THE LITERATURE OF SWEDEN
Swedish literature is sublime and magnificent, like its history and
its scenery; it is simple and glad, as well as sad, like the lives of
its people. One of the great days in Sweden, or at least in Stockholm,
is the celebration, on the 26th of July, of the anniversary of the
birth, more than a century and a half ago, of the national poet
Bellman.
His songs are as household words throughout the land. To the Stockholm
born they speak of their daily life and surroundings, of the green
isles and shady banks of the Malar, the flowery woods of Haga, the
smiling park of Dijurgarden. Burlesque scenes of the life of the
people, street tragedies, drinking bouts, and country junketings;
broad humor and Nature's philosophy; lively fancies and exquisite
landscape painting--such are the themes of his song, which from one
generation to another has held the heart of the people spellbound.
Every man, woman, and child knows his favorite ditties by heart, has
sung or hummed them in moments of joy or sorrow. For his song is both
joyful and sad. His joy is the joy of the simple hearted, his gladness
a Dionysian gladness, the very enjoyment of existence; his sadness
that of sympathy with suffering humanity, of anguish at the
evanescence of life and happiness. His fancy oscillates between
constant extremes and ever-recurring contrasts. It makes of his song,
as Tegnér has so aptly defined it, "a sorrow decked in roses." Bright,
gay, enraptured, full of sunshine and glamour, like the summer day
around Stockholm, it is traversed by a strain of melancholy like
a smile through tears, the laugh which conceals a sob. There is
symbolism and there is parody in his rustic figures, but they are so
living, so real, they appeal so strongly to the innermost feelings,
that they seem the embodiment of one's thoughts. His pictures are like
those of the Dutch painters: every trait in the rustic scene tells the
life-story of some humble existence.
It is this characteristic which has made the poet appeal so powerfully
to the minds of the people. He seems to see with their eyes and feel
with their hearts, and to have experienced all the vicissitudes of
their own life. And yet he eminently reflects his own time, the gay,
the light-hearted Gustavian era, with its classical fancies and rococo
tastes. Venus and Bacchus, the Nymphs and the Dryads, Hebe and Amor
are mixed up incongruously with the homely scenes of Scandinavian
life. His Dutch pictures assume then a Watteau-like coloring of
extraordinary effect, as fancy and contrast enhance the sharp outlines
of his figures and give their vitality still greater relief. They are
so lifelike and so various that the whole of the every-day life of
Sweden, and more especially of Stockholm, of the eighteenth century,
is unrolled before our eyes. It is said that if every other book
descriptive of the period were to fail, his verses would suffice to
inform us how the middle classes then lived, thought, and felt.
Around the poet's monument--his bust in bronze on a white marble
column--there gather, on the anniversary of his birth, the crowds who
love him and love his song. Every heart beats high as the Bellman
choirs burst forth in turn into the well-known melodies, composed
or adapted by the poet himself to his words, and sung by him to the
accompaniment of his lute. And song alternates with enthusiastic
orations, addressed to the crowd by improvised orators, teeming with
quotations of well-known lines. It is an orgy of Bellman's verse, such
as the Stockholmer specially delights in. Bellman's songs generally
form a sequence, a continuous chain of lyrical romance. His _Fredman's
Epistles_ are a sort of epic cycle of lyrics. This is a form often
adopted by Swedish poets. We find it in Tegnér's _Frithiof's Saga_,
in Runeberg's _Sayings of Sergeant Stal_, and in the works of other
poets. It is a question, however, whether even by these Master
Singers, in their more elaborate conceptions and genial flights of
poetry, Bellman has ever been surpassed. In lyric power and vivid
realism, his popular ditties are unrivaled.
The next to incarnate the genius of the Scandinavian race was Tegnér.
His love of brave deeds and reckless adventure and his exaltation of
the man of action above the man of thought are typical. His heroes,
fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength
and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not
aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the
national ideal. His whole vision of life is Scandinavian, bright and
vivid, with a tinge of melancholy. Tegnér was, with Geijer and Ling,
the first to adopt national subjects, to use the Scandinavian myths
and folk-lore in their poetry, in opposition to the classical themes
and the Hellenic mythology, until then exclusively in vogue in the
poetical field.
Geijer was a romantic by nature, in politics as well as in literature,
but he was above all an ardent Scandinavian, opposed to exotics,
and passionately devoted to the great traditions of the past, a
hero-worshiper, an enthusiast, and a _Goth_. The Goths were members of
a society formed to revive the old national manners and customs, the
freedom of the age of the Vikings, and the ardor of the heroes
of Walhalla. Their organ was the _Idun_, an exclusively literary
publication. In a letter written by Geijer from Stockholm to his
_fiancee_, then living in the country, dated March 7, 1811, he says:
"We have formed a society which meets nearly daily. We talk, smoke,
and read together about Gothic Viking deeds. We call each other by
Gothic names, and live in the past." And Anna-Lisa, his future wife,
writing to a friend, says: "My _fiancee_ has become a Goth; instead of
loving me, he is in love with Valkyries and shield-bearing maidens,
drinks out of Viking horns, and carries out Viking expeditions--to the
nearest tavern. He writes poems which must not be read in the dark,
they are so full of murders and deeds of slaughter." Ling, who also
belonged to this society, was a fervent admirer of the Eddas and
Sagas, of the Scandinavian myths and folk-lore. Tegnér, despite his
classical education and Hellenic turn of mind, was an ardent Norseman
in feeling and instinct. "Go to Greece for beauty of form," he would
say, "but to the North for depth of feeling and thought." He scorned
alike the metaphysical subtleties of French philosophy and the
moonshine heroics of German romanticism. But he was at one with Geijer
and Ling in the desire to make Scandinavian heroes and myths the
subjects of poetry.
The result of the movement was _Frithiof's Saga_, by Tegnér, Geiger's
_Viking_, and Ling's heavy epics of Walhalla warriors. But Geijer and
Ling alone had followed out the theory in all its consequences. Their
heroes were simply _Eddic_, of their time, in spirit and in thought.
Ling's realism went so far that his Northern gods and warriors,
"everlastingly killed but to revive again," were deemed "pork-eating
and mead-drinking yokels." They were soon forgotten, and Ling himself
is best known as the inventor of gymnastic exercises on scientific
principles, an art now practiced all the world over as "Swedish
gymnastics." Geijer, whose _Viking_ gave a pure and true picture
of Viking life seen in its own light, was himself disappointed. He
abandoned poetry and took to history, though Tegnér says of him that
if he had devoted himself to poetry, he would have surpassed all his
contemporaries. As historian he rose to the highest rank; and he is
perhaps the greatest historian Sweden has ever produced.
Tegnér had modernized his hero and heroine in _Frithiof's Saga_. He
gave them Viking garbs and surroundings, but modern thoughts and
sentiments. By the more copious development of the inner life, and
by placing woman on an equality with man, love had received a higher
meaning, and his poetry unfolded inspirations unknown to the ancient
world, such as melancholy and the love of nature. He did no more than
Tennyson did later in making of King Arthur the type of an English
gentleman. Frithiof and Ingeborg were representatives of the national
ideal. The success of his poem was immense. It had a lyrical
intensity which set the Scandinavian mind vibrating. Unmindful of the
anachronism, youth gloried in the noble disinterestedness of Frithiof,
in his generosity to his rival, his melancholy philosophising and his
high-minded love, as well as in his daring and his love of adventure.
Manly breasts heaved in sympathy with him, and women's tears flowed at
the story of Ingeborg's love. As the poet Snolisky has said--
From the highest to the lowest throughout the land
The poet had created a bond of union.
In every home, within every school door,
His verses were read and conned and loved,
And Sweden's youth felt its cheek glow
At Frithiof's courage and manly mood.
While Ingeborg's love to the maiden's dream
Gave life and thoughts to her weaving and sewing.
In his _Children of the Lord's Supper_, so beautifully translated for
us by Longfellow, Tegnér conveyed a true image of Sweden's religious
life. The scene in the country church, decked out with flowers and
evergreens for the solemn ceremony, the rustic boys and girls bowing
and curtseying as they make their responses before the assembled
congregation, and the attitude and words of the patriarchal pastor are
all true to life. The somewhat declamatory tone of the oration is not
less consistent with the character of the rural parson, the trend of
Swedish religious thought, and the solemnity associated with these
occasions.
It was in his patriotic war-songs, however, that Tegnér roused the
greatest enthusiasm. His _Svea_, his dithryambic declamation _King
Charles_, and his _Scanean Reserves_, sent a thrill through young and
old. When _Svea_ was read at the Swedish Academy, which awarded the
poem its gold medal, the friends and opponents of Tegnér alike were
moved to undisguised admiration. In breadth and intrinsic power, and
in the beauty of its rythm, which seems to echo the clash of arms and
the marching of masses, this poem is unequalled in Swedish literature.
Tegnér's name soon became known far beyond the limits of the lands
where his language is understood. His works were translated into
almost all modern tongues, so that some fifty different translations
of the whole or parts of his poems now exist in eleven European
languages.
A new feature was introduced into Swedish poetry by Runeberg. Although
born of Swedish parents, he was brought up in Finland, his mind being
nurtured in the traditions and the mixed racial influences of his new
fatherland. Thus he breathed a new spirit, and a new inspiration,
drawn from the realities of life, into poetical fiction. He was a
realist in the best sense of that much-misused word. He sought his
ideals _in_ life, instead of outside of it and above it in imaginary
creations. He saw nature such as it is, with all its faults and
sublimities, and, loving it with a true poet's devotion, he painted it
simply and faithfully, without aiming at ennobling it, but seeking and
finding what there is of native dignity in its humblest expressions.
In his lyrical poem, _The Sayings of Sergeant Stal_, he portrayed
incidents of the wars of Finland fighting by the side of Sweden in
1809, when the country was conquered by Russia. It was a series of war
pictures, a collection of hero types, painted in living colors, and
breathing the most ardent patriotism.--Simple tales told by a sergeant
of his recollections of the war, they deal with real personages, most
of them drawn from the humblest stations in life, described just as
they really lived and spoke and acted. Yet throughout the story of
their simple acts and thoughts there swept a breeze which kindled
the blood, roused the emotions; and fired the patriotic feeling of
Runeberg's contemporaries. In poetic depth and beauty of language,
as in style and conception, and in their departure from all the
prevailing ideas and methods of romanticism, these lyric tales were
a revelation. They classed their author at once as in the line of
true-born poets. The works of Runeberg, although properly belonging
to the literature of a country politically no longer one with Sweden,
have from the nature of their subjects and the identity of languages,
always been looked upon in Sweden as common property, and they have
certainly exercised a powerful influence on Swedish thought and
letters. Some of his songs, set to music, are to this day sung as
national anthems.
The last champion of dying romanticism was a sort of universal genius,
eccentric, _bizarre_, unequal, a spirit out of harmony with itself,
but gifted with the most wonderful imagination and power, K.J.L.
Almquist. His life was as checquered as his writings were various. In
turn a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a journalist, and an exile, he has
written volumes on almost every conceivable subject, from fiction,
poetry, and history, to lexicography, pedagogy, and mathematics. His
stories, published in two series, under the common title of _The
Book of the Hedgerose_, show powers of conception, imagination, and
description such as are only to be found in Edgar Allen Poe. His was
an essentially revolutionary temperament. He disdained all authority,
and cavilled at all moral restraints. He was in constant rebellion
against society, its accepted laws and precepts, and vented his moral
skepticism in bitter sarcasm and cutting paradoxes. "But two things
are white in this world," he would say, "innocence and arsenic." The
coupling of the two, however, nearly proved fatal to him. He was
involved in a mysterious affair of poisoning, in which the victim was
a dunning creditor. He was suspected of having given him arsenic by
way of ridding himself of the debt which he could not pay. No proof
of the fact could be adduced, and the crime was never brought home to
him; but public opinion was against him, and fearing or distrusting
the justice of his country, he fled from it ere the case was tried. He
wandered over Europe and America, trying his hand at everything, and
died, a literary wreck, in Germany, longing, and yet not daring, to
return to his country. Lately, the Society of Authors in Stockholm,
judging that his crime was "not proven," while his literary merits
were great beyond all doubt, undertook the rehabilitation of his
memory. His remains were brought back from Lubeck, and buried in
Stockholm with "literary" honors, among others a remarkable oration
delivered at his grave by Verner von Heidenstam, in which he was
styled a martyr in the great cause of the emancipation of thought.
Whatever may be thought of his moral character, Almquist was a great
thinker and a wonderfully versatile writer. The last of the romantics,
he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he
was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms
became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary
schools. One critic has made him out to have been a sort of forerunner
of Ibsen, while another calls him the most modern of classics. His
genius placed him in advance of his age in most things. He was the
first in the list of those Scandinavian revolutionists who have laid
out new landmarks in the field of thought, and introduced new methods
in fiction and the drama.
Liberalism, which spread like wildfire over Europe after its outbreak
in the July Revolution in France, reached Sweden soon after. It was
represented in literature by such men as Sturzen-Becker, Wetterbergh,
and Strandberg, writing under the names of Orvar Odd, Uncle Adam,
and Talis-Qualis; Blanche, who wrote stirring novels in the style
of Eugene Sue; Hjerta, and the staff of the then newly founded
_Aftonbladet_, who were revolutionizing the press. The press was
beginning to enlist the highest literary capacities of the country,
gradually becoming what it now is, a purveyor not only of news but of
thought, and a leader of opinion in literature and art, in science
and philosophy. In poetry, liberalism found its echo in the verses
of Malmström, Nybom, Schlstedt. In fiction its banner was carried by
three women, two of whom--well known in England and America--Frederica
Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class,
Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of
the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted
descriptions of life in aristocratic circles. All three were very
productive, and their novels count by dozens. Yet they failed to
sustain the reputations their first works had won for them.
Verner von Heidenstam is now foremost among the writers of his
country. His early works, _Endymion, Hans Alienus_, and others, raised
him to this rank, and his last two productions, _The Carolines_
(the companions of Charles XII) and _Saint Brigitt_, have more than
confirmed it. _Hans Alienus_ was, like Goethe's _Faust_, a work of
deep philosophical research into the problems of existence, the
purpose and significance of life, set forth in symbolical images and
explained by allegory. In the _Carolines_, a series of short stories
connected by the red thread of history which runs through them, he
gives a new conception, but a wonderfully graphic and striking one,
of Charles XII and his times. It is an epic, and yet so living and so
human a picture of the wild, iron-souled, quick-tempered hero, whose
"eyes flew around like two searching bees," and whose will was like
the steel of his sword; who had the heart of a lion and a "woman's
hatred for women," but for whom men shed their blood freely; who
"never grieved over a misfortune longer than the darkness lasted,"
and was "best loved by those who tried to hate him." His pictures are
drawn by a master hand, and with the intuitive coloring of genius.
_Saint Brigitt_ carries us back to medieval Sweden. Here, too, the
picture is lifelike, centered round the struggle of a high-minded
woman, who makes everything bend to her stern rule of holiness, her
thirst for sanctity, as Charles XII did to his inexorable policy and
thirst for dominion.
The psychological and the historical novel, the latter, in its modern
conception, akin to the former, since it is a study of the psychology
of historical characters and a historical epoch, is the form of
fiction at present most in vogue. It is in this form that such writers
as Tor Hedberg, Per Hallström, and Axel Lundegard have made their
reputations. Tor Hedberg's romances embody profound analysis of the
inner workings of the soul, of the secret motives which, more or less
consciously, determine a man's acts. In this line he ventures on the
most difficult psychological problems. In his _Judas_, a scriptural
romance from which he has drawn a drama, he attempts to solve the
darkest psychological enigma that has puzzled humanity, viz., to
analyze the motives which led Judas to betray his Master and become
the typical traitor. The character he draws of him is original and
striking, and departs entirely from the accepted tradition. But bold
and subtle as the theory is, it is far from convincing. His Judas is
a dark, brooding spirit, fierce and inharmonious, divided between
extatic love and admiration of his Master and inward irresistible
forces of hatred and revolt: a double nature, thirsting for freedom
and love, yet predestined to evil, and led by fearful secret impulses
to the accomplishment of his destiny and the fulfilment of his
mission, necessary to the scheme of salvation. He rushes blindly to
his fate while struggling in vain to escape it. But in the very act of
betrayal, while obeying the command: "What thou doest, do quickly,"
his better nature triumphs for one instant and he falls on the neck of
his Master and embraces Him. It is the Judas kiss which betrays his
Lord. The last look of Jesus, however, showed him that he had been
understood and forgiven. The detestation of humanity to the end of the
world will be his expiation, but that look of Jesus has freed him.
Woman, represented by writers like Ellen Key, Selma Lagerlöf, Sophie
Elkau, Alfhild Agress, Hilma Stanberg, and others, holds a high
position in Swedish letters. Ellen Key is an essayist of virile
power and argumentative breadth, of superior intellect and unfailing
erudition. She is a fearless and unfailing champion of free thought,
individualism, and woman's emancipation. As was said of Madame de
Staël, her writings are "the most masculine productions of the
faculties of woman." Selma Lagerlöf occupies as a novelist a position
of her own. Her style and her manner in fiction are unique. Symbolism
and allegory are blended in it with the most realistic pictures of
everyday life. She thinks in parables, and describes realities, and
the realities convey the moral teachings of parables. With something
of the peculiar power of George Eliot in the delineation of character,
she makes each humble life preach some great moral truth. Her latest
book, _Jerusalem_, is one of extraordinary fascination, created quite
a sensation in Sweden, and places Selma Lagerlöf quite among the
foremost writers of the day.
It may in general be said of Swedish writers that they have a high
idea of their calling. Few, if any, have accepted as their sole
function the idealization of form. They hold mostly that the highest
aim of art should be to teach and elevate, to destroy prejudice and
conventionality, and indicate, in so far as it is possible, the
solution of moral problems through the creative faculty of inspired
productiveness. The wish to inculcate action, the energy that is
born of enthusiasm, the chivalry that is inspired by high ideals and
unselfish motives. Raised thus from the region of mere chronicles of
human passions, of woman's frailty and man's baseness, and exercising
themselves with the political, social, and religious problems of the
day, these works of imagination have become, alongside the Press, a
powerful factor in the development of modern thought.[f]