Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/381

Rh ife when his songs had become widely known by means of written copies, they were collected and published. In this work he was aided by Kellgren, who from the outset had opposed his poetical tendency which was diametrically the opposite of Kellgren's own, but he gradually became one of Bellman's warmest admirers. The other academicians were also compelled to recognize the power of Bellman's genius, and the Academy awarded a prize to the author of "Fredmans Epistlar."

After his death Bellman was almost wholly forgotten until he was again dragged forth from obscurity by the romantic school, and now his songs are known and celebrated throughout the whole North. The old prejudices and misunderstandings according to which Bellman was looked upon as the cynic apostle of a fast life, have yielded to the more correct opinion that as a humorist and author of sparkling dithyrambics he is not himself in the midst of the world which he depicts, but far above it. His "Epistles" are partly burlesque and partly idyllic descriptions from popular life, and the characters in them have been taken from reality. Fredman himself, who died in 1767, was "a well-known watchmaker without watches, workshop or store," and the others, Ulla Winblad Mollberg, Mowitz, etc., were also well-known pot-house characters in Stockholm. But the descriptions of these persons and of their wild Bacchanalian life constitute only one side of Bellman's poetry; and were we to look exclusively at this side of his poems we should completely misunderstand their real character, which owes its fascinating power to the deep, elegiac tone that bursts forth from the midst of all his pictures and sparkles with passionate buoyancy; we would fail to appreciate the fact that Bellman regards all earthly existence as perishable and incomplete and that he continually longs for a higher existence, a longing that glimmers forth even from the merriest freaks of his imagination. In order to appreciate thoroughly this peculiarity of Bellman, the great humorist, to whom life appeared