Page:Von Heidenstam - Sweden's laureate, selected poems of Verner von Heidenstam (1919).djvu/26

 and penetrating mind, he is perhaps most like Browning. He does not, however, often complicate his poetry with parentheses or diffuse himself in abstract speculation. With a painter's eye, he is consistently visual.

We shall best appreciate his work by determining his artistic creed. The present writer has elsewhere denominated him an "imaginative realist," but Heidenstam might properly resent being called a realist of any sort. Above all things he abhors uninspired naturalism; "gray-weather moods," he calls it. To his thinking Strindberg merely "let the cellar air escape through the house." He likewise repudiates pessimism no less than sentimentalism. Yet, he is no dodger of issues, no apostle of easy acquiescence. The solution of this apparent anomaly is that what Heidenstam seeks is not external fact but underlying truth. He wrestles with life for the deeper meaning of life. We may therefore call him an applied idealist, or perhaps better still, a vitalist.

Taking his three poetical volumes in detail, we can observe Heidenstam gradually winning his mastery over art and life. In the Pilgrimages we discover not mere description, but a series of striking ideas powerfully presented. Like most youthful poets, Heidenstam attacks superficiality, hypocrisy, and narrow moral restrictions. Most typical is where Mahmoud Khan reveals by a blow of his sword that the people's god is the priests' money-chest. The chief inspiration of the volume lies in