The novel is opened by that favourite device of Selma Lagerloef, the monologue, through which she pries into the very soul of her characters, in this case Ingmar, son of Ingmar, of Ingmar Farm.  Ingmar’s monologue at the plow is a subtle portrayal of an heroic battle between the forces of conscience and desire.  Although this prelude may be too subjective and involved to be readily digested by readers unfamiliar with the Swedish author’s method they will soon follow with intent interest into those pages that describe how Ingmar met at the prison door the girl for whose infanticide he was ethically responsible.  He brings her back apparently to face disgrace and to blot the fair scutcheon of the Ingmarssons, but actually to earn the respect of the whole community voiced in the declaration of the Dean:  “Now, Mother Martha, you can be proud of Ingmar!  It’s plain now he belongs to the old stock; so we must begin to call him ‘Big Ingmar.’”

In the course of the book we are introduced to two generations of Ingmars, and their love stories are quite as compelling as the religious motives of the book.  Forever unforgettable is the scene of the auction where Ingmar’s son renounces his beloved Gertrude and betroths himself to another in order to keep the old estate from passing out of the hands of the Ingmars.  Thus both of these heroes in our eyes “play yellow.”  On the other hand they have our sympathy, and the reader is tossed about by the alternate undertow of the strong currents which control the conduct of this farming folk.  Sometimes they obey only their own unerring instincts, as in that vivid situation of the shy, departing suitor when Karin Ingmarsson suddenly breaks through convention and publicly over the coffee cups declares herself betrothed.  The book is a succession of these brilliantly portrayed situations that clutch at the heartstrings—­the meetings in the mission house, the reconciliation scene when Ingmar’s battered watch is handed to the man he felt on his deathbed he had wronged, the dance on the night of the “wild hunt,” the shipwreck, Gertrude’s renunciation of her lover for her religion, the brother who buys the old farmstead so that his brother’s wife may have a home if she should ever return from the Holy Land.  As for the closing pages that describe the departure of the Jerusalem-farers, they are difficult to read aloud without a sob and a lump in the throat.

The underlying spiritual action of “Jerusalem” is the conflict of idealism with that impulse which is deep rooted in the rural communities of the old world, the love of home and the home soil.  It is a virtue unfortunately too dimly appreciated in restless America, though felt in some measure in the old communities of Massachusetts and Virginia, and Quaker homesteads near Philadelphia.  Among the peasant aristocracy of Dalecarlia attachment to the homestead is life itself.  In “Jerusalem” this emotion is pitted on the one hand against religion, on the other against love.  Hearts are broken in the struggle which permits Karin to sacrifice the Ingmar Farm to obey the inner voice that summons her on her religious pilgrimage, and which leads her brother, on the other hand, to abandon the girl of his heart and his life’s personal happiness in order to win back the farm.