This is his style: "O my friend, how criminal of me to have yielded to a passion which I was well aware would be my destruction! But I will at least die in the love of virtue and sacred truth; I will not charge Heaven with my misfortunes, as so many men in my plight do (what virtue); I will endure without complaint the suffering which I have brought upon myself, and which I love, although it is killing me. I will go when the Almighty calls me, burdened with many sins, but not with that of suicide." (ii. 63.)
Gustave is not a man. It is generally acknowledged that the portraiture of men is not the strong point of female authors. They almost invariably depict them as entirely absorbed in their relations with women. Gustave is, as already observed, a Scandinavian; but Scandinavians have no reason to be proud of this compatriot, in whom the vigour of the Northerner is conspicuously absent. The national colouring of the story is confined almost entirely to the Teutonic sentimentality in which the descriptions are immersed, and to a variety of Swedish names, which, it goes without saying, are as a rule incorrectly spelt. At Venice Gustave gives a fête in Valerie's honour; the decorations are intended to remind her of the home of her youth, amongst the birches and pines; when she catches sight of them she cries: "Ah! c'est Dronnigor" (Drottninggård).
There is nothing characteristically Swedish about Gustave. Really beautiful in the description of his character is the gleam of youthful philanthropic enthusiasm shed over his confessions. It seems to him that in most men's lives the period of love is succeeded by that of ambition. There is something fine and sincere in the language in which he tells that the glory others desire is not that which in his eyes has seemed desirable. "The glory of which I dreamed was won by occupying one's self with the happiness of all, as love occupies itself with the happiness of a single individual. It was virtue in the man who possessed it, before his fellow-men gave it the name of fame." And he adds: "What has real glory in common with the petty vanity of the many, with the pitiful contention that one is something because one is striving hard to be it?" It is strange to find sentiments like these in a book the fame of which was due to such artifices as were employed to puff _Valérie_.