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Runeberg.

Ar the opening of the present century the monarchy of Sweden lay defenceless and almost moribund, supported in European opinion solely by the memory of its vast prestige. The dynasty of Wasa, which had held the crown for nearly two centuries, and from the hands of whose successive kings Sweden had received such matchless glory and such a world of sorrows, was approaching its last degeneracy in the person of Gustavus IV., a prim and melancholy bigot, touched with madness, and retaining of the iron will and clear intelligence of his ancestors nothing but a silly obstinacy and the ingenuity of a wizard maker of prophetic almanacks. The old order was passing, throughout Europe, and the new had scarcely taken fixed form or entity. Geographically Sweden had been dwindling throughout the eighteenth century, drying up, as it were, along the south shores of the Baltic: Courland was lost, Esthonia lost, even Pomerania was assailed. Finland, the most precious, the most extensive outland province, forming more than a fourth of the entire dominion, remained untouched, or almost untouched. There had not been wanting signs of Russian ambition working on the vast open frontier by Lake Ladoga. Already, before the century was half out, the great new power of eastern Europe had determined that its capital would never be secure until the Russian supremacy was acknowledged everywhere east of the Gulf of Bothnia. The Empress Elizabeth, while seizing the eastern counties of the province, had dangled before Finland the tempting hope of national independence under a protectorate of Russia. In 1788 the malcontent nobles, met at Anjala, offered to another great woman, to the Empress Catherine II., the dictatorship of Finland; but their treason infuriated the middle and lower classes, and when the Russian army commenced its invasion in 1789, it was met by a resistance as determined as it was unexpected. It was in this campaign that modern Finland first expressed itself; the war culminated in the battle of Porrasalm, a glorious victory for the Finns, in which Adlercrantz and Döbeln, afterwards so famous as generals, won their spurs. The peace of Wärälä, in 1790, left Finland full of the enthusiasm of military success, and loyal as a dependency of Sweden. But the murder of Gustavus III., at the Opera House of Stockholm, in 1792, brought the luckless Gustavus IV. to the throne, and reduced the nation to despair. One of the first events of the new reign was the loss of Pomerania. Finland now became the most precious, as it was the last, jewel in the Swedish crown; and to comfort his excellent Finnish

subjects, and to strengthen their hearts in the fear of Punaparte, as the Finns called Napoleon, the dreary monarch made a solemn tour through the province in 1802. Thus security reigned for a little while on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia, Europe in the meantime writhing, con vulsed by a conjunction of wars that threatened to conclude in chaos.

At this eventful moment there saw the light in a seaport of Finland the greatest poet that has ever used the Swedish tongue. Johan Ludvig Runeberg was born February 5th, 1804, at Jakobsstad, a little town halfway up the Gulf of Bothnia. He was the son of a merchant captain, and the eldest of six children. The straitened means of the parents induced them to accept the offer of the father's brother, a very well-to-do man in Uleåborg, who offered to adopt Johan Ludvig. Thither, therefore, far away north to the extreme town of the country, the child went. In Uleåborg he must have seen the birth-place of the greatest then-living poet of Finland, Franzèn, in whose steps he was afterwards to tread. We know little of his boyhood, except that at due age he was sent to the college at Wasa, and that he was so poor that he could only continue his studies there by serving as tutor to the younger and richer boys. But in the meantime changes of vast importance had occurred in the constitution of his country, changes to which he was destined in after life to give immortality by his art. In 1807, Napoleon had met Alexander I. at Tilsit, and had offered Finland to the Russian monarch in exchange for help against England. By one of those coincidences which give history the air of a well-planned sensation drama, the autocrat who now lies under a mass of Finnish porphyry in his Parisian tomb set out on the last great perilous enterprise which led him to his doom by the sacrifice of Finland to Russian ambition. In February 1808, three Russian armies broke into Finland. Like the troops who obeyed the summons from Anjala in 1788, these armies were grievously disappointed to find the fruit not ripe or ready to drop into their hand. Everywhere the Swedish sentiment was decided; the Finns rose in arms, 19,000 strong, and collected around the fortress of Tavasthus. But their resistance was, at firs', not very successful. The south of the province was overpowered. Sveaborg, an impregnable maritime citadel, the Gibraltar of the north, built by Augustin Ehrensvärd, in 1749, on seven islets at the entrance of the harbour of Helsingfors, was shamefully and treasonably surrendered. In May the Russians marched into Helsingfors. Meanwhile the Finlanders had a different fortune in the north, where, under two noble generals, Adlercrantz and Döbeln, they rallied their forces to defend the sea-coast and the Bothnia districts. On April 18, across the frozen river Sükajoki, the Swedes and Finlanders won their first victory, and defeated the Russians again, nine days later, at Revolax. A little later, Döbeln contrived to drive the enemy back from the walls of Nykarleby, and to win a signal victory at Lappo. But on September 14, 1808, Adlercrantz lost all but honour at the terrible battle of Oravais, the most fiercely contested and the decisive engagement of the campaign. Finland

was lost, and by the Peace of Fredrikshamn, on September 17, 1809, it was finally annexed, as a grand duchy, to the dominions of Russia.

Such were the events which agitated the childhood of Runeberg. In after life he clearly remembered seeing Döbeln and Kulneff, the Swedish general with the black band round his forehead that concealed the wound in the left temple which he bore away after the battle of Porrasahni, the Russian general with his bright eyes and long, brown beard. He saw them in the streets of Jakobsstad, when he was four years old, and this memory gave a particular colouring to his pictures of the war. Stories were repeated in his presence of the chivalric regard which each opponent had for the other, how Kulneff forbade his Cossacks to fire upon Döbeln, and how Döbeln's soldiers respected the person of Kulneff; and when he came to write Fänrik Ståls Sägner, there was to be found among the portraits of friends and patriots a noble tribute to the generous Russian leader also. It is noticeable that in the native literature of Finland, since the annexation, there is none of the tone of smothered insurrection which marks the atmosphere of Poland, or even the dull discontent of Esthonia and Courland. The Swedish Lutherans of Finland have been by far the best treated of all the dependants of the empire. No attempt has been made to force Russian upon them as their official language, no check has been put on the free development of the literature, even when, as in the case of Runeberg, that development has taken the form of deepening and extending the patriotic sentiment. The fact is, that under the casy Russian yoke Finland is more free than she was under the Wasas, and has actually attained that intellectual and spiritual independence which Porthan, her great citizen of the eighteenth century, dreamed for her—an independence which consists in liberty of thought, the spread of an education congenial to the nature of the people, and a free development of science and belles lettres.

In the autumn of 1822, Runeberg, then in his nineteenth year, left Wasa to enter a student life in the university of Åbo. He enjoyed few of the luxuries and the amenities which we identify with the existence of an undergraduate. Such a university life as is to be found in Aberdeen or St. Andrews presents a truer analogy with that in a Scandinavian town. Most of the students were poor, many of them extremely poor, and among these latter few had a harder struggle than Runeberg. In the spring of 1827 he successfully closed his examinations, and received the degree of doctor of philosophy. It was a little earlier than this that he made his first appearance before the literary public. One evening in 1826 a party of young people met at the house of Archbishop Tengström, the metropolitan of Finland; there was set on foot a game of forfeits, the last of which was lost by a student of the same of Runeberg. The young ladies put their heads together, and finally decided that, as he was suspected of writing verses, he should then and the compose a Hymn to the Sun. This he accomplished, nothing loth; and it was so highly approved of that Sjöström, then considered one of the chief Fin

nish poets, printed it forthwith in a newspaper of which he was the editor. The young poet had hardly received his degree, when an event occurred which entirely revolutionised his career. On a mild September evening in 1827, as the good people of Åbo were going to bed, they were alarmed to hear the tocsin furiously sounded from the tower of their cathedral. A girl had spilled some tallow, the tallow had taken fire, and in half an hour the wood-built city was in a blaze. The fire spread with infinite velocity, engulfed the university first, and then the cathedral; before the morning broke not an eighth of the flourishing capital of Finland still existed. In the confusion that ensued, the university was transferred to Helsingfors, a larger town further east on the Gulf of Finland, and this place has since then been the seat of government. Runeberg was left to choose his career. He decided to leave the sea-coast, where he associated only with educated persons using the Swedish language, and to penetrate into the heart of the country, by so doing to gain a knowledge of his beautiful fatherland and its singular aborigines. He therefore accepted a tutorship in a family living at Saarijärvi, a sequestered village in the heart of the country, on the high road between the Gulf of Bothnia and the White Sea. Here he had plenty of leisure to study the primitive life of the country people, among the desolate and impressive scenery of the interior. Saarijärvi lies on the extreme arm of one of the great winding lakes, that seen to meander for ever between forest and moorland, thickly dotted with innumerable islands. Round it stretch in every direction the interminable beechwoods, muffling the air with such a silence that the woodman's axe falls with a mysterious, almost with a sinister sound. There are few spots in Europe so utterly remote and inaccessible; the solitude is broken only by the farmer's cart, the footstep of some wandering Finn or Quain, or the voice of a Russian pedlar from Archangel singing loud to keep himself company through the woods. Here it was that Runeberg buried himself for three years. He had a good many books, mainly the Greek poets; he studied hard, whether nature was his master or Homer, and he set himself studiously to unlearn whatever his teachers had taught him of the art of Swedish poetry. The ruling genius of Sweden at that date was Tegner, the famous poet of Frithiofssaga, in whom the peculiarly Swedish vice of style, which consists in cultivating empty and sonorous phrases, had reached its climax. Tegnèr was a poet of great genius, but he had not the intellectual courage or the inclination to cast behind him the poetic phraseology of his day. Instead of doing this, instead of adopting a realistic style, he simply gilded and polished the old "ideal" language, and the practical result of his brilliant productions was to paralyse retry in Sweden for half a century. It was right that the voice whi was to do away for ever with this glitter and fustian should come out of the wilderness. Not in Lund or Upsala, but in an unknown village in the heart of the forests of Finland, the seed was germinating which was destined to fill the whole country with a flower of

a new sort, a veritable wood-rose to take the place of the fabulous asphodel. In Tegnèr the old forces that battled in Swedish literature had found a common ground, and, as it were, an apotheosis. There were no longer academic writers who loved the old French rules. "Phosphorists" who outdid Tieck and Novalis in mysticism, Gothic poets who sought to reconcile the antique Scandinavian myths to elegant manners and modern thoughts, all these warring groups united in Tegnér. Between Tegner and Runeberg the natural link is wanting. This link properly consists, it appears to me, in Longfellow, who is an anomaly in American literature, but who has the full character of a Swedish poet, and who, had he been born in Sweden, would have completed exactly enough the chain of style that ought to unite the idealism of Tegnér to the realism of Runeberg. The poem of Evangeline has really no place in Anglo-Saxon poetry; in Swedish it would accurately express a stage in the progress of literature which is now unfilled. It is known that Mr. Longfellow has cultivated the language of Sweden with much assiduity, and has contemplated literary life in that country with all the unconscious affection of a changeling.

The years spent by Runeberg at Saarijärvi were occupied in almost continual literary production. He wrote here the most important and most original works of his early manhood. Among these must be mentioned Svartsjukans nätter (Nights of Jealousy), a large part of his Lyrical Poems, and his great epic or idyl of Elgskyttarne, or The Elk Hunters. Of these the lyrical poems have lately been translated in their entirety by Messrs. Magnusson and Palmer (C. Kegan Paul and Co.), in a version remarkable for care and scholarship. They were originally published, together with a collection of Servian Folksongs, in 1830, and formed Runeberg's first published volume. This publication followed close upon the young writer's reappearance in the civilised world; he left his hermitage in that year to accept the post of amanuensis to the council of the university, now settled in Helsingfors. The volume was dedicated to Franzén, the poet-bishop of Hernösand, one of the most illustrious persons Finland had produced; a proem addressed to this eminent man breathes the same fresh and unconventional air that animates the body of the book itself, and also contains not a few traces of the study of the poet eulogised. In fact, the influence of Franzèn is strong throughout the early writings of Runeberg, a pure and genial, but not robust influence, which did the young poet no harm, and out of which he very speedily grew. Franzèn wrote to him a letter full of tenderness and prophecy. "I know," he had the generosity to write to this unknown beginner, "that it is a great poet that Finland is about to produce in you." The perfume of the violet and the song of the lark were strong in this book of thoroughly sincere and unaffected verses, and the public was not slow in acknowledging the Bishop of Hernösand to have been a true prophet.

In 1831 he attempted to win larger laurels than the coteries of Hel