Laura Marholm

“ There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver, when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. ”

“ It was the world of her own soul, the ever-changing woman’s world, which no one before her has ever expressed on the stage; she gave us the secret, inner life of woman, which no poet can wholly fathom, and which only woman herself can reveal, which with more refined nerves and more sensitive and varied feelings has emerged bleeding from the older, coarser, narrower forms of art, to newer, brighter forms, which, though more powerful, are also more wistful and more hopeless. ”

“ The Women-Haters: Tolstoy and Strindberg I Leo Tolstoy
There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure, rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning. ”

“ To compare Fru Leffler to Sonia is like comparing a nine days’ wonder to an eternal phenomenon. One is an ordinary woman with a carefully cultivated talent, while the other is one of those mysteries who, from time to time, make their appearance in the world, in whom nature seems to have overstepped her boundaries, and who are created to live lonely lives, to suffer and to die without having ever attained the full possession of their own being. ”

“ Behind this powerful forehead all the ideas that have moved the second half of this century have fermented, but only one thing original and new has taken shape, and that is the sombre instinct of sex hatred. Strindberg’s one act has been to drag out this enmity from beneath the threshold of consciousness, where it had hitherto lain, to lend it speech and clothe it with an artistic form. He grasps hold of woman like an impetuous bourgeois, and treats her like a captured savage. ”

“ But beneath this almost lethargical stillness is enacted a tragedy in which a life is at stake, and the stake is lost, and death is the consequence. The deadliest blow against another’s soul is caused, not by words, but by deafness and indifference, by neglect at the moment when the heart yearns for love, and the bud is ready to blossom into flower beneath a single breath of sympathy. Next morning, when you go to look at it, you find it withered; it is then too late for your warm breath and willing fingers to force it open; you only make it worse, and at last the buds fall to the ground. ”

“ Just as the forms of the flying ravens break the great self-sufficiency of the landscape and thereby attract attention to it, so the powerful simple outlines of the man and woman are only a more emphatic expression of the solemn silence which the evening casts over the land. Just as Millet places his people in the landscape, as an inseparable part of nature, one with her, so Barbey D’Aurevilly places his characters on the great, lonely sea-coast, on the yellow sands and the long, flat, green meadows of storm-bound Normandy. ”

“ 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 ”

“ That enchanting being who has just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at all,—poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and arms of her mother—still a child, already a woman! ”

“ She becomes stronger and more beautiful, and is more than ever imbued with an indescribable longing. This vague longing leads her on towards that which she is going to experience—which is to be her life’s only experience. She feels her pulses beat and her heart burn within her, and not till then does the matured woman of thirty tear aside the bandage that binds her eyes; and looking out, she cries: Where art thou, who givest me life’s fulness? On one of her boating expeditions, she goes to the nearest lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper, a strong, quiet young man, comes out. ”

“ How many helpless women whose talents bore no hope of fruition have lived their youth solely in books and for books! And as though their hearts were the chords of a quivering instrument, Heyse played his tender tale of the far horizon, and sang to them of liberty, of spiritual greatness, and of the glory of woman, beside which the doctrine of self-renunciation which was preached to us at home and at school appeared ugly and dull in the extreme. ”

“ When I began to read him his style influenced me like the sharp, bitter smell and the infinite breadth of the sea, while his descriptions of life’s mystery ran through me like the stab [Pg 201] of a knife, causing me to shudder with a suppressed cry as only a woman can cry when she sees the innermost sanctuary of her womanhood exposed to the public gaze. Shakespeare is the only one who has this greatness without mercy, this self-sufficing completeness of a human being, this pride which is justice, moral law, religion and a world to itself. ”

“ Life was empty around her, and in the void her excited nerves became even more and more centred upon her own ego. Her opinion of herself assumed gigantic proportions, and whatever there had been of soul grandeur in her nature was changed into admiration of self. And yet, in spite of all, this girl, who was undoubtedly a genius, never realized her own power to the full. The natural nobility of her feelings assumed a moral, bourgeois dress, and her young senses, which had manifested such a passionate craving at their first awakening, withered and grew numb. ”

“ Take Madame de Burne for an example. She is a widow. Perhaps it was her marriage with a despotic churl that awoke in her heart a longing to execute vengeance, a sombre craving to make men suffer for all that she had endured at the hands of one of them, to feel herself for once the strongest, able to bend the will of others, to inflict suffering, and to conquer opposition. But before all else she is a born coquette. Her heart does not hunger for emotion, like the hearts of tender and sensitive women. She does not desire the love of one man, she does not seek the happiness of a strong passion ”

“ Man and man’s love are not a joy to her; they are a torment. He is inconsiderate in his demands, brutal in his caresses, and unsympathetic with those sides of her nature which are not there for his satisfaction. He is no longer the great comic animal of “Keynotes,” whom the woman teases and plays with—he is a nightmare which smothers her during horrible nights, a hangman who tortures her body and soul during days and years for his pleasure; a despot who demands admiration, caresses, and devotion, while her every nerve quivers with an opposite emotion ”

“ And all the while they seek for that which is lacking in themselves, they like to talk about the weariness of life, the vanity of hope, the secret attractions of love; they tease and charm and beckon from afar, they let it be supposed that they have much to give, yet all their desire is to play with their idle delicate fingers upon the soul of man as upon an instrument of music. ”

“ And if even the average woman cannot attain to the full consciousness of her womanhood without man, how much less can the woman of genius, in whom sex is the actual root of her being, and the source from whence she derives her talent and her ego. If her womanhood remains unawakened, then however promising the beginning may be, her life will be nothing more than a gradual decay, and the stronger her vitality, the more terrible will the death-struggle be.
That was Sonia’s life. No man took her in his arms and awoke the whole harmony of her being. ”

“ They lay hold on woman in the hidden depths of her personality, as one who stands alone and lives her own life—her life of the many days, weeks, months, years, when she grows in herself, educates and miseducates herself in the loneliness of her being, in that inner life which is made up of wishes, dreams, hopes and disillusions, before any appointed man and any appointed event appears on the horizon of her soul. ”

“ It affects one like a landscape on an evening in early autumn, when the sun has gone down and twilight reigns; it seems as though veiled in gray, for there is no color left, although everything is strangely clear. Mrs. Egerton has a peculiarly gentle touch and soft voice where she describes the lonely, independent working girl. Her little story is often nothing more than the fleeting shadow of a mood, but the style is sustained throughout in a warm stream of lyric; for this Celtic woman certainly has the lyrical faculty, a thing which a woman writer rarely has, if ever, possessed before. ”