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On the 29th great celebrations were held in Stockholm and other cities and at the old university town of Upsala the speakers were the Archbishop, Dr. Selma Lagerlöf and Prime Minister Brantung. It was not all ended, however, for the measure had to pass a second Parliament, although this was a mere matter of form. The elections took place in the autumn of 1920.
"Selma Lagerlöf," declared the Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, "has the eyes of a child and the heart of a child." This naïveté is responsible for the simplicity of her character types. Deep and sure they may be, but never too complex for the reader to comprehend.
"Selma Lagerlöf," says the Swedish composer, Hugo Alfvén, "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 Lagerlöf.
She called Frederika Bremer the first feminist and "last old Mamsell" of Sweden, meaning that Frederika Bremer's life's work had banished the "old maid" from the realm of pitiful figures. Selma Lagerlof was herself proof of her statement. In The Treasure, written midway between her farewell to Frederika Bremer and her plea for woman suffrage, the men are interested in money, murder, and revenge.
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 Lagerlöf, declared that they did so "for reason of the noble idealism, the wealth of imagination, the soulful quality of style, which characterize her works."
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 Lagerlöf takes her delight, not in developing the psychology of the unusual, but in analyzing the motives and emotions of the normal mind.
Five years later, in 1914, that august body elected Doctor Lagerlöf 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 Lagerlöf an author acknowledged not alone as a classic in the schools but also as the most popular and generally beloved writer in Scandinavia?
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