BOOKS AND THE STAGE
The history of the development of a soul can be sometimes written by giving a simple bibliography; for a man who lives in a narrow circle and never meets great men personally, seeks to make their acquaintance through books. The fact that the same books do not make the same impression, nor have the same effect upon all, shows their relative powerlessness to convert anybody. For example, we call the criticism with which we agree good; the criticism which contradicts our views is bad. Thus we seem to be educated with preconceived views, and the book which strengthens, expresses and develops these makes an impression on us. The danger of a one-sided education through books is that most books, especially those composed at the end of an era, and at the university, are antiquated. The youth who has received old ideals from his parents and teachers is accordingly necessarily out of date before his education is completed. When he enters manhood, he is generally obliged to fling away his whole stock of old ideas, and be born again, as it were. Time has gone by him, while he was reading the old books, and he finds himself a stranger among his contemporaries.
John had spent his youth in accumulating antiquarian lore. He knew all about Marathon and Cannae, the war of the Spanish succession and the Thirty Years' War, the Middle Ages and antiquity; but when the war between France and Germany broke out, he did not know the cause of it. He read about it as he would have read a play, and was interested to see what the result of it would be.
In Kristineberg, where he spent the summer with his parents, he lay out on the grass in the park and read Oehlenschläger. For his degree examination, he had, besides his chief subject—æsthetics,—to choose a special one, and, enticed by Dietrichson's lectures, he had chosen Danish literature. In Oehlenschläger he had found the summit of Northern poetry. That was for him the quintessence of poetry,—the directness which he admired perhaps for the very reason that he had not got it. The Danish language perhaps also contributed to this result; it seemed to him an idealised Swedish, and sounded like his mother-speech from the lips of a woman worshipped from afar. When he read Oehlenschläger's Helge, Tegner's Frithiof's Saga seemed to him petty; he found it unwieldy, prosaic, clerical, unpoetic.
Oehlenschläger's dramas were a book which had an influence on John by way of a supplementary contrast. Perhaps the romantic element in them found an echo in the youth's mind, which had now awoken* to poetic activity, and looked upon poetry and romance as identical. Other contributory circumstances were his liking for Norse antiquities which Oehlenschläger had just discovered, and the unrequited love he had just then for a blond maiden who was engaged to a lieutenant. But the impression made by Oehlenschläger was only fleeting, and hardly lasted a year; it was a light spring breeze which passed by.
It fared worse with John's study of æsthetics as expounded by Ljunggren in two closely printed volumes, containing the views of all philosophers on the Beautiful, but giving no satisfactory definition of it.
John had studied the antique in the National Museum, and asked himself how the pot-house scenes of the Dutch genre painters which, when they occurred in reality, were called ugly, could be reckoned among beautiful pictures, although they were in no way idealised. To this the æsthetic philosophers gave no answer. They shirked the question and set up one theory after another, but the only excuse they could find for the admission of ugliness was that it acted as a foil, and provided a comic element. But a strong suspicion had been aroused in John that the "Beautiful" was not always beautiful.
Furthermore, he was troubled by doubts whether it was possible to have independent standards of taste. In the newly-founded paper, the Schwedische Zeitschrift, he had read discussions about works of art, and seen how disputants on both sides defended their position with equally strong arguments. One sought beauty in form, another in subject, and a third in the harmony between the two. Accordingly a well-painted subject from still life can rank higher than the Niobe, for this group of statuary is not beautiful in its outlines, the arrangement of the drapery of the principal figure being especially tasteless although the judgment of the majority regards the work as sublime. Therefore the sublime does not necessarily consist in beauty of form.
Victor Hugo's romances had found a fertile soil in John's mind. The revolt against society; the reverence paid to Nature by the poet living on a lonely island; the scorn for the ever-prevalent stupidity; the indignation against formal religion and the enthusiasm for God as the Creator of all,—all that was germinating in the young man's mind began to grow, but was stifled by the autumn leaf-drifts of old books.