and depth
of character, clever and modest, possessed of a keen divination with
regard to her own feelings and that of others, mingled with a chaste
pride that is founded upon the consciousness of her own importance,--a
pride that will not accept less than it gives. And these girls are
confined to the narrow circle to which all women are reduced, to
two or three possibilities in the whole course of their long youth,
possibilities which chance throws in their way, and which are perhaps
no possibilities at all to them. A few years pass by, and these girls
have become stern judges upon the rights of love, and they have
developed a bitter expression about the mouth, and a secret gnawing in
the soul. A few years more, and this unappreciated womanly instinct
will have brought them to hate men.
Fru Edgren went the same way. In her “Sketches from Life” we find
some traces of this feeling in the stories where she displays the
comparative worth of men and women; take, for instance, the tale called
“At War with Society.” But before she had quite joined the army of
stern judges, she weighed the problem of love once more, in the second
of her five completed novels, called, “Aurora Bunge.”
For the last ten years Aurora Bunge has been chief among the ball
beauties of Stockholm. Everything in her life is arranged and settled
beforehand. In the winter she goes to balls, night after night, to
parties and plays; in the summer she is occupied in much the same way
in a fashionable watering-place. For the last ten years she has known
exactly with whom she is going to dance, what compliments will be paid
her, what offers she will receive, and whom she is eventually going to
marry. The marriage can be put off until she is thirty--and now she is
nearly thirty, and the time has come. She is one of those girls who
have danced and danced until everything has grown equally indifferent
and wearisome to them; and yet she is without experience, and is likely
to remain so to the end. She allows herself perfect freedom of speech,
but she will never allow herself a single free action. A couple of
intrigues in the dim future are not entirely excluded from her plans,
but what difference will that make? She has something of Strindberg’s
“Julie,” but without the latter’s perversity; she is also some years in
advance of her. She would have no objection to eloping with a circus
rider, or doing something _de très mauvais goût_, but she knows that
she will never do it. The summer previous to the announcement of her
engagement she is seized with a fit of liking the country, and she
accompanies her mother to one of her properties, which is situated on a
desolate part of the coast. It is the first of her thirty summer visits
that is not quite _comme il faut_. In a sudden outburst of enthusiasm
for nature, she spends days and weeks wandering about in the woods and
fields, with torn dress and down-trodden shoes, and goes out sailing
with the fishermen. She becomes stronger and more beautiful, and is
more than ever imbued with an indescribable longing. This vague longing
leads her on towards that which she is going to experience--which is to
be her life’s only experience. She feels her pulses beat and her heart
burn within her, and not till then does the matured woman of thirty
tear aside the bandage that binds her eyes; and looking out, she cries:
Where art thou, who givest me life’s fulness? On one of her boating
expeditions, she goes to the nearest lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper,
a strong, quiet young man, comes out. She looks, and she knows that it
is he!
Up to this point Fru Edgren has copied the secret writing in her own
soul, and every touch is true. But her experience went no further.
The part that follows is psychological and logical too, but it has
the greatest fault that a romance can have; _i.e._, it is word for
word imagined, not experienced, and for this reason it is overdrawn.
Aurora has scarcely landed before a storm sets in. She flutters
like an exhausted bird, in and out of the narrow lighthouse. The
lighthouse-keeper sees the danger, and hurries down. She wants to throw
herself into the water. He climbs down the rocks and seizes hold of
her. Already before, this son of the people had found time to give her
a love poem to read. The storm lasts three days, and for three days she
remains there. On the fourth day the fishermen return to fetch her, and
the lighthouse-keeper is furious. By this time she is no better than a
very ordinary fisher girl. She is deathly pale, but insists on leaving
him. He threatens her with his fists, and she proposes that they should
drown themselves together; but his mother had already drowned herself,
and he does not wish to have two suicides in the family. Aurora goes
home, and they never meet again. A few months afterwards she marries an
officer who is in debt.
Fru Edgren’s men may be divided into two types,--the one she cannot
endure, but she describes him admirably; the other she cannot
describe at all, but she likes him very much indeed. The first is the
fashionable man of Stockholm society, who has tasted life’s pleasures,
and is wearied of them; the second is the simple, unsophisticated son
of the people.
VI
Fru Edgren looked life boldly in the face.--life, which was continually
passing her by, because she was a lady, whose duty it was to lead a
blameless existence. She was by this time a celebrated authoress, with
a comfortable income, but what had she gained by it? Merely this: that
envious eyes watched her more narrowly than before, and that she was
expected to live for the honor and glory of Sweden, and for the honor
and glory of her position as a woman writer. Yet, after all, were
they not in the North? And was she not allowed all possible freedom
up to a certain point? Even this certain point might be overstepped
sometimes,--in private, of course,--and such was the general usage.
But she was one of those proud natures who will not tolerate a greasy
fingermark on the untarnished shield of their honor, and she was also
one of those sovereign natures whose will is a law to themselves.
We are confronted by a strange sight in Scandinavian literature. We
find man’s laxity and woman’s prudery existing side by side. Björnson,
Ibsen, Garborg, Strindberg, were contemporaries of Fru Edgren, and
their renown was at its height. The eighties were the great period of
Scandinavian romance, and this romance turned solely upon the problem
of man and woman. The productive enthusiasm of those days drove a
multitude of women into the fields of literature, including those whom
we have mentioned, who died early, and some lesser ones, who still
continue to lead a useless, literary existence. But their writings are
strangely poor compared with those of the men, even though there were
numbered amongst them an Edgren-Leffler, an Ahlgren, and a Kovalevsky.
The men were not afraid; they all had something to impart, and that
which they imparted was themselves. But there was not a single woman’s
voice to join in the mighty chorus of the hymn to love; not one of them
had experienced it, and they had nothing to say. Their longing kept
silence. When, however, the literature of indignation, with Kalchas
Björnson at its head, broke loose against the corruptions and depravity
of men, then all the authoresses raised their voices, and instituted a
grand inquisition.
Fru Edgren took part in it. What hymn could she sing? She had no
experience of love, and her patience was at an end. Towards the end
of the eighties, love had completely vanished from her books, and its
place had been filled by the question of rights,--women’s rights with
regard to property and wage-earning, and marriage rights. “The Doll’s
House” was followed by a deluge of books on unhappy marriages, and Fru
Edgren contributed to increase their number. In a play called “True
Women,” she contrasts the hard-working, wage-earning woman with the
indolent, extravagant man; while she severely condemns the woman who
so far lowers herself as to love a husband who has been unfaithful to
her. She is, in fact, so badly disposed towards love that she allows
an honest, hard-working man, in the same piece, to be refused by an
honest, hard-working woman, and for the simple reason that superior
people must no longer propose, nor allow others to propose to them.
Her drama, “How People do Good,” is written in the same mood. “The
Gauntlet” and “The Doll’s House” have exerted such a great influence
over her that she has unconsciously quoted whole sentences. She has
become no better than the ordinary platform woman; her former sense
and good taste are no longer to be observed in her writings, and even
socialism has a place in her programme. This woman, who knows nothing
of the proletarian, represents him in a melodramatic manner, as she has
done before with the son of the people. She travels about the country
and fights for her rights; she becomes a propagandist.
It was at this time that the celebrated mathematician, Sonia
Kovalevsky, was appointed to the high school at Stockholm at the
instigation of Fru Edgren’s brother, Professor Mittag-Leffler, and
the two women became the greatest of friends. Sonia Kovalevsky had
practiced the principles of women’s rights and asceticism in her own
married life, and was now, after her husband had shot himself, a widow.
She was probably Björnson’s model in more than one of his books, and
she combined Russian fanaticism with the Russian capacity to please.
She had not been long at Stockholm before the war broke loose.
Strindberg raged against women, ignoring Fru Edgren and others on
the plea that they could not be reckoned as women, since they had no
children. Björnson and Fru Edgren were everywhere welcomed at women’s
meetings as the champions of women’s rights.
For four or five years Sonia Kovalevsky and Fru Edgren were almost
inseparable. Fru Edgren took back her maiden name of Leffler after her
separation from her husband. The two friends were always travelling.
They went to Norway, France, England, etc., together, and Fru Leffler
wrote her longest novel, “A Tale of Summer.” It was the old problem of
love and the artistic temperament. A highly gifted artist falls in love
with a commonplace schoolmaster,--she nervous, refined, independent; he
young, big, strong, true-hearted, and very like a trusty Newfoundland
dog. It does not answer. An artist must not marry, the most learned of
Newfoundland dogs cannot understand an artist, and yet artists have a
most unfortunate preference for Newfoundland dogs.
There was something in this novel that was not to be found in any of
her earlier works,--a hasty, uneven beat of the pulse, something of the
fever of awakened passion.
Sonia, meantime, was engaged with her work for the _Prix Bordin_; but
she had scarcely begun her studies before she left them to devote
herself to a parallel romance, about which she was very much excited.
It was called “The Struggle for Happiness: How it Was, and How it Might
Have Been.” She persuaded Fru Leffler to give this thought a dramatic
setting, and she was very anxious to have it published. It was nothing
more or less than a hymn to love, which had fast begun to set flame to
her ungovernable Russian blood. Fru Leffler wrote the piece, but it
proved an utter failure.
On her travels she made the acquaintance of the Duke of Cajanello, a
mathematician, who was probably introduced to her by Sonia Kovalevsky
He was professor at the Lyceum at Naples, and Fru Leffler appears to
have fallen suddenly and passionately in love. Her last novel bears
witness to this fact; like the former one, it treats of “Love and
Womanhood,” but here the proof of true womanliness lies in the loving.
She was divorced from her husband and went to Italy. Liberty, love,
and the South,--all were hers at last.
She had something else besides to satisfy her ambition as a society
lady, when, in May, 1890, she became the Duchess of Cajanello. After
her marriage she paid a visit to Stockholm with her husband, and every
one thought that she looked younger, more gentle, more womanly, and
happier than she had ever done before.
After the marriage, her friendship with Sonia Kovalevsky was at an end.
The latter had not found happiness in loving, and she died in the year
1891.
The Duchess of Cajanello lived at Naples, and in her forty-third year
she experienced for the first time the happiness of becoming a mother.
When she died, the little duke was scarcely more than six months old.
Up to the last few days of her life, she was to all appearances happy
and in good health. Her last work was the life of her friend Sonia
Kovalevsky. In writing it she fulfilled the promise which they had
made, that whichever of the two survived should write the life--a
living portrait it was to be--of the other. She had just begun to
correct the proofs before she died. On the last day before her illness,
she worked till three o’clock in the afternoon at a novel called “A
Narrow Horizon,” which was left unfinished. She died after a few days’
illness.
Fru Edgren-Leffler belonged to that class of women whose senses slumber
long because their vital strength gives them the expectation of long
youth. But when the day comes that they are awakened, the same vitality
that had kept them asleep overflows with an intensity that attracts
like a beacon on a dark night. It is the woman who attracts the man,
not the reverse. Fru Edgren-Leffler found in her fortieth year that
which she had sought for in vain in her twentieth and thirtieth,--love!
The unfruitful became fruitful; the emaciated became beautiful; the
woman’s rights woman sang a hymn to the mystery of love; and the
last short years of happiness, too soon interrupted by death, were a
contradiction to the long insipid period of literary production.
THE END
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Miss Gertrude Hall’s second volume of short stories, “Foam of the Sea
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pure romance it is long since we have had anything so rich in simple
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commingled,--he is astonished and delighted to find himself the same
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