thinker and a wonderfully versatile writer. The last of the romantics,
he has been called a realist, a psychologist, and a symbolist, and he
was certainly something of all these, half a century before the terms
became battle-cries in literature, and came to designate literary
schools. One critic has made him out to have been a sort of forerunner
of Ibsen, while another calls him the most modern of classics. His
genius placed him in advance of his age in most things. He was the
first in the list of those Scandinavian revolutionists who have laid
out new landmarks in the field of thought, and introduced new methods
in fiction and the drama.

Liberalism, which spread like wildfire over Europe after its outbreak
in the July Revolution in France, reached Sweden soon after. It was
represented in literature by such men as Sturzen-Becker, Wetterbergh,
and Strandberg, writing under the names of Orvar Odd, Uncle Adam,
and Talis-Qualis; Blanche, who wrote stirring novels in the style
of Eugene Sue; Hjerta, and the staff of the then newly founded
_Aftonbladet_, who were revolutionizing the press. The press was
beginning to enlist the highest literary capacities of the country,
gradually becoming what it now is, a purveyor not only of news but of
thought, and a leader of opinion in literature and art, in science
and philosophy. In poetry, liberalism found its echo in the verses
of Malmström, Nybom, Schlstedt. In fiction its banner was carried by
three women, two of whom--well known in England and America--Frederica
Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class,
Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of
the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted
descriptions of life in aristocratic circles. All three were very
productive, and their novels count by dozens. Yet they failed to
sustain the reputations their first works had won for them.