Chapter 8

. The best exposition of Kipling, the poet, will be found in Andre Chevrillon’s _Three Studies in English Literature: Kipling, Galsworthy, Shakespeare_ (translated by Florence Simmonds). Katharine Fullerton Gerould, in her _Modes and Morals_, in the essay on “The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling,” offers a brilliant justification for Kipling as a prophetic and moral influence in English affairs. The literary investor should not let these aspects take his attention from the Kipling of _Plain Tales from the Hills_, of _Kim_ and of such short stories as “The Brushwood Boy” and “They.” A collection of rich, remarkably diversified, “gilt-edged” securities possessing the widest possible market and an almost universal currency.

Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish novelist, the only woman so far to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The quality of her work is best conveyed by the words of various critics. Edwin Björkman: “She has revived not only the courage but the ability to feel and dream and aspire that belonged to the scorned romanticists of the early nineteenth century. But this ... she has achieved for us without surrender of that intimate connection between poetry and real life which was established by the naturalists in the latter half of the same century.” J. B. Kerfoot, in Life: “The wise cannot find bottom nor the child get beyond its depth.” Attempted comparisons with George Eliot fail because Selma Lagerlöf has the fine Swedish folklore to enrich the roots of her work. “She is as national,” says Walter Prichard Eaton, “as a song by Grieg or a play of Tchekov. And like all deeply national art, it is therefore universal.” Hugo Alfven, the Swedish composer: “Reading Selma Lagerlöf 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 best approach is possibly through _The Story of Gösta Berling_. Her other great novels are _Jerusalem_, woven from the actual experience of Swedish colonists in the Holy Land, and _The Emperor of Portugallia_. Her _Nils_ stories for children are mentioned in