The drawings by Georg Pauli in later Swedish editions often resemble nothing so much as the illustrations by “Phiz,” Hablot Knight Browne, for Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Certainly there is a great deal of rollicking humor in Gösta, the “special Swedish exuberance” praised by Fredrik Böök—the eventual kingmaker of the Swedish Academy, the man behind Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize in 1929. Böök also fostered the belief that “the bitter and the negative” were “completely foreign” to Lagerlöf. The connoisseur of arts and letters Hans Emil Larsson wrote that “she can scarcely paint anything but the comfortable, the solid, the good,” perceptions that propelled Lagerlöf swiftly into the status not only of a national icon, but also of a dependable provider of benevolent parables.

Undoubtedly, the strong admixture of humor, on many levels, contributed to Gösta’s fame. Lagerlöf does not hesitate to undercut her loudmouthed hero as he and the trusty Beerencreutz, pulled in the sleigh by the black steed Don Juan, abduct the surprised but willing Elisabet Dohna from Sheriff Scharling’s birthday party at Munkerud: “Beerencreutz . . . look, this is life. Just as Don Juan races away with the young woman, so time races away with every person.” Beerencreutz tells him to shut up: “Now they’re coming after us!” Yet Gösta will not be silent: “I am Gösta Berling . . . lord of ten thousand kisses and thirteen thousand love letters. Cheers for Gösta Berling! Catch him, if you can!”

Gösta returns to Ekeby that night, in that wonderful epilogue to chapter 10, one of the parade pieces in the book. The old cavaliers want to sleep, but Gösta will not stop talking. “He just talks” (Han bara pratar, in plain Swedish). After he has held forth for a while, “a few snores began to sound behind the yellow-checked curtains,” but “most of [the cavaliers] swore and complained at him and his follies.”Lagerlöf’s Gösta resembles another splashy hero of European fiction of the time, D’Annunzio’s Andrea Sperelli in Il Piacere (Pleasure, 1889), the master of all the arts, the constant orator, the constant self-praiser. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, from 1890, likewise unbelievably gifted and handsome, comes to a fall far more radical than Andrea’s or Gösta’s—he is perhaps fetched by the devil, as he loses his eternal youth. Gösta, maybe, is in danger of being fetched by the evil one too. Still, as Sintram points out, he is not yet ripe.

Like Andrea and, more discreetly, Dorian, Gösta is a seducer: the point is made repeatedly. However, the Danish critic Georg Brandes, himself notoriously priapic—in 1888 he drove the Scanian novelist Victoria Benedictsson, abandoned by him, to suicide—cast doubt on Gösta’s ultimate success with the ladies, an omission Brandes naughtily attributed to Selma’s inexperience: “throughout, one feels that the narrator is a maiden lady, for whom a large area of life . . . is a closed book.” Seemingly, Gösta takes none of his loves to bed, not Anna Stjärnhök, not Marianne Sinclaire, not even Elisabet, after their hole-in-the-corner marriage. For Brandes, the embraces “are cold as snow and the night.” The sparks of carnal fire ignited by Anna, Marianne, Elisabet, flicker out quickly.

In 1942 Elin Wägner said that Gösta was “a diaphanous and elusive figure,” and Brandes thought that “psychology was the weak side” of the Saga. “The outlines of his form are given, but never more than the outlines. He stands before the reader, living, only in each separate situation, never as a whole, never as a human being.” These strictures are unfair to Lagerlöf’s implicative artistry. Gösta, an inordinately gifted speaker when the fit is on him, also has a gift for self-pity (he imagines his congregation rising up against him) and self-exculpation. He is vain, taking his revenge on the countess when she rejects his invitation to dance; it is “no honor,” she says, to dance with the man who has refused to help free his benefactress, the majoress. He is the poet who has never written poetry (so he says), but when he does, the product is ever so slightly mawkish, far less gripping than the sincere verses of rejected Marianne Sinclaire. Cowardly on occasion, he is also brave, soft-hearted, and empathetic: confronted by an animal “poet” and “king,” he cannot bring himself to shoot the charging bear at Gurlita Bluff.

He can be thoughtlessly cruel: he decks out the dead-drunk Captain Lennart—the ex-convict, come home to his wife—as a robber. The deed resembles the nasty trick played on the drunken visitor in Rudyard Kipling’s “A Friend’s Friend” in Plain Tales from the Hills; but there the victim deserves the treatment.