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.