And mine—written as it is with the full consciousness of being better able to understand her than either of these two, partly on account of the impressions left by my own half-Russian childhood; partly, too, because in some ways my temperament resembles hers—my sketch, although it is an analysis of her life, is not Sonia Kovalevsky.
She is still standing there, supernaturally great, like a shadow when the moon rises, which seems to grow larger the longer one looks at it; and as I write this, I feel as though she were as near to me as a body that one knocks up against in the dark. She comes and goes. Sometimes she appears close beside me sitting on the flower-table, a little bird-like figure, and I seem to see her quite distinctly; then, as soon as I begin to realize her presence, she has gone. And I ask myself,—Who is she? I do not know; she did not know it herself. She lived, it is true, but she never lived her own, real, individual life.
She remains there still,—a form which came out of the darkness and went back into the same. She was a thorough child of the age in every little characteristic of her aimless life; she was a woman of this century, or rather, she was what this century forces a woman to be,—a genius for nothing, a woman for nothing, ever struggling along a road which leads to nowhere, and fainting on the way as she strives to attain a distant mirage. Tired to death, and yet afraid to die, she died because the instinct for self-preservation forsook her for the space of a single instant; died only to be buried under a pile of obituary notices, and forgotten for the next novelty. But behind them all she stands, an immortal personality, hot and volcanic as the world’s centre, a thorough woman, yet more than a woman. Her brain rose superior to sex, and learned to think independently, only to be dragged down again and made subservient to sex; her soul was full of mysticism, conscious of the Infinite existing in her little body, and out of her little body again soaring up towards the Infinite,—a one day’s superficial consciousness which allowed itself to be led astray by public opinion, yet possessing, all the while, a sub-consciousness, which, poetically viewed, clung fast to the eternal realities in her womanly frame, and would not let them rise to the brain, which, freed from the body, floated in empty space. Hers was a queenly mind, feeding a hundred beggars at her board,—giving to all, but confiding in none.
Ellen Key once said to me: “When she shook hands, you felt as if a little bird with a beating heart had fluttered into your hand and out again.” And another friend, Hilma Strandberg, a young writer of great promise, whose after career belied its commencement, said, after her first meeting with Sonia, that she had felt as though the latter’s glance had pierced her through and through, after which she seemed to be dissecting her soul, bit by bit, every bit vanishing into thin air; this psychical experience was followed by such violent bodily discomfort that she almost fainted, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that she managed to get home.
Both these descriptions prove that Sonia’s hands and eyes were the most striking part of her personality. Many anecdotes are told about her penetrating glance, but this is the only one which mentions her hands, although it is true that Fru Leffler remarked that they were very much disfigured by veins. But this one is sufficient to complete a picture of her which I remember to have seen: she has a slender little child’s body, and her hands are the hands of a child, with nervous, crooked little fingers, anxiously bent inwards; and in one hand she clasps a book, with such visible effort that it makes one’s heart ache to look at her.
The hands often afford better material for psychological study than the face, and they give a deeper and more truthful insight into the character because they are less under control. There are people with fine, clever faces, whose hands are like sausages,—fleshy and veinless, with thick stumpy fingers which warn us to beware of the animated mask. And there are round, warm, sensuous faces, with full, almost thick lips, which are obviously contradicted by pale, blue-veined, sickly-looking hands. The momentary amount of intellectual power which a person has at his disposal can change the face, but the hands are of a more physical nature, and their speech is a more physical one. Sonia’s face was lit up by the soul in her eyes, which bore witness to the intense interest which she took in everything that was going on around her; but the weak, nervous, trembling little hands told of the unsatisfied, helpless child, who was never to attain the full development of her womanhood.
II
Neurotic Keynotes
I
Last year there was a book published in London with the extraordinary title of “Keynotes.” Three thousand copies were sold in the course of a few months, and the unknown author became a celebrity. Soon afterwards the portrait of a lady appeared in “The Sketch.” She had a small, delicate face, with a pained and rather tired expression, and a curious, questioning look in the eyes; it was an attractive face, very gentle and womanly, and yet there was something disillusioned and unsatisfied about it. This lady wrote under the pseudonym of George Egerton, and “Keynotes” was her first book.
It was a strange book! too good a book to become famous all at once. It burst upon the world like the opening buds in spring, like the cherry blossom after the first cold shower of rain. What can have made this book so popular in the England of to-day, which is as totally devoid of all true literature as Germany itself? Was it only the writer’s strong individuality, which each successive page impressed upon the reader’s nerves more vividly and more painfully than the last? The reader, did I say? Yes, but not the male reader. There are very few men who have a sufficiently keen appreciation for a woman’s feelings to be able to put their own minds and souls into the swing of her confession, and to accord it their full sympathy. Yet there are such men. We may perhaps come across two or three of them in a lifetime, but they disappear from our sight, as we do from theirs. And they are not readers. Their sympathy is of a deeper, more personal character, and as far as the success of a book is concerned, it need not be taken into consideration at all.