If Sonia failed to please,—she whose personal charm was so great, whose vivacity was so prepossessing, as all who knew her declared that it was; if she failed where so many lesser women have succeeded, her failure was entirely due to her ignorance of the art of flirtation,—an art which is as old as sex, and to which men have been accustomed since the world began. Even the most refined, the most highly-developed men, are not geniuses in this matter, where everything has always been most carefully arranged for them. And if they did not fall in love with Sonia, it was due to a kind of purity with which she unconsciously regarded the preliminaries of love,—a kind of nobility which existed in her more modern nature, and a lack of the ancient instinct which had been a lost heritage to her.
Sonia belonged to a class of women who have only been produced in the latter half of our century, but in such large numbers that it is they who have determined the modern type. We cannot help hoping that they are but transitory, so greatly do their assumptions seem opposed to their sex, and yet they are formed of the best material that the age supplies. They are the women who object to begin life by fulfilling their destinies as women, and who consider that they have duties of greater importance than that of becoming wives and mothers; they are the “clever” daughters of the middle-class families, who, as governesses and teachers, swarm in every country in Europe. The popular opinion about them is that they do not want to marry; and as that, by the majority of men, is interpreted to mean that they are no good as wives, they turn to the herd of geese who are driven yearly to the market, and who go cackling to meet their fate. And although the descendants of such fathers and such mothers present a very small amount of intelligence capable of development, yet it is they who form the majority, and the majority is always right. Formerly, it was people’s sole object to get their daughters married, clever and stupid alike; it was an understood thing. But nowadays, the ones with “good heads” are set apart to lead celibate lives, while those who are “hard of understanding” are brought into the marriage market. This method of distribution has already become one of the first principles of middle-class economy. The daughters who are considered capable of providing for themselves are given a good education, accompanied by numerous hints as to the large sums which their parents have spent on them; while, together with the inevitable marriage portion, every effort is made to find husbands for the others with as little delay as possible. The first named are “the clever women,” but the latter make “the best wives;” and man’s sense of justice in the distribution of the good things of this life has fixed a stern practical barrier between these two classes.
The intellectual women themselves were originally to blame for raising a distinction which is so essentially characteristic of our time. They were the first to separate themselves, and to force the narrow-minded bourgeois to entertain other than the ordinary ideas concerning women. They thrust aside the dishes which were spread for them on life’s table, and grasped at others which had hitherto been considered the sole property of men, such as smoking and drinking. And when it appeared that they were really able to pass examinations and smoke cigarettes, without suffering any apparent harm from either, the spirit of equality, so popular at the present time, was quick to recognize a proof of the equality between man and wife, and to proclaim the equal rights of both, as well as the equality of the brain. They did not mention the other human ingredient, which could never be either equal or identical, because it is always inconvenient to go to the root of a thing, and the arguments of this materialistic century are too superficial ever to go below the surface.
Can it be true that the talented woman has actually forgotten that destiny intended her to be a woman, and bound her by eternal laws? Can it be true that the best women have an unnatural desire to be half men, and that they would prefer to shirk the duties of motherhood? A woman’s stupidity would not suffice to account for such an interpretation; it needs all a man’s thick-headedness; and yet there is no doubt that that is, to a great extent, the popular view of the case. The women whose intellectual abilities are above the average are often those who lay themselves open to the reproach that they have abandoned their sex; and yet, strange to say, some of them have attained to mature womanhood at an exceedingly early age. Sonia, who was par préférence the woman of genius of this century, was only nine years old when she flew into a passion of jealousy, caused by a little girl who was sitting on the knees of her handsome young uncle. She bit him in the arm till it bled, merely because she believed that he liked the child better than herself; that this was something more than mere childish naughtiness, is shown by the fact that her feelings towards her uncle were so changed that from that moment she felt disillusioned, and treated him with coldness.
Disillusioned! Even in their childhood these women have a strong, though indistinct, consciousness of their own worth as compared to ordinary women. They are always on the watch, and they have a good memory. Unlike ordinary young girls, they do not fall in love with mere outward qualities, nor with the first man who happens to cross their path. They wish to marry some one superior to themselves, and they do not mistake a passing passion for love. Then when the first years of adolescence with their hot impulses are past, and a temporary calm sets in, they experience a new desire, which is that they may enter into the full possession of their own being before beginning to raise a new generation. Physical maturity, which has hitherto been considered sufficient, has placed the need for intellectual and psychical maturity in the shade. They want to be grown-up in mind and soul before entering on life; they do not wish to remain children always; they want to develop all their capabilities,—and this longing for individuality, for which the road has not yet been made clear, nearly always leads them astray into the wilderness of study.
This is certainly the case when they are urged on, as Sonia Kovalevsky was, by a remarkable talent. She was not even obliged to follow the usual weary path of study; richly endowed and favorably situated as she was, she discovered a more direct way than is possible to the majority of girl students. Few have been able to begin as she did at the age of seventeen, under the protection of a devoted husband, and under the guidance of learned men, who took a personal interest in her welfare. Few have finished at the age of twenty-four, and have been loaded with distinctions while in the full bloom of their youth, able to stand on the threshold of a rich, full life, while fortune bid them take and choose whatever they might wish.
Yet these were but hollow joys that were offered to her. Those six years of protracted study left her weak in body and soul, and so weary that she needed a long period of idle vegetation, and she felt an aversion from the very studies in which she had accomplished so much. Sonia had overworked herself in the way that most girls overwork themselves in their examinations, whether it be for the university or as teachers; they work on with persistent diligence, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but going straight ahead as though they were the victims of hypnotic suggestion, with all their energies paralyzed except one solitary organ,—the memory. A man never does this; he interrupts his studies with social recreations and by means of a system of hygiene, applied alike to body and soul, from which a woman is excluded, no less on account of her womanly susceptibility than owing to conventional views. During this period of nervous tension, her sex is silent; or if it shows itself at all, it does so only in general irritability.
This was the case with Sonia; but until she became thoroughly engrossed in her work at Weierstrass’s, Valdemar Kovalevsky had a great deal to endure. It was not enough for her that she made him run all kinds of messages, which a servant could have done as well, but she was always going to see him in his bachelor apartments, and planning little excursions, and she was never satisfied unless she could have him to herself. Valdemar did not understand her. He had willingly consented to become the husband, in name only, of an undeveloped little girl, and be respected the distorted ideas of the time, which had got firmly fixed into this same little girl’s head. It is very natural that Sonia should not have understood the situation; it was not her business to do so, it was his. But she was always irritable and vexed after a tête-à-tête of any length with him, and long after his death she used scornfully to say: “He could get on capitally without me. If he had his cigarettes, his cup of tea, and a book, it was all that he required.”
Valdemar Kovalevsky, the translator of Brehm’s Birds and other popular scientific works into Russian, appears to have belonged to that portion of the male sex who are called “paragons.” He drudged diligently, had few wants, always did what was right, and never gave in. But he was in no way suited to Sonia, and the fact of his having agreed to her proposal proves it. After he had gone to Jena to escape from her wilful squandering of his time, an estrangement took place between them, and at Berlin she seems to have behaved as though she were ashamed of him. She was living then, as we have seen, with a girl friend who was a fellow-student of hers; and although she let Valdemar fetch her from Weierstrass’s, she introduced him to no one, and did not let it appear that he was her husband. Afterwards, when she had finished her studies and undergone a long period of enforced idleness at the time when her nerves were shaken by her father’s death, she clung so closely to him that a little warmth came into his stolid nature. But, naturally enough, neither her affection nor the birth of a daughter could change his nature, and even during the short time when they were together at St. Petersburg he allowed an intriguing swindler to come between them. Repulsed, dissatisfied, and saddened, Sonia went to Paris.
She wished to stand alone, and the only way in which this was possible was to turn her studies to account and to work for her own bread. She had given up the wish to be a learned woman; she wanted to be a wife, to be loved and made happy; she had done her best, but it had turned out a failure. It was just about this time that she received an invitation through Professor Mittag-Leffler to be teacher under him in the new high school at Stockholm. He was Fru Leffler’s brother, and a pupil of Weierstrass’s. Sonia gratefully consented, but a fine ear detects a peculiar undertone in the letters with which she responded.