Chapter I: Introduction

Jenny Lind—the name carries music with it to English ears. The memory is very tender and fragrant of her who, to our joy, found, for so long, a home among us. And yet it may well be questioned whether we English have even yet formed an adequate estimate of her gifts and character.

For what is it which we have in our minds as we recall her name? It is, first, some tale of the wonderful days when all London went mad over her singing. We have heard people tell, as their eyes kindle with the old passionate delight, how she came tripping over the stage in the _Figlia_, and how the liquid notes came rippling off her lips. We hear of the hours they waited in the historic crush at the Opera in the Haymarket; of the feverish energy with which they toiled to catch one glimpse of her passing. We remember, with a smile, some picture in an old copy of _Punch_, or the _Illustrated London News_, of scenes in the opera passages on a Jenny Lind night.

And then we add to this memory of that surpassing triumph, the thought of one whose purity and simplicity won all hearts to love the girl who, in the hour of her overwhelming success, remembered others rather than herself, and poured out her money in charities, and devoted her marvellous gifts to the relief of poverty and the healing of pain.

That is our English picture, and it is good and pleasant enough; and it is quite true, so far as it goes. But it is strangely imperfect and fragmentary. It assumes that her operatic career is to be identified with the brief passage of those London seasons, and that her fame is a private possession of our own here in England, where she lived and died. There prevails no general conception that the English visits were but the latter episodes of a long dramatic experience—an experience which had begun, with extraordinary promise, before she had passed out of her childhood, and which had already won to her the same enthusiasm which greeted her in England, not only in her own Swedish home and in the kindred capital, Copenhagen, but in the great musical centres of Germany—Berlin, the Rhine, Leipzig, Munich, and Vienna.

Nor was it only the enthusiasm of the general public for a most beautiful voice, which had been already given her; but it was the authoritative chiefs of the musical art who had signalised in her the arrival not only of an exquisite singer, but of a supreme and unique artist. The admiration for Jenny Lind was not a mere popular fever, such as has now and again followed the steps of some favourite of the opera. Its peculiar force lay in this—that it held enthralled the highest and best minds in Europe. It was the men of genius who recognised in her something akin to themselves. In her native land it had been those who dominated in the musical and literary world who were drawn to sing, and write, and talk of her—Geijer, historian and poet; Lindblad, the “Schubert of Sweden”; Bishop Thomander, Fredrika Bremer, Topelius. At Copenhagen it is the chief artists and poets, and writers and sculptors of the day who are profoundly sensitive to her influence—Jensen, Hans Andersen, Thorwaldsen, Melbye, Œhlenschläger. In Berlin it is Meyerbeer, who can talk of nothing else but this marvellous Swedish girl. In London it is Moscheles, who writes, “What shall I say of Jenny Lind? It is impossible to find words adequate to describe the impression she has produced. This is no short-lived fit of public enthusiasm. So much modesty and so much greatness united are seldom, if ever, to be met with.” It is Thalberg, Taubert, Schumann, who welcome her into the elect company of the masters, “who know.” It is Tieck and Kaulbach at Berlin, it is Grillparzer at Vienna, who are her friends and her hosts. And, finally, it is Mendelssohn himself, who, as will be seen in the letters that follow, is fascinated by her personality, and feels all his gifts roused in him to compose something worthy of her, and is eager and on fire to put out all his power in an opera which she may sing, and bends before her judgment as to his own place and career, and delights to share with her the deepest motives and convictions with which he sets to work at the _Elijah_. Does not our picture of the Haymarket crush rather fade into insignificance as a standard of Jenny Lind’s position as an artist when we recall the high notes of the soprano in the _Elijah_, giving out the cry of Seraphim to Seraphim, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth,” and remember that it was with her image before him that Mendelssohn wrote that music—that it was to catch the peculiar beauty which he loved in her voice that the high F sharps ring out so appealingly in the “Hear ye, Israel?” And have we at all realised that she was one of whom he could say, “She is as great an artist as ever lived; and the greatest I have known”?[2]

The question that we have put was one which her visible presence would at once suggest. Surely those who first saw her in much later life must have instinctively felt a jar between the popular ideal and the realisation; not that she was less than their expectation, but that she was so much more than the general report tended to convey. They had come to be introduced to her, murmuring perhaps to themselves some air from the _Sonnambula_, or the _Figlia_, with which her early fame was associated; but the air was forgotten when they found themselves in her presence; that strong and solemn face, with its deep lines and grey pathetic eyes, with its grave dignity, with its serious exultation—what had this face in common with an opera of Donizetti? Charm, animation, lightness, grace—these, no doubt, she had at command, and she could brim over with gaiety and humour; but not in these lay the impression she produced—not here was the dominant note struck. Rather one felt oneself to be facing a character of emphatic force and vigorous outlines—a character that it was difficult to imagine curbed within the conventional artificialities of the Italian drama. It had far more of the impressive pose of a powerful tragedienne. Even the name of “Jenny Lind” seemed to be inadequate to the occasion. It is a name which English lips caress with affection, having in it the sense and sound of some homely and endearing diminutive. But here, one felt, was something more than affectionate diminutives could express; something more than a delicious singer; something more, even, than the pure and simple and beneficent woman. All this there certainly was, but with it and above it was that which startles and quells and even alarms—something of a rare and majestic type, which broke through the ordinary layers which encrust and imprison our average human life; a character solitary and distinct, dowered with strange intensity, retaining its free original spontaneity, drawing ever on its own resources, independent and somewhat contemptuous of those external tests and standards by which the mass of men guide their hesitating judgments. Susceptible, indeed, she was, as an artist must be, to outside influence and atmosphere, but her individuality had not succumbed, or lost its sharp and unique distinction under this liability to sensitive impression; it had never yielded to the grinding years. It retained, obviously and undeniably, the rarity and the grandeur of genius; and all who had eyes to see knew, at a glance, that here before them was a pilgrim-soul, aloof and uplifted,

“One of the small transfigured band,
Whom the world cannot tame.”

It is to justify this high estimate of her powers and gifts that this book is written. It starts from the level of Mendelssohn’s judgment of her. If, indeed, she was the greatest musical artist that he had ever known, it is well worth while to ask whence her capacities took their rise, what was their artistic development, what are the special notes and features which were most characteristic of her genius. The book proposes to respond to such questions as these; and, with this end in view, after lightly tracing the records of her birth and early infancy, it offers a sketch of her dramatic career from the year 1829–30, when she first passed within the doors of the theatre, to the year 1850–51, when, after having bade farewell to the stage for ever, she signalised her new position by her triumphant passage to the New World beyond the Atlantic. Within those full twenty years she was a Child of the Drama in an intimate and peculiar sense. Within that time she won the experience, under the pressure of which the gifts with which she was endowed received their impress, and moved forward to their perfection. By the close of those years she had gained everything that gave its unique character to her artistic genius; for, not only had she proved her complete mastery over all the manifold opportunities and material of the operatic stage, but she had already, in earlier days, by her singing of selections from the _Creation_, and the _Seasons_, and more especially by her marvellous rendering of the soprano part in the _Elijah_, in London, on behalf of the Mendelssohn Scholarships, on December 15th, 1848, attested her supremacy in that domain of art which was so singularly congenial both to her special capacities and to her spirited temper, and through which she was, in after years, to carry such a high message to her hearers—the domain of sacred Oratorio.

Those twenty years, then, contain the secret of her growth as an artist. The years that followed, besides the splendid opportunities which they brought her of exercising the powers which were already matured, added, also, to this, much which matured and deepened the woman’s inward history—added the good gifts which she herself had, by hard necessity, most pitifully lacked in her early days—the gifts of tender domestic love, of watchful devotion—the background of warmth and confidence which belongs to home, and husband, and children. All this would, for herself, measured by her own balances, be of priceless worth in the estimation of her life, and for those who knew and loved her, it would be of inexhaustible interest. But it is the _artistic_ life, alone, of an artist, over which the world has a positive and undeniable claim. An artist is, in a sense, public property; his or her art makes direct appeal to public judgment; it offers itself as a public endowment to the world at large. Its development, its movements, its story, are public facts. And it is due to mankind, when it gives to an artist a generous and unstinted welcome, that it should know the peculiar growth and training, the advantages and the perplexities, the hindrances and the helps, through which that gift, which was at last so triumphant, won its slow way forward out of darkness into light. Such a story may not be without profit, if it aids men to understand how better to cherish and foster those germs of genius which are to be found scattered in such strange freedom, amid conditions which seem least calculated to rear them in hardihood and grace. And, certainly, the tale of Jenny Lind may well be told for the sake of bearing splendid witness, to all those who feel themselves stirred by some inherent native power, of the unconquerable force with which a pure and strong individuality, if it be true to the inner light and loyal to the outward call, can dominate circumstances, however harsh and rude, and can, with a single eye on the far goal of artistic perfection, and upheld by faith in God, move straight to its aim with an unswerving and irresistible security, shaping its passage, amid pitfalls and snares, over this perilous earth with a motion as free and sure and faithful as a star that passes, in unhindered obedience, over the steady face of heaven.

Nor will it be without significant interest that those twenty years begin with her earliest attachment to the Royal Theatre in her own home city of Stockholm, and end with her tribute-gifts, made out of her wonderful winnings, as thank-offerings to that theatre and home to which her heart had so often and so tenderly turned. The years of her main artistic growth are those in which, whatever her successes elsewhere, Swedish influences dominated her life. It was from the Swedish stage that she derived all her dramatic training. It was Swedish literature, Swedish literary men, who first made her sensitive to the high motives that were at work within her. It was in their company, under their encouragement, that she learned the truth and power of her own spiritual promptings. It was to carry back to her beloved Stockholm the rich fruits of her Parisian discipline that she toiled in exile. And even though, as an artist could not but do, she felt her spirit expand when she found herself taken into the full sweep of the musical forces at a great centre like Berlin, still her Swedish heart beat true to the old home-country, and it was out of her innermost self that she bent herself, as soon as the currents of her public triumph carried her far abroad, to the sweet task of securing for Sweden, out of the gains that Europe and America poured into her lap, records and pledges of her faithful remembrance of the needs and necessities of her own people, and her fatherland.