SELMA LAGERLOF.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9789, 4 March 1910, Page 2

SELMA LAGERLOF.

(By LEONARD COURTNEY, in the "Telegraph.")

+ : A SWEDISH NOVELIST.

For the first time in the history of the institution, the Nobel Prize for literature has been presented to a woman. Selma Lagerlof, the fortunate winner of the prize, is not very well known in England, although in France they have written a good deal about her—witness an article in the current "Revue de Deux Mondes," by M. Andre Bcllessort; and Germany, of course, has some acquaintance with her works. She is a Swedish novelist, who represents, together with Bjornson and Strindberg, some of tho best work that has been done in Scandinavia. has this distinction from other modern writers of the Northern school, that on the whole she is an optimist and an idealist. The same cannot, of course, be said of Ibsen, still less of August Strindberg. When they paint the modern world in characters which seem appropriate to the newest forms of civilisation, there is a hard and strident tone, a clear brilliancy of remorseless analysis, which sometimes make the head ache and the heart sick. To Selma Lagerlof have been given far other gifts. She wrote a eort of Swedish epic, " Gosta Berling's Saga," which has appeared in an, English translation—not exactly a work of art, because it is too prolix and careless in its construction, but a thing which, in its is comparable with losely-strung epics like the " Chanson de Roland," or the history of the ingenious knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Selma Lagerlof's works are, indeed, quite numerous. " Invisible Bonds" contains a number of very characteristic stories, as also does the book entitled "Queens of Kungahalla." " Jerusalem " is a study of a Swedish colony, which settled m the old Jewish capital—a little community torn between tho conflicting call of religious duty and love of their abandoned native country. There are othet things, besides, which sho has written. There is an ideal book of Swedish geography, called "The Wonderful Voyage of Nils Holgersson." There are also "Legends o? Christ" and "Miracles of Anti-Christ," the scene in the latter case being laid in Sicily. Her latest book, once more a collection of short stories, contains, oddly enough, a little study intended as a criticism of that very idealism which for so many years she has been preaching. But this only proves the sanity and equipoise of her talents. Being immersed in the old Scandinavian legends, loving her native country with an intense devotion, in entiro sympathy with its people and its mountains, and its great valleys, she believes that the final message which the Cosmos of things has to give is one of comfort and hope. But meanwhile, to mistake an imaginative dream for real life is a failure as tragic as would be the contrary hypothesis—to banish imagination, as a sacrifice to hard and insistent facts. AN IDEALIST.

Thcso two sides of her nature can easily be illustrated. Here is a story taken from the book called "Invisible Bonds." An old hermit, Hatto, is so enraged with the wickedness of mankind that he beseeches the good God to annihilate the whole human race, lie goes further than this: he makes a vow to keep his arm stretched up towards the sky from morning to night i.itil tne Destroyer of Sodom and GoiM.rrah shall have granted his prayer. Many days pass, and his ami is still erect and immobile. So motionless is it that in time the little water-wag-tails come and build their nest in the hollow of hia hand. And slowly the heart of this rugged saint is changed. The marvels of the little life enclosed between his fingers, the activity, the patience of the parents, the twittering ai'xiety of the young brood—these things impress him and soften his heart. And when the women come to him, bringing figs and milk for his sustenance, he does not insult them any more; and when a hawk menaces the young brood in his hand he has another hand ready to defend his proteges. Well, the moral is obvious enough. Old Hatto begins to understand how God holds human beings in the hollow of his hand, and will not destroy them at any fierce hermit's prayer. For g<od or for evil He lets them live, p.iTcrding to tile inscrutable designs of His providence. That is one instance of the tender idealism of Solma Lagerlof, and many others could be quoted. In another story, for instance, the aged Agneta is forced to live alone on the t'Se of a mountain covered with snow. The creed of the neighbourhood is that all the condemned, all those who have forfeited the grace of Heaven, have to endure their punishment on the eternal glaciers which overhang her little cottage. She is when she thinks she sees their shadows driven and tortured along the mountain side bv the wind; they are so cold and so hopeless. What is it they want? Perhaps a moment or two of rest and warmth. And the good old woman_gets rid of her superstitious terror, because at given moments she throws open the dtor of her house, and keeps the fire lit in her parlour, where the dead may warm their shivering limbs, It is a beautiful and tender mysticism with which Selma Lagerlof is full, and, as may be observed, it is all on the side of the angels. NORTHERN MYSTICISM AND SOUTHERN LOGIC. Curious enough, one of the candidates proposed against her tor the Nobel Prize was Anatole France. Nothing could more closely illuistrate the difference between the Northern and the Latin imagination than to bethink oneself for a moment how Anatole Franco would have treated old legends like these. The Latin intellect is very precise and logical. It cannot wholly surrender its reason, and even its best bits of imaginative work must be done in obedience to a rationalising instinct, so as not to shock too utterly the modern mind. Anatole France would have been delightful and charming, but always with a point of irony, and a tendency to mock. Hatto would no longer have been a sort of Elijah, complaining that he was the only good man feft in the world; lie would have been a sceptic, a Voltaire, a Rochefoucauld, explaining with admirable logici why at a certain moment in the worlds history the sins of humankind had so accumulated ae to make their doom intellectually necessary. And the old Agneta would have reasoned with herself that, at all events, an act of kindness could do no harm, even if she did not believe in the existence of the other world or its denizens. Selma Lagerlot is much more primitive, much more of a real mystic. She lias something of the gifts which belong to the Celtic imagination—simplicity and faith, and a profound belief that < somehow good will be the final goal of ill. But our 'Swedish novelist is by no means only a dreamer. She knows that there cornea a time when too easy an acquiescence in the realm of imagination makes a man or a woman incompetent to discharge the ordinary duties of this workadav world, bhe tells us the story of a widow, a young woman, who has just learnt that the husband whom sho adored has been drowned at eea. For days sho wanders through the streets of her native town, in a kind of waking trance, far removed from reality nursine her memories of an old and' happier time. Then they bring her a littlo Vox washed up by the sea, oontainin< r the letters which the man had written to his wife every day, and which he was, during the continuance of his voyage, unable to send home. At first she refuses to undo the packet, because she prefers to go on in her dream-like existence; but when her mother, out of pity for her, throws the letters into the fire, then the spell is indeed broken. The agony of sorrow that she could never know what loving words the letters contained brought her back with a bound to the actual Wd facts of the case, which she had

hitherto refused to acknowledge. Imagination is a luxury, and the indulgence of excessive sorrow is a luxury; meanwhile, life has to be lived. Such is Selma Lagerlof's lesson. And she emphasises it once more in one of her latest stories, already referred to, in which two youths, skating on the ice, see before them a balloon, and are so keen in its pursuit that they no longer take heed to their steps, and disappear beneath the broken ice. This is a parable of the failure of idealism, told us in symbolic form. Selma Lagerlof is no vain dreamer of an idle day, but a thoughtful, earnest woman, who during tho fifty years of her life has learnt many things—who has found out, for instance, the enormous moral value of suffering, and kept untarnished her belief that goodness is at once a stronger and more enduring thing than evil. DRAMATIC INOISIVENEfes. And she is a dramatist, too. She can paint in a few decisive words an acute situation, in a fashion that makes it live before our eyes. Take, for instance, this little incident, which comes out of " The Queens of Kungahalla." Sander's child is just dead, and Sander himself is sitting at his mid-day meal, while his -wife is crying as she talks of the burial. Suddenly Sander says to his wife, " I will not have this child put into my tomb. Father and mother are lying there; the name of Sander is engraved on the stone outside. I will not have this child put in with the others." "You have found out, then?" says the wife. " I knew well that you would avenge yourself some day." But the man is not one to unpack bis soul in curses. He rises from the table. "I have not the slightest desire to avenge myself,'' he says, without raising his voice. "It iB simply because I cannot permit such a thing." "And what about meP" says the wife. "I shall be a ruined woman." "I have thought about that," he says, "but I cannot help it." " And why, then, did. you pardon me?" is her answer. That is all. It is very brief, very concentrated—perhaps few artists could have condensed into such simple words the story which we can easily imagine for ourselves. As I have said so much of Selma Lagerlof as a romantic writer and an imaginative mystic, it is only right to add that when she wishes she can be as pointed and as direot as any realist could desire.