Part 12

The problem does not often present itself like this in real life, and if it did the result would in all probability be very different; in the imagination of a well-bred girl of eighteen, like Anne Charlotte Leffler, it was the only conclusion possible. And as he will not consent to her wishes, and she refuses to give way to his; as he has no desire to marry an actress, and she no intention of becoming a housewife, they separate with mutual promises of eternal platonic love.

The end is comic, but it is meant to be taken seriously. No matter how it begins, the ordinary woman’s book always ends with platonic love; and it is very characteristic of Anne Charlotte Leffler that her first play should have a platonic and not a tragic ending.

The tragic element, which generally assumes supernatural proportions in the imagination of the young, did not appeal to her; her life was placed in comfortable, bourgeois surroundings, and she was perfectly contented with it.

We find the same want of imagination in all the Swedish authoresses, from Fru Lenngren, Frederica Bremer, and Fru Flygare-Carlén onwards.

A few years later Anne Charlotte Leffler wrote a three-act play, called “The Elf,” of which the two first acts afford the best possible key to her own psychology. It was acted for the first time in 1881, but it was probably written soon after her marriage, in 1872, with Edgren, who was at that time in the service of the government.

IV

Fru Edgren was one of those proud, straightforward women who would never dream of allowing any one to commiserate them. She made no attempt to suit her actions to please the world; her sole ambition was to show herself as she really was. When she wished to do a thing, she did it as quickly as possible, and without any one’s help. She wrote under the influence of her personal impressions, her personal judgment, and her personal opinions; whatever she might attain to in the future, she was determined to have no one but herself to thank for it. But she was a woman. Though usually possessed of a clear judgment, she did not sufficiently realize what it means for a woman to enter upon a literary career by herself. She succeeded in her literary career; but in doing so she sacrificed the best part of her life, and was obliged to suppress her best and truest aspirations, thereby destroying a large amount of real artistic talent.

There are few things that afford me more genuine pleasure than the books of modern authors. I enjoy them less on account of what they tell me than for that which they have been unable to conceal. When they write their books, they write the history of their inner life. You open a book and you read twenty lines, and in the tone and character of those twenty lines you seem to feel the beating of the writer’s pulse. In the same way as a fine musical ear can distinguish a single false note in an orchestra, a fine psychological instinct can discern the true from the false, and can tell where the author describes his own feelings and where he is only pretending--can discern his true character from among the multitude of conscious and unconscious masks, and can say: This is good metal, and that a worthless composition, wherewith he makes a dupe of himself and of others.

The woman who attempts to write without a man to shield her, to throw a protecting arm around her, is an unfortunate, incongruous being. That which sets her soul aglow--which calls loudly within her--she dare not say. When a man wishes to be a great writer, he defies conventionalism and compels it to become subservient to him; but for a lonely woman, conventionalism is her sole support, not only outwardly, but inwardly also. It forms a part of her womanly modesty; it is the guide of her life, from which naught but love can free her; that is why the more talented a woman is, the more absolutely love must be her pilot.

Fru Edgren’s best play and her two most interesting stories are “The Elf,” “Aurora Bunge,” and “Love and Womanhood.” None of her other works can be said to equal these in depth of feeling, and none strike a more melancholy note. There is an emotional, nervous life in them which presents an attractive contrast to the cold irony of her other works. She has put her whole being into these writings, with something of her womanly power to charm; while in the others we meet with the clear insight, the critical faculty, and the rare sarcasm to which they owe their reputation.

Yet in these three works we notice how very much she is hedged in on all sides by conventionalism. “The Elf,” “Love and Womanhood,” and “Aurora Bunge” make us think of a large and beautiful bird that cannot fly because its long, swift wings have been broken by a fall from the nest.

The “elf” is the wife of the respected mayor of a small country town. Her father was a Swedish artist, whose whole life was spent in travelling, because every time that he came home he was driven away by the narrow social life of Sweden. When he is lying on his deathbed, he leaves his penniless child to the care of his younger friend, the Mayor, who knows no better way of providing for her than by making her his wife. He is universally considered the best son, the best partner in business, and the best man--in the town. The elf wanders about the woods, and becomes the subject of much gossip, likewise of envy, among the smart ladies of the town.

One evening when they are giving a party, and she forgets to play the part of hostess, their neighbor, a Baron, arrives with his sister. Both, no longer young, free from illusions, liberal in thought and speech, seem to carry with them a breath from a bigger world; their mere presence serves to make the elf thoughtlessly happy, and from henceforward she sits daily to the Baron for a picture representing Undine when the knight carries her through the wood, and her soul awakes within her. The elf’s soul--_i.e._, love--is also awakened. She feels herself drawn towards this man, who has sufficient fire to awaken her womanhood with a kiss. She does not wish, she does not think, but she would not like to be separated from him; he lives in an atmosphere that suits her, and in which she thrives. She is still a child; but the child would like to wake. It is true that her conscience reproaches her with regard to the Mayor, but here the circumstances are related as though she were not quite married,--that is a mistake which nearly all Teutonic authoresses make.

The Baron tells her the story of Undine. The knight finds her at the moment when the brook stretches forth his long white arm to draw her back, but he does not let her go; he takes her in his arms and carries her away, and she looks up at him with a half anxious expression--there is something new in this expression. She is no longer Undine. She loves. She has a soul.

In this drama, Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, the future leader of the woman’s rights movement, makes the confession that a woman’s soul is--love. She is the only Swedish woman writer who would have owned as much.

The Baron is a decadent. Fru Edgren took this type from real life long before the decadence made its appearance in literature. He had enjoyed all sensations with delight and inner emotion, until the woman in the elf opens her eyes in the first moment of half consciousness, and when that happens she becomes indifferent to him. His passion cools. It is true that his actions still tend in the same direction, but he is able to gaze at his thoughts critically. He is not the knight who lifts Undine out of the cold water. He leaves her lying in the brook.

Among the experiences by means of which “independent” women, with a “vocation,” awake to womanhood, this is probably the most common. It is very difficult to define their feelings when they realize a change in the man who first aroused their affections; but I think that I am not far wrong in saying that it is something akin to loathing. The more sensitive the woman, and the more innocent she is, the longer the loathing will last. However cold her outward behavior may appear, the feeling is still there.

There is nothing that a woman resents more keenly than when a man plays with her affections, and neglects her afterwards. The more inexperienced the woman, the more unmanly this behavior seems. If she is a true woman, her disappointment will be all the greater; she will feel it not only with regard to this single individual, but it will cast a shadow over all men.

The last act reveals the author’s perplexity. From an æsthetic point of view the ending is cold, and to a certain extent indifferently executed; but judged from a psychological point of view, it is thoroughly Swedish. Considered as the writing of a young lady in the year 1880, it must be confessed that the dialogue is tolerably strong, even _piquante_; but in order to please the highly respected public, it is necessary for the play to end well.

Suddenly they one and all--in this land of pietism and sudden conversion--beat their breasts and confess their sins. The Mayor examines himself, and repents that he was selfish enough to marry the elf; his mother repents because she cared more for her son than her daughter-in-law; the elf repents because she almost allowed herself to be betrayed into falling in love; and the Baron’s sister, who, throughout the piece, has always held aloft the banner of love and liberty, repents in a general way, without any particular reason being given. Thus everything returns to its former condition, and Undine remains in the duck-pond.

With this satisfying termination, “The Elf” survived a large number of performances.

The question which suggests itself to my mind is: Whether the author intended the piece to end in this manner? Or was the original ending less conventional, and was Fru Edgren obliged to alter it in order that the play might be acted? What else could she do? A lonely woman like her dared not sin against the public morals. It were better to sin against anything else, only not against the public morals; for in that case they would have condemned her to silence, and her career would have been at an end. The keynote of the piece was the yearning to escape from the long Swedish winters and the gossip by the fireside, out into the fresh air, into the light and warmth of the South.

V

Ten years afterwards Fru Edgren returned to the same problem in “Love and Womanhood,” and this time she treated it with greater delicacy and more depth of feeling.

The heroine is no longer the traditional elf, but the modern 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.