Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/789

 Two writers of the academic period, besides Bellman, and a generation later than he, kept apart, and served to

lead up to the romantic revival. Bengt Lidner (1759-1793), a melancholy and professedly elegiacal writer, had analogies with such German sentimentalists as Novalis. He led a strange wandering life, and died, still young, in extreme poverty. His poems appeared in 1788. Tomas

Thorild (1759-1808) was a much stronger nature, and led the revolt against prevailing taste with far more vigour. But he is an irregular and inartistic versifier, and it is mainly as a prose writer, and especially as a very original and courageous critic, that he is now mainly remembered. He settled in Germany, and died as a professor in Greifswald. Karl August Ehrensvärd (1745-1800) may be mentioned here as a critic whose aims somewhat resembled those of Thorild. The creation of the Academy led to a great production of æsthetic and philosophical writing. Among critics of taste may be mentioned Nils von Rosenstein (1752-1824); the rhetorical bishop of Linköping, Magnus Lehnberg (1758-1808); and Count Georg Adlersparre (1760-1809). Kellgren and Leopold were both of them important prose writers.

The excellent lyrical poet Frans Mikael Franzén (1772-1847) (see ), and a belated academician Johan David Valerius (1776-1852), fill up the space between the Gustavian period and the domination of romantic ideas from Germany. It was Lorenzo Hammarsköld (1785-1827) who in 1803 introduced the views of Tieck and Schelling by founding the society in Upsala called “Vitterhetens Vänner” (see ). This passed away, but was succeeded in 1807 by the famous “Aurora

förbundet,” founded by two youths of genius, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom (1790-1855) and Vilhelm Frederik Palmblad (1788-1852). These young men had at first to endure bitter opposition and ridicule from the academic writers then in power, but they supported this with cheerfulness, and answered back in their magazines, Polyfem and Fosforos (1810-1813). They were named “Fosforisterna” (Phosphorists) from the latter. The principal members of the school were the three writers last named (see ) and Karl Frederik Dahlgren (1791-1844), a humorist who owed much to the example of Bellman. Fru Julia Nyberg (1785-1854), under the title of Euphrosyne, was their tenth Muse, and wrote agreeable lyrics. Among the Phosphorists Atterbom was the man of most genius. On the side of the Academy they were vigorously attacked by Per Adam Wallmark (1777-1858). One of them, Atterbom, eventually forced the doors of the Academy itself.

In 1811 certain young men in Stockholm founded a society for the elevation of society by means of the study of Scandinavian antiquity. This was the Gothic Society, which began to issue the magazine called Iduna as its organ. Of its patriotic editors the most prominent was

Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847), but he was presently joined by a young man slightly older than himself, Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846), afterwards bishop of Vexio, the greatest of Swedish writers (see and ). Even more enthusiastic than either in pushing to its last extreme the worship of ancient myths and manners was Per Henrik Ling (1776-1839), now better remembered as the father of gymnastic science than as a poet. The Gothic Society eventually included certain younger men than these—Arvid August Afzelius (1785-1871), the first editor of the Swedish folk-songs; Gustaf Vilhelm Gumælius (1789-1877), who has been somewhat pretentiously styled “The Swedish Walter Scott,” author of the historical novel of Tord Bonde; Baron Bernhard von Beskow (1796-1868), lyrist and dramatist; and Karl August Nicander (1799-1839), a poet who approached

the Phosphorists in manner. The two great lights of the Gothic school are Geijer, mainly in prose, and Tegnér, in his splendid and copious verse. Johan Olof Wallin (1779-1839) may be mentioned in the same category, although he is really distinct from all the schools. He was archbishop of Upsala, and in 1819 he published the national hymn-book of Sweden, now officially used in all churches; of the hymns in this collection, one hundred and twenty-six are written by Wallin himself.

From 1810 to 1840 was the blossoming-time in Swedish poetry, and there were several writers of distinguished merit who could not be included in either of the groups enumerated above. Second only to Tegnér in genius, the brief life and mysterious death of Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793-1823) have given a romantic interest to all that is connected with his name. His first publication was the epic of Vladimir the Great (1817); to this succeeded the romantic poem Blanda. His singular dramas, The Bacchantes (1822), Sigurd Ring, which was posthumous, and The Martyrs (1821), are esteemed by many critics to be his most original productions. His mystical lyrics, entitled Liljor i Saron (“Lilies in Sharon”), and his sonnets, which are the best in Swedish, may be recommended as among the most delicate products of the Scandinavian mind. Stagnelius has been compared, and not improperly, to Shelley. Erik Sjöberg, who called

himself “Vitalis” (1794-1828), was another gifted writer whose career was short and wretched. A volume of his poems appeared in 1820; they are few in number and all brief. His work divides itself into two classes—the one profoundly melancholy, the other witty or boisterous. Two humorous poets of the same period who deserve mention are Johan Anders Wadman (1777-1837), an improvisatore of the same class as Bellman, and Kristian Erik Fahlcrantz (1790-1866), bishop of Vesterås, whose humorous polemical poem of Noah's Ark (1825) is a masterpiece.

Among the poets who have been mentioned above, the majority distinguished themselves also in prose. But the period was not one in which Swedish prose shone with any special lustre. The first prosaist of the time was, without question, the novelist Karl Jonas Ludvig Almqvist (1793-1866), around whose extraordinary personal character and career a mythical romance has already collected (see ). He was encyclopædic in his range, although his stories preserve most charm; on whatever subject he wrote his style was always exquisite. Frederik Cederborgh (1784-1835) revived the comic novel in his Uno von Trasenberg and Ottar Tralling. The historical novels of Gumælius have already been alluded to. Swedish history supplied themes for the romances of Count Per Georg Sparre (1790-1871) and of Gustaf

Henrik Mellin (1803-1876). But all these writers sink before the sustained popularity of the Finnish poetess Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865), whose stories have reached farther into the distant provinces of the world of letters than the writings of any other Swede except Tegnér (see ). She was preceded by Sofia Zelow, afterwards Baroness von Knorring (1797-1848), who wrote a long series of aristocratic novels.

At the beginning of the romantic period a high position was taken as an independent thinker by Benjamin Höijer (1767-1812), who owed much at the outset to Kant and Fichte. Geijer also distinguished himself in philosophical writing, but the most original of Swedish philosophers has been Kristofer Jakob Boström (1797-1866), a peripatetic talker, who wrote little, but whose system has been reduced to literature by K. Claëson (1827-1859), Professor Axel Nyblæus (b. 1821), and other disciples. A polemical writer of great talent was Magnus Jakob