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This play was acted at Helsingfors, and also, in a Swedish translation, at Stockholm. By some it was praised to the skies, by others violently abused, and even by the writer herself it has been severely criticised. It contained much bitter satire, she said, but nothing of any psychological depth, nor could it be called matured art. She was never satisfied with any of her writings, but always hoped to do better in the future; she died leaving that hope unfulfilled. She wrote three or four plays later on, besides two novels and several short stories and articles, but it is doubtful if any of them were equal to The Workman's Wife. The amount of literary work which she achieved is astonishing when one considers how much she did besides; she translated all the six volumes of Brandes's Main Currents into Finnish, but owing to the representations made by the clergy to her publishers the publication was stopped after the issue of the first volume. People began to hold her up as an atheist and accused her of leading the young astray, they pitied her children for having such a mother, and so exaggerated were their accusations that it required no little moral courage to be a friend of hers. It was only to be expected that this want of sympathy should have a corresponding effect upon her character, and it is not surprising if she never attained to all that she might have been amid more favourable surroundings.

The writings of Päivärinta and Minna Canth present a wide contrast to those of Juhani Aho, whose style bears so much resemblance to that of modern Swedish writers that it is often difficult to realise that he is not a Scandinavian. Juhani Aho (J. Brofeldt, born 1861) is the son of a clergyman of Savolaks. His first book was a collection of short stories descriptive of the lives of the country people, and one of these, called When Father Bought the Lamp, is reckoned a little masterpiece. A later work has been translated into English under the title of Squire Hellman1 and other Stories, but his best book is a novel in two parts called The Clergyman's Daughter and The Clergyman's Wife. Like Björnson, he introduces his characters as children, describing early influences which explain the gradual development of his heroine from a lonely little girl, who delights to climb high trees where she can sit unseen and indulge in daydreams, to the grown woman in whom daydreams have absorbed the best part of life.

The account of Elli's childhood and schooldays is very vividly given, and so, too, is the description of her first ball, where she finds. herself the only girl in a grey homespun dress, without gloves, and with her hair done in a pigtail. Then follows the account of her return home, and the reading of forbidden books, The Talisman and Runeberg's Hannah-forbidden because they treat of love, for although Elli has been taught that marriage is to be the chief object Translated by Nisbet Bain, and published by Fisher Unwin in the Pseudonym Library, 1893.

Elli's mother is a

of her life all thought of romance is excluded. woman with strict religious views who has accustomed herself to accept all things in life with the same unquestioning faith as the dogmas of her religion. She never loved her husband, yet she got on well enough, and she cannot see why her daughter should not do the same; so when a fat elderly clergyman with a pronounced squint comes to stay some weeks in their house, accompanied by a young student called Olof Kalm, and when he, the clergyman, ends by proposing to Elli, the mother is ready with the same old argument which her own mother had used to induce her to marry: 'You do not love him now,' she says, 'but with time you will learn to do so. He is a good and honest man. Besides, what else can you do? Some day you must marry.' No one alludes to the subject again, and as Elli has not the courage to start it, the others appear to take her tacit consent for granted. Time passes, and the situation becomes more and more difficult, the unwelcome suitor shows no signs of leaving, and at last it seems to Elli that she has forfeited her right to a choice in the matter. She becomes engaged to him, and there the first part of the story ends.

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In the second volume Elli has become The Clergyman's Wife. She lives in a picturesque, old-fashioned red house amid scenery which is not unlike that which surrounded her old home, except that the fjord is a highway for the tourist traffic during the summer season, and the large passenger steamers pass within view of the windows. It is the kind of place at which the world-wearied stranger throws a longing glance. What a peaceful spot!' he exclaims, how delightful it would be to live there.' Elli, who has lived there during the five years of her married life, does not find it so pleasant. There is a feeling of melancholy that pervades the atmosphere, induced partly by the sound of waves splashing against the shore, partly by the quivering leaves of the aspens, and maybe by the glare of the sun against the window panes, displaying the utter absence of life within. There is no sound of children's voices, no lowing cattle, and not even the sound of oars upon the water.

Elli is sitting close to the fjord under a birch tree, in a place which she has dedicated to her daydreams, where both her happiest and unhappiest hours are spent-happy because here at least there is no one to disturb her, unhappy because here she realises the full burden of her solitude. As she sits watching the ships sail by, 'looking out into the world,' as she calls it, she develops a superstitious belief that her life will not always go on as it has done, but that some day something will happen which will change the whole course of her existence. Perhaps someone will come in a boat and fetch her away. Elli has met only three men in her life: the first was scarcely to be called a man, he was little more than an overgrown schoolboy; the others were Olof Kalm and her husband. She had not realised

that she loved Olof when she first met him, but since those days he has somehow become idealised in her fancy as the embodiment of what might have been. Sometimes he takes the guise of a deliverer, and then she allows herself to think-for there can be no harm in thinking-how it would be if he were to come over the fjord and fetch her away.

'Come as you are,' he says, and gives her a kiss on the forehead.

'How did you know that I loved you?' she asks.

'I saw it in your eyes.'

'And you have come to fetch me?'

'Yes, for I have thought of you by day and dreamed of you by night.' 'Where shall we go?'

'Away from here. The wind is with us; let us sail over the waters of the fjord.'

Then it is true that you love me?'

'It is true.'

'And you will always love me?'

'Always! Come with me. No one will look for you; they will think that you have gone for a swim and are drowned. Hold up your shawl, it will make a sail.'

Away they go over the waves, away, away! The red house disappears in the distance, and she is on her way to a far country, where Olof lives in a little house on the edge of a steep hill.

Such dreams as these are supposed to belong only to girlhood; but Elli indulges in them still, and when at last she hears that her husband's former travelling companion is actually coming to spend the summer with them as a paying guest she believes that he has come only for her sake, and that her secret wishes have had some strange, inexplicable power of drawing him towards her.

Olof comes, and the former acquaintance ripens. He finds Elli charming now that she is another man's wife, and wonders why he had not thought so before. He is busily engaged in writing a book on 'Woman in the Realistic Literature of France,' woman being, as he says, a very popular subject at that time. He discusses all manner of social questions with Elli, unhappy marriages being one of them, and gives it as his opinion that all ill-assorted couples should separate. He knows that she is unhappy by a kind of instinct when on first entering the house the appearance of the dining-room oppresses him. The colourless walls and worn-out furniture bear the stamp of uniformity and boredom; he knows that they sit, year in, year out, each in his and her own place, gazing at their plates with nothing to say, while from time to time the silence is broken by a request to pass the bread or the remark that there is no more butter.

Olof's artistic temperament enables him to see and to feel this as though he had been actually present, and he encourages Elli to tell him how she has spent her time, while he in turn confesses to her many things which cause her to admire him for his honesty, little

realising how easy a matter it is for a man to confess faults of which he is not in the very least ashamed. She tells him how she used to go out alone on ski after everyone else had gone to bed, how she wandered through the pine forests by moonlight and returned so tired that she was cured for the time being-cured of the terrible feeling of loneliness that haunted her.

To all that she tells him he listens with a sympathetic interest, and gradually he teaches her to share his interests-a thing which her husband had never attempted to do-and they read together Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Ibsen's Doll's House, and some of Runeberg's poems, lingering over his lines on friendship in The Swan.

'Do you believe in a friendship such as that?' Elli asked, and he replied: 'I believe that it is the only thing of any value, the only thing that remains when all else is lost and done for. It is the beginning of love, and it is love's heir. When love dies friendship remains.'

This was exactly what Elli thought too; she believed in it as the realisation of the life which she had sought after, and she believed that Olof really meant what he had said.

The italics are ours; they emphasise the knowledge of human nature contained in those words. If Juhani Aho describes the woman's inner life with unflinching realism, neither does he spare his own sex, and Olof's colossal selfishness looms large in all its cold-blooded deformity. He realises that she must have loved him long ago in the days before her marriage, and the thought flatters him: How grandly tragic! How she must have suffered!' The pity which he might have felt for her is swallowed up in an æsthetic sense of the fitness of things. He had read many French novels, and had felt attracted by the passionate manner in which women of the South expressed their feelings; even the most ordinary revolver tragedy delighted him; but here was something grander still-a silent suffering which knows nothing of the relief to be obtained by a passionate outburst, a soul weighted by a sense of duty, a life spent in suppressing itself. It gave him an artistic satisfaction to compare the women of the South with the women of the North, and now for the first time he did so to the advantage of the latter. Sometimes he, too, would let his imagination wander, thinking how pleasant it would be to have a secret love affair in a beautiful spot like this. What a delightful relaxation during the intervals of work and study! He was fully convinced that she loved him so much that she was practically his; he had but to stretch out his arms and she would come; but when he asked himself, 'Do I love her?' he decided that he did not do so sufficiently to devote himself entirely to her, while on the other hand he loved her too much to disturb her outward peace. He thinks that he understands her, but in reality he understands her only up to a certain point, while she, for her part, entirely fails to understand

him. She is a far simpler character than the women writers of 'human documents,' and it is a terrible shock when she discovers that although he is not satisfied with the friendship which they have so often discussed together he does not care for her sufficiently to be burdened for life; and when at last the awakening comes, and Olof sails away in a ship without her, she is left in the old place by the fjord, lonely as ever and more unhappy than before, because now even her daydreams have been taken from her.

There is something restful about Juhani Aho's style; his characters are made to stand out against a beautiful background of never-ending lakes and distant low-lying hills overgrown with dark pine forests. In his next book, Panu (1898), he gives the story of the last struggle between Christianity and heathendom. Panu, the Seer of Korpivaara, is a picturesque figure with his long, thin, straggling black hair, and a worthy descendant of the old magicians. His followers are largelimbed, bearded men, clothed in furs and armed with bows and arrows, their names having a strange sound, uncouth as themselves-Ilpo, Kuisma, Jouko, and others. They are camping out in the snow on their way to a fair with skins of animals for sale, their snow-shoes (ski) are standing upright in the snow round the camp fire, and before starting on their day's journey the men gather in a half-circle round their leader, who half sings, half chants, a prayer to the forest god.

The book is a beautiful panorama from beginning to end, with this peculiarity, that the scene is always laid out of doors and it is always winter. Aho is one of the few writers who know how to describe a northern winter without making their readers long for the fireside, and is able instead to make them conscious of the beauty and stillness of a great pine forest carpeted with snow where men on ski glide noiselessly in and out among the trees, bearing torches on a dark night.

Here ends a sketch of six authors whose works may be allowed to speak for them. They seldom dwell on politics, have never exhibited a revolutionary tendency, and it is extremely doubtful whether any nation in Europe can produce six representative writers who show less inclination to overthrow the foundations of Church and State: their ideals, both social and political, are based on all that is best in Western Europe; for the Finlanders have,' as a French writer puts it, idealised us, and in so doing they have striven hard to live up to their ideal.'

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HERMIONE RAMSDEN.

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