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Chicago, Illinois [Page Left Blank] A ptologue

Man Is a Fraction

J#AN is but a fraction. There is nothing which human history teaches more clear ly than the fact that man is insufficient to become a sum total even of his own possibilities. Man's onesidedness is appalling. It is a part of his nature. It is a part of his greatness. In most cases genius means one particular faculty overdeveloped. A great man is, therefore, a very faulty man. He is the common man very much enlarged, warts and all. Man is a cripple by nature, and even more so by education. None is born a whole man. There is no such a thing as a type in embryo. Man is never a type, but an average. Man is specialized from the start. And yet he is more nearly whole in the cradle than ever after. An 3 acorn, said Boström, is bigger than an oak. Why I Because the acorn contains more nearly all the possibilities of an oak than any fullgrown tree in the for est. A baby is more nearly a total man than he ever will become in any succeed ing season of life. Education is not summing man up but rather splitting him into so many de tails, leaving as man's highest attain ments not a total man but a residue, one chip as it were out of the original block. Education too often tends to develop man's head at the expense of his chest, his brains at the expense of his heart, his thinking quality at the expense of activity, his speed at the expense of di rection and safety, and vice versa. For an upward flight the forward march is neglected. Very few become idealists but at the expense of all the good on earth, or realists but at the price of heaven. If a conservative, man blindly pursues the shadows of yesterday; if a progressive, he just as blindly pursues the spectres of to-morrow. Specializing in wit and intellectuality, he spends his time at the fireside, spinning endless yarns of fine theories, with never a knot 4 of decision. If an executive, he becomes an explosive acting all the time, with no chance for thought, and therefore result ing in nothing particular. In brief, man in his sad lack of totality resembles the locomotive which actually has to stop going every time it whistles, not having steam enough to do both at a time. Where and when did we ever find a total man or even a man so well bal anced, that he had the perfect use of all his faculties, such as they are? Diog enes sought for such a man diligently among the Athenians, lantern in hand in broad daylight, with no success recorded. Solomon, the wisest of men, acknowledges his practical defeat, when he tells that he had found one man in a thousand, and not even that percen tage in the case of woman, meaning of course the normal article. The fact is, that when we find, or think we find, a perfectly normal individual, the fault less, it is likely to turn out to be the illusion of smallness mistaken for per fection. In other words, the perfect man is a dwarf, in whom the whole structure is so diminutive that it will take a strong microscope to discover any 5 detail smaller than the rest. Enlarged to the normal size, the perfect dwarf will come out a cripple like the rest of us. II. HLU TSacfegrounö

Rule of Reason in Literature

HIS insufficiency of man to see truth in its perspective and to realize his own total ity is most interestingly illustrated, at the opening of the nineteenth century, in the great spiritual and verbal war which then took place and divided all Europe into two camps. What made this war the more bitter, was the fact that it was a struggle for supremacy not between forces which, in the nature of their existence, really are two and dual, but between forces which really are the two halves of one whole. Nothing exceeds in bitterness war between brothers. Near relatives at war seldom see the expedient so near at hand to strangers, who may easily agree to disagree. No hate is more deadly than the hate which 7 is, at bottom, love. As in the war just referred to, in which we find arrayed against each other not only brothers of the same family, poets of the same school, interests of the same society, but faculty against faculty within the one mind. Perhaps the war was at bottom a racial struggle, the old fight for su premacy between the Roman and the Teuton, not however any longer the Roman and the Teuton of two different civilizations, or rather culture versus barbarism, but the Roman and the Teuton for centuries amalgamated into one culture, one religion, almost one nation, now suddenly springing apart, the next moment to rush at each other's throat. What provocation from without, what impulse from within could be so power ful as to cause this estrangement, this sudden falling out of elements, so long and so thoroughly mixed as really to seem one and the same ? To understand this and know this whole struggle more intimately it is necessary to see the new romantic movement in its immediate reaction against the school of reason, 8 which preceded it and, in a negative sort of way, called it into being. The school of reason was born with the Renaissance and nourished on the then newly discovered literature of the classics. It waxed fat from the luxu riant pasture of classical forms, and grew strong and independent with the spirit of an ancient world culture. Having given its aid and succor to that partial renunciation of traditions which we call the Reformation, for its own part it threw off the yoke of all traditions once and for all, enthroning Reason, where Religion, now called Superstition, had ruled supreme. Rightly so perhaps, as far as the choice of ruler is concerned. Presupposing that a vacancy really existed in the of fice of Supreme Authority; presuppos ing the merited downfall of tradition, all tradition, revelation included; pre supposing that man was to find his sov ereign within himself and nowhere else, the choice could not have fallen on a worthier candidate. In the whole king dom of mind reason alone has any chance as a ruler. Emotion has no com petent claim. Emotion cannot rule for 9 one day without turning the whole gov ernment into anarchy, stopping the whole machinery, as it were, by an over charge of energy. Imagination does even worse than that, running the ma chinery to its certain destruction against all speed limits. Emotion is the cen tripetal force of mind. Unconstrained it ends in a heap. Imagination is mind's centrifugal force. Unconstrained it leads in's Blaue hinein. Reason alone has any chance of authority to centralize and unify. And for a while reason behaved fine. Mankind progressed by leaps and bounds. Old philosophemes were popularized in to their elements of every day maxims. Intellectualism made every riddle trans parent. God and nature were reduced to science. Everything was generalized, systematized, humanized. Old, foggy no tions were distilled into their pure es sence ; mists cleared into daylight; the emotional elements of thought, so hard to get rid of, successfully clarified in the perfectly dry heat of reason; in brief, ideals on every hand reduced to ideas. The particular was spread out into 10 the universal. There were no longer nations and individuals, there was hu manity. There were no longer creeds, per suasions, conscience, there were laws, eternal, unchangeable laws of nature and laws of mind. Truth for once stood revealed to the senses in such an aboslute power as to make unbelief quite impos sible and belief quite unnecessary. Noth ing went slip-shod in this great machin ery. Everything came out as expected. Nothing was too hidden to be exam ined, nothing too sacred to be under stood. Religion was reduced to a sys tem of moral philosophy, practical hy gienics, and, for funeral necessities, a tear. Preachers left their Bibles at home, brought herbariums with them into the pulpit, taught their listeners the rel ative value of different fertilizers and advised against placing graveyards too near the city, when they did not lecture on the apparent ignorance of the apos tles and the stupidity of the prophets. Poetry was no longer a life calling but became the pastime of leisure moments, devoted to that near approach to an ideal known as utile chad. Picturing nature was legalized into a science of 11 colors and situations: the sky always blue, like in Italy, the grass ever green, and all the people shepherds and shep herdesses, dressed according to the latest fashion, moving about in this correct nature, whiling away their time a la Boccaccio, who now is worshipped as the first modern man. Everything in the province of human experience was worked out according to a model. Noth ing escaped the levelling ironroller of system and order. There was truly so much that was beautiful or at least sounded beautiful in all this.Downtrodden humanity was res cued, if only in print. None was bigger than the rest, at least in theory. The worst despot upon the throne was pleased to call himself the first citizen of a free republic, carefully reserving to himself all the executive powers of liberty. There was democracy on every hand, and really a great deal of decency. Common vir tues were everywhere in favor, to the disadvantage of the heroic. Everything obeying a rule was welcome, anything like an exception discountenanced. Hu man rights were defended, never more emphatically than when applied as an 12 argument against the rights of one's neighbour; special privileges lustily damned, by none better than by the ones who enjoyed them. This whole government in literature, spelling truth with capital letters, fore told in the master drawings of Boccac cio, ushered into the world by Erasmus, christened in a manner by Voltaire, and systematized into an encyclopedia of universal knowledge by Diderot and D'Alembert, was at last solemnly willed to the French people, in the last part of the eighteenth century happening to be the hungry masses of Paris, who promptly put the whole fabric to a prac tical test, called the French revolution. It was reason quickly unreasoned. It was common sense appealing to the emo tions and overpowered.

13 III. Cfce Reaction The New Romanticism

HUS is was, that the other half of the whole human proposition was awakened, first in France, in the voice of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and then in Germany and up north in the new nationalism, the new emotion alism, the rule of imagination, ending in the new romantic craze. Now the tables were quickly turned. Feelings ran high, although not higher than in the French revolution and not quite as dangerous to life and limb. Now emo tion was defended, in its own divine rights. "See, to what depth of misery reason has brought humanity. Down with reason. Crucify the intruder. Common sense is after all but a shabby citizen. Up with the royalty and nobil ity of the uncommon. Listen to the 14 voice, not to the laws, of nature, the voice of conscience, of God. Honor the old regime." To be able to look over more clearly the entire front of this remarkable re action, we have to follow the line step by step more closely. First of all re membering that the movement is a re action. It is the return surge of the waves, the back-to-rest movement of the pendulum, the unrolling of the spring, the other side of the argument, It is the self-assertion of nature against cul ture, the self-assertion of spirit against matter. It is all through a home-feeling. Sore feet axe turning backwards to soft, familiar grounds. Hearts desolate are crying for old nurses. It is a gen- eneral stampede towards the center. Back to nature, cries Rousseau, antici pating the very modern idea, that culture exhausts nature. To the question, what is the matter with humanity, his an swer is in the word Civilization. Every human ill is a civilized ill. Man left alone will outgrow his woes. Oh, for the ideal existence of the brutal! Oh, for the rich simplicity of few needs, ever fewer! Oh, to be without ambition! 15 Thrice happy the man, "who never craves adding the length of another man's arm to his own." Back to na ture, not to study nature, not to know nature, not to learn from nature; back into the bosom of nature, to live, to be come nature once more! Thus cries Rousseau to his country men. And the echo of his voice was repeated a thousand times from rock to rock, from shore to shore. It sounded particularly sweet and familiar to the Germans and the Scandinavians, because they were near enough to nature still to recognize their own living past. They were the children of the modern civil ization, yet capable of believing in sagas and fairy tales. Back to nature meant to them scarcely more than a step, a crossing of a line into another world, an enchanted world, which in fact had always been with them, filling up their nights and their dreams, quite undis turbed by their wide-awake devotion to a new culture crowding every hour of their day. Out of this enchanted world they had never been entirely civilized, nor Christianized. There were plenty of nooks and corners into which day- 16 light never shone, where witches and trolls and spirits of a foresworn faith and superstition abounded. The heroic to them had an ancestral first meaning. And thus in their "back to nature" they turned upon not a lifeless mass of ancient ideals long forgotten, but upon a past still throbbing with life, sagas and songs still in the heart and on the lips of the living generation. And these popular legends, which unknown poets of the North, already before the North itself was really discovered, had sung in the epics known as the Eddas, now the German poet unifies and intensifies in that first and unrivaled new romantic poem, known as " Nibelungenlied." In the discovery of the Eddas and in the re-singing of their old legends in "Ni belungenlied" the new romanticism finds its voice in poetry. They are the keys to open wide the doors of the past to a generation longing from a dayworld of sterile reality to the pregnant and mysterious saga nights. And this "back to nature," "back to the glorious past" blended beautifully with the clarion call to German patriot ism and nationalism, which was a Ger- 17 man reaction upon the "brotherhood, equality and liberty" of the French re volution, those notions of a new human ity, which Napoleon interpreted in a somewhat original manner, hewing out a brotherhood of nations and peoples with his sword and with the same in strument, as with a scythe, giving a most wonderful demonstration of equal ity and liberty, meaning respectively equal dependency of all under one will and perfect liberty of all the governed from any further participation in gov ernment. There was no lack of clear ness to this reasoning. It was a line of argument quite irresistible, with a logic admitting of no dubious meaning as to the conclusion. It was altogether as fine a demonstration as one could wish of the best style of the old school by a master reasöner. But to the nations around it was lacking in true emotions. It was all head and no heart. And at the oppor tune time, when the master was away, they lifted their voices against this grand idea of generalizing and sys tematizing mankind, for old institutions, on behalf of the Teutonic temperament, which always has spelt human rights as 18 personal privileges and identified man kind with one's own tribe. All over Europe the old school of rea son, preaching brotherhood, equality and liberty and exploding in revolutions, winded up its business in a progressive despotism, the Napoleonic. That was progress. And the reaction, starting from the grand culmination of this pro gram, flooded back like an inrushing tide, and bore upon the crest of its waves old monarchies back into old moorings. It was the restoration of good old times with a vengeance. Formerly old des pots were obeyed grumblingly. Now they were fairly worshipped, in the name of patriotism and religion, not to say culture. The past became holy ground, the farther past, the holier. Lost nobil ity was resuscitated and its titles pol ished up for use again. Liberty was frowned at, the press gagged, free speech forbidden. Despots ruled again, now by the grace of God, and despotism was sanctioned under the assumption of the holy alliance. I have alluded to the fact that this reaction in its worst and last sequences merits the name of a craze and an as- 19 sumption. It was both. But only in its last extremes. In fact, the reaction rep resents the best as well as the worst in man and really nothing between the two. If the school of reason represents man in his moderation, in his level best, new romanticism is nothing but the super lative in man, man turned into a saint or a devil. Thus the reaction was the rule of emotions, the very strongest and noblest that ever took possession of the human heart. It was the instinct of self-love enlarged into love of home, of country, of history, of noble forefathers, of na tional ideals symbolized in the flag, of religious ideals materialized in cathe drals and church services, of traditions made holy by sacrifices and sufferings. It was all this and more. It was a sacred debt of gratitude nobly paid. It was an all important message duly rec orded. It was unity and connection once more read into history. It was the glorious resurrection of the dead, in- gloriously buried. It was the grand re vival of faith. And it was more. It was the discovery, true enough the blind discovery, of the fact which reason had 20 overlooked, the fact that the boasted forward movement in reality leads to the past, that human progress to the in dividual means old age and oblivion, except for the emotions, the loving care of memory, retracing in the sand of time the prints of human feet and recording their connected meaning. Thus in what we boastfully call progress we lose our selves and life's true meaning, and re gain the loss only as we are looking back wards. The progressive, in spite of his generous promises to posterity, really enriches the past, while the regressive, paying his tribute to the past, enriches posterity. Be it so, and the movement is yet in its last resource a craze, the uncon strained rule of emotions, suspending reason for the time being, breaking with the immediate past for the sake of find ing a connection farther to the rear, not in yesterday, but perhaps in medieval and ancient times, with the ultimate goal in the pope or in the viking, thus breaking the whole chain of life by breaking its nearest connecting link, aiming to advance towards the past, which is contradictio in adjecto and 21 spells suicide, while pretending to ad vance from the past, mistaking the start ing point for the goal and glittering ex amples for accomplishment, Worse than that. The emotions, hav ing thus exhausted themselves in a retro grade movement, and having lost control of affairs, give the reins over to imagi nation, which promptly starts the move ment double quick on its forward march to annihilation, no longer pursuing the sacred, buried ideals of the past but all sorts of spectres and fire-bugs danc ing over the graves, ending in the calam ity known as the esthetics of the hor rible, which total failure to rule on the part of emotion and imagination is the signal for a new reaction, a new rule of reason and a new period of sanity in literature, known as the modern school of realism. The new romantic movement thus be gun and thus completing its course is not inaptly called a craze. It was like wise an assumption. Not only have we the divine king, the despot by the grace of God and tyranny fortified in the holy alliance. We have now also the divine poet; genius deified; a new Olympus of 22 immortals, claiming a divine nature and their own code of morals; inspired bards, who, closing their eyes to the world, saw visions and spoke oracles; a new aristocracy of the soul and a higher priesthood ministering to the select few, as the common priesthood to the masses. All this is no doubt an assumption on the part of the poets, amounting to a sacredness to their per sons and their exaltation above the laws, otherwise claimed only for the annointed royalty, and quite as freely as in their case including the consequential assump tion that greatness is an excuse for vileness. Except for the assumption there is nothing very remarkable in this. Great men are very human. Genius is a temp ter. Besides this, fine words from a sin ner are not always hypocrisy pure and simple. They may be the frenzied ex pression of a man's ideals which he tries to hold above the mire, they may be after all his better self, his honest will which he tries to save out of his ruin. To be sure, this is not victory, but. neither is it a complete defeat. Any way, in this light there may be a greater 23 gain to humanity in the very real failure of the great ideals claimed by the new romanticism, than in their very succes- ful absence in the preceding school of reason. Excepting the assumption! To fail is not the worst failure. The worst failure is to fail to see it, to assume.

g4 HISTORICAL LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES EVANGELICAL COVENANT CHURCH 5125 N. SPAULDING AVENUE CHICAGO, ILL. IV. Cfie Ji3eto Romanticism in ^Denmark

AVING thus outlined the new M ^Jfc. romantic movement in gen- Mz&p eral terms, it remains to de- -**- scribe, in more specific terms, its progress in Scandinavian literature. In Denmark the school of reason came, saw and conquered in the person of Ludvig Holberg. None of his successors reached his grasp. The school soon grew old and deteriorated in the French comme il faut, which ruled thought and expression with an iron hand everywhere in Europe in the be ginning of the nineteenth century, stif ling true emotions and creating for stage purposes the bombast which Wessel in his "Love without Stockings" so suc cessfully laughed off the stage and out of existence, as far as Danish liter ature is concerned. Wessel belonged 25 otherwise body and soul to the old school and indeed wielded against it only its own weapons. In other words, he wrote a drama brimful of the accepted gen eralities of the school, with such ap parent sincerity, that for a while the public was entirely duped as to its pur poses, weeping over the burlesque as over a tragedy, until at a second thought the truth dawned upon them and they discovered the true nature of the drama. Then the laugh came, and the tears of conventional sympathy now ran in hearty merriment over the ridiculous situation and their own deception so dramatically undeceived. The drama acted as a boom erang, and Wessel, a new Samson, killed the Philistines, falling with them. In the silence thus inaugurated Jo hannes Evald sighed his sorrows and sang his lyrics. He is the early lark of spring in Danish literature, scarcely listened to while he was yet singing, although he sang what was to become the national anthem of Denmark and in fact sang a new birth into the Danish art and literature. Alas, the lark was too early. Spring was not yet. The unhappy singer was dashed to the 26 ground from his lofty heights of vision, in the last grip of winter. He died as he had lived, alone. But the spring he saw, came. It was ushered in from the south, through Klopstock and Steffens, the first messengers of the new that were fully conscious of a message, singing to Danish hearts in German accents and awaken ing Oehlenschläger, the nightingale of the fullblown summer, from now dom inating the entire season with the inex haustible wealth and the endless variety of his repertoire. There were other beaut iful singers of the season, among them Grundtvig, the psalmist and ballad writer. But Oehlenschläger is the prince of all the singers, the first man of letters, in Denmark. He is a poet by the grace of God, untutored except by a benev olent nature, a master singer in his first performance, singing throughout a long life without any appreciable check from within or from without. His resources of inspiration seemed quite unlimited and quite as unlimited was his faith in himself. He sang apparently without the slightest restraint, neither critizing himself nor listening to criticism from others, not even from such an authority 27 on Danish style as Baggesen. His best and his worst taken together is both in volume and in quality the greatest in Danish literature. He is to all the Danes the king poet and was greeted as such, at the memorable occasion of his visit to Lund as the guest of honor at the Doctors' Jubilee 1820, by none less than Esaias Tegnér, Sweden's greatest poet, who, in the capacity of the orator of the occasion and the distributor of laurels to the doctors, brought the impressive ceremony to a climax by an impromptu address to Oehlenschläger, in which he half humourously and yet with touching earnestness created him emeritus doctor of Scandinavian letters. This action on the part of Tegnér was promptly and generously applauded by the sister na tions of Scandinavia and did more than a hundred years of polities and state craft for the sentiment of Scandinav- ianism in the home countries. Oehlenschläger's writings abound in new romanticism. From his first great poem, "The Golden Horn," throughout all his literary activity his genius is working the mines of national sagas and legends and ballads to their fullest ca- 28 pacity and is winning from them a larger output of precious metals than any other poet of the North. He sings the gods and the heroes of northern mythology as well as the heroes of ancient northern history in beautiful lyrics, he retells their adventures in majestic epics, and presents them again in action through dramas which are the classics of Danish dramatic literature. And into this mass of ancient forms, mostly northern, but occasionally as in "Aladdin" oriental, he breathes the same spirit of new ro manticism. Hearts beat, pulses go high, the longing is there and faith and hope, and the greatest of all, love, all conquer ing love. And the best of all, this new ro manticism is so healthy, so harmonious, so well satisfied with life, that it wholly neglects to follow the track of the new romantic movement in Germany and in England into the wilderness of the esthetics of the horrible. By the com posure and the serenity of his genius, which is the true genius of Denmark, Oehlenschläger is warding off the su icidal from his following, thus robbing the Danish literature of its Heine, its Byron, but adding immensely to sanity 29 and good behavior. In consequence of this fact the modern school of realism in Denmark found an extremely weak background to paint from and had to borrow it from abroad, from Norway to be exact. Danish literature from Oehlen schläger's time and through his influ ence has been for the most part one broad, majestic river, flowing serenely on without breaks of waterfalls, except here and there one artificially arranged for better effect.

3(1

.' Cbe I3eto Romanticism in jRottoap

?N Norway the political unrest incidental to its separation from Denmark and its sudden P national awakening and start upon the road to independ ence, disturbed the boundaries between the two schools. Thus Wergeland, who by temperament and instinct was or should have been a typical romanticist adher ing to the past, is by the influence of his birth and his political surroundings thrown to the front of the new progres sives, as the nationalists in Norway are styled. Wellhaven, on the other hand, the great antagonist of Wergeland, a scholar of high rank in classical forms whom we would have expected to see, according to the fashion of the school of France, the exponent of liberty and pro gress, becomes a stand-patter and a eon- 31 servative. As an emotionalist, an in spired bard, paying little or no attention to form, Wergeland is indeed the new romanticism, to whom Wellhaven, the artist and the critic, pays his respects in rhymed and unrhymed sarcasm, much as Baggesen did to Oehlenschläger, and with greater provocations. In this as in the new nationalism, with its slogan "Norway for the Norwegians" ,Werg- eland is unmistakably preaching the text of new romanticism, while Well- haven adheres to the now conservative idea of universal laws governing poetry and a larger brotherhood, including Denmark and the old, cultural relations with Denmark. But the nationalism of Wergeland was, as I have suggested, upon progressive lines exclusively. He looked forward to a new Norway, per fectly willing to forget the past. And in this particular, as in his free thoughts on morals and religion, he represents the school of reason and is, with all his nationalism, a son of the French revolu tion, a republican, while Wellhaven in that particular is the romanticist, seek ing the foundations for national great ness in the hidden, the latent forces 32 of Norwegian peasant life, thus antic ipating both the saga activity of As- björnsen and Moe and the dialect activ ity of Ivar Aasen and Vinje. In his great Philippic, "The Dawn of Norway," a collection of sonnets alike perfect in form and replete in meaning, he de mands for any future to be realized a sufficient past, and warns against break ing the connecting link in the chain of development as suicidal to greatness. With all this Wellhaven was the friend of Oehlenschläger and the more cultured classes at home, while Wergeland was slowly coming to his power as the most popular and the most truly national poet of Norway. Except for the sentiment given poetic form in "The Dawn of Norway" the quarrel between the two poets is of small literary interest, being to a large extent personal misunderstanding and factio nal abuse from irresponsible adherents, mostly academic youths. Both poets lived their lives in poverty and disap- poinments, the misfortunes of Werg eland augmented by personal habits detrimental to health and good report. He fell in disgrace with his politcal in- 33 timates by accepting a pension from the king whom he from principle abused and from the bottom of his heart admir ed. He was with all his personal short comings and all the shortcomings of his poetry the greater poet of the two and altogether a remarkable personality, a re publican with true chivalry and knight hood in his make-up, an iconoclast in politics, Norwegian to the core, and yet a champion of international justice, the defender of Jews and Gypsies. There is no doubt but that to Wergeland more than to any one else belongs the honor of ushering in the new romantic move ment in Norway. As a nature poet, singing the life of flowers and animals, he has scarcely a rival. There he is the romanticist out and out. These songs are his last, his highest, his supreme effort. If in his earlier works he is half a scientist, half an emotionalist, to the disadvantage of both parts, the emo tions dimming his thoughts, the science stifling his feelings, now at last he has found his true love, whole and undi vided. He spent his life's evening, in extreme poverty and loneliness, on the sickbed, and sang from there in strains 34 more sweet and sound than ever in strength and health, claiming at last for his dying accords the undivided attention and admiration of the nation he loved so well, none giving it more freely and more sincerely than Well haven, his old antagonist. The effect of the new romantic move ment in Norway, because of the political situation, became quite unlike that in Denmark. The difference is well pict ured in the different natural aspect of the two countries. In Norway the sagas of the past took hold of the national imagination with the power of the water falls rushing down from the mountains and with the power of an earthquake, creating out of the depths of national life almost a new civilization, language and all, gathering material enough for Björnson, the great national optimist, and creating in far away Norway a con dition so thoroughly and universally human, that it could serve as the point of action for the modern school of rea lism in all Scandinavia and, in the works of Ibsen, a world literature of pessi mism.

35 VI. Cöe JSeto Romanticism in Stoeöen Introduction

pN Sweden the reaction took on new phases because of local conditions, without changing P its character. There the school of reason, with its best polished French taste, flourished under the bril liant reign of Gustav III in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This ruler knew fully as well as Frederic the Great, his brother in law, how to talk despotism in the endearing terms of lib erty. He ended the period, called the Epoch of Liberty, by a master stroke of revolution in the interest of restoring the old sovereignty, with such a con summate skill of acting, that the reign was hailed almost universally as the dawn of a new era of true liberty and greatness. To such an extent had the 36 factional feuds, the hatred, the banality marred the epoch called by the name of Liberty, that the nation was quite will ing to give that sacred name to any form of despotism, with a capacity for redeeming the nation's lost prestige abroad and unity at home. This Gustav III accomplished. Hence his great pop ularity. And more, he had the ambition of a poet, a poet's heart, and was, with his French education and his thirst for autocracy, at least in this respect a pa triot in all sincerity. He became the august patron of Swedish art and art ists, especially the poets, among whom Kellgren was the greatest representative of the dominating school, an academ ician of ready wit and polished form, and, besides, capable of true poetic feel ings. In him the school of reason reached its climax and even overreached itself into new romanticism, which later claim ed him as its own. His first meeting with the new movement was in the form of an attack from an impetuous youth, Thorild, whose poem Kellgren had crit icized not without praise. Thorild's answer was an onslaught on the Acad- 37 emy in the person of Kellgren whom he accused of petty tyranny. There is no doubt but that Thorild, the first apostle of new romanticism in Sweden, greatly overestimated himself. He was, because of his vehemence in political invectives, harshly dealt with, to the extent of tem porary exile, and he richly deserved a rebuke because of his lack of moderation and justice. And yet his collision with Kellgren was not wholly lost upon that poet, and his "Criticizing the Critics" or "An Attempt at Legislation in the Kingdom of Poetry" is an unanswer able argument for the new school against the old and easily the most able de fence extant in behalf of the new roman tic movement, Lidner, who might be called the first new romantic poet in Sweden, was less impressive, on account of his rather un lovable personality, in spite of his great gifts and his poetry of heart burnings, quite in the style of Byron, expressing with equal abandon the noblest senti ments and the coarsest sensuality, al most touching upon the horrible, thus anticipating in the first beginning of the movement its worst ending, with all his 38 emotionalism never entirely free from the influence of the dominating school as seen in a certain rigor of thought and expression. Of a greater moment to the new romantic movement were Bellman and Anna Maria Lenngren, without any restraint of schools and factions singing life as they saw it and felt it, Bellman in fact not as yet discovered as a poet of national importance, and Lenngren writing her home idyls with no ambition to fame. With these poets and Creutz, whose poetical story "Atis and Camil la," enjoying for a while a popularity equaled only by Tegnér's "Frithjofs Saga," was as quickly forgotten as it was warmly received, the brilliant Gus- tavian period closed. Only one single poet, Leopold, the strictest of all the academicians, outlived his contempora ries long enough to become the target of the onrushing forces of new romanti cism, when they at last gathered for their great attack. Before that happened Gustaf III had ended his reign, cowardly assassinated at a masquerade ball under the pretext of Sic semper tyrannis, and had left his throne and, alas, his sovereignty to 39 his son, Gustav IV Adolv, a most unfortunate prince, born to his fate, wholly incompetent, exceedingly dull and proud in proportion, a religious maniac, inspired by his musings over the Apocalypse to the belief that he was the God-sent avenger of Napoleon, whom he considered the Wild Beast of holy writ. In him the reaction, so gracefully started by his father, took on less pleas ant if not less sincere forms. He lost Finland to Russia and paid the loss with the price of his crown. The year 1809, marking this great calamity and a yet greater looming up in the immi nent ruin of the whole country happily averted by the bloodless revolution, un doing the revolution of 1772 and sending the son of the royal revolutionist into exile, ushers in a new era in Sweden, with a new nationalism quite as pro nounced as the nationalism of the year 1814 in Norway, although on different lines. In Norway the program was making a new nation, in Sweden making a nation new. In both countries modern representation in two chambers dis placed the old representation by estates. The thoroughly Swedish situation lies 40 in the fact that the matter under debate in Sweden was the question generally answered in the affirmative, whether the liberty of the people was not better pro tected by safeguarding royal preroga tives than by the experiment of popular government in its true sequence. In no other country, if not in England, is the royal power so nearly the symbol of pop ular rights over against special priv ileges, the only true parallel being the medieval conjunction of kings and people against the strongholds of knight hood. To what other country of modern times could Geijer's words: "The his tory of the Swedish people is the his tory of their kings" be applied in all sincerity, as an aphorism with no tinge of irony? To the general mind, even in the year of 1809, the Epoch of Liberty was a spectre to be warded off at any cost, and any drift into popular govern ment spelling the return of that epoch, to be checked. By what? The only adequate check seemed to be a king, with royal prerogatives sufficient to make him the ruler in fact as well as in name under the constitution. 41 To acknowledge the sincerity of this opinion one has only to note, that it was entertained by Geijer, perhaps the most universal mind of the period, during the better part of his life, before what has been called his backsliding, when he after a life study of history came to the mature conviction, that the opinion, however plausible, is nevertheless wrong and that popular interests are best safe guarded by a popular form of govern ment, thus in his old years becoming a moderate liberal after having been an ultraconservative all his life. And to understand, on the other side, how per plexing this political question really was to the best enlightened minds, I need only add, that Tegnér, probably the most brilliant intellect Sweden ever boasted, underwent a like change of posi tion, only in the reversed order, starting out with the ideas of popular rights from the French revolution in his mind, including the Napoleonic career in the interest of liberty on a grand scale, but face to face with the sequence of these ideas of liberty in the later revolutions, which dared to include the proletarians in the scheme of popular government, 42 drew back and became in his old age as suddenly a conservative as Geijer a lib eral. The mentioning of these two great names suggest, how literary interests in Sweden as elsewhere mingle with polit ical interests, in Sweden as elsewhere in a manner fitting to that country's polit ical situation, and yet not deviating from its true character of being essentially a reactionary movement, aristocratic even in its revolutionary tendencies. However, to go into the detail of this would lead us too far from the center of our pres ent interest which is to see new roman ticism in Sweden reaching out for its purely literary ideals. This will now be demonstrated in the story of the bitter literary fight which for eleven years was raging between the old school and the new, a tale which is one of the most interesting chapters in Swedish history of literature and brings us into con tact with practically all the poets of any importance in Sweden during the first half of the nineteenth century.

43 VII. Cöe I3eto Romanticism in ^toeöen A Muster and a Call

p IRST then a muster of the j J strength of the old school. We find there Leopold still in life and pretty vigorous for his years, sitting among the younger bards as their Nestor, with almost a royal dignity. He was the living bridge that spanned the distance back into king Gustav's time, and some thing of its glory shone on him. He ruled the Academy and through the Academy the official taste of literature. At his side was David Valerius, the pol ished Bellman, whom Tegnér in his very honest humility called "the greatest of us all," and also Bernard Beskow, a young academican of the strictest pat tern, too much of a patrician to take an active part in the strife, and Stjerne- 44 stolpe, quite unknown except for his "Letters from the Moon" of which more presently, and old Wallmark, not indeed a poet by any excuse, but a fighter, a man with a broad back and a shrewd ness for repartee, otherwise of little imagination and less emotion, a valuable man to send to the front in a battle, ready alike to sacrifice enemies and friends for the sake of winning. This very nearly completes the whole muster. Not one poet whom we could call great! No, it is not all. The school claimed with some rights Wallin, the great psalm singer of the North, whom Tegnér called '' the Harp of David, a poet like few and an orator like none." Not however in his capacity of a psalm singer or as a poet of religious songs did he belong to the old school in any sense. In this respect his influence was rather on the other side. But he was an ally to the old school in his more educational poems, his discoursive and dedicative poems and in his great admiration for the glory of the Gustavian period, "the time of the great king" to whom none has written finer panegyrics. With even smaller claim and still smaller comfort 45 the old school counted upon Franzén, another bishop poet, who tried with a great deal of genuine feeling and with a moderate success to get new tones out of Kellgren's old lyre. If I add, that Tegnér now and then broke a lance for the old school although his aid was quite unsolicited, I think, that I have men tioned the complete strength of the old school. As I said, the muster does not reveal one great poet whom the school could really call its own. The strongest ally, Tegnér, was quite as dangerous to his friends as to his foes. He is the great Isolated of the period, the Goethe of Sweden, too intellectual to fall in with the new romantic movement in its excesses, too much alive to the needs of the present to accept the dead issues of the old school, too much a poet and a man not to acknowledge poetic gifts wherever he saw them. He was sincere and modest to a fault. Scarcely any poet of the time could be mentioned to whom he did not at one occasion or another accede superiority. His depreciation of his own greatest poem, "Frithjofs sa ga, '' is well known. And yet he was so independent, that he was ruled by none, 46 himself a master who never adopted the name. Against this phalanx more or less in congruously organized into a line of de fence the new romantic forces arrayed themselves. The movement is born in Uppsala with the "Aurora Covenant," a literary society formed by Atterbom, nineteen years old, and his friend Palm blad, twentyone. The aim of the two young men is told in no modest lan guage. The purpose of the society, writes Atterbom, "is to develop on eternal and unchangeable foundations first their own strength and then,—war to the fin ish against the old things!" He called the achievements planned by the society "probably the mightiest ever contemp lated by any society from the creation of the world." The mission of the poet he defines as r"thing less than "to be the connecting link between angels and men, heaven and earth," and a poet's calling "the imperative need of his di vine nature to find an expression of its own inner melodious Self." The poets so called of the dominating school, Leo pold in the first instance, he calls "mon sters and cripples calling themselves po- 47 ets, although dragging the ideals of true poetry into the mire and changing the language of the Gods into rhymed moral sentences, drinking songs and senseless ditties, mocking canary birds, or such sentimental verses which any gentleman could write in honor of his lady.'' None of this for a true poet, who is "the am bassador of God, a sort of a highpriest ministering to the mysteries of heaven into which the higher humanity is to be initiated, just as the common priesthood is ministering to the masses." In this ministry, alas, "the poet is a martyr, as humanity, owing to the low estate into which it has fallen, cannot understand him, and failing to understand hates him." In such words Atterbom defines po etry and poets of his choosing. And a few years later, looking back on the minutes of the society, he is ready to "challenge all the societies of all times in Sweden to produce from their acta an equal number of original ideas, of new thoughts, expressed in almost fault less form."

•is VIII. Cöe Jfteto Romanticism in ^toeDen The Great War

VHILE Atterbom and Palm blad with their friends were musing over the grand outlook of poetry, the first shot against the bulwark of the old school was fired in Stockholm by another young enthusiast, of whom Atterbom and Palmblad at that time knew little or nothing. He was Lorenzo Hammarsköld, assistant libra rian at the Royal Library in Stockholm, and therefore working under Wallmark as his superior. He was an earnest reader of literature, a sharp critic, a man of character, with pronounced opinions and a mind always ready to utter them at whatever cost and defend them to the last ditch. He worked with Wallmark for a while as a literary critic in the 49 official literary periodical of the period, but the partnership proving uncongenial he started his own periodical, Polyfem. In the sample issue of that periodical, appealing to his readers to become sub scribers, Hammarsköld refers to the past and present epoch in literature as "an iron age in which the coercion of thought from those in power was stalk ing like an angel of death under the sky of enlightenment, blinding the eyes of men against true knowledge.'' And now, continues the article, "when at last an awakening has taken place and the con valescent is slowly habituating himself to the pure light and the pure air, the first imperative need is a somewhat sev ere and yet nourishing diet to aid the patient to regain his full strength.'' For which purposes, of course, the periodical was published. The one to answer this attack was Wal- lin, who wrote a parody on the appeal in Polyfem, substituting for literature "the Belle of Stockholm, for whom the last weeks of rain and slush (referring to the tearful complaints of the new school) no doubt had proved very in convenient to the extent of meriting the 50 nickname of an iron age. In the very noble aim of street cleaning the more usual means were clearly not enough under so great provocations. What was imperatively needed was not only a somewhat severe discipline and a nour ishing diet on the part of the contractors and their workingmen and their mules, but rather a total change in methods from those hitherto employed in such emergencies." A larger volley was next served from Polyfem, in the publication of Captain Bagfoot's papers or more fully "Sam ples from the Tungusian Literature from the Papers of Sea-Captain Mr. Bagfoot." The articles were written by Hammarsköld under the fictitious name of Nils Nyberg, and so well did he keep the anonymity that not even his nearest friends and co-workers knew that he was the author. The attack was directed against Wallin and Valerius, the former called Struthio and the latter Amarulli, whose journey to the land of the poets on the other shore of Styx is jokingly told. In this their joint visit to the enchanted country the two would- be poets suffered a great deal of humil- 51 iation at the hand of Anakreon and other great celebrities with whom they pretended to mingle on equal footing. The worst was, that they, like all others who aspired to literary fame, had to submit to the test of dipping their po etry in the water of Styx (oblivion), which has the property of completely washing away all that is not genuine. Amarulli, having already by his recent experiences become somewhat shaky, as to his worth, dared not stay to see the outcome of the test. He staid, however, long enough to see, how the minutes of the French Academy, the great model of the Swedish, came out of the bath as so many sheets of white paper, with not a line, not a single word left of their boasted immortality. The answer from the old school did not come as a direct attack upon the young men editing Polyfem, whom Leo pold thought beneath his dignity to honor with a reply, but as a series of articles on "the German stupidity"—the ex pression is really Tegnér's—which the new romantic movement was blindly fol lowing, referring in this instance espec ially to Fichte whose "Reden an die 52 deutschen Nationen" he ridiculed as a document heavy with fogs. Then, as it were quite incidentally, he refers to the home antagonists in the following words: "It is then little to wonder at, if also with us there should be found a few youngsters who, in the sweat of their brow between school hours having tried to crush the shell and taste the kernel of those hard German nuts and suc ceeded not so badly in their own con ceit, should by this experience find them selves elated into a dizzy height of self- esteem, so lovable in children, and look down upon such ordinary mortals as Voltaire, Pope, and Racine with some thing like condecension if not scorn." Hammarsköld's answer was to take the war out of Polyfem and write over his name a scathing criticism of Leo pold's whole literary career, unmerci fully laying bare his many weaknesses, not even sparing his character, accusing him of catering to high favors while shamming with the public. There was much that was true and well merited in this criticism, but more that was an in justice and beyond the mark. And the onesidedness of the criticism provoked 53 the anger of Tegnér, who was always considerate of motives and aims, how ever sharply he could criticize attain ments. Because of this as he consid ered ungentlemanly criticism of an hon orable old man Tegnér from this hour bore Hammarsköld a grudge. With fine chivalry he dedicated to the old poet, thus insulted, one of his own longer po ems, "Axel and Maria," in a poem in which he pays him a tribute as beauti ful as it was sincere. And when Ham marsköld later on repeated the attack on Leopold, after the death of the poet and under the added aggravation of a preceding concilation between the two, Tegnér's wrath knew no bounds. He spoke of Hammarsköld as carrying the dead poet around in his teeth like a wild beast and wrote against'' Hammar- spike" a diatribe which is the most venomous from his pen and one of the most scathing invectives in Swedish lit erature. While the war thus went on in Stock holm, Atterbom and his friends in Upp sala were not idle. They published a literary periodical dedicated to crit icism and called it Phosphoros, thus 54 gaining many friends and some enemies. As their number grew and wiser heads prevailed, they published another per iodical, a Poetical Calendar dedicated more exclusively to literature proper, following the advice of Tegnér to the effect that the old school must be ousted not by invectives but by a new song. Thus the circle of young enthusiasts in Uppsala gathered around their cause most of the younger poets of the time who for longer or shorter periods con tributed the best products of their pens to the Calendar. One of them was Ling of romantic history, exiled as a student, returning when the incident was for gotten, in Lund Tegnér's friend, a new romanticist born and bred, an enthusiast to say the least, composing his poems in a sort of a frenzy, poet, fencing master and gymnast, giving his name to large volumes of poetry most of it now quite unreadable and to a system of school gymnastics known over the world as the Swedish or the Ling system. He took now for a while a great interest in the Uppsala circle, until his extraordinary energy found everything there too lame, then moving his interest over to the 55 Gothic Covenant, a society formed by himself and Geijer, with Tegnér as a sort of a passive member, and promptly leaving that society, when Geijer uttered a doubt, whether northern mythology, Ling's great and lasting craze, after all should not be used rather sparingly. He was altogether, with all his peculiarities, a splendid fellow and for a while his pen proved a mighty weapon to the cause. Others were Samuel Hedborn, next to Wallin Sweden's best psalmist, Elg- ström, Ingelgren, Sondén, Dahlgren, who is probably Sweden's most accom plished humorist, Grafström, who wrote the well known "Longing to Norrland," Zeipel, Börjeson, Afzelius, who was Gei jer's co-worker in collecting Swedish bal lads and himself writing one of the most beautiful of them, "Neckens polska," and Arwidsson, their rival in that line of work. Geijer also contributed, not ably his " Kolargossen," as did Stagne- lius, Nicander, Vitalis and even Anders Fryxell, Geijer's pupil and later most pronounced antagonist, the most pop ular pen ever engaged in writing Swed en 's history, a man decidedly of his own 56 mind, an aristocrat even after Geijer had become a liberal, not bowing before the idols of the time, refusing to worship at the shrine of Carl XII, where Teg nér officiated as the high priest, and taking issue with Atterbom upon the Bellman cult which he introduced. He was altogether a common sense mind, and his aristocracy the aristocracy of the plain farmer rather than of the royal type. To these poets must also be counted not a few women of literary fame, such as Malla Silfverstolpe, Countess D'Al- bedhyll and, especially, Euphrosyne, next to Lenngren perhaps the best of Swedish poetesses. Tegnér held aloof, as he in fact did not identify himself with any school. And yet he contributed to the cause of new romanticism, if not to the Poetic Calendar, the greatest new romantic epic of the period, his "Frith- jofs saga." And even earlier than that he sang in the same strain his '' Sång till skånska lantvärnet" and "Svea," Very characteristically the new romantic fac tion, with Atterbom as judge, did not fully acknowledge in '' Svea'' more than the last dithyrambic part, to the more 57 mature opinion very much the weakest part of the poem. I must hasten to the last and the con cluding events of the literary feud. It happened or at least began, while Leo pold was yet alive. The old poet, no doubt smarting under the criticism of Hammarsköld, already referred to, wrote a witty poem, called '' The New Colony,'' in which he ridicules the new roman tic assertion that northern mythology should illustrate northern literature to the exclusion of the classical. '' The New Colony " is a republic of home birds, the owls and the ravens, loudly recording their protest against the song of the nightingale which they find not at all becoming to northern climates, proving their assertion by what they please to call the consent of their deepest feelings, which they declare to be art's highest laws, and clinching the argument by ar ranging a recital of their own, which true enough puts to flight all the night ingales. We should bear in mind, that this idea of using illustrations from northern mythology was a point of warfare be tween the two schools from the start in 58 all the northern countries. Oehlenschläg er had to defend it as a youth against the academicians of his country, and won the day. In Sweden the idea was quite new and foreign up to the time of Fran zén who did not favor it but in a mild way warned against the attempt as prob ably tending to turn the forward march of culture back into barbarism. This is the sentiment Leopold voices. Geijer, who did so much to revive interest in north ern mythology and as a poet writing "Vi kingen," "Odalmannen," "Den siste skalden," "Den siste kämpen," "Man hem," made such an excellent use of the material, yet does not wholly accept the notion that the viking ages should be bodily taken out of their past and put on the screen with all their original col orings, but rather believes in moderniz ing the means for a more human effect. And Tegnér adopts that moderation in an even more pronounced way, as we see in '' Frithiofs saga,'' which is a very ancient saga in a very modern setting, retold in the most approved latest edi tion of the language, with scarcely an accent to betray the ancient text, Frith- jof, the viking, humanized into a thor- 59 oughly acceptable Christian gentleman, and the old precepts from Havamal re vised so as to harmonize with the higher teachings of Christianity. And this was exactly what the poet himself intended. He was the last to sacrifice culture on the altar of originality, as we learn in so many words from himself: '' All culture is a loan from foreign climes, Our own, our very own but heathen times.'' Leopold's warning against the new romantic craze for antiquities even at the price of culture was therefore sec onded by some of the greatest minds of the time, otherwise and in moderation followers of the faith. And to their stand may be attributed the fact that the new romantic adoration of every thing ancient and medieval in Sweden, except in rare instances, failed to restore the actual worship of Odin and Thor or to inaugurate any appreciable return to the Roman church, the sentiment asser ting itself and slowly evaporating in such milder forms of idolatry as the po etical inventions of hero worship and ancestral cults. Leopold's "The New Colony" was followed by Stjernestolpe's "Letters 60 from the Moon" in which the poet alludes sarcastically to Atterbom as "a boy down with measles," and also by three sonnets of Valerius, entitled '' The Pen, The Paper and The Ink," and at last an anonymous poem, thought to be written by Tegnér, called "The Metal lic," ridiculing an expression of Atter bom to the effect that "nature has a metallic ear transforming into music every whisper from the world spirit." Tegnér undoubtedly took a part in the fight, if only by reference, in his song at the death of his brother Elof, in which he finds opportunity to chastize the extremists of the new faith, and also in his famous poetical oration at the Academic Jubilee, perhaps his most brilliant declaration of intellectuality in art. It is truthfully said, that to the genius of Tegnér water and light as ele ments of clearness in nature are the two dominating symbols. Last but not least came a criticism written by Leopold of Atterbom's trans lation of Tasso. The old man was there in his right element and fairly overdid himself in extraordinary witticism, tearing Atterbom's work into shreds. 61 He found faults in abundance, faulty rhymes, absurd figures of speech, dark ness everywhere as to the real meaning of the original. And Atterbom felt deeply hurt, to the extent that he chose to consider Leopold's criticism not only unjust but "a libel to which there could be no other worthy answer than the silence of scorn." This was Leopold's last great effort. He scarcely lived to see the great counter move which was a joint attack prepared by Hammarsköld in Stockholm and Atterbom and his friends in Uppsala and consisted of a series of poems entitled '' The Sleepless Nights of Markall.'' Markall is the name given to Wallmark, who now comes in for a speci fic dose of bitter scorn. According to the poem his birth is attended by por tentous omens in the shape of the myth ological bird Hsisi who presents the new born with gifts explaining his character and attainments. According to the runes Hsisi

'' Gave him the curved back of a cat, The long ears of a monkey, The hissing tongue of a serpent, The timid cowardice of the hare, The icy blood of the toad.'' 62 After this introduction the poem tells of Markall 's bad dreams. He dreams that the poets of his own school, repre sented in the story under the hateful name Hrimthursar or giants, are sum moned to the Syssisgrotto to meet in deadly combat the sons of Apollo, that is, the poets departed to the land of bliss, such as Thorild, Kellgren, Lenn gren and others. The battle ends disas trously for the giants, and they would have been harshly dealt with, had it not been for the intercession of Anna Maria Lenngren, who allows Tegnér to take most of them from the scene of battle in a baggage van, himself on the box. Then comes the duel between Thor ild and Leopold, the latter of whom falls before a shot of red pepper. He sneezes, and his skull bursts, emitting in place of brain—a flea. This ends the dream of the first night. A second night came out later, but the matter had already lost its inter est. Leopold was dead. Atterbom tired of the fight. He had just returned from a journey to Italy, which had greatly broadened his views. He did not at his return home find the quarrel 63 worth while and refused to lend his pen to a continuation of the invectives against Wallmark. In fact, he sued for peace, in a poet's greeting to Tegnér, which Tegnér promptly answered in the same spirit. Tegnér was always easily moved by magnanimity and generosity or what he so considered, and declared to Geijer, that Atterbom's advance for peace was an expression of a sentiment '' the most beautiful he ever met with in Swedish literature." With Tegnér and Atterbom thus clasping hands it was nothing left for the rest of them to do but to join in the general peace move ment. Even Wallmark slowly adapted himself to the new condition of things and published a rather conciliatory and from his viewpoint entirely impartial re view over the whole war. It had then lasted eleven years.

64 IX. Cöe JI3eto Romanticism in §toeDen Effects on Literature

-ITERATURE was all the richer for it, and none had taken a very great hurt. The new romantic move ment had been obliged to spend a great part of its strength in de fending its ideals. And this was upon the whole beneficial, as there was less strength left for the extremes and the vagaries into which otherwise it would have been likely to stray. The contribution of the new romantic movement to Swedish literature may be studied from three different viewpoints. First its influence upon literature gen erally, without regard to schools. That is the main good it did. New ideals were introduced, the call of the poet en hanced, a warmer religious sentiment 65 was setting in, nature was appreciated for its beauty and its mere being and not only as an object of science, the study of history deepened into a search not only for facts but for meaning and unity. Fichte's idealism gave a new prominence to the spiritual in life and grew with Sehelling into an idealism of beauty, unifying all existence, a tre mendous impetus to poetry. Not all followed the development of this Ger man philosophy to the length of the Hegelian pantheism. Thus in general. The specific new romantic poet, including all the merits and most of the faults of the movement, is Atterbom. He is the Tieck and the Novalis in Scandinavian letters. He car ries new romanticism boldly into the mystic wonderland, which is its true homeland. He seeks quite as earnestly as Novalis the blue flower of heavenly birth, longing for the unreachable and attempting the impossible, almost to the point of confessing with Tertullian of old: "It is unreasonable: there you have the reason why I believe it; it is impossible: therefore it shall come to pass." He is the pantheist in poetry quite Hegelian, without exploiting it as a new religion as Stagnelius did. He makes poetry out of sorrow and woes, an art in which however Vitalis is even more persistent. He delights in the form less, the sentimental, the tearful. His poetry is a mine of the new romantic riddle. He fully lives up to the new romantic standard that poetry to be per fect should be sufficiently dark to allow the reader to feel that somehow beyond the expression is a greater world not ex pressed, thus obeying to the letter Vol taire's ironical warning "To become tiresome you need only tell it all," or Goethe's humorous advice:

'' In Auslegung seyd nur f roh und munter. Legt Ihr nichts ein, so legt was unter."

Atterbom's greatest poem, "The Is land of the Blest,'' tells the story of the prince Astolf who visits the grotto of the winds and there by listening to the stories told by the different winds is enticed to renounce home and kingdom and all the nearest ties and duties to seek the love of his imagination. He finds her and lives with her three hun dred years in blissful ignorance of the 67 flight of time, until rudely awakened out of his selfish happiness by conscience in the person of his mother in law and sent again about his duties only to fall into the hand of father Time who had been seeking for him in vain while under the spell. The poem is full of lyrics not surpassed if matched in beauty in Swe dish literature, such as "Jägarens sång,'' "Vindarnas sång," "Svanevits sång," but owing to its inordinate bredth and its lack of movement the story does not sustain interest, and the poem, which Atterbom considered his life work, met with far less popularity than it des erved. Atterbom was in fact a very disappointed poet. The extraordinary ambition with which he set out was but partly realized. He laid down his lyre long before his time with something of the bitter disappointment that comes from realizing the fact, which he indeed had anticipated, that the great public failed to understand him, and the more bitter discovery that friends were apt to undervalue. Deeply disappointed he turned from poetry to the more prosaic task of his duties as professor of esthet ics and literature. As a critic, in his 68 "Svenska siare och skalder," he writes without bias and partiality, giving friend and foe his due in a manner strikingly at variance with his earlier partisan writings. The only real issue which he raises in his history of litera ture is in the new interpretation which he gives to the genius and the work of Bellman as typically and genuinely Swedish. Atterbom discovered in Bell man's dithyrambs a quite new roman tic undertone of "Welt Schmertz" and resignation, entirely redeeming them of their shocking coarseness and apparent rudeness, revealing under the masque of a clown a mind pure as snow and a suf fering almost sacrificial. In fact Atter bom rescued Bellman from his relative obscurity and made him the national poet of Sweden in whom the poetic ge nius of Sweden has become incarnated as the heroic in Carl XII, the two di viding between themselves the high honors of being the Patron Saints of Sweden, in whose praise Tegnér, the greatest bard of the time, tuned his lyre. Tegnér 's song to the Royal Saint, Carl XII, is already referred to. His eulogy of Bellman is not less superlative, the 69 discordant harmony of whose genius he pictured in the famous word:

"And see that line of sadness on his forehead, A smile in tears, a sorrow jubilant," while he predicts the lasting estimate of Bellman's art in the words ever after quoted as the golden text of the Bellman cult: "Time will not lull to sleep these mighty accords Of wl ich no other country has the like.'' How Anders Fryxell, the stubborn common sense historian, entered his pro test against both the hero and the poet cult, has already been mentioned. I mentioned Stagnelius and Vitalis. They illustrate the third phase of the new romantic contribution to Swedish literature, in so far as they, together with Almqvist, are the nearest approach in Swedish literature to that Heine and Byron type which we have mentioned before as cultivating the esthetics of the horrible. It is true, in their case in a rather mild form, and, besides, dif ferent in the one from the other. They are both tear-drained poets, carrying their hearts upon their sleeves for better 70 observation and description. Truly gi gantic is the desperate pride of Vitalis given expression in the climax:

"Not mine for the asking the sun in the sky, And therefore I naught will ask."

Luckily in his case the worldgrief of which he is possessed finds solace in faith, Christian faith, and the last accords of this poet, rent asunder by the discords of his genius, are at last harmonious, expressing not only perfect resignation but perfect hope. In Stagnelius we find the same discord between ideals and attainment, with a less proud poverty and a sweeter if not less shy disposition. He is one of the most gifted of Swedish poets and died like Vitalis a young man. His grip on the language is a master's. What he writes, is perfect. He is one of the few Swedish poets writing lyrics, epics and drama with the same ease. His hexameters are the best in Swedish literature, and his dramas likewise of the highest order, although scarcely fit to be acted. Like Vitalis he experiences a change of heart in his last years, not however like Vitalis turning to the Chris tian religion for consolation, but creat- 71 ing a religion of his own, a pantheism which he preaches with unsurpassed el oquence and poetic beauty in his '' Roses of Sharon." The solution of his "Welt Schmertz'' problem, there offered, is the solution of non-existence. Death is the great, the only liberator, and sorrow and pain his benevolent servants. Death, death is therefore the cry alike of grief and hope, the consummation of all hu man ambition. And the soul, Anima, at last liberated out of the body, her prison, takes her flight into the great All-Spirit, alike indifferent to joy and pain, to hope and regret, like the drop of water disappearing in the ocean. It is truly beautiful, and as truly horrible. In Almqvist the esthetics of the hor rible takes on a more conscious note and becomes a part of his art for the sake of effect, quickly giving way for better and more realistic tools when he is ready for them. In Vitalis and Stagnelius the sentiment is still a sentiment, the un conscious cry of grief springing from the heart of the poet who is musing over life's bitterness, communing with him self, seeking no other ear. That is truly new romantic. When this horrible is 72 projected into the outside world, thrown upon a screen, as it were, and made the interest of a third party, it is no longer new romanticism proper, emotionalism in all sincerity, but emotionalism alas made very real, emotions turned into their market value.

73 X. an (Epilogue Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf

HUS we have seen how the new romanticism entered Scandinavian literature and to what extent it came to rule thought and expres sion. When it had once taken hold of the minds, it clung to them with great tenac ity. Once a new romanticist ever a new romanticist! As will be seen in Ibsen, the great Norwegian, who even in his most advanced realism and problem writ ing is still the romanticist, moving in a world of mystery and symbolism and teaching his morals in allegory. The same holds true of Almqvist and Rune- berg, the first Swedish realists, with due attention to their many individual marks of distinction. Strindberg on the other hand, the greatest of Sweden's realists, is remarkably free from new romanti- 74 cism. He moves, like Tolstoy and Zola, in a world entirely practical even in its worst gloom, and is altogether the most manly and least sentimental of all Swe dish geniuses of modern time. In Selma Lagerlöf at last new romanticism in Swedish literature has its afterbloom, its Indian summer, wholly unexpected and gorgeously rich. Her popularity is partly at least due to surprise, every thing in connection with her art bein^ so pleasantly out of season. It is like picking strawberries out of the snow or finding spring flowers in autumn.