Jerusalem

Jerusalem

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Jerusalem, by Selma Lagerl?f, et al, Translated by Velma Swanston Howard
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Title: Jerusalem
Author: Selma Lagerl?f
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 LAGERL?F
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 H?k 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 Lagerl?f, 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 Lagerl?f 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 Lagerl?f 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 Lagerl?f," says the Swedish composer, Hugo Alfv��n, "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 Lagerl?f. 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 Lagerl?f 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 Lagerl?f," declared the Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, "has the eyes of a child and the heart of a child." This na?vet�� 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 Lagerl?f 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 Lagerl?f 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, "G?sta 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 Lagerl?f's adopted home. They, too, have their dancing festivals at Midsummer Eve, and their dress is the most gorgeous in Sweden, but one thinks of them rather as a serious and solid community given to