Norse mythology is to Celtic mythology what a Yukon forest is to an Orinoco jungle. In the Sagas of Iceland the fancy never runs riot as it does in the legends of Connemara or Brittany. It is not surprising, then, that our Scandinavians are not distinguished for visual imagination. Professors notice that the lads of this breed are slow to grasp the principle of the machinery about the college of agriculture, and need a diagram to supplement oral description of a ventilating system. To them even a drawing is a maze of lines rather than a picture. A physical director working among Scandinavians labored in vain to get his trustees to imagine from the blue prints how the new gymnasium would look. Not until the scaffolding was down were his gymnasts satisfied that there would be "room to do the giant swing." His boy scouts had no faith in a selected camp-site till the brush was actually cleared from it. They lacked "the mind's eye."
"It is not enough," remarks a settlement head, "to show rich Nils or Lars 'how the other half lives'; you've got to clinch your appeal by showing him how the other half ought to live." Says a social worker, "I picture to the poor Slovak an eight-room, steam-heated house as a goal, and he will work for it; but the poor Swede can't imagine such a house as his own, so I have to talk to him of the four-room house he will one day possess."
It is said that, as merchant, the Scandinavian puts little visualizing into his advertisements, and is slow to catch the vision of a community prosperity through team-work. As business man, he is a "stand-patter," able to run a going concern, but without the American's power to anticipate developments and to plant a business where none exists. As farmer, he is not so far-sighted as the German. He will burn off the growth on his cut-over land till the humus has been consumed, or wear out his fields with some profitable but exhausting crop, like tobacco. As investor, he is the opposite of the imaginative, speculative American, for large, remote profits do not appeal to him. As labor leader, he lacks vision and idealism. On the stump he does not address the imagination as does the Hibernian spellbinder. As advocate, he makes a hard-headed plea without sentiment, and as after-dinner speaker he lacks in wit and fancy.
Typical Norwegian Boy
Typical Swedish Girl
So little sociable are the Scandinavians that it is said "ice-water runs in their veins." Even liquor will not start the current of fraternal feeling. They care little for the social side of their labor-unions, and neglect the regular meetings. They do not warm up to an employer who treats them "right." Without the happy art of mixing and fraternizing, these sons of the North do not shine as bar-tenders, salesmen, canvassers, commercial travelers, or life-insurance solicitors. As street-car conductors in Minneapolis they are said to be less helpful and polite than the American or the Irish conductors of St. Paul. Teachers of this blood do not easily attach their pupils to them; while the children, instead of being inspired by an audience, as are the Irish, become tongue-tied. Often one hears a teacher lament, "I can't get anything out of them."