Chapter IV: Home Once More

She reached Stockholm on the 12th of May, in our old friend “The Gauthiod,” and was welcomed home by an immense crowd, who had assembled on the quay to greet her. She was to sing at six concerts in the Royal Theatre, on the 24th, 28th, and 31st of May, and the 3rd, 5th, and 7th of June; and, besides these, there were to be two State Concerts during June in honour of the wedding of the Crown Prince. The tickets for the concerts were put up for auction, but all the profits went to the Royal Theatre.[160] It was, we remember, on its behalf, that the King had invited her to return and sing. On the concerts themselves, the _Daily Allehanda_, her old friend, wrote that it was enough to say that—“she was the same as ever.”

“Though Mdlle. Lind may not appear again in any _rôle_ on the stage
itself, yet it is only the costume which we miss; for if you will only
go and see and hear her sing, in the _Puritani_, or as the woodland
child in _Vielka_, or as the passionately sorrowing Donna Anna, or,
again, as Jenny Lind herself, impulsive, naïve, and charming, pouring
out her wonderful music in Taubert’s little Lied—then come back and
say whether you have ever heard such dramatic singing, or seen a more
living representation in look, manner or expression of each several
character whose mind and feelings the artist proposed to paint in
song.”

Fröken von Stedingk was faithful as ever, in welcoming her back, and warmly defended her resolution to leave the boards.

“In the spring,” she writes in her diary, “I met Jenny Lind again.
Many were blaming her, just then, for the decision she had taken, and
which had, no doubt, been painful to her—the decision to quit the
stage. I could not possibly disapprove it, knowing as I did the
convictions on which it was based, however much I might, personally,
be the loser. She now sang only in concerts. Thus she closed her
theatrical career at the very height of her triumph; she deliberately
renounced the admiration which everywhere followed her, and this in
consequence of a resolution which in my eyes, makes her more worthy of
honour than ever.

“Many suppose this resolution to be the result of Pietism. Jenny Lind
is as God-fearing as she is pure, but had Pietism been the cause, she
would not herself have gone to the play, which she declared that she
liked to do, to see others act. No! but she had felt how physically
and morally wearing was the work in the service of dramatic art, so
that, for instance, for several days after a performance of _Norma_,
her nerves would be so shattered that she would be unfit for other
useful mental occupation.”

Fröken von Stedingk attended the Queen Dowager’s _soirée musicale_ in the spring, and she tells us how, when Jenny Lind was taking leave of the Queen Dowager, “Her Majesty asked her to choose for herself one of some magnificent bracelets set before her. But she, with tears in her eyes, begged to be allowed the favour of having sung once before the Queen, without any more reward than the tiny bunch of forget-me-nots which were in a vase on the table. The Queen then gave her the simple flowers, which seemed to make her happier than diamonds; and this little incident, which I witnessed, well illustrates Jenny Lind’s way of feeling.”

Nor was it only the Court which desired to do her special honour at this parting.

In the course of June, she received a tribute which embodied, in a distinct and remarkable manner, the profound feeling with which the entire body of her people were touched, by the splendour of her generosity. A medal had been struck in her honour, to which almost every one of distinction in Sweden, from the King downwards, subscribed; the committee of presentation included the names of the

BARON DE GEER,
COUNT B. VON PLATEN,
G. ALBERT EHRENSWÄRD,
J. L. ASPELIN,
A. F. LINDBLAD,
J. A. FRÖST,
JULIE LÖFVENSKIÖLD,
ELIZABETH BERZELIUS,
F. VON DARDEL,
J. N. BORELIUS,
BARON BERNHARD VON BESKOW,
CHARLOTTE MURRAY.

The Address with which the gift was presented is singularly graceful; and it fitly closes the record of public tribute given in this book, in that it recalls, yet once again, at the end of her artistic life in Sweden, the tone and temper which we noticed in all the earliest records of her appearance.

A spiritual and moral force animating Art; a spiritual and moral service for Art to render—these are the two poles of her Artistic belief: and it is these which the following Address notes with felicity and fervour.

“_To Jenny Lind._

“The lovers of music at Stockholm have, during the present spring, as
well as during the winter season of 1847–48, enjoyed a succession of
memorable feasts, at which they have admired alike the Artist’s
genius, and the nobility of heart wherewith she has dedicated her
triumphs exclusively to Charity and Benevolence, and has thereby
testified that the aim of true Art is something higher than to please,
and to astonish.

“Having been privileged to witness these festivals of Art, where the
beauty of the soul found its expression through the medium of song,
the lovers and friends of music are desirous that the great artist, on
leaving her native country, should carry away with her some outward
token of this period of her life, of which the inner memory, which is
at all times the companion of virtue, will follow her through life,
until that other world is unveiled to her of which she has been the
messenger to us through the language of music.

“The undersigned have received the agreeable charge of handing to her
this simple souvenir,” &c.

The medal was struck both in gold and silver and bronze. On its face was the bust of Jenny Lind, draped, with the left shoulder brought rather forward. On the back was a design in which the figures of Charity and Patriotism stand on either side of the Genius of Song, while a symbolic figure of Gratitude, bearing a wreath of Immortelles, kneels at the foot of the throne, and inscribes the date of the gift, made by Jenny Lind, out of the profits of her last operatic season in Sweden—December 3, 1847, to April 12, 1848. Inside the laurel wreath that encircles this design are given the names of the chief characters in which she sang,— Norma, Lucia, Agatha, Amina, Susanna, Alice, Maria, Adina. Below the group of figures runs the inscription: “In memory of the friends of Lyric Art in Stockholm.”

The gift was one which went home to her heart. She recognized in it her own people’s appreciation of her career—their warmth of affection, their delight in her glory, their grateful sense of her loyalty to them. Those three medals were zealously treasured by her to the very close of her life, as a precious token of the bond of kinship which knit her so fast to the land of her birth, and to her childhood’s home: and so fully did she acknowledge the appeal made, in the design, to her patriotism that, on her death, she left the medals to be committed to the National Museum at Stockholm, where now they lie, a pledge of the unbroken bond to her country, which no long years of separation had served to weaken or annul.

Before she left Stockholm she twice sang some Sacred music, on a Sunday, at Evening Prayers; once on June 8th, in the Jakobs-kyrka, and, again, later in the St. Clara Kyrka.

In the London house, at Moreton Gardens, where her last years were spent, there hangs a most graceful picture, in water-colours, of the west gallery in St. Clara, as she stood to sing the solemn solo in the _Elijah_, “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun.”[161] Her upright figure, in its elevated pose, is beautifully caught, thrown out against the floods of mellow light that pour in through the western window. Something there was in her, at that moment, as in the church of that very parish where her troubled infancy first felt the light, she was delivering, with all her dedicated powers, to the praise and honour of God, the message of radiant hope which awaited the righteous— something there was, which arrested the artist’s eye, and interpreted to him its significance. He left on the paper a record, which conveys, at a glance, the rapt, upward look, so familiar to those who knew her; and he spread about her the glow of a sunlight, which seemed a symbol of that shining glory of which her voice rang out the promise.

In that church she sang for the last time in Sweden under the maiden-name which was hers by birth. The service was on June the 25th, and on the 27th day of the month she started from Stockholm on her great venture.