Fairy-Tale Mysticism

Jerusalem, a Novel by Selma Lagerlöf (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York).

Those Scandinavians! I have often wondered at the combination of grim strength with childlike imaginativeness that we find in the artists of those pale cold lands. In the winter, at twilight, I like to sit with closed eyes and to relive old and new Norse sagas, the unbelievable wonders told or sung or painted with the perfect earnestness of absorbed children; I like to dream then to the accompaniment of the not-smiling music of the sad child, Edward Grieg.

Jerusalem is not a novel, not according to the terminology accepted heretofore. For—may I reveal a secret en passant?—we are on the eve of the publication of a novel by a Chicagoan who will revolutionize the prevailing literary classifications. Another thing which is not! Selma Lagerlöf is not a mystic, some of her friends want us to believe; not in the Maeterlinckian sense. The book is a series of tapestries to be hung in an ideal children’s-room; a web of fairy-tales told in the Scandinavian, unsmiling, earnest way. Mystic? Yes, as much as all fairy-tales are mystic, as much as all not “clever” and “wonderful” children are mystic. A mysticism which instead of lifting us up to the clouds brings the clouds down to us; instead of lending us wings and making us soar in imperceptible intangible regions, anthropomorphosizes gods and spirits and drags them down to terra firma. So convincing! We actually see the dead Ingmarssons gathered in a large farm house up in heaven; we see their ruddy hard faces, sandy hair, white eyes; we hear their slow, heavy, laconic talk. We are not surprised at meeting Christ among the pines in the glow of the autumnal sunset. The opening of heaven on a winter night before the eyes of the two Ingomars appears as ordinary reality. We are in a world where everything is simple, believable, possible. And you cannot smile; you are in an earnest childlike atmosphere.

Those Scandinavians!

K.