Chapter 9

In the summer of 1853, when the cholera devastated Stockholm, Frederika became president of a society of noble women, whose aim it was to take charge of, and provide a home for, those children who were orphaned by the terrible epidemic, and to give assistance to families in which the father or mother had been taken away. Two years afterwards, she placed herself at the head of a small association of ladies whose object it was to visit the prisons of Stockholm, and procure an amelioration of the condition of the prisoners, as well as to assist, on their discharge, those who seemed anxious to embark on an honest career. A considerable portion of her time, her energies, and her income was devoted to benevolent purposes, and the alleviation of human suffering she accepted as one of her holiest and happiest duties.

Having read with deep interest the works of Vinet, she was seized with a desire to study on the spot the religious movement in Protestant Switzerland called forth by the "Free Church," of which that eloquent divine was the founder. In the summer of 1856 she accordingly visited Switzerland. Thence she proceeded to Belgium, France, and Italy, and finally she extended her tour to Greece and Palestine, so that it was not until the summer of 1861 that she returned home. Of this long and interesting journey she issued a graphic record.

Three months of the summer of 1864 she spent at Arsta with the patriarchal family who had become the owners of the paternal estate, and enjoyed so much peace and pleasantness that she resolved to accept their invitation to lodge with them permanently. She still continued her philanthropic labours, and looked forward confidently to an old age of usefulness, hallowed by the love of suffering humanity and brightened by implicit confidence in the mercy and meek submission to the will of God. But on Christmas Day, 1865, she caught cold at church, and inflammation of the lungs supervened with a severity she had not strength enough to resist. She herself did not believe there was any danger; and in spite of increasing pain and difficulty in breathing, could not be persuaded to lie down, but walked about even on the last day of her life, which was also the last day of the year. Her mind preserved its clearness and serenity. Shortly before her death, she went, leaning on her nurse's arm, from window to window in her large sitting room, as if taking leave of the surrounding landscape which she loved so deeply. Then in a low weak voice she uttered some broken sentences, and frequently repeated the words, "Light, eternal light!" Clasping her nurse's hands in her own, she exclaimed, "Ah, my child, let us speak of Christ's love,--the best, the highest love!" At three o'clock on the following morning, she peacefully drew her last breath.[10]

* * * * *

From this brief sketch of the life of the great Swedish novelist, we turn to a consideration of her work as a traveller.

Her visit to the United States she turned to good account, examining with a keen observant eye the manners and customs of the people. She made the acquaintance of Channing and Emerson; she went from town to town, and village to village; she investigated the character and influence of American institutions; she gave a lively consideration to the great moral and political questions which were then stirring the American mind. The result was, a strong and affectionate interest in the great Western Commonwealth--an interest so strong and deep that it made her somewhat unjust to England, which she had formerly placed in the front rank of the nations as the mother of progress and true freedom.

In the following passage she particularizes, from her point of view, the difference between the English and American character:--

"Brother Jonathan and John Bull," she says, "have the same father, but not the same mother. John Bull is corpulent, with high-coloured cheeks, is self-assertive, and speaks in a loud voice; Brother Jonathan, who is much younger, is lank, tall, weak about the knees, not boastful, but vigorous and decided. John Bull is at least forty, while Jonathan is not yet twenty-one.

"The movements of John Bull are pompous, and somewhat affected; Jonathan's feet move as nimbly as his tongue. John Bull laughs loud and long; Jonathan does not laugh, but smiles slightly. John Bull seats himself calmly to make a good dinner, as if he were bent on some great and weighty matter; Jonathan eats rapidly, and is in a hurry to quit the table in order to found a town, dig a canal, or construct a railway. John wishes to be a gentleman; Jonathan does not trouble himself about appearances--he has so much to do, that it matters little to him if he rushes about with a hole at the elbow or a tail of his coat torn off, so long as he advances. John Bull marches, Jonathan runs. John Bull is certainly very polite to the ladies, but when he is bent on enjoying himself at the table, he puts them to the door--that is, he begs them to be so obliging as to go into another room and make tea for him, 'he will follow them immediately.' Jonathan does not act like this; he loves the society of women, and will not be deprived of it; he is the most gallant man upon earth, and if he sometimes forgets his gallantry, it is because he has forgotten himself; but this does not often happen. When John Bull has a fit of indigestion, or a stroke of ill-luck, he suffers from the spleen, and thinks of hanging himself; when Jonathan has a fit of indigestion, or a stroke of ill-luck, he goes on his travels. Now and then he has a paroxysm of lunacy, but he recovers himself quickly, and never dreams of putting an end to his existence. On the contrary, he says to himself, 'Let us think no more of it; go ahead!'

"The two brothers have taken it into their heads that they will humanize and civilize the world; but Jonathan marches with more zeal in this direction, and wishes to go much farther than John Bull; he has no fear of wounding his dignity by putting his two hands to the pie, like a true workman. The two brothers desire to become rich men; but John Bull keeps for himself and his friends the best and largest portion. Jonathan is willing to share his with everybody, to enrich all the world;[11] he is a cosmopolitan; a part of the earth serves him as larder, and he has all the treasures of the globe with which to keep up his household. John Bull is an aristocrat; Jonathan is a democrat--that is to say, he wishes to be, and thinks he is one; but it occurs to him to forget it in his relations with people of a different complexion from his own. John Bull has a good heart, which at times he conceals in his fat and phlegm under his well-wadded and buttoned-up coat. Jonathan has a good heart also, but does not hide it. His blood is warmer; he has no corpulence; he marches with coat unbuttoned or without one. Some persons maintain even that Brother Jonathan is John Bull stripped of his coat, and it is with this American saying that I take leave, for the present, of John Bull and his brother Jonathan."

* * * * *

The manners and customs most opposed to European ideas found favour in the eyes of Frederika Bremer, when she thought she detected in American usages the elements of progress and liberty. It is, indeed, with too light a touch that she glides by the more regrettable defects of the American character, so fascinated, so dazzled is she by the brilliant mirage of independence--independence of thought and action, often verging upon or passing into licence--which the United States presented to her. She reminds one of that Western patriot who, from the banks of the Mississippi, watching the explosion of a steamship, exclaimed, "Heavens! the Americans are a great people!" This exclamation she does not repeat in so many words, but the idea which it embodies is present in every page of her book.

But, in truth, she travelled under conditions which made it almost impossible for her to form an impartial judgment of men and things. She was everywhere received with so much enthusiastic hospitality, even by Quakers, Shakers, Plungers, and other of those strange sects described with so much unction by the late Mr. Hepworth Dixon, that her usual keen powers of observation were necessarily obscured. She saw everything through rose-coloured glasses. On the question of slavery, for example, she, the ardent champion of the emancipation of humanity, who started with the firm resolution to launch her heaviest thunderbolts at the slave-owners, was led to give forth an uncertain sound. For the astute Southerners got hold of her, fêted her, complimented her, read her works; how could she retain her impartiality when brought under such powerful influences? Can any author inveigh against the men who read his books? So it has not inaptly been said that she denounces the slave-holders only when she is in Yankee territory, and criticises the Yankees only when she is in the Southern States. Allowing herself to believe that the condition of the negroes was not so deplorable as she had supposed, she even began to extenuate the institution of slavery by arguments too transparently feeble to call for detailed confutation. It is true, she says, that slavery is an evil to-day, but to-morrow it will be a boon to humanity, and a boon to the negro world. Why? Because the American negro, enlightened by the teachings of Christianity through his contact with the white man, will, at some future time, return to Africa, the home of his ancestors, a missionary of civilization, charged with the glorious task of redeeming and regenerating it.

This was a new reading of the old falsehood, doing evil that good may come. What could the negro think of a Christianity that justified his subjugation by oppression? Or how could a race, kept in the bonds and fetters of an accursed degradation, be fitted to play the part of apostles and missionaries? Happily it is unnecessary to discuss the subject, since slavery no longer exists in America.

* * * * *

Of those beautiful descriptions of nature which lend so great a charm to Miss Bremer's fiction we find but few examples in her work on the United States. Unfortunately she travelled as a philosopher, not as an observer of nature; engaged in the study of social questions, she seems to have had neither the leisure nor the inclination to survey the magnificent scenery through which she passed. The area she traversed was very considerable; from New York she crossed the continent to New Orleans; she visited Canada, the lakes, the valley of the Mississippi, and made an excursion to Cuba; but of all the landscapes, sublime, beautiful, and picturesque that met her gaze, she says little or nothing. Even the mighty Niagara has scarcely power to move her; the rolling prairies make no impression on her imagination. From her book, therefore, we can offer no quotations. In a country like America social questions change their aspects with so much rapidity that Miss Bremer's opinions upon them are already antiquated. It is Nature only that preserves her character. The relations of the North to the South, of the slave-holder to the negro, or of the Democratic party to the Republican, may undergo, in twenty or thirty years a complete transformation; but Niagara still pours its flood of waters into the St. Lawrence, and leagues upon leagues of grassy savannahs are still untrodden by the foot of man.

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The defect which we have indicated in Miss Bremer's "Homes of the New World" does not appear in the later work, "Two Years in Switzerland and Italy." Here we find that warm sympathy with Nature, that vivid appreciation of the beautiful, which we might reasonably expect from one who had the poet's feeling and fancy, though not endowed with the poet's faculty of expression.[12] In the opening chapter or "station," as she prefers to call it, we come upon a picture full of power and colour, in which the artist uses her pencil with equal grace and freedom. It is the valley of Lauterbrunnen, or "Laughing Waters":--

"From Steinbock the valley becomes ever narrower, between ever higher mountain walls; louder and louder roar the becks and the streams, which, now swollen by the rains, are hurled from the glaciers down towards the valley and the river. Here falls the Staubbach, thrown like silver rain, driven hither and thither by the wind over the field which it keeps green below; here rushes down the strong Trummelsbach, foaming from the embrace of the cliffs; there the still stronger Rosenbach, which the Jungfrau pours out of her silver horn. On all sides, near and afar off, there is a rushing and roaring and foaming, on the right hand and on the left, above me, below me, and before, out of a hundred hidden fountains, and even wilder beside me rushes on the Lutschine, with still increasing waters. It is too much, I cannot bear even my own thoughts. I am in the bosom of a wild Undine, who drowns her admirers while she embraces them--and the Titans are growing ever loftier and broader, and the valley ever narrower, gloomier, and more desolate. I felt depressed, and as it were, overwhelmed, but, nevertheless, I went forward. It is melancholy scenery, but, at the same time, grand and powerful. And scenery of this character exercises a strong attractive power, even when it astonishes. The shades of evening fell darkly over the valley, where I saw before me, in its gloomy depth, a broad, grey-white, immense wall of water, like dust hurled thundering down from a lofty mountain. It seemed to shut up the valley. That is enough. I salute the giantess, the great Schmadribach, the mother of the Lutschine river, and return. No, it is not good to be here, and the society of the Titans is more agreeable for a simple mortal at a greater distance!...

"On my return to Interlachen the Titans presented me with a glorious spectacle, and it was not without joyful admiration that I parted from their immediate neighbourhood. The great spirits which terrify can also enchant. In the light of the descending sun the white peaks and fields of the Alps stood out in the most brilliant colouring; the lofty Jungfrau clothed herself in rose-tint, the blue glaciers shone transparently, and the lower the sun sank the higher and clearer gleamed the Alpine pinnacles....

"Later still, new astonishment awaited me from the camp of the giants. The head of the Jungfrau was surrounded with a soft glory of light, which increased in beauty and brightness, till at length the moon, shining in full splendour, slowly advancing above, crowned the Titaness with beauty."[13]

Apart from its picturesque descriptions, however, Miss Bremer's book on Switzerland and Italy is hardly a success. She had not the qualifications of a Madame de Staël, and her observations, therefore, are frequently superficial. Moreover, she seems to have suffered in self-appreciation. In Sweden she shone as a great star in the literary firmament; and she appears to have been under an impression that her fame would have preceded her into other countries, and ensured her a triumphal reception in any town she entered; but Germany showed her very little attention, and hence she sees it in a very unfavourable light. So in Switzerland: she was caught up in the stream of tourists; her name, inscribed in the visitors' books of the hotels, received but a fugitive notice; and she who had created in her fancy an ideal Switzerland, prepared to welcome with open arms the champion of freedom generally, and the freedom of women in particular--discovered only a nation of good housekeepers, who were thinking of everything in the world but emancipation.

Miss Bremer visited the valleys of the High Alps and the Forest Cantons; spent a Sunday on the Righi; journeyed to Basle; passed into Belgium and Flanders, surveying the antiquities of the old historic cities of Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp; proceeded to Paris; returning to Switzerland, spent the winter at Lausanne; in the following year crossed the Alps into Italy, and through Piedmont travelled to the Eternal City; thence to Naples, where she saw an eruption of Vesuvius and the buried city of Pompeii; and, finally, explored the fair landscapes of Sicily. This vast variety of scenes she sketches always with a quick and dexterous pencil.

In the course of her two years' travel she met with several illustrious men--with some who have made, or helped to make, the history of our time--and her record of their conversations is full of interest. As might be expected, she excels in portraiture. This is her portrait of the late Cardinal Antonelli:--

"Antonelli has a strongly marked countenance of the true Italian character; handsome dark eyes, with a penetrative glance, gloomy or bright according to the sentiment which they express; dangerous eyes, it seems to me, they would be to those on whom their glance was directed in love. The countenance is pale; the features are regular--even handsome--all except the mouth, which is large, with large teeth, and devoid of agreeable sentiment when speaking. In short, the countenance has a commanding expression. An abundance of dark brown hair waves from under the red cap, and falls in waving curls upon the pale cheeks. The whole figure is picturesque--artistic in effect; to which also the costume--the red cardinal stockings, the large silver buckles, the short silk cloak, and the red cap--contribute in no small degree. In his demeanour he has all the self-possession and ease of a perfect man of the world."

* * * * *

The Roman Carnival has often been described, but never, we think, with more lively appreciation of its humorous features than by Frederika Bremer. In the following passage we recognize something of that realistic power which makes the charm of her novels. The details are touched as vividly and picturesquely as in her Swedish interiors:--

"At three o'clock in the afternoon the festival began. The Corso was filled with people and gendarmes. Military, mounted and on foot, were posted at the corners of all the streets, as well as in the square. Crowds of ragged lads were loitering about the Corso, shouting as they followed any laughably-attired mask. Windows and balconies were filling with gentlemen and ladies in dominoes, some in costume. One saw many lovely faces.... The whole Corso, from the Piazza di Venezia to the Piazza del Popolo, looks like a festively-decorated arena. But, for the first time during many weeks, the sky is grey, and the streets are wet with rain which has fallen in the night; it even now looks threatening, and already has rained a little, but the air is soft and calm. The north wind has left Rome, and all windows are open. Some carriages, with masks in costumes and dominoes, begin to drive up and down the Corso; the war with comfits and bouquets has begun between pedestrians and those who are in carriages--between the people in the streets and the people at the windows and in the balconies. They seek either to powder one another or to make a present. Extremely beautiful bouquets and fine bonbons come amongst quantities of others which are less beautiful and not at all splendid. One is obliged, in the meantime, to hold a fine wire gauze, in the form of a little scoop, before the face, if one would escape bruises. Our balcony is decorated with red and white, and along the outside of the iron railing small boxes are hung for the bouquets and comfits. Our agreeable hostess belongs to the ornaments of her balcony, into which flowers are assiduously thrown by gentlemen in carriages and on foot.

"At five o'clock a mounted troop of soldiers, in close rank, galloped at full speed up the Corso, in order to clear the street, for now the horse-race was to begin. The people gather themselves close together by the walls of the houses; a pause succeeds, and then a loud exulting shout, which runs like wildfire along the Corso; and from the Piazza del Popolo speeds, in flying career, a little troop of small horses, adorned with gold-paper wings or flags. Away they rush at full speed along the Corso up to the Piazza di Venezia, where they are stopped, and the judges of the race award the prizes which their owners shall receive. Scarcely have the swift-footed steeds passed, when the throng of people crowd after them like a swarming ant-hillock. This closes the amusements of the day....

"On Monday the Corso was, nevertheless, more animated than on Saturday, and the warfare of comfits and flowers was carried on very gaily. People threw flowers at each other from balcony to balcony, from window to window; and people amused themselves with grand comfits, strung upon long threads fastened to long sticks, like fishing-lines, which they enticed their acquaintance, from one story to another, to catch; or they deceived the boys in the streets with these same tempting baits, which the next moment were snatched up again. If any one wishes to be polite, he fastens at the end of the string a beautiful flower, or some other pretty little thing, and allows it to be caught by the lady for whom it is intended. The street boys are in general, however, the greatest winners by this polite warfare; for everything which misses its object and falls into the street belongs to them, and that is not little....

"On Friday ... the Corso was crowded with all kinds of costumes and masks in carriages and on foot; the windows and balconies and roofs were thronged with dominoes and fantastic costumes; bouquets of flowers and comfits showered down through the air.... Two rows of carriages drive in close file along the Corso. They assaulted each other incessantly; besides which, they threw their missiles up to the windows and balconies, and received others in return. Sometimes a masquerading gentleman designs to present you with an extremely beautiful bouquet; but if you do not take great care it is quickly snatched away by some lad, who jumps upon the step or wheel of the carriage.... Sometimes the procession of carriages is stopped by the crush, and woe then to the carriage or the ladies who happen to be stopped under a great balcony, for they are then overwhelmed by such a shower of chalk and powder comfits, which rain down upon them like hail, that the dominoes and outer attire are spoiled! One is fortunate if one can keep one's eyes uninjured; but a great many of the uneducated class amuse themselves by throwing white powder into people's faces, and if this gets into the eyes, it sometimes occasions long suffering; sometimes one receives a great blow on the head from an immense bouquet; or a great piece of confectionery, as hard as a stone; but any one who enters into the sport must tolerate it--and, happen what may, people are only the more excited and filled by the spirit of the time.... That which interested me most was to see the handsome Roman women, in their holiday costume, standing in open _loges_ in the lower story of the houses. They receive, with stoical resignation, the showers of comfits and bouquets which are incessantly aimed at their gold-adorned heads. Women of the peasant class, dressed as if for a wedding festival, with bare heads, adorned with red ribbon and grand ornaments, were also the principal figures in many of the carriages....