He tried to pour the torrents of his love Into a tiny vase; a trinket--smooth, Pretty enough--but fit to hold a rose Upon some shrewd collector's cabinet. Toward that small moon the wild tides of his love Reared up, and fell back, moaning; and he died Asking his heart why love was agony.
And she? She loved the best she could, I think, And wondered sometimes--but not overmuch-- At poor John's queer, unseemly violence.
Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
From the north, whence Ibsen's Nora challenged the world as far back as 1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström's, which has but now appeared in Edwin Björkman's translation, we must remember that it was written in 1907--before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.
Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction. Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude, has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum. These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong--a conclusion weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.
