688 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
needs most what these two seem to possess— 
hearts, trained fingers, and the power of 
throwing themselves into the moods of the 
poet. 
In Jensen’s energetic, vivid vers libre At 
Memphis Station, S. F. D. translates “go¬ 
loshes” as “rubbers.” 
‘Court the clamosel with roses and gold ring, 
And begin your saw-mill, like other people, 
lank on your rubbers regularly .... 
Look about you, smoke your sapient pipe 
In sphinx-deserted Memphis. . . 
In Philadelphia, S. F. D. would have said 
“gums” even at the risk of the rhythm, and 
“gum shoes” w r ould be more in the atmosphere 
of Tennessee. Memphis is not treated alto¬ 
gether justly by Jensen in his resounding 
verse, but if one reaches that station on a 
rainy night, even the inhabitants of that im¬ 
perial city ought to excuse him. 
Johannes Jorgensen is right when he speaks 
of the sensuous richness of Sophus Claussen. 
And for lightness and grace of Pan ,— 
“Pan sat and laughed, 
As he laughs all day, 
Except when he chooses 
To sit and play.” 
“Infinite richness in a little room,”—and 
just enough! The reticence of the editors is 
as admirable as their good taste. 
Maurice Francis Egan. 
Per Hallstrom: Selected Short Stories. 
Translated by F. J. Fielden, Scandinavian 
Classics, Volume XX. New York: The 
American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1922. 
Among the brilliant group of Swedish 
writers who burst out in the nineties Per 
Hallstrom holds an important place. Suc¬ 
cessful in verse, the novel and the drama, he 
is best known for his shorter prose fiction. 
Admirers of the typical French or American 
story will, however, find some difficulty in ac¬ 
cording him high rank. Different as are 
French ideals from ours in this field, the two 
are alike in their demands for compactness 
and proportion. A good short story, we have 
been taught to feel, should include nothing 
superfluous or extraneous. But we must re¬ 
vise any stereotyped rules if we are to ap¬ 
preciate Hallstrom. 
To get the right attitude we must form no 
preconception as to what a short story should 
be, granting the author his own method in 
each separate case, and reserving judgment 
until we have read the whole. This being 
done, we shall, I think, enjoy most of the 
present volume and find in it the development 
of new artistic possibilities. Whether in the 
end we may call the author an intelligent 
experimenter rather than a master will be a 
matter of taste. 
Hallstrom resembles Hawthorne in his 
stressing the idea rather than character In 
his fiction. Despite the realism of method to 
which nearly all modern writers are bound, 
we sense in these stories, if not an allegorical, 
at least a symbolic meaning. To present life 
cleverly for its own sake is not Hallstrom’s ! 
purpose, nor is it to evolve an ingenious plot.; 
Rather, as the sum of a given story, do we 
attain to a flash of both heightened moral 
beauty and a deepened philosophy of life. 
With dark seriousness as his prevailing mood, 
Hallstrom brings out a remarkable nobility 
and purity in his characters. Fie resembles j 
Hardy in the clear relief with which courage | 
and faithfulness stand out against the back¬ 
ground of untoward fate. This is peculiarly 
the case with Hidden Fires, which to my 
thinking is decidedly the masterpiece of the 
present volume. But the simple-hearted hero 
in A Secret Idyll is also much like Giles 
Winterbourne in The Woodlanders. Faith¬ 
fulness and courage! When truly incarnate, 
how can they fail to stir us to the inmost 
fibre ? 
But Hallstrom is a hard author to pigeon¬ 
hole either as to subject or treatment. Many 
periods, many types serve to bring out his 
genius. He has a distinct flair for the ro¬ 
mantic, as in his Don Juan story and the rich 
atmosjDhere of Carneola. In general, how¬ 
ever, he prefers a modern scene, with a char¬ 
acter of the down-and-out class as protagonist. 
His idealism challenges the crudeness of sor¬ 
did surroundings and triumphs the more from 
meeting such opposition squarely. But it is 
in the dramatic structure of his stories that 
Hallstrom seems most arbitrary. Though he 
can be clear and direct, he often prefers to 
confuse our sense of unity and to delay the 
action with digressions. He wishes, no doubt, 
to give a more naturalistic effect than that of 
the crystallized French type. His climaxes, 
therefore, often bring us a thrill of surprise 
quite different from the Jack-in-the-box sort 
to which we are accustomed. In this he is 
true to life, for do not the crises of the spirit 
often come in an apparently illogical way? 
