Among the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature more than half are practically unknown to readers of English.
Of these there are surely few that would be more rewarding discoveries than Verner Von Heidenstam, the Swedish poet and novelist who received the award in 1916 and whose centennial was celebrated two years ago.
Equally a master of prose and verse, he recreates the glory of Sweden in the past and continues it into the present.
In the following sketch we shall present a brief outline of his life and let him as much as possible speak for himself.

Heidenstam was born in 1859, of a prosperous family.
On his father's side he was of German descent, on his mother's he came of the old Swedish nobility.
The family estate was situated near Vadstena on Lake Vattern in south central Sweden.
It is a lonely, rather desolate region, but full of legendary and historic associations.
As a boy in a local school he was shy and solitary, absorbed in his fondness for nature and his visions of Sweden's ancient glory.
He liked to fancy himself as a chieftain and to dress for the part.
Being somewhat delicate in health, at the age of sixteen he was sent to Southern Europe, for which he at once developed a passion, so that he spent nearly all of the following ten years abroad, at first in Italy, then in Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Palestine.
In one of his summers at home he married, to the great disapproval of his father, who objected because of his extreme youth.

Deciding to become a painter, he entered the studio of Gerome in Paris, where he enjoyed the life of the artists, but soon found that whatever talent he might have did not lie in that direction.
He gives us an account of this in his lively and humorous poem, "The Happy Artists".
"I scanned the world through printed symbol swart, And through the beggar's rags I strove to see The inner man.
I looked unceasingly With my cold mind and with my burning heart".
In this final line, we have the key to his nature.
Few writers have better understood their deepest selves.
Heidenstam could never be satisfied by surface.
It may, however, be noted that his gift for color and imagery must have been greatly stimulated by his stay in Paris.

The first result of Heidenstam's long sojourn abroad was a volume of poems, Pilgrimage And Wander-Years (Vallfart och Vandringsar), published in 1888.
It was a brilliant debut, so much so indeed that it aroused a new vitality in the younger poets, as did Byron's Childe Harold.
Professor Fredrik Book, Sweden's foremost critic of the period, acclaims it as follows: "In this we have the verse of a painter;
strongly colorful, plastic, racy, vivid.
In a bold, sometimes careless, form there is nothing academic;
all is seen and felt and experienced, the observation is sharp and the imagination lively.
The young poet-painter reproduces the French life of the streets;
he tells stories of the Thousand and One Nights, and conjures up before us the bazaars of Damascus.
In the care-free indolence of the East he sees the last reflection of the old happy existence, and for that reason he loves it.
And yet amid all the gay hedonism in Pilgrimage And Wander-Years is a cycle of short poems, "Thoughts In Loneliness", filled with brooding, melancholy, and sombre longing".

Of the longer pieces of the volume none is so memorable as "Nameless And Immortal", which at once took rank among the finest poems ever written in the Swedish language.
It celebrates the unknown architect who designed the temple of Neptune at Paestum, next to the Parthenon the noblest example of Grecian classic style now in existence.
On the eve of his return to their native Naxos he speaks with his wife of the masterpiece which rises before them in its completed perfection.
The supreme object of their lives is now fulfilled, says the wife, her husband has achieved immortality.
Not so, he answers, it is not the architect but the temple that is immortal.
"The man's true reputation is his work".

The short poems grouped at the end of the volume as "Thoughts in Loneliness" is, as Professor Book indicated, in sharp contrast with the others.
It consists of fragmentary personal revelations, such as "The Spark": "There is a spark dwells deep within my soul.
To get it out into the daylight's glow Is my life's aim both first and last, the whole.
It slips away, it burns and tortures me.
That little spark is all the wealth I know, That little spark is my life's misery".
A dominant motive is the poet's longing for his homeland and its boyhood associations: "Not men-folk, but the fields where I would stray, The stones where as a child I used to play".
He is utterly disappointed in himself and in the desultory life he has been leading.
What he really wants is to find "a sacred cause" to which he can honestly devote himself.
This restless individualism found its answer when he returned to live nearly all the rest of his life in Sweden.
His cause was to commemorate the glory of her past and to incite her people to perpetuate it in the present.

He did not, however, find himself at once.
His next major work, completed in 1892, was a long fantastic epic in prose, entitled Hans Alienus, which Professor Book describes as a monument on the grave of his carefree and indolent youth.
The hero, who is himself, is represented as a pilgrim in the storied lands of the East, a sort of Faustus type, who, to quote from Professor Book again, "even in the pleasure gardens of Sardanapalus can not cease from his painful search after the meaning of life.
He is driven back by his yearning to the wintry homeland of his fathers in the forest of Tiveden".

From this time on Heidenstam proceeded to find his deeper self.
By the death of his father in 1888 he had come into possession of the family estate and had re-assumed its traditions.
He did not, however, settle back into acquiescence with things as they were.
Like his friend and contemporary August Strindberg he had little patience with collective mediocrity.
He saw Sweden as a country of smug and narrow provincialism, indifferent to the heroic spirit of its former glory.
Strindberg's remedy for this condition was to tear down the old structures and build anew from the ground up.
Heidenstam's conception, on the contrary, was to revive the present by the memories of the past.

Whether in prose or poetry, all of Heidenstam's later work was concerned with Sweden.
With the first of a group of historical novels, The Charles Men (Karolinerna), published in 1897-8, he achieved the masterpiece of his career.
In scope and power it can only be compared to Tolstoy's War And Peace.
About one-third as long, it is less intimate and detailed, but better coordinated, more concise and more dramatic.
Though it centers around the brilliant and enigmatic figure of Charles 12,, the true hero is not finally the king himself.
Hence the title of the book, referring to the soldiers and subjects of the king;
on the fatal battlefield of Poltava, to quote from the novel, "the wreath he twined for himself slipped down upon his people".

The Charles Men consists not of a connected narrative but of a group of short stories, each depicting a special phase of the general subject.
Somewhat uneven in interest for an average reader, eight or ten of these are among the finest of their kind in literature.
They comprise a great variety of scene and interest: grim episodes of war, idyllic interludes, superb canvases of world-shaking events, and delightfully humorous sketches of odd characters.
The general effect is tragic.
Almost nothing is said of Charles' spectacular victories, the central theme being the heroic loyalty of the Swedish people to their idolized king in misfortune and defeat.

To carry out this exalted conception the author has combined the vivid realism and imaginative power we have noticed in his early poetry and carried them out on a grand scale.
His peculiar gift, as had been suggested before, is his intensity.
George Meredith has said that fervor is the core of style.
Of few authors is this more true than of Heidenstam.
The Charles Men has a tremendous range of characters, of common folk even more than of major figures.
The career of Charles 12, is obviously very similar to that of Napoleon.
His ideal was Alexander of Macedon, as Napoleon's was Julius Caesar.
His purpose, however, was not to establish an empire, but to assert the principle of divine justice.
Each aspired to be a god in human form, but with each it was a different kind of god.
Each failed catastrophically in an invasion of Russia and each brought ruin on the country that worshipped him.
Each is still glorified as a national hero.

The first half of The Charles Men, ending on the climax of the battle of Poltava in 1709, is more dramatically coherent than the second.
After the collapse of that desperate and ill-fated campaign the character of the king degenerated for a time into a futility that was not merely pitiable but often ridiculous.
Like Napoleon, he was the worst of losers.
There are, however, some wonderful chapters at the beginning of the second part, concerning the reactions of the Swedes in adversity.
Then more than ever before did they show their fortitude and patient cheerfulness.
This comes out in "When The Bells Ring", which describes the rallying of the peasants in southern Sweden to repel an invasion by the Danes.

In "The King's Ride", Charles breaks out of a long period of petulance and inertia, regains his old self, escapes from Turkey, and finally reaches his own land after an absence of eighteen years.
He finds it in utter misery and desolation.
All his people ask for is no more war.
But he plunges into yet another, this time with Norway, and is killed in an assault on the fortress of Fredrikshall, being only thirty-six years of age when he died.
He had become king at fifteen.

Then suddenly there was a tremendous revulsion of popular feeling.
From being a hated tyrant and madman he was now the symbol of all that was noblest and best in the history of Sweden.
This is brought out in the next to last chapter of the book, "A Hero's Funeral", written in the form of an impassioned prose poem.
Slowly the procession of warriors and statesmen passes through the snow beside the black water and into the brilliantly lighted cathedral, the shrine of so many precious memories.
The guns are fired, the hymns are sung, and the body of Charles is carried down to the vault and laid beside the tombs of his ancestors.
As he had longed to be, he became the echo of a saga.

Heidenstam wrote four other works of fiction about earlier figures revered in Swedish memory.
Excellent in their way, they lack the wide appeal of The Charles Men, and need not detain us here.
It is different with his volume The Swedes And Their Chieftains (Svenskarna och deras Hovdingar), a history intended for the general reader and particularly suited for high school students.
Admirably written, it is a perfect introduction to Swedish history for readers of other countries.
Some of the earlier episodes have touches of the supernatural, as suited to the legendary background.
These are suggestive of Selma Lagerlof.
Especially touching is the chapter, "The Little Sister", about a king's daughter who became a nun in the convent of St. Birgitta.
The record teems with romance and adventure.
Gustaf Vasa is a superb example, and Charles 10,, the conqueror of Denmark, hardly less so.
Of Gustavus Adolphus and Charles 12, it is unnecessary to speak.