Staël, her writings are "the most masculine productions of the
faculties of woman." Selma Lagerlöf occupies as a novelist a position
of her own. Her style and her manner in fiction are unique. Symbolism
and allegory are blended in it with the most realistic pictures of
everyday life. She thinks in parables, and describes realities, and
the realities convey the moral teachings of parables. With something
of the peculiar power of George Eliot in the delineation of character,
she makes each humble life preach some great moral truth. Her latest
book, _Jerusalem_, is one of extraordinary fascination, created quite
a sensation in Sweden, and places Selma Lagerlöf quite among the
foremost writers of the day.

It may in general be said of Swedish writers that they have a high
idea of their calling. Few, if any, have accepted as their sole
function the idealization of form. They hold mostly that the highest
aim of art should be to teach and elevate, to destroy prejudice and
conventionality, and indicate, in so far as it is possible, the
solution of moral problems through the creative faculty of inspired
productiveness. The wish to inculcate action, the energy that is
born of enthusiasm, the chivalry that is inspired by high ideals and
unselfish motives. Raised thus from the region of mere chronicles of
human passions, of woman's frailty and man's baseness, and exercising
themselves with the political, social, and religious problems of the
day, these works of imagination have become, alongside the Press, a
powerful factor in the development of modern thought.[f]




CHAPTER VII