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406
IV. EDUCATION AND MENTAL CULTURE IN SWEDEN.
life. Fredrika Bremer (1801/65) took her model from those English novelists
who paint the home-life of the eighteenth century. Her first production was
»Teckningar ur hvardagslifvet» (Home-life Sketches), characterized by an idealistic,
somewhat sentimental tone; but at the end of her life she devoted herself to
tendential novel-writing. She sought to advance the humanitarian ideas of the
time, and especially the emancipation of women, and thereby gained a fame
outside of Sweden that equaled, if it did not surpass, that of Tegnér. There appeared
many other male and female novelists, whose greatest merit it was to write for
and about our people. Their aim was rather moral than esthetical. At the same
time that Fredrika Bremer published her novels, Sofia Margareta von Knorring
(1797/1848) pictured the higher social classes, and Emilie Flygare-Carlén
(1804/92) gained great celebrity by her sketches from the fishermen’s life on
the coast of Bohuslän.
A deep appreciation of home-land nature, and a warm love of the people
are distinctive traits of the new and significant tendencies in poetry aroused by
J. L. Runeberg (1804/77) in Finland. Runeberg is a realist in the best
meaning of that word, and he has received his epical limpidness in part from
the calm, sad, Slavonic »folksongs», and in part from the harmoniously beautiful
world of old Greece. In some of his works his intimate knowledge of Goethe,
Byron, and Almqvist are clearly discernible. Above all he loves to portray
the scenery and people of Finland, as he has done especially in his great epic
»Älgskyttarne» (The Elkhunters), which in beauty can be compared with Goethe’s
»Hermann und Dorothea». He is entirely original in his »Fänrik Ståls sägner»
(Tales of Ensign Stål), a collection of songs depicting the war of 1809. The
poet here gives us a series of war-pictures, or rather, a gallery of heroic types
charged with idealism, a profound moral view of life, and so deep a patriotic
love that both to Finns and Swedes the Tales of Ensign Stål have come to be
something more than mere perfect poems, their love to them being inseparable
from the love of their countries. The first edition of his collected writings was
published in 1870 by C. R. Nyblom (born 1832) who, besides, has issued collections
of poems of his own as well as translations from classical and modern poets.
Among Finnish authors using the Swedish language should be mentioned also
Z. Topelius (1818/98), whose gentle lyre is much beloved in Sweden, and whose
»Fältskärens berättelser» (The Surgeon’s Tales, romantized pictures from the history
of Sweden and Finland) is the favourite book of Swedish young people.
Runeberg has formed no school. He filled alone the great vacuum in our
literature at the middle of the nineteenth century; and when, after 1850, his
lyre sounds but rarely, little is to be said about the poetry of that period. To be
sure, Viktor Rydberg (1828/95) had by the publication of his novel »Den siste
Atenaren» (The Last Athenian) attracted general attention, but it was only
gradually that he obtained his position as the spiritual leader in modern Swedish
literature. The last fifteen years of his life he was recognized as the foremost
among living Swedish authors. Rydberg was long known and admired as a
writer on esthetics, mythology, religious philosophy, and as a champion for a
noble humanity and an undogmatic Christianity. It was only låte that he
appeared as a lyrical poet, but his poems belong to the very jewels in the treasury
of Swedish poetry. Cast in a perfect classical form and stamped with Germanic
earnestness, they contain meditations upon the deepest questions of life. As
exponents of idealism are to be mentioned at the side of Rydberg also Count C.
Snoilsky (1841/1903) and C. D. af Wirsén (born 1842), both lyrical poets with
great formal power. Snoilsky, known especially by his exquisitely chiseleil sonnets,
has gained very great popularity through his patriotic epic-lyrical songs »Svenska
Bilder» (Pictures from Swedish history). A religious feeling pervades all the poems
of Wirsén.’*",
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