It slept for a few years, and when it awoke it was faced by a reality which suggested a miscalculation. There were murmurs here and there; the statesmen who had recently been lauded to the skies were now criticized. There were even, among the students, some who discovered that the whole movement had originated in a country which stood in very close relationship to the promoter of the Bill, and that the original could be found in a well-known handbook. But enough of it! Characteristic of these days was a certain embarrassment which soon took the form of universal discontent or, as it was called, opposition. But it was a new kind of opposition; it was not, as is generally the case, directed against the Government, but against Parliament. It was a Conservative opposition including Liberals as well as Conservatives, young men as well as old; there was much misery in the country.
Now it happened that the newspaper syndicate Grey Bonnet, born and grown up under Liberal auspices, fell asleep when it was called upon to defend unpopular views—if one may speak of the views of a syndicate. The directors proposed at the General Meeting that certain opinions should be changed, as they had the effect of decreasing the number of subscribers, necessary to the continuance of the enterprise. The General Meeting agreed to the proposition, and the Grey Bonnet became a Conservative paper. But there was a but, although it must be confessed that it did not greatly embarrass the syndicate; it was necessary to have a new chief editor to save the syndicate from ridicule; that no change need be made so far as the invisible editorial staff was concerned, went without saying. The chief editor, a man of honour, tendered his resignation. The editorial management, which had long been abused on account of its red colour, accepted it with pleasure, hoping thereby, without further trouble, to take rank as a better class paper. There only remained the necessity of finding a new chief editor. In accordance with the new programme of the syndicate, he would have to possess the following qualifications: he must be known as a perfectly trustworthy citizen; must belong to the official class; must possess a title, usurped or won, which could be elaborated if necessity arose. In addition to this he must be of good appearance, so that one could show him off at festivals and on other public occasions; he must be dependent; a little stupid, because true stupidity always goes hand in hand with Conservative leanings; he must be endowed with a certain amount of shrewdness, which would enable him to know intuitively the wishes of his chiefs and never let him forget that public and private welfare are, rightly understood, one and the same thing. At the same time he must not be too young, because an older man is more easily managed; and finally, he must be married, for the syndicate, which consisted of business men, knew perfectly well that married slaves are more amenable than unmarried ones.
The individual was discovered, and he was to a high degree endowed with all the characteristics enumerated. He was a strikingly handsome man with a fairly fine figure and a long, wavy beard, hiding all the weak points of his face, which otherwise would have given him away. His large, full, deceitful eyes caught the casual observer and inspired his confidence, which was then unscrupulously abused. His somewhat veiled voice, always speaking words of love, of peace, of honour and above all of patriotism, beguiled many a misguided listener, and brought him to the punch table where the excellent man spent his evenings, preaching straightforwardness and love of the Mother Country.
The influence which this man of honour exerted on his evil environment was marvellous; it could not be seen, but it could be heard. The whole pack, which for years had been let loose on everything time-honoured and venerable, which had not even let alone the higher things, was now restrained and full of love—not only for its old friends—was now—and not merely in its heart—moral and straightforward. They carried out in every detail the programme drawn up by the new editor on his accession, the cardinal points of which, expressed in a few words, were: to persecute all good ideas if they were new, to fight for and uphold all bad ones if they were old, to grovel before those in power, to extol all those on whom fortune was smiling, to push down all those who strove to rise, to adore success and abuse misfortune. Freely translated the programme read: to acknowledge and cheer only the tested and admittedly good, to work against the mania of innovation, and to persecute severely, but justly, everybody who was trying to get on by dishonest means, for honest work only should be crowned with success.
The secret of the last clause which the editorial staff had principally at heart was not difficult to discover. The staff consisted entirely of people whose hopes had been disappointed in one way or another; in most cases by their own fault—through drinking and recklessness. Some of them were "college geniuses," who in the past had enjoyed a great reputation as singers, speakers, poets or wits, and had then justly—or according to them unjustly—been forgotten. During a number of years it had been their business to praise and promote, frequently against their own inclination, everything that was new, all the enterprises started by reformers; it was, therefore, not strange that now they seized the opportunity to attack—under the most honourable pretexts—everything new, good or bad.
The chief editor in particular was great in tracking humbug and dishonesty. Whenever a delegate opposed a Bill which tended to injure the interests of the country for the sake of the party, he was immediately taken to task and called a humbug, trying to be original, longing for a ministerial dress-coat; he did not say portfolio, for he always thought of clothes first. Politics, however, was not his strong, or rather his weak point, but literature. In days long past, on the occasion of the Old Norse Festival at Upsala, he had proposed a toast in verse on woman, and thereby furnished an important contribution to the literature of the world; it was printed in as many provincial papers as the author considered necessary for his immortality. This had made him a poet, and when he had taken his degrees, he bought a second-class ticket to Stockholm, in order to make his début in the world and receive his due. Unfortunately the Stockholmers do not read provincial papers. The young man was unknown and his talent was not appreciated. As he was a shrewd man—his small brain had never been exuberantly imaginative—he concealed his wound and allowed it to become the secret of his life.
The bitterness engendered by the fact that his honest work, as he called it, remained unrewarded specially qualified him for the post of a literary censor; but he did not write himself: his position did not allow him to indulge in efforts of his own, and he preferred leaving it to the reviewer who criticized everybody's work justly and with inflexible severity. The reviewer had written poetry for the last sixteen years under a pseudonym. Nobody had ever read his verses and nobody had taken the trouble to discover the author's real name. But every Christmas his verses were exhumed and praised in the Grey Bonnet, by a third party, of course, who signed his article so that the public should not suspect that the author had written it himself—it was taken for granted that the author was known to the public. In the seventeenth year, the author considered it advisable to put his name to a new book—a new edition of an old one. As misfortune would have it, the Red Cap, the whole staff of which was composed of young people who had never heard the real name, treated the author as a beginner, and expressed astonishment, not only that a young writer should put his name to his first book, but also that a young man's book could be so monotonous and old-fashioned. This was a hard blow; the old "pseudonymus" fell ill with fever, but recovered after having been brilliantly rehabilitated by the Grey Bonnet; the latter went for the whole reading public in a lump, charging it with being immoral and dishonest, unable to appreciate an honest, sound, and moral book which could safely be put into the hands of a child. A comic paper made fun of the last point, so that the "pseudonymus" had a relapse, and, on his second recovery, vowed annihilation to all native literature which might appear in future; it did, however, not apply to quite all native literature, for a shrewd observer would have noticed that the Grey Bonnet frequently praised bad books; true, it was often done lamely and in terms which could be read in two ways. The same shrewd observer could have noticed that the miserable stuff in question was always published by the same firm; but this did not necessarily imply that the reviewer was influenced by extraneous circumstances, such as little lunches, for instance; he and the whole editorial staff were upright men who would surely not have dared to judge others with so much severity if they themselves had not been men of irreproachable character.
Another important member of the staff was the dramatic critic. He had received his education and qualified at a recruiting bureau in X-köping; had fallen in love with a "star" who was only a "star" in X-köping. As he was not sufficiently enlightened to differentiate between a private opinion and a universal verdict, it happened to him when he was for the first time let loose in the columns of the Grey Bonnet that he slated the greatest actress in Sweden, and maintained that she copied Miss——, whatever her name was. That it was done very clumsily goes without saying, and also that it happened before the Grey Bonnet had veered round. All this made his name detested and despised; but still, he had a name, and that compensated him for the indignation he excited. One of his cardinal points, although not at once appreciated, was his deafness. Several years went by before it was discovered, and even then nobody could tell whether or no it had any connexion with a certain encounter, caused by one of his notices, in the foyer of the Opera House, one evening after the lights had been turned down. After this encounter he tested the strength of his arm only on quite young people; and anybody familiar with the circumstances could tell by his critique when he had had an accident in the wings, for the conceited provincial had read somewhere the unreliable statement that Stockholm was another Paris, and had believed it.
The art critic was an old academician who had never held a brush in his hand, but was a member of the brilliant artists club "Minerva," a fact which enabled him to describe works of art in the columns of his paper before they were finished, thereby saving the reader the trouble of forming an opinion of his own. He was invariably kind to his acquaintances, and in criticizing an exhibition never forgot to mention every single one of them. His practice, of many years' standing, of saying something pretty about everybody—and how would he have dared to do otherwise—made it child's play to him to mention twenty names in half a column; in reading his reviews one could not help thinking of the popular game "pictures and devices." But the young artists he always conscientiously forgot, so that the public, which, for ten years had heard none but the old names, began to despair of the future of art. One exception, however, he had made, and made quite recently, in an unpropitious hour; and in consequence of this exception there was great excitement one morning in the editorial office of the Grey Bonnet.
What had occurred was this: Sellén—the reader may remember this insignificant name mentioned on a former, and not a particularly important occasion—had arrived with his picture at the exhibition at the very last moment. When it had been hung—in the worst possible place—for the artist was neither a member of the Academy nor did he possess the royal medal—the "professor of Charles IX" arrived; he had been given this nickname because he never painted anything but scenes from the life of Charles IX; the reason again for this was that a long time ago he had bought at an auction a wine glass, a tablecloth, a chair, and a parchment from the period of Charles IX; these objects he had painted for twenty years, sometimes with, sometimes without, the king. But he was a professor now and a knight of many orders, and so there was no help for it. He was with the academician when his eye fell on the silent man of the opposition and his picture.