The theory of Celtic influence, though established in its essentials, is not perfectly consistent as set forth in the Britannica article. Thus, while the Celticised literature is remarked for "noble simplicity of language," the true Icelandic, primarily like the Old English, is said to develop a "complexity of structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, assonance, luxuriance, quantity, and syllabification which it caught up from the Latin and Celtic poets." Further, while the Celticised school is described as "totally distinct from the Icelandic," Celtic influence is also specified as affecting Norse literature in general. The first generations of Icelandic poets were men of good birth, "nearly always, too, of Celtic blood on one side at least"; and they went to Norway or Denmark, where they lived as kings' or chiefs' henchmen. The immigration of Norse settlers from Ireland, too, affected the Iceland stock very early. "It is to the west that the best sagas belong: it is to the west that nearly every classic writer whose name we know belongs; and it is precisely in the west that the admixture of Irish blood is greatest" (ib.). The facts seem decisive, and the statements above cited appear the more clearly to need modification. It is to be noted that Schweitzer's Geschichte der skandinavischen Literatur gives no hint of the Celtic influence.
But the Icelandic civilisation as a whole could not indefinitely progress on its own basis any more than the Irish. Beyond a certain point both needed new light and leading; for the primeval spirit of strife never spontaneously weakened; the original Icelandic stock being, to begin with, a selection of revolters from over-rule. So continual domestic feuds checked mental evolution in Iceland as in old Scandinavia; and the reduction of the island to Norwegian rule in the thirteenth century could not do more for it than monarchy was doing for Norway. Mere Christianity without progressive conditions of culture availed less for imaginative art than free paganism had done; and when higher culture-contacts became possible, the extreme poverty of Iceland tended more than ever to send the enterprising people where the culture and comfort were. It is in fact not a possible seat for a relatively flourishing civilisation in the period of peaceful development. The Reformation seems there to have availed for very little indeed. It was vehemently resisted,[690] but carried by the preponderant acquisitive forces: "nearly all who took part in it were men of low type, moved by personal motives rather than religious zeal."[691] "The glebes and hospital lands were a fresh power in the hands of the crown, and the subservient Lutheran clergy became the most powerful class in the island; while the bad system of underleasing at rack-rent and short lease with unsecured tenant-right extended in this way over at least a quarter of the better land, stopping any possible progress." For the rest, "the Reformation had produced a real poet [Hallgrim Petersen], but the material rise of Iceland"—that is, the recent improvements in the condition of the people—"has not yet done so,"[692] though poetry is still cultivated in Iceland very much as music is elsewhere.
Thus this one little community may be said to have reached the limits of its evolution, as compared with others, simply because of the strait natural conditions in which its lot was cast. But to think of it as a tragically moribund organism is merely to proceed upon the old hallucinations of race-consciousness. Men reared in Iceland have done their part in making European civilisation, entering the more southerly Scandinavian stocks as these entered the stocks of western Europe; and the present population, who are a remnant, have no more cause to hang their heads than any family that happens to have few members or to have missed wealth. Failure is relative only to pretension or purpose.
The modern revival of Scandinavian culture, as must needs be, is the outcome of all the European influences. At the close of the sixteenth century, in more or less friendly intercourse with the other Protestant countries of north Europe, Denmark began effectively to develop a literature such as theirs, imaginative and scientific, in the vernacular as well as in Latin; and so the development went on while Sweden was gaining military glory with little enlightenment. Then a rash attack upon Sweden ended in a loss of some of the richest Danish provinces (1658); whereafter a sudden parliamentary revolution, wrought by a league of king and people against the aristocracy, created not a constitutional but an absolute and hereditary monarchy (1660), enthroning divine right at the same instant in Denmark and Norway as in England. Thereafter, deprived of their old posts and subjected to ruinous taxes, the nobility fell rapidly into poverty;[693] and the merchant class, equally overtaxed, withdrew their capital; the peasantry all the while remaining in a state of serfdom.[694] Then came a new series of wars with Sweden, recurring through generations, arresting, it is said, literature, law, philosophy, and medicine,[695] but not the natural sciences, then so much in evidence elsewhere: Tycho Brahe being followed in astronomy by Horrebow, while chemistry, mathematics, and even anatomy made progress. But to this period belongs the brilliant dramatist and historian Holberg, the first great man of letters in modern Scandinavia (d. 1754); and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the two years of ascendency of the freethinking physician Struensee as queen's favourite (1770-72) served partially to emancipate the peasants, establish religious toleration, abolish torture, and reform the administration. Nor did his speedy overthrow and execution wholly undo his main work,[696] which outdid that of many generations of the old régime. Still, the history of his rise and fall, his vehement speed of reconstruction and the ruinous resistance it set up, is one of the most dramatic of the many warnings of history against thinking suddenly to elevate a nation by reforms imposed wholly from without.[697]
Thenceforward, with such fluctuations as mark all culture-history, the Scandinavian world has progressed mentally nearly step for step with the rest of Europe, producing scholars, historians, men of science, artists, and imaginative writers in more than due proportion. Many names which stand for solid achievement in the little-read Scandinavian tongues are unknown save to specialists elsewhere; but those of Holberg, Linnæus, Malte-Brun, Rask, Niebuhr, Madvig, Œhlenschläger, Thorwaldsen, and Swedenborg tell of a comprehensive influence on the thought and culture of Europe during a hundred years in which Europe was being reborn; and in our own day some of the greatest imaginative literature of the modern world comes from Norway, long the most backward of the group. Ibsen, one of a notable company of masters, stood at the head of the drama of the nineteenth century; and the society which sustained him, however he may have satirised it, is certificated abreast of its age.
§ 5
In one aspect the Scandinavian polities have a special lesson for the larger nations. They have perforce been specially exercised latterly, as of old, by the problem of population; and in Norway there was formerly made one of the notable, if not one of the best, approaches to a practical solution of it. Malthus long ago[698] noted the Norwegian marriage-rate as the lowest in Europe save that of Switzerland; and he expressed the belief that in his day Norway was "almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehension expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower classes of people is in some degree seen and understood."[699] This state of things having long subsisted, there is a presumption that it persists uninterruptedly from pagan times, when, as we have seen, there existed a deliberate population-policy; for Christian habits of mind can nowhere be seen to have set up such a tendency, and it would be hard to show in the history of Norway any great political change which might effect a rapid revolution in the domestic habits of the peasantry, such as occurred in France after the Revolution. Broadly speaking, the mass of the Norwegian people had till the last century continued to live under those external or domiciliary restraints on multiplication which were normal in rural Europe in the Middle Ages, and which elsewhere have been removed by industrialism; yet without suffering latterly from a continuance of the severer medieval destructive checks. They must, therefore, have put a high degree of restraint on marriage, and probably observed parental prudence in addition.
When it is found that in Sweden, where the conditions and usages were once similar, there was latterly at once less prudential restraint on marriage and population, and a lower standard of material well-being, the two cases are seen to furnish a kind of experimentum crucis. The comparatively late maintenance of a powerful military system in Sweden having there prolonged the methods of aristocratic and bureaucratic control while they were being modified in Denmark-Norway, Swedish population in the eighteenth century was subject to artificial stimulus. From about the year 1748, the Government set itself, on the ordinary empirical principle of militarism, to encourage population.[700] Among its measures were the variously wise ones of establishing medical colleges and lying-in and foundling hospitals, the absolute freeing of the internal trade in grain, and the withdrawal in 1748 of an old law limiting the number of persons allowed to each farm. The purpose of that law had been to stimulate population by spreading tillage; but the spare soil being too unattractive, the young people emigrated. On the law being abolished, population did increase considerably, rising between 1751 and 1800 from 1,785,727 to 2,347,308,[701] though some severe famines had occurred within the period. But in the year 1799, when Malthus visited the country, the increased population suffered from famine very severely indeed, living mainly and miserably on bark bread.[702] It was one of Malthus's great object-lessons in his science. On one side a poor country was artificially over-populated; on the other, the people of Norway, an even poorer country, directly and indirectly[703] restrained their rate of increase, while the Government during a long period wrought to the same end by the adjustment of its military system and by making a certificate of earning power or income necessary for all marriages.[704] The result was that, save in the fishing districts, where speculative conditions encouraged early marriages and large families, the Norwegian population were better off than the Swedish.[705]
Already in Malthus' youth the Norwegian-Danish policy had been altered, all legal and military restrictions on marriage having been withdrawn; and he notes that fears were expressed as to the probable results. It is one of his shortcomings to have entirely abstained from subsequent investigation of the subject; and in his late addendum as to the state of Sweden in 1826 he further fails to note that as a result of a creation there after 1803 of 6,000 new farms from land formerly waste, the country ceased to need to import corn and was able to export a surplus.[706] It still held good, however, that the Norwegian population, being from persistence of prudential habit[707] much the slower in its rate of increase, had the higher standard of comfort, despite much spread of education in Sweden.
Within the past half-century the general development of commerce and of industry has tended broadly to equalise the condition of the Scandinavian peoples. As late as 1835 a scarcity would suffice to drive the Norwegian peasantry to the old subsistence of bark bread, a ruinous resort, seeing that it destroyed multitudes of trees of which the value, could the timber have found a market, would have far exceeded that of a quantity of flour yielding much more and better food. At that period the British market was closed by duties imposed in the interest of the Canadian timber trade.[708] Since the establishment of British free trade, Norwegian timber has become a new source of wealth; and through this and other and earlier commercial developments prudential family habits were affected. Thus, whereas the population of Sweden had all but doubled between 1800 and 1880, the population of Norway had grown even faster.[709] And whereas in 1834 the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate births in Stockholm was 1 to 2.26[710] (one of the results of foundling hospitals, apparently), in 1890 the total Swedish rate was slightly below 1 to 10, while in Norway it was 1 to 14. The modern facilities for emigration have further affected conjugal habits. Latterly, however, there are evidences of a new growth of intelligent control.