It was in his patriotic war-songs, however, that Tegnér roused the greatest enthusiasm. His Svea, his dithryambic declamation King Charles, and his Scanean Reserves, sent a thrill through young and old. When Svea was read at the Swedish Academy, which awarded the poem its gold medal, the friends and opponents of Tegnér alike were moved to undisguised admiration. In breadth and intrinsic power, and in the beauty of its rythm, which seems to echo the clash of arms and the marching of masses, this poem is unequalled in Swedish literature. Tegnér's name soon became known far beyond the limits of the lands where his language is understood. His works were translated into almost all modern tongues, so that some fifty different translations of the whole or parts of his poems now exist in eleven European languages.
A new feature was introduced into Swedish poetry by Runeberg. Although born of Swedish parents, he was brought up in Finland, his mind being nurtured in the traditions and the mixed racial influences of his new fatherland. Thus he breathed a new spirit, and a new inspiration, drawn from the realities of life, into poetical fiction. He was a realist in the best sense of that much-misused word. He sought his ideals in life, instead of outside of it and above it in imaginary creations. He saw nature such as it is, with all its faults and sublimities, and, loving it with a true poet's devotion, he painted it simply and faithfully, without aiming at ennobling it, but seeking and finding what there is of native dignity in its humblest expressions. In his lyrical poem, The Sayings of Sergeant Stal, he portrayed incidents of the wars of Finland fighting by the side of Sweden in 1809, when the country was conquered by Russia. It was a series of war pictures, a collection of hero types, painted in living colors, and breathing the most ardent patriotism.—Simple tales told by a sergeant of his recollections of the war, they deal with real personages, most of them drawn from the humblest stations in life, described just as they really lived and spoke and acted. Yet throughout the story of their simple acts and thoughts there swept a breeze which kindled the blood, roused the emotions; and fired the patriotic feeling of Runeberg's contemporaries. In poetic depth and beauty of language, as in style and conception, and in their departure from all the prevailing ideas and methods of romanticism, these lyric tales were a revelation. They classed their author at once as in the line of true-born poets. The works of Runeberg, although properly belonging to the literature of a country politically no longer one with Sweden, have from the nature of their subjects and the identity of languages, always been looked upon in Sweden as common property, and they have certainly exercised a powerful influence on Swedish thought and letters. Some of his songs, set to music, are to this day sung as national anthems.
The last champion of dying romanticism was a sort of universal genius, eccentric, bizarre, unequal, a spirit out of harmony with itself, but gifted with the most wonderful imagination and power, K.J.L. Almquist. His life was as checquered as his writings were various. In turn a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a journalist, and an exile, he has written volumes on almost every conceivable subject, from fiction, poetry, and history, to lexicography, pedagogy, and mathematics. His stories, published in two series, under the common title of The Book of the Hedgerose, show powers of conception, imagination, and description such as are only to be found in Edgar Allen Poe. His was an essentially revolutionary temperament. He disdained all authority, and cavilled at all moral restraints. He was in constant rebellion against society, its accepted laws and precepts, and vented his moral skepticism in bitter sarcasm and cutting paradoxes. "But two things are white in this world," he would say, "innocence and arsenic." The coupling of the two, however, nearly proved fatal to him. He was involved in a mysterious affair of poisoning, in which the victim was a dunning creditor. He was suspected of having given him arsenic by way of ridding himself of the debt which he could not pay. No proof of the fact could be adduced, and the crime was never brought home to him; but public opinion was against him, and fearing or distrusting the justice of his country, he fled from it ere the case was tried. He wandered over Europe and America, trying his hand at everything, and died, a literary wreck, in Germany, longing, and yet not daring, to return to his country. Lately, the Society of Authors in Stockholm, judging that his crime was "not proven," while his literary merits were great beyond all doubt, undertook the rehabilitation of his memory. His remains were brought back from Lubeck, and buried in Stockholm with "literary" honors, among others a remarkable oration delivered at his grave by Verner von Heidenstam, in which he was styled a martyr in the great cause of the emancipation of thought. Whatever may be thought of his moral character, Almquist was a great thinker and a wonderfully versatile writer. The last of the romantics, he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary schools. One critic has made him out to have been a sort of forerunner of Ibsen, while another calls him the most modern of classics. His genius placed him in advance of his age in most things. He was the first in the list of those Scandinavian revolutionists who have laid out new landmarks in the field of thought, and introduced new methods in fiction and the drama.
Liberalism, which spread like wildfire over Europe after its outbreak in the July Revolution in France, reached Sweden soon after. It was represented in literature by such men as Sturzen-Becker, Wetterbergh, and Strandberg, writing under the names of Orvar Odd, Uncle Adam, and Talis-Qualis; Blanche, who wrote stirring novels in the style of Eugene Sue; Hjerta, and the staff of the then newly founded Aftonbladet, who were revolutionizing the press. The press was beginning to enlist the highest literary capacities of the country, gradually becoming what it now is, a purveyor not only of news but of thought, and a leader of opinion in literature and art, in science and philosophy. In poetry, liberalism found its echo in the verses of Malmström, Nybom, Schlstedt. In fiction its banner was carried by three women, two of whom—well known in England and America—Frederica Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class, Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted descriptions of life in aristocratic circles. All three were very productive, and their novels count by dozens. Yet they failed to sustain the reputations their first works had won for them.
Verner von Heidenstam is now foremost among the writers of his country. His early works, Endymion, Hans Alienus, and others, raised him to this rank, and his last two productions, The Carolines (the companions of Charles XII) and Saint Brigitt, have more than confirmed it. Hans Alienus was, like Goethe's Faust, a work of deep philosophical research into the problems of existence, the purpose and significance of life, set forth in symbolical images and explained by allegory. In the Carolines, a series of short stories connected by the red thread of history which runs through them, he gives a new conception, but a wonderfully graphic and striking one, of Charles XII and his times. It is an epic, and yet so living and so human a picture of the wild, iron-souled, quick-tempered hero, whose "eyes flew around like two searching bees," and whose will was like the steel of his sword; who had the heart of a lion and a "woman's hatred for women," but for whom men shed their blood freely; who "never grieved over a misfortune longer than the darkness lasted," and was "best loved by those who tried to hate him." His pictures are drawn by a master hand, and with the intuitive coloring of genius. Saint Brigitt carries us back to medieval Sweden. Here, too, the picture is lifelike, centered round the struggle of a high-minded woman, who makes everything bend to her stern rule of holiness, her thirst for sanctity, as Charles XII did to his inexorable policy and thirst for dominion.
The psychological and the historical novel, the latter, in its modern conception, akin to the former, since it is a study of the psychology of historical characters and a historical epoch, is the form of fiction at present most in vogue. It is in this form that such writers as Tor Hedberg, Per Hallström, and Axel Lundegard have made their reputations. Tor Hedberg's romances embody profound analysis of the inner workings of the soul, of the secret motives which, more or less consciously, determine a man's acts. In this line he ventures on the most difficult psychological problems. In his Judas, a scriptural romance from which he has drawn a drama, he attempts to solve the darkest psychological enigma that has puzzled humanity, viz., to analyze the motives which led Judas to betray his Master and become the typical traitor. The character he draws of him is original and striking, and departs entirely from the accepted tradition. But bold and subtle as the theory is, it is far from convincing. His Judas is a dark, brooding spirit, fierce and inharmonious, divided between extatic love and admiration of his Master and inward irresistible forces of hatred and revolt: a double nature, thirsting for freedom and love, yet predestined to evil, and led by fearful secret impulses to the accomplishment of his destiny and the fulfilment of his mission, necessary to the scheme of salvation. He rushes blindly to his fate while struggling in vain to escape it. But in the very act of betrayal, while obeying the command: "What thou doest, do quickly," his better nature triumphs for one instant and he falls on the neck of his Master and embraces Him. It is the Judas kiss which betrays his Lord. The last look of Jesus, however, showed him that he had been understood and forgiven. The detestation of humanity to the end of the world will be his expiation, but that look of Jesus has freed him.
Woman, represented by writers like Ellen Key, Selma Lagerlöf, Sophie Elkau, Alfhild Agress, Hilma Stanberg, and others, holds a high position in Swedish letters. Ellen Key is an essayist of virile power and argumentative breadth, of superior intellect and unfailing erudition. She is a fearless and unfailing champion of free thought, individualism, and woman's emancipation. As was said of Madame de Staël, her writings are "the most masculine productions of the faculties of woman." Selma Lagerlöf occupies as a novelist a position of her own. Her style and her manner in fiction are unique. Symbolism and allegory are blended in it with the most realistic pictures of everyday life. She thinks in parables, and describes realities, and the realities convey the moral teachings of parables. With something of the peculiar power of George Eliot in the delineation of character, she makes each humble life preach some great moral truth. Her latest book, Jerusalem, is one of extraordinary fascination, created quite a sensation in Sweden, and places Selma Lagerlöf quite among the foremost writers of the day.
It may in general be said of Swedish writers that they have a high idea of their calling. Few, if any, have accepted as their sole function the idealization of form. They hold mostly that the highest aim of art should be to teach and elevate, to destroy prejudice and conventionality, and indicate, in so far as it is possible, the solution of moral problems through the creative faculty of inspired productiveness. The wish to inculcate action, the energy that is born of enthusiasm, the chivalry that is inspired by high ideals and unselfish motives. Raised thus from the region of mere chronicles of human passions, of woman's frailty and man's baseness, and exercising themselves with the political, social, and religious problems of the day, these works of imagination have become, alongside the Press, a powerful factor in the development of modern thought.[f]