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256
SWEDEN IN 1914 [chap. xv.
and see how Swedish virtues were extolled in the
account of the Thirty Years’ War and in that of the War
of the North. In novels the hero was generally some
good-looking youth of Dalecarlia, and the heroine a
frank and loyal Scandinavian maiden with
periwinkle-blue eyes. At this period the Swede was still much
attached to his Protestant religion; so Pan-German
theory emphasised the fact repeatedly that Reform was
the quintessence of the German mind, the incarnation of
the irresistible German flight towards truth and moral
independence. And all this was presented in a very
clever way. To pedants and those priding themselves
on their erudition—fat volumes full of propositions and
international difficulties ; to simple men and youths at
school—popular works either of a categorical and
almost imperious doctrine, or fanatical and vibrating. I
defy a young Swede to read the so-called history of the
Thirty Years’ War by Schiller—the work of an ardent
imagination aud of a pathetic Protestant
pietism—without feeling himself one with his German brothers in
religion, without communicating with them in the person
of the principal hero in the book, King Gustavus
Adolphus of Sweden. And this book is always seen in
the hands of every Swedish schoolboy.
But it was not only intellectual influences that caused
Sweden and Germany to draw nearer to one another;
the political events and situations of the last third of the
nineteenth century contributed to it decidedly. After
the defeat of France and the enormous increase in the
power of Prussia, now become the German Empire,
Swreden no longer had any reason to direct her policy
towards France. Everything in the North depended on
the trend of German policy: would it still continue to
cultivate the former friendly relations of Berlin with St.
Petersburg, if so it would be necessary to take care not
to incur the displeasure of either of these all-powerful
friends; if Germany should separate herself from
Russia and become frankly hostile to her, then it would
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