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 criticised by one who is herself a modern woman and an authoress.
H. R.
I
The Learned Woman
I
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.