Grimm's genuine admiration did not remain without effect upon thinking men in Germany. Gradually but steadily the circle of Emerson's influence widened. Julian Schmidt, Friedrich Spielhagen were affected by him; even Nietzsche could not resist his personality. From the eighties on, two Austrian writers helped to increase his following: Anton E. Schönbach, to whom we owe the first objectively critical account in German of Emerson's work, and Karl Federn, who first published a comprehensive translation of his essays. Just now a second, and more ambitious, edition of Emerson's works in German is being published in Leipzig. Meanwhile there has been gathering strength, independently from Emerson, a movement which is bound to draw still wider circles of German intellectual life toward Emerson, a reaction against the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the cynicism of Nietzsche, the soulless monotony of scientific specialization. Herman Grimm's own life-work, his incessant insistence on artistic culture, on a free, noble, reverent personality, was perhaps the initial force in this spiritual reawakening. But other and younger men have followed in his steps. The signs of the time are full of promise. The extraordinary success of such a book as Harnack's "Essence of Christianity"; the widespread influence of such a university teacher, such a wise, free, kindly man of ideals as Friedrich Paulsen; the devoted efforts of Pastor Naumann, of Bruno Wille, of Wilhelm Bölsche, and others, to win the masses back to spiritual hope and an enlightened faith; the new life kindled in poetry, the novel, and the drama,—all this is conclusive evidence that we are on the very verge of a new era of German idealism. And if it comes, there will come with it the demand: less Nietzsche and more Emerson; and a new intellectual bond between America and Germany will have been established.

T

RENÉ PUAUX

PARIS

HERE rings through my mind as I begin this study the line of

the poet Franzen, the oldest poet of Finland, "Ne pleure pas d'avance le jour qui ne fait que de naïtre." It seems almost a prophecy today when his country is even more harassed and worn than in 1809, a gloomy time when war was devastating the "country of a thousand lakes." It was concerned with the same enemy, whose honesty, however, could not be doubted. They fought with swords, it is true, but they did not make use of poison.

May Finland not despair, however, but listen once again to the voice of her beloved poet singing from the depths of the past, "Ne pleure pas d'avance le jour qui ne fait que de naïtre."

May she remember the trials and tribulations out of which she has emerged victorious, may she think of the mysterious symbol of her own life in nature, the long winter when the sky is dark and cold but which is always followed by the radiant summer when the sun shines in the sky night and day,-may she remember and take courage.

"The time will come," wrote M. Ch. Gide, "when those nations shall be rekindled, who have kept alight, even in the grave, one little spark of life; we are forced to believe that some day there will be a Paradise on earth wherein according to justice all those nations shall be found who have succeeded in winning for themselves an immortal soul. And Finland will be there."

Is not the life and personality of a people best shown in their literature, is not this the surest way of making known their presence to the civilized world and of revealing their soul! Thus, by pointing out the magnificent efforts that the Finns have made during the last century for the futherance of the art and the welfare of their country, I wish to assert my entire confidence in the future and its justice with respect to them.

I.

The literary history of Finland, correctly speaking, does not date back more than a century. Tossed about, from 1400 to 1809, between Sweden and Russia, devastated by continual wars, ruined by famines and invasions, she had neither the time nor the occasion to make known her

Translated by Susan Hilles Taber of Burlington, Vermont.

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

autonomous existence in any other way than by an heroic cohesion and resistance. Established in 1809, beneath the Russian protectorate, Finland understood that her fate was settled, that, for the future, her powerful neighbor and protector, having accomplished its aim, would esteem it an honor to protect its conquest and fight its battles; she felt that the time had come to lay down her arms and continue the struggle only with her plough and her pen, the weapon of thought.

Yet what a formidable loss of time confronted her as she considered the achievements of the other peoples of Western Europe; Germany mourned the recent death of Schiller and glorified Goethe in the apotheosis of his genius universally known; France guarded for herself the treasures of the century of Louis XIV., stirring the world by the clear sighted call of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and was so rich, indeed, in poets that she sent some of them to the guillotine to give scope, soon after, to the brilliant pleiades of the romanticists from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; England hung breathlessly upon the lips of that charming story teller, Walter Scott, enamored of her unique and delightful Byron, and strangely thrilled by the audacity of Shelley's thoughts; and Italy inscribed upon the list her famous names of Manzoni, Sylvio Gellico, and Leopardi.

How rich were all these peoples in comparison with little Finland who had nothing to offer to the world but the song of Franzen: "Ne pleure pas d'avance le jour qui ne fait que de naître." But her whole soul was in this.

She

The hand of fate had been long in marking upon the dial of history the hour of Finland's awakening; at length the hour had come. was able now to sing freely and superbly.

But literature does not invent itself; it is not made at the will of the first comer nor of the most skilful maker of rhymes; it is necessarily the product and reflection of the national thought; the poet does not direct his people, he expresses them.

Italy has given expression to the despair of death and the beatitude of the flesh, through her poets of passion, Dante and Gabriel d'Annunzio. England, cloudy and romantic, sentimental and gloomy, has produced "Macbeth" and "On the Road to Mandalay." Germany, placid and intelligent, argumentative and full of the joy of living, lays down, with her importunate serenity, the problems of thought from Luther to Nietzsche. France, the land of sunshine and gaiety, dispenses her wit freely, from the dullest to the most lively, Rabelais and Anatole France. What was left for them, the Finlanders, whose atmosphere had not the brilliant coloring of a sky of Naples or Amalfi, nor the smiling buoyancy of Touraine or

a Parisian street, nor the somewhat heavy but kindly richness of the hillsides of Saxony and the monotonous delicacy of a Kentish landscape ? They had their native land.

The others might have wit, intelligence, spleen, or passion, but none of them had the Finnish lakes and the Finlander's love for his little corner of the world. Their poetry discovered its own originality; it was to be national. But a fresh difficulty arose. Two different languages were used in Finland, the Swedish and Finnish. The people of the western coast who had been brought into constant association with the Swedish, spoke Swedish; they were the upper classes and were all related to the Swedish functionaries who, for five centuries, had governed the Grand Duchy. The great mass of the population, of pure Finnish or rather Tartar blood, still spoke and thought entirely in Finnish. The universities of Abo and Helsingfors taught in Swedish. Were not the future writers of the country to be recruited from their students, and was the literature of Finland doomed to be understood only by an eighth part of its population; was it to be a mere work of dilettantes, a modest and sterile branch of Swedish literature?

A great event caused this fear to disappear forever and brought about the realization of this motto, dear to the Finnish heart, "Two tongues and one thought!" This event was the birth of "The Kalevala."

II.

The night descends slowly upon the lakes of Savolak, the darkness effaces little by little the clear cut outlines of the pine covered hills, the boats return one by one from their fishing and are left for their night's rest upon the shore. In the distance, the cabins are lighted, the rosy light from the windows streams out upon the moss, a puff of blue smoke issues lightly from the chimneys. The meal is just finished. The fishermen are silent. Soft music, almost imperceptible, preludes in a few minor chords. Two men sit opposite, holding each other's hands. The silence grows even deeper; they begin to sing. What are these strange legends that come from their lips? From what collection have they gathered these mysterious, majestic tales. To what mythology do these heroes belong whose names are constantly repeated? This was a problem to tempt a philologist. The honor fell to Elias Lönnrot, born in 1802, the son of a poor village tailor in a distant foreign region. This young man, by dint of hard work and obstinate purpose, arrived at the University of Abo. He soon took his degree and, longing to be of help to his friendless countrymen, he chose a medical career. Although

his reason and sense of duty led him to prefer this vocation, the love of literature had long been a real passion with him. His interest had been awakened by reading some publications of the Doctor Zacharias Topelius, concerning a few epic songs, gathered from the lips of the singers of the Russian Carelie. Eager to seek this poetry at its very source, Lönnrot went to settle in Kajana, far away in the North, in the solitude beyond the frontiers of civilization.

There he began the gigantic work which was to make his name one of the most beloved and venerated in Finland. Going from cabin to cabin, healing the peasants and the fishermen, with admirable patience he gathered together the stories that the sick people sung to him as a mark of gratitude. Soon he perceived that a thread of narrative ran through all of these runic songs and little by little, he pieced together the story and published it under the name of "Kalevala." The publication of this gigantic epic,-it comprises more than twenty-two thousand lines,-met with an overwhelming success in all countries.

The contemporaries of Alcibiades, suddenly discovering the Iliad and the Odyssey, would not have felt a greater joy. At last Finland had a national literary treasure, she had a past, a claim to intellectual nobility. But before we analyze this monument, henceforth to be historic, it would be well for us first to pause and learn something of its origin and peculiarities, for they alone can reveal the whole heart of Finland.

The Finnish people, like all primitive peoples, made use of oral tradition, in order to preserve their legends, an inheritance at once literary and religious. Education by books necessarily resulted in the disappearance of the singers of the runes, who were called runviats.' Lönnrot recalls these words of one aged singer, eighty years old:

"Oh! why were you not there, during the fishing season when we rested around the lighted brazier on the shore ! One of our companions was a man of our village, a good runviat but not so good as my father. Every night so long as the fishing lasted, they would sing, my father and he, holding each other's hands and never once would the same rune be repeated. I was only a boy then, but I listened with a greedy curiosity and it was in this way that I learned the principal runes. Alas! I have already forgotten many of them. After my death, my sons will never be as good runviats as I was after the death of my father. They do not care today so much for the old songs as they did in my childhood; they still sing at the reunions, especially when they have been drinking, but they rarely sing anything of value. The young people hum songs with which I would not soil my lips."

The men were not the only ones to preserve these traditions and the

(1) Finnish singers who sang the sagas and songs to the sound of the kantele or harp, thus transmitting them from generation to generation.