Chapter II: Childhood

“A Child of the Drama”—so we have named her—and not without reason; for it was within the shelter of the Royal Theatre at Stockholm that she first found the comfortable warmth of a steady and a tender home, in which her child-heart, with its intense affections, could freely and candidly expand. She was hardly ten years old when she came under the guardianship of the Royal Theatre; and throughout those nine early years, she was a forlorn little pilgrim, often passed about through the hands of strangers, and pitifully deprived of that deep security which a fixed and stable home-life inbreeds in us through its traditional sanctities and immemorial kindnesses.

Her birth, which took place in the parish of St. Clara, in Stockholm, on October 6th, 1820, found both her parents somewhat under difficulties. Her father, Niclas Jonas Lind, son of a lace-manufacturer, seems to have been able to do little or nothing towards providing a home for mother and child. He was very young, only twenty-two years old; he had, through lack of energy, failed to continue his father’s business, and at this time, kept the ledgers at a private merchant’s house; in virtue of which office he is entered as “Accountant” in the church register at the baptism of his little daughter, who was christened, on the day after her birth, with the name “Johanna Maria.”

Such a post would, no doubt, bring him in but little; and perhaps he was not very likely to make the most of what he got. For he was good-naturedly weak; much given to music of a free and convivial kind, such as was widely popular in Sweden at that day. Mr. Lind had a good voice, and took an eager part in these musical festivities. Such a life, it will be easily understood, does not tend to foster steadiness or thrift; and he was perfectly unable to provide mother and child with either lodging or board, though he probably contributed to it in some slender way. All the practical management had to be left to the energy and determination of the mother, who was, at the time, making her own way through the world under conditions which were not favourable to a baby’s entry on the scene.

She was, herself, of very respectable burgher-stock. Her maiden name had been Anna Maria Fellborg; but she had been first married, in 1810, at the age of eighteen, to a Captain Rådberg. Her marriage had proved very unhappy, owing to the bad character of the husband; and after about eighteen months she obtained a divorce from him in the High Ecclesiastical Court, the Court assigning to her, in decisive recognition of her husband’s misconduct, the custody of a little daughter who had been born to them, called Amelia Maria Constantia, together with aliment to the amount of half Rådberg’s income, whatever that might be. She was thus thrown upon her own unaided exertions; but she was a woman of great force of character, well-educated for her circumstances, resolute not to be beaten. She got along, in one way or another, chiefly by means of education; and in 1820, at Jenny’s birth, was keeping a day-school for girls, one or two of whom she also boarded; it was one of these little boarders, nine years older than Jenny, who became afterwards so helpful to her as companion and friend—Louise Johansson, whose name will frequently recur in the course of our story.

A baby would be, no doubt, a most tiresome inconvenience in the management of such a household; and so her mother seems to have placed the child, at once, under the care of Carl Ferndal, who was organist and parish clerk of the church at Ed-Sollentuna, some fifteen English miles out of Stockholm. She was tended by this man and his wife for about three years, her mother visiting her, it seems, at intervals, and spending with her the summer of 1821. Owing to some dispute with the clerk, she took Jenny back in 1824, probably in the early part of the year, to Stockholm; but it is possible to believe that those early years in Sollentuna were not without some influence on the child’s character, for they seem to have woke up in her, from the very start, that innate and instinctive sense of the country which was so noticeable in her. The instinct itself is, indeed, native to the Swedes, for whom “the country” is a passion; and this national characteristic held, in her, a deep-rooted dominion. Somehow, one felt, in her company, as if she had come out of the country. She was in close touch with all that belongs to a simple peasantry. She knew the tones of its songs; and the rhythm of its dances; its simplicity, its charm, its pathos—all were hers. Something of its native depth and dignity seemed to have passed into her. She ever felt herself at home in the country; she breathed there freely; she revelled in its wild flowers, in contrast with cultivated garden-flowers for which she had little love. She had an intense delight in the songs of wild-birds, with whose ways and habits she had intimate acquaintance. She enjoyed, especially, the expanse of wide waters. She delighted to be at large; she hated crowds, and the pressure of a city, and the unresting stir of society. She did not desire the constant company of many fellow-creatures; the town-instincts did not draw her. Her need of music might bring her to live there where she could best satisfy it; but her heart was, naturally, away in country-scenes, where men were not too thick and near; and where God seems closer; and where the soul can feed its own high thoughts, somewhat aloof and alone, unfretted by man’s insistent noise. Yet, after these first four years, she was brought up altogether in a city, winning the sight of the country only in her holidays. Something, surely, sank down very deep into the tiny baby, as she toddled in and out of the clerk’s house, in the village of Sollentuna—something, which made her at home, ever, amid trees and fields—and something which was still strong in her to the end, linking the first days in the Swedish village to those last hours when she waited for her death, hid in the English home, where she had made for herself a refuge of peace, amid the sweet solitude of the Malvern hills.

Back, however, to Stockholm, she was then quickly brought; and there, in her home, she, most likely, found a new arrival in the person of Fru Tengmark, her grandmother on her mother’s side, now in her second widowhood, who had, hitherto, lived with one of her daughters, Fru Perman, at Östersund, in the north of Sweden, but who had now come to press her claim for admittance into a certain Home for the Widows of Stockholm burghers, an established and endowed institution of some importance in Stockholm. Already, in 1822, the old lady had put in her plea that she was unable, at an age which made employment impossible, to save herself, by her own efforts, from need; but it was not until 19th August, 1824, that rooms were finally allotted to her. Jenny, therefore, it would appear, found her at her mother’s house; and she seems to have received from Fru Tengmark a more kindly and appreciative treatment than it was in her mother’s nature to bestow upon her. She always spoke of her grandmother with strong admiration and affection. Above all, she took in from her a profound impression of religion; and it was to her that, in after years, she was accustomed to trace back those spiritual influences which became the very soul of her life.

It was the grandmother who was the first to detect the musical gifts of the child; and this detection left a profound impression on the child herself, as if she, too, then first made a discovery of what was in her through the surprise which she found herself producing in others. The story formed her earliest distinct memory. Coming up from the country to the town, she was struck by the music of the military bugles that daily past through the street; and one day when she fancied herself alone in the house she crept to the piano on which her half-sister used to practise her music, and, with one finger, strummed out for herself the fanfare which she had caught from the soldiers. But the grandmother was at hand, and, hearing the music, called out the name of the half-sister, whom she supposed it to be; and little Jenny, in terror at being found out, hid under the square piano; she was so small that she fitted in perfectly; and the grandmother, getting no answer to her calls, came in to look, and presently discovered her, and dragged her out, and was astonished, and said, “Child, was that you?” and Jenny, in tears at her crime, confessed; but the grandmother looked at her deeply, and in silence; and when the mother came back she told her, and said: “Mark my words, that child will bring you help.” And, after that, the neighbours used to be called in to hear her play. As she told the story in later years, she would reproduce most vividly the frightened look of the child creeping away to hide; and the significant look of the wonder-struck grandmother as she took in that it was indeed the tiny creature of three years old who had played the tune. She never forgot the historic “fanfare”; and, as the earliest signal of her after-career, it is given in the form in which she herself committed it to the memory of her daughter.

At this day-school Jenny continued with her mother, for three or four years; but, at last, the only boarder, Louise Johansson, was taken away, and her mother found herself hard pressed for funds. She determined to go out as governess; and, perhaps with this intention, answered an advertisement stating that a certain childless couple were anxious to have a child to take care of. It turned out that this couple lived in the very same Widows’ Home, in which Fru Tengmark had rooms, the man being the Guardian or Steward of the Home—a thoroughly comfortable and respectable position, by right of which he occupied the Lodge at the gate. This all seemed to fall in admirably, as Jenny would have the companionship of her favourite relation. So thither she was sent, probably in the year 1828; and her mother retired from Stockholm and took a place as governess, in Linköping, carrying with her her daughter Amalia Rådberg to help her in her educational work.

For a year and more she lived in the Widows’ Home, but there is nothing recorded of her life there until we come to the famous incident which brought about her removal, and which fixed, for ever, the lines of her future career. It came about in this fashion. “As a child I sang with every step I took, and with every jump my feet made.” So she herself records in her letter to the editor of the ‘Swedish Biographical Lexicon,’ written in 1865;[3] and, apparently one of the forms which the perpetual song took was addressed to a cat, “with a blue ribbon round its neck,” of which she was very fond. The rest of the story shall be given in her own words as they were taken down by her eldest son, to whom she told it at Cannes in the spring of 1887:—Her favourite seat with her cat was in the window of the Steward’s rooms, which look out on the lively street leading up to the Church of St. Jacob’s, and there she sat and sang to it; and the people passing in the street used to hear, and wonder; and amongst others the maid of a Mdlle. Lundberg, a dancer at the Royal Opera House; and the maid told her mistress that she had never heard such beautiful singing as this little girl sang to her cat. Mdlle. Lundberg thereupon found out who she was, and sent to ask her mother, who seems to have been in Stockholm at the time, to bring her to sing to her. And, when she heard her sing, she said, “The child is a genius; you must have her educated for the stage.” But Jenny’s mother, as well as her grandmother, had an old-fashioned prejudice against the stage; and she would not hear of this. “Then you must, at any rate, have her taught singing,” said Mdlle. Lundberg; and the mother was persuaded, in this way, to accept a letter of introduction to Herr Croelius, the Court Secretary and Singing-master, at the Royal Theatre. Off with the letter they started; but, as they went up the broad steps of the Opera House, the mother was again troubled by her doubts and repugnance. She, no doubt, had all the inherited dislike of the burgher families to the dramatic life. But little Jenny eagerly urged her to go on; and they entered the room where Croelius sat. And the child sang him something out of an opera composed by Winter. Croelius was moved to tears and said that he must take her in to Count Puke, the head of the Royal Theatre, and tell him what a treasure he had found. And they went at once; and Comte Puke’s first question was, “How old is she?” and Croelius answered, “Nine years old.” “Nine!” exclaimed the Count; “but this is not a _crèche_! It is the King’s Theatre!” And he would not look at her, she being, moreover, at that time what she herself (in her letter to the ‘Biographical Lexicon’) calls “a small, ugly, broad-nosed, shy, gauche, under-grown girl!” “Well,” said Croelius, “if the Count will not hear her, then I will teach her gratuitously myself, and she will one day astonish you!” Then Count Puke consented to hear her sing; and, when she sang, he too was moved to tears; and, from that moment, she was accepted; and was taken, and taught to sing, and educated, and brought up at the Government expense.

So she told the crucial event in her life in her own graphic manner. Those stairs were to become familiar enough to the little feet which then first felt them. Up that broad flight she stepped on to the platform on which, for twenty years to come, she was to live out her life, and win her unexampled victories. As she pulled at her mother’s unwilling hand that day, she took the step which determined her whole destiny.

For, radical as her mother’s dislike might be to the stage, yet fate, on the one hand, was too strong for her, and, on the other, she was pressed sorely by her straitened means. Croelius and Count Puke were not going to let their new-found treasure slip through their hands. They made an immediate offer to relieve the mother of all direct responsibility for her child’s maintenance and education; they proposed to adopt her into the School of Pupils, which was attached to the Royal Theatre, looking to repay the expenses, which they risked, through the after-success which they anticipated. It was a generous proposal; it came at a moment of pressure when it was almost impossible to refuse the opportunity of relief; and the mother yielded. To her it still seemed an act by which, in her own words, used afterwards to the Directors of the theatre, she was “sacrificing her own child to the stage.” But circumstances were unfortunate, and she could not but agree. So Jenny passed over from the Widows’ Home to become a little nursling of the Drama; and the world owes a debt of genuine gratitude to the Directors of the Theatre Royal for so quick and bold a recognition of the wonderful gift which lay hid in that tiny body. Rare, indeed, in the annals of art is it that the official authorities are so swift in their appreciation of strange and exceptional genius or so ready to make a venture on its behalf. And the chief honour, in a deed most honourable to all concerned, must lie with Herr Croelius. It was his insight that saw what there was in the “shy, gauche, and ugly, under-grown girl;” it was his courage that laid compulsion on the natural unwillingness of Count Puke. “The person,” she herself wrote in the letter we have already quoted to the editor of the ‘Biographical Lexicon,’ “whom alone I have to thank for the first discernment of my gift of song was the Court Secretary Croelius, Singing-master at the Theatre Royal. He told me all that which in later years came to pass.” His kindly features, quaint and dignified, are recorded in the accompanying sketch, on which she herself, long afterwards, wrote her witness to the goodness of him who was “the first to discern her gifts,” and whose insight and courage determined her career.

So closes her early childhood. Hitherto she has sung as Nature bade her, singing to herself, singing to her cat, singing “at every step and jump which she made with her baby feet.” Something, indeed, she may have caught from her mother, who was qualified to teach music, and from her half-sister and the day-pupils who used to practise on the piano on which Jenny made her first famous experiment; and she would have heard her father, who used to come in the evening and sing, while her mother played the guitar, when the little one lay probably in bed. And, even at Sollentuna, she would have listened, in baby-wonder, to Ferndal as he played his organ in the church. But her young life had been, as we have seen, strangely wandering, chequered, and untutored, and nearly everything she had must have come from her own instinctive spontaneity. She was now to pass at this tiny age into a school devoted to the drama, under the definite training and discipline of skilled masters in music. The little foundling of Nature was henceforward to become the child of Art.