Six Modern Women

Preface

It is not my purpose to contribute to the study of woman’s intellectual life, or to discuss her capacity for artistic production, although these six women are in a manner representative of woman’s intellect and woman’s creative faculty. I have little to do with Marie Bashkirtseff’s pictures in the Luxembourg, Sonia Kovalevsky’s doctor’s degree and Prix Bordin, Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler’s stories and social dramas, Eleonora Duse’s success as a tragedian in both worlds, and with all that has made their names famous and is publicly known about them. There is only one point which I should like to emphasize in these six types of modern womanhood, and that is the manifestation of their womanly feelings. I want to show how it asserts itself in spite of everything,—in spite of the theories on which they built up their lives, in spite of the opinions of which they were the teachers, and in spite of the success which crowned their efforts, and bound them by stronger chains than might have been the case had their lives been passed in obscurity. They were out of harmony with themselves, suffering from a conflict which made its first appearance in the world when the woman question came to the fore, causing an unnatural breach between the needs of the intellect and the requirements of their womanly nature. Most of them succumbed in the struggle.

A woman who seeks freedom by means of the modern method of independence is generally one who desires to escape from a woman’s sufferings. She is anxious to avoid subjection, also motherhood, and the dependence and impersonality of an ordinary woman’s life; but in doing so she unconsciously deprives herself of her womanliness. For them all—for Marie Bashkirtseff as much as Sonia Kovalevsky and A. C. Edgren-Leffler—the day came when they found themselves standing at the door of the heart’s innermost sanctuary, and realized that they were excluded. Some of them burst open the door, entered, and became man’s once more. Others remained outside and died there. They were all individualistic, these six women. It was this fact that molded their destiny; but Eleonora Duse was the only one of them who was individualistic enough. None of them were able to stand alone, as more than one had believed that she could. The women of our day are difficult in the choice of a husband, and the men are slow and mistrustful in their search for a wife.

There are some hidden peculiarities in woman’s soul which I have traced in the lives of these six representative women, and I have written them down for the benefit of those who have not had the opportunity of discovering them for themselves.

Introduction

The subjects of these six psychological sketches are well known to English readers, with the exception of Amalie Skram, the Norwegian novelist, and Fru Leffler, who is known only as the biographer of Sonia Kovalevsky.

Laura Marholm, the writer of this book, is a German authoress of Norwegian extraction, who is celebrated for her literary criticisms and the beauty of her style. In September, 1889, she married Ola Hansson, the Swedish author of Sensitiva Amorosa, Young Scandinavia, and a novel called Fru Esther Bruce, in which the heroine is said to bear a strong resemblance to Eleonora Duse. He has also published a volume of prose poems, called Ofeg’s Ditties, which has been translated by George Egerton, whose vivid style and powerful descriptions have gained a place for her among the foremost women writers of the day.

Laura Marholm was the first to introduce her husband to the German public by means of two articles in the Neue Freie Presse. The first, called A Swedish Love Poet, appeared May 24th, 1888, before they had met, and was written in praise of his early work, Sensitiva Amorosa. The second article was a criticism on Pariahs, and it is an interesting fact that in it she compares him to Gottfried Keller.

In all her writings, Laura Marholm looks at life through the spectacles of a happy marriage; she believes that matured thought and widened views can—in a woman’s case—be only the direct result of marriage; and consequently she considers marriage to be absolutely indispensable to every woman, and that without it she is both mentally and morally undeveloped. She has little sympathy with the Woman’s Rights movement, judged either from the social, political, or educational point of view; with regard to the latter, she has not had a university education herself, and she is not at all impressed by those who have. She considers that a woman’s individuality is of greater importance than her actions; she upholds woman’s influence as woman, and has no sympathy with the advanced thinkers, who, with Stuart Mill at their head, would fain have women exert their influence as thinking, reasoning human beings, believing all other influence to be unworthy the dignity of the modern woman. Laura Marholm has the intuitive faculty, and this enables her to gauge the feelings of those women who spend a long youth in waiting—who are taught to believe, and who do believe, that their youth is nothing more than a transition period between childhood and marriage,—women who grow old in waiting, and awake to reality to find behind them nothing but a wasted youth, and in the future—an empty old age. But these are not modern women, they are the women of the ancien régime, who have missed their vocation, and failed to attain their sole object in life,—viz., marriage. On the one hand we are confronted with the old-fashioned girl, on the other by the new woman. Of the two, we prefer the new woman; and while recognizing her mistakes, and lamenting her exaggerated views, Laura Marholm acknowledges that she is formed of the best material of the age, and prophesies for her a brighter future. But her views differ greatly from those of Ibsen and Björnson. According to Ibsen, a woman is first of all a human being, and then a woman; she places the woman first, the human being last. Björnson believes that an intellectually developed woman with a life-work can get on very well by herself; Laura Marholm maintains that, apart from man, a woman is nothing. According to her, woman is a creature of instinct, and this instinct is her most precious possession, and of far greater value than the intellect. Of all the studies in this book, Fru Leffler is probably the one with whom she is least in sympathy. Fru Leffler was essentially intellectual, possessed of a somewhat cold and critical temperament, and in writing the biography of Sonia Kovalevsky she was often unable to appreciate the latter’s very complicated character. Sonia was a rare combination of the mystic and the scientist; she was not only a mathematician, but also, in every important crisis of her life, a dreamer of prophetic dreams. The biography was intended to be the continuation of Sonia’s own story of her childhood, and the two should be read together. As a child, Sonia suffered from a painful conviction that in her family she was not the favorite, and it is probable that her unaccountable shyness, her want of self-confidence, and her inability to attract love in after life, were due to the fact of her having passed an unhappy and unloved childhood.

Fru Leffler’s writings are remarkable for the simplicity and directness of her style, her keen observation, and love of truth. Her talents were by no means confined to her pen; she held a salon,—the resort of the intellectual world of Stockholm,—and attained great popularity by her tactfulness and social gifts. She did not, however, shine in society to the same extent as Sonia Kovalevsky. Her conversation was not as brilliant and witty as the latter’s, but it was always interesting, and it was of the kind that is remembered long afterwards. When she told a story, analyzed a psychological problem, or recounted the contents of a book, she always succeeded in setting forth its real character in a clear and decided manner. Sonia, on the other hand, was ever ready with an original remark. Ellen Key tells how one day, when the conversation turned upon love, Sonia exclaimed: These amiable young men are always writing books about love, and they do not even know that some people have a genius for loving, just as others have a genius for music and mechanics, and that for these erotic geniuses love is a matter of life and death, whereas for others it is only an episode.

Fru Leffler travelled a great deal, and made many friends in the countries that she visited. She took great interest in socialism, anarchism, and all religious and educational movements. In London she attended lectures given by Mrs. Marx-Aveling, Bradlaugh, and Mrs. Besant. Theosophy, positivism, spiritualism, and atheism,—there was nothing which did not interest her. The more she saw the more she doubted the possibility of attaining to absolute truth in matters either social or religious, and the more attracted she became by the doctrine of evolution.

From this authoress, who was the chief exponent of woman’s rights in Sweden, we turn to a very different but no less interesting type. Eleonora Duse, the great Italian actress, has visited London during the past few years, acting in such a natural, and at the same time in such a simple and life-like manner, that a knowledge of the language was not absolutely indispensable to the enjoyment of the piece. Besides most of the pieces mentioned here, she acted in La Femme de Claude, Cleopatra, and Martha; but she attained her greatest triumph in Goldoni’s comedy, La Locandiera.

In all these typical women, Fru L. Marholm Hansson traces a likeness which proves that they have something in common. Numerous and conflicting as are the various opinions on the so-called woman question, the best, and perhaps the only, way of elucidating it is by doing as she has done in giving us these sketches. We have here six modern women belonging to five nationalities, three of whom are authoresses, and the other three—mathematician, actress, and artist, portrayed and criticized by one who is herself a modern woman and an authoress.

H. R.

1

The Learned Woman

1

It sometimes happens that a hidden characteristic of the age is disclosed, not through any acuteness on the part of the spectator, nor as the result of critical research, but of itself, as it were, and spontaneously. A worn face rises before us, bearing the marks of death, and never again may we gaze into the eyes which reveal the deep psychological life of the soul. It is the dead who greet us, the dead who survive us, and who will come to life again and again in future generations, long after we have ceased to be; those dead who will become the living, only to suffer and to die again.

These self-revelations have always existed amongst men, but among women they were unknown until now, when this tired century is drawing to its close. It is one of the strangest signs of the coming age that woman has attained to the intellectual consciousness of herself as woman, and can say what she is, what she wishes, and what she longs for. But she pays for this knowledge with her death.

Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal was just such a self-revelation as this; the moment it appeared it was carried throughout the whole of Europe, and further than Europe, on far-reaching waves of human sympathy. Wherever it went it threw a firebrand into the women’s hearts, which set them burning without most of them knowing what this burning betokened. They read the book with a strange and painful emotion, for as they turned over these pages so full of ardent energy, tears, and yearning, they beheld their own selves, strange, beautiful, and exalted, but still themselves, though few of them could have explained why or wherefore.

It was no bitter struggle with the outer world to which Marie Bashkirtseff succumbed at the age of four-and-twenty; it was not the struggle of a girl of the middle classes for her daily bread, for which she sacrifices her youth and spirits; she met with no obstacles beyond the traditional customs which had become to her a second nature, no obstruction greater than the atmosphere of the age in which she lived, which bounded her own horizon, although in her inmost soul she rebelled against it. She had everything that the world can give to assist the unhindered development of the inner life,—mental, spiritual, and physical; everything that hundreds of thousands of women, whose narrow lives need expanding, have not got,—and yet she did not live her life. On every one of the six hundred pages of her journal (written, as it is, in her penetrating Russian-French style) we meet the despairing cry that she had nothing, that she was ever alone in the midst of an everlasting void, hungering at the table of life, spread for every one except herself, standing with hands outstretched as the days passed by and gave her nothing; youth and health were fading fast, the grave was yawning, just a little chink, then wider and wider, and she must go down without having had anything but work,—constant work,—trouble and striving, and the empty fame which gives a stone in the place of bread.

*****

The tired and discontented women of the time recognized themselves on every page, and for many of them Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal became a kind of secret Bible in which they read a few sentences every morning, or at night before going to sleep.

A few years later there appeared another confession by a woman; this time it was not an autobiography, like the last one, but it was written by a friend, who was a European celebrity, with a name as lasting as her own. This book was called Sonia Kovalevsky: Our Mutual Experiences, and the things she told me about herself. The writer was Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler, Duchess of Cajanello, who had been her daily companion during years of friendship.

There was a curious likeness between Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal and Sonia Kovalevsky’s confessions, something in their innermost, personal experiences which proves an identity of temperament as well as of fortune, something which was not only due to the unconscious manner in which they criticized life, but to life itself, life as they molded it, and as each was destined to live it. Marie Bashkirtseff and Sonia Kovalevsky were both Russians,¹ both descended from rich and noble families, both women of genius, and from their earliest childhood they were both in a position to obtain all the advantages of a good education. They were both born rulers, true children of nature, full of originality, proud and independent. In all respects they were the favorites of fortune, and yet—and yet neither of these extraordinary women was satisfied, and they died because they could not be satisfied. Is not this a sign of the times?

2

The story of Sonia Kovalevsky’s life reads like an exciting novel, which is, if anything, too richly furnished with strange events. Such is life. It comes with hands full to its chosen ones, but it also takes away gifts more priceless than it gave.

At the age of eighteen Sonia Kovalevsky was already the mistress of her own fate. She had married the husband of her choice, and he had accompanied her to Heidelberg, where they both matriculated at the university. From thence he took her to Berlin, where she lived with a girl friend, who was a student like herself, and studied mathematics at Weierstrass’s for the space of four years, only meeting her husband occasionally in the course of her walks. Her marriage with Valdemar Kovalevsky, afterwards Professor of Paleontology at the university of Moscow, was a mere formality, and this extraordinary circumstance brings us face to face with one of the chief characteristics of her nature.

Sonia Kovalevsky did not love her husband; there was, in fact, nothing in her early youth to which she was less disposed than love. She was possessed of an immense undefined thirst, which was something more than a thirst for study, albeit that