It was a cool night in the early part of October. The moon was up; a cold, moist wind was blowing. The big buildings on Blasieholm formed a dark mass, whose broken and irregular edge seemed to be catching at the wisps of cloud that drove forward against a deep-blue background. The still, heavy water of Nybro Inlet mirrored a broad glittering moonpath in oily rings, and along the wharves the lumber sloops raised a thin and motionless forest of masts and tackle. In the upper air was haste and tumult; the clouds hunted each other from west to east, till over the woods of Djurgården they congested into a low black wall. It was as if Heaven were breaking camp for a journey, for a flight.
The reader of Martin Birck will find any number of similar passages, in description, character-drawing and the power of the author to express his own reactions on life and art.
What manner of man is this quiet interpreter of the life about him? Hjalmar Söderberg was born in Stockholm, . The outward tenor of his way has been uneventful. After trying journalism in a provincial town he tired of “serving caviar to the Boeotians” and returned to his native city, the background of nearly all his work. He first achieved distinction in the “Storiettes,” miniature stories usually told in the first person and based on some casual incident of daily life. In this form he is unsurpassed. Martin Birck, his first novel, published in , was partly inspired by Niels Lyhne, the work of his elder Danish contemporary, J. P. Jacobsen, but was mainly autobiographical. Söderberg was also influenced by the modern French novelists, especially Flaubert, Maupassant and Anatole France. The last named he translated. He wrote two other novels, Dr. Glas and The Serious Game, and two plays, Gertrud and The Hour of Fate, besides numerous collections of short stories. His last long book is Jehovah’s Fire, an historico-religious narrative. Some early poems and a small sheaf of criticism complete the tally of his rather moderate output. Of recent years he has been living in Copenhagen. He has never married.
How little this dry recital of facts has to do with the real case in point! The genius of Söderberg is inherent in the temperament of the man. In appearance he is homely, stoutish, and suave, a bit Bohemian but decidedly a gentleman. Quiet, observant, unpretentious, and rather indolent, he gives an impression of infinite leisure and tolerance which is largely borne out by his writing. His mind is a rich, seemingly passive soil, in which small events take root and grow, as it were, without an effort on his part. Therein lies the unique charm of his stories; their unforced, organic quality.
But in the simplicity of Söderberg there is infinite subtlety. He lets life speak through him because he realizes that in the last analysis nothing speaks as persuasively as life. In his presentation there is a skill beyond praise. With all his naturalism and tranquillity of style, he gives us great moments, moments of profound insight, of wistful loveliness, of quaint and surprising humor. After all, things do not choose themselves or arrange themselves in right relation on the canvas; they only seem to do so. Without obtruding his personality Söderberg speaks to the mind and emotions of his audience in no uncertain terms.
What does he give us finally? First, perhaps, the delight of seeing nature and humanity clearly and the greater delight of entering imaginatively into the essence of both. His truth has the beauty of understanding. We find that life does not need to be idealized to be beautiful; it needs only to be realized. And as a corollary he gives us a sympathy in this manifestation which is not unlike that of Whitman, for it is the sympathy of acceptance. There is a tone of sadness, sometimes of almost tragic depth, in the knowledge of “what man has made of man,” and with it a smile of forgiveness. What we understand we pardon. Men and women are lovable in spite of, largely no doubt because of, their mistakes.
But also men and women are irresistibly funny. Söderberg has almost exactly the mood of Jaques in As You Like It. But whereas Jaques is dry, Söderberg is sly, with an ingenuous slyness that never, as with Sterne, slips off into a leer. How he enjoys letting his people amuse us, in watching with us their self-important gestures, the eternal passions that fade away in a month or a year, their curious delusions about fame and money and respectability! If these people could see themselves! And as we look, we may perhaps be a little mortified to see ourselves. How foolishly we have wasted our energies and annoyed those about us, for what? Perhaps we shall be a little more lenient to the faults of others from now on. The laughter which Söderberg evokes is thoughtful laughter.
Are we then given no positive impulse, is there no meaning in life, nothing worth striving for? “Perhaps not,” says Söderberg. And yet, pessimist though he is, he has a reticent pride of his own. He cannot, we feel, tell a lie, cannot force anyone in his stories to do or think anything that is not in character. Furthermore, he adumbrates through the philosophy of Martin the ideal of writing “so that each and all who really cared to could understand him.” And, like most of Söderberg’s simple statements, that means considerably more than appears on the surface.
Enough, perhaps more than enough, has been said to indicate the
