Jerusalem

Jerusalem

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Jerusalem, by Selma Lagerlöf, et al,
Translated by Velma Swanston Howard
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Title: Jerusalem
Author: Selma Lagerlöf
Translator: Velma Swanston Howard
Release Date: May 16, 2005 [eBook #15837]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
JERUSALEM***
E-text prepared by Nicole Apostola

JERUSALEM
A Novel
From the Swedish of
SELMA LAGERLÖF
Translated by VELMA SWANSTON HOWARD
With an Introduction by
HENRY GODDARD LEACH

CONTENTS
Introduction
BOOK ONE
The Ingmarssons
BOOK TWO

At the Schoolmaster's "And They Saw Heaven Open" Karin, Daughter
of Ingmar In Zion The Wild Hunt Hellgum The New Way
BOOK THREE
The Loss of "L'Univers" Hellgum's Letter The Big Log The Ingmar
Farm Hök Matts Ericsson The Auction Gertrude The Dean's Widow
The Departure of the Pilgrims

INTRODUCTION
As yet the only woman winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the
prize awarded to Kipling, Maeterlinck, and Hauptmann, is the Swedish
author of this book, "Jerusalem." The Swedish Academy, in
recognizing Miss Selma Lagerlöf, declared that they did so "for reason
of the noble idealism, the wealth of imagination, the soulful quality of
style, which characterize her works." Five years later, in 1914, that
august body elected Doctor Lagerlöf into their fellowship, and she is
thus the only woman among those eighteen "immortals."
What is the secret of the power that has made Miss Lagerlöf an author
acknowledged not alone as a classic in the schools but also as the most
popular and generally beloved writer in Scandinavia? She entered
Swedish literature at a period when the cold gray star of realism was in
the ascendant, when the trenchant pen of Strindberg had swept away
the cobwebs of unreality, and people were accustomed to plays and
novels almost brutal in their frankness. Wrapped in the mantle of a
latter-day romanticism, her soul filled with idealism, on the one hand
she transformed the crisp actualities of human experience by throwing
about them the glamour of the unknown, and on the other hand gave to
the unreal--to folk tale and fairy lore and local superstition--the
effectiveness of convincing fact. "Selma Lagerlöf," says the Swedish
composer, Hugo Alfvén, "is like sitting in the dusk of a Spanish
cathedral ... afterward one does not know whether what he has seen was
dream or reality, but certainly he has been on holy ground." The
average mind, whether Swedish or Anglo-Saxon, soon wearies of
heartless preciseness in literature and welcomes an idealism as
wholesome as that of Miss Lagerlöf. Furthermore, the Swedish
authoress attracts her readers by a diction unique unto herself, as
singular as the English sentences of Charles Lamb. Her style may be
described as prose rhapsody held in restraint, at times passionately

breaking its bonds.
Miss Lagerlöf has not been without her share of life's perplexities and
of contact with her fellowmen, it is by intuition that she works rather
than by experience. Otherwise, she could not have depicted in her
books such a multitude of characters from all parts of Europe. She sees
character with woman's warm and delicate sympathy and with the clear
vision of childhood. "Selma Lagerlöf," declared the Swedish critic,
Oscar Levertin, "has the eyes of a child and the heart of a child." This
naïveté is responsible for the simplicity of her character types. Deep
and sure they may be, but never too complex for the reader to
comprehend. The more varied characters--as the critic Johan Mortensen
has pointed out--like Hellgum, the mystic in "Jerusalem," are merely
indicated and shadowy. How unlike Ibsen! Selma Lagerlöf takes her
delight, not in developing the psychology of the unusual, but in
analyzing the motives and emotions of the normal mind. This accounts
for the comforting feeling of satisfaction and familiarity which comes
over one reading the chronicles of events so exceptionable as those
which occur in "Jerusalem."
In one of her books, "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils," Miss
Lagerlöf has sketched the national character of mart Swedish people in
reference to the various landscapes visited by the wild goose in its
flight. In another romance, "Gösta Berling," she has interpreted the life
of the province at Vermland, where she herself was born on a farmstead
in 1858. A love of starlight, violins, and dancing, a temperament easily
provoked to a laughing abandon of life's tragedy characterizes the folk
of Vermland and the impecunious gentry who live in its modest manor
halls. It is a different folk to whom one is introduced in "Jerusalem,"
the people of Dalecarlia, the province of Miss Lagerlöf's adopted