in the practice and the preaching of Zola, Norwegian drama mainly through Ibsen, and Danish criticism in the essays and monographs of Georg Brandes. Unquestionably the greatest name in recent Swedish literature is that of Johan August Strindberg (q.v.; b. 1849). His drama of Master Olaf in 1878 began the revolutionary movement. In 1879 the success of his realistic novel, The Red Room, fixed universal attention upon his talent. It was the sensation caused in 1884 by the lawsuit brought against Strindberg’s Married (a collection of short stories dealing realistically with some of the seamy sides of marriage) which brought to a head the rebellion against the elegant and superficial conventions which were strangling Swedish literature. He affronts every canon of taste, more by a radical absence, it would seem, of the sense of proportion than by any desire to shock. His diatribes against woman suggest a touch of madness, and he was in fact at one time seized with an attack of insanity. He writes like a man whose view is distorted by physical or mental pain. His phraseology and his turns of invention are too empirically pseudoscientific for the simplicity of nature. With all these faults, and in spite of a terrible vulgarity of mind, an absence of humour, and a boundless confidence in the philosophy of Nietzsche, Strindberg is a writer of very remarkable power and unquestionable originality. His mind underwent singular transformations. After devoting himself wholly to realism of the coarsest kind, he began in 1889 his series of mystico-pathological novels about life in the archipelago of Stockholm. This led him to a culte du moi, of which the strangest result was an autobiography of crude invective, A Fool’s Confession (1893), the printing of which in Swedish was forbidden. He rapidly passed on, through books like Inferno (1897), the diary of a semi-lunatic, up into the sheer mysticism of To Damascus (1898), where he reconciles himself at last to Christianity. His best work is classic in its breadth of style, exquisite in local colour and fidelity to the national characteristics of Sweden.
A curious antidote to the harsh pessimism of Strindberg was offered by the delicate and fantastic temperament of Ola Hansson (b. 1860), whose poems came prominently before the public in 1884, and who, in Sensitiva amorosa (1887), preached a gospel of austere self-restraint. Hansson has been as ardent in the idolatry of woman as Strindberg has been in his hostility to the sex. Of those who have worked side by side with Strindberg, the most prominent and active was Gustaf af Geijerstam (b. 1858), in his curious and severely realistic studies of country life in his Poor People (1884) and other books. In 1885 he produced a gloomy sketch of student life at Upsala, Erik Grane, which made a great sensation. Since then Geijerstam has published more than forty volumes, and has become one of the most popular writers of the north of Europe. A melancholy interest surrounds the name of Victoria Benedictsson (Ernst Ahlgren, 1850–1889), who committed suicide in Copenhagen after achieving marked success with her sketches of humble life in Från Skåne, and with the more ambitious works Money and Marianne. She was perhaps the most original of the many women writers of modern Sweden, and Money was hailed by Swedish critics as the most important work of fiction since Strindberg’s Red Room. Her biography, a most affecting narrative, was published by Ellen Key, and her autobiography by Axel Lundegård (b. 1861), who, after some miscellaneous writing, produced in 1889 a curious novel of analysis called The Red Prince, and who, becoming a devout clerical, published a number of popular stories in a neo-romantic manner. In 1898–1900 he produced a historical trilogy, Struensee, tracing the career of the minister from his early years as a doctor in Altona to his final downfall. In 1904 appeared the first volume of a second historical trilogy, The Story of Queen Philippa. Fru Alfhild Agrell (née Martin), who was born in 1849, produced a series of plays dealing with the woman question, Rescued (1883) and others. She also showed great ability as a novelist, among the best of her books being a series of sketches of country life (1884–1887). An historical novelist of unequal powers, but great occasional merit, is Matilda Malling, née Kruse (b. 1864), whose romance about Napoleon (1894) enjoyed a huge success. Tor Hedberg (b. 1861) also began as a decided realist, and turned to a more psychological and idealist treatment of life. His most striking work was Judas (1886); he has written some excellent dramas. Late successes in the novel has been those of Hilma Angered-Strandberg (On the Prairie, 1898) and Gustaf Janson (Paradise, 1900). The most remarkable of the novelists of the latest group is Selma Lagerlöf (b. 1858), who achieved a great success with Gösta Berlings Saga in 1891–1892. She employs the Swedish language with an extraordinary richness and variety, and stands in the front rank of Swedish novelists. But perhaps the most cosmopolitan recent novelist of Sweden is Per Hallström (b. 1866), who spent much of his youth in America, and appeared as an imaginative writer first in 1891. He has published volumes of ballads, short stories and sketches, fantastic and humoristic, all admirable in style. His play, A Venetian Comedy, enjoyed a substantial success in 1904.
Among the recent lyrical poets of Sweden, the first to adopt the naturalistic manner was Albert Ulrik Bååth (b. 1853), whose earliest poems appeared in 1879. In his rebellion against the sweetness of Swedish convention he proved himself somewhat indifferent to beauty of form, returned to “early national” types of versification, and concentrated his attention on dismal and distressing conditions of life. He is a resolute, but, in his early volumes, harsh and rocky writer. From 1882 onwards Bååth was steadily productive. Karl Alfred Melin (b. 1849) has described in verse the life in the islands of the Stockholm archipelago. Among lyrists who have attracted attention in their various fields are Oskar Levertin (1862–1906) and Emil Kléen (1868–1898). Of these Levertin is the more highly coloured and perfumed, with an almost Oriental richness; Kléen has not been surpassed in the velvety softness of his language. But by far the most original and enjoyable lyrical genius of the later period is that of Gustaf Fröding (b. 1860), whose collection of poems, called Guitar and Accordion, humorous, amatory and pathetic, produced a great sensation in 1891. Three other volumes followed in 1894, 1895 and 1897, each displaying to further advantage the versatility and sensuous splendour of Fröding’s talent, as well as its somewhat scandalous recklessness. In 1897 he was struck down with insanity, and after three months' confinement in the asylum at Upsala, although he recovered his senses, all his joyousness and wildness had left him. He became gloomily religious, and in a new volume of poems he denounced all that he valued and enjoyed before his conversion. A younger poet is K. G. Ossian-Nilssen (b. 1875), the author of several volumes of vigorous dramatic and satiric verse.
The writer who was exercising most influence in Sweden at the opening of the 20th century was Verner von Heidenstam (b. 1859). He started authorship with a book of verse in 1888, after which time he led a reaction against realism and pessimism, and has turned back to a rich romantic idealism in his novels of Endymion (1889) and Hans Alienus (1892), and in his stories (1897) of the time of Charles XII. Heidenstam also published interesting volumes of literary criticism, and he is a lyrical poet of very high attainment. Miss Ellen Key (b. 1849), a secularist lecturer of great fervour, became an author in biographical and critical studies of remarkable originality. She is distinguished from Selma Lagerlöf, who is simply an artist, by her exercise of pure intellect; she is a moral leader; she has been called “the Pallas of Sweden.” She published in 1897 a biography of the Swedish author, Almqvist; in 1899 she collected her finest essays in the volume called Thought Pictures; in 1900 appeared, under the title Human Beings, studies of the Brownings and of Goethe; but the finest of Ellen Key’s books is The Century of Childhood (1901), a philosophical survey of the progress of elementary education in the last hundred years. She exercises a very remarkable power over the minds of the latest generation in Sweden. A polemical essayist of elaborate delicacy of style is Hjalmar Söderberg (b. 1869), who has been influenced by Strindberg and by Anatole
