"The bards praise Gerda's fair cheeks too high,Fresh snows which playful north-lights dye!I cheeks have seen whose daylights clear,Two dawnings blushing in one sphere."[5]
It would be unjust to cite this last stanza as an adequate specimen of Tegnér's picturesque method; nevertheless there is something typical in it. Most of the similitudes produced by the fancy of Tegnér, so far exceed the brilliancy of nature, that to me they appear very much the same as the image he makes his Ingeborg weave of Fridthjofs falcon:—
"Here on his hand,Work I thy form on the cloth's broad band;Pinions of silver, and glowingGold talons sewing."[6]
With a predilection of this kind, something conventional and stiff can scarcely be avoided. The inclination to transform every idea into a figure beguiles Tegnér, in uninspired moments, into a common-place use of once-applied similes, which keep recurring in an almost stereotyped way. Thus he has (merely to keep to the birds) a few bird forms which he never wearies of dragging in eagle, nightingale, and dove. They stand as equivalents for strength, poetry, and piety. The eagle used for this purpose by Tegnér retains no more of the nature of the real eagle than may be seen in the eagles that adorn royal escutcheons; Tegnér's eagle is purely heraldic. In his poetry may be found lines like these: "Alas! poor Psyche, fly as she will, on earth she is but an eagle with butterfly's pinions"; or similes like the following: "Within her throat a nightingale she carried, and a snow-white dove by night and by day did linger in her bosom." An eagle with butterfly pinions is a creature totally contrary to nature, and when a nightingale is firmly fixed in a female throat, it does not exactly contribute to the perspicuity of the thought.
In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct it.
Tegnér was born about the middle of the reign of Gustavus III. The assassination took place when he was ten years old; consequently he, who in later years was so fond of styling himself a Gustavian, had childish reminiscences alone of that period, and no other personal impressions of the character of Gustavus than those gained at second hand from a legend, embellished or idealized by tender hands. Even this was scarcely needed to make the period seem like one of rare brilliancy, in comparison with the leaden epoch which followed. Gustavus III. was a man of great energy, endowed with remarkable talents, unusual virtues, and dazzling vices; he was a vain despot, yet had an enlightened mind; he was one of the many crowned followers of Voltaire that were the product of the eighteenth century; he was full of superstition and yet a free-thinker, frivolous yet intellectual, in matters of trifling import displaying a petty spirit, but having traits of true greatness; he was brave, magnanimous, a hero of the stage, with genuine courage in his breast. During his whole life he attracted about him, through the magic of his mental powers, all the gifted literary men of his land, especially the poets, who saw in him a colleague; not one of them could boast so distinctly marked a dramatic talent as his. Thus it was that for a long time he imprinted upon the manners, the forms of speech, the literature of Sweden, the stamp of an exquisitely refined, light, frivolous culture; and it is the conversational tone of his day that invested Tegnér's letters, even in the reign of Charles John (Bernadotte), with their grace and their soaring flights of fancy. His was a form that had remained fixed in history, like one of Bernini's admirable statues; full of mannerism, coquettish, affected, if you will, with airily rustling drapery, but presenting an attitude that was bold and unflinching, and producing an impression of the most profound significance. Nor could this be denied, however little satisfaction might be taken in the figure. And what had come after him? First, the regency of the brother of Gustavus, the duke of Södermanland, which embraces the period from Tegnér's tenth to his fourteenth year. The regent, a wretched imbecile, who had grown prematurely gray in the service of Venus, and who was well adapted to be the prey of every Phryne and every Cagliostro, was wholly governed by his favorite Reuterholm, who represented the type of brutal and incompetent passion for rule. Not from love of freedom, but simply as an indirect way of censuring the murdered king, these empty-pated men introduced freedom of the press into Sweden, and, without any preparation or gradual transition, all the inflammatory writings of the French Revolution now flooded the land. The long-continued ignorance concerning what was transpiring in France and throughout Europe was followed by a tumultuous and immature enthusiasm for freedom. During the reign of Gustavus the word republican was still synonymous with the word philosopher; so that in the year 1789 a courtier like Rosenstein could commend his nephew to the king by stating that the young man, although somewhat infected with republican views, had kept these so well within bounds that they "only served to increase his love for hisking,his fatherland, and honor." Later, as contrasted with the pitiful wreck on the throne, the word became invested with a more accurate significance. With eager suspense the people followed the defensive war of the French Republic; its victory was decisive for public opinion; the peaceful citizens of the small towns of Sweden spoke in the same tone as the extreme left of the French convention.
No sooner had that misfortune occurred than the freedom of the press, established half a year earlier with so much false pathos, was abolished, and throughout Sweden the persecution of Jacobinism became rife; even the loyal Swedish Academy, because it voted against admitting to its membership the totally uncultured favorite of the regent, was treated as a Jacobin club, and closed.
An act of baseness of the worst sort caused contempt to reach its climax. The conspiracy of Armfelt, the Swedish Alcibiades, was discovered, and the duke-regent endeavored to avail himself of this opportunity to make the fair young Mlle. Rudenskjöld, one of the ornaments of the court, cruelly atone for the obstinacy with which she had rejected the gallant propositions of the aged married libertine. Intercepted letters furnishing proofs that Armfelt had been her lover, she was arrested, and accused of being a participator in his crime; but when the duke, through his chancellor, judicially ordered her to be whipped on the public market-place for her immorality, the exasperated populace branded him with so deep a stigma that it could neither be effaced by time, nor covered with the white hairs of old age; not even the deportment of Bernadotte toward Charles XIII., with its wily assumption of simplicity, could bury it in oblivion.
While all these events were taking place, Tegnér was still too young to be able to enter into or understand them; but the after effects on his mind were profound and strong. No remote corner of the land was too far distant to be reached by the sparks from the crater of the revolution; no youth, whose intelligence had once been aroused, was so absorbed in his studies that he escaped hearing outbursts of contempt for royalty and government, which he at once applied to his own land. Persecuted "Enlightenment" became a magic, a beloved word to every youth. The Swedish Academy, which under other circumstances might readily have become an object of his displeasure, simply as an academy, as an official and antiquated institution for the gilding of mediocrity, very early appeared to Tegnér as a knightguard of the light, the worth of which had been fully tested. The prevailing revolutionary spirit had no power over his harmonious soul, and only led him to the conditional royalism which is revealed throughout his writings. He was in favor of royalty when the king was worthy of his throne, not otherwise.
In the year 1796 the regency came to an end, and from that time until 1809 (that is, from Tegnér's fourteenth to his twenty-seventh year), Gustavus (IV.) Adolphus reigned as king. Pedantically honorable, rigidly grave, rigorously frugal as this monarch was, he could not but produce, when he first appeared upon the stage, a pleasing contrast to his uncle. It soon became apparent, however, that this youthful form was wholly unnational. The physiognomy proved to be rather Spanish than Swedish. Gustavus IV. bears a striking resemblance to the type of regents of the Spanish decadence, with character modelled after the great, lamentable shadow of Philip II., who held sway in Madrid so long after his death. The same petty adherence to etiquette, the same haughty gloom, the same awkward formality, the same melancholy piety, combined with fanatic faith in royalty by the grace of God. The court which, ten years earlier, had presented the appearance of a festal painting by Watteau, was now as quiet and as ceremonious as the Spanish court under Charles II., and even the great Philip could not have punished the crime of lèse-majesty with more severity than Gustavus, the fault of neglecting to raise the hat in the street to him. In Rosenstein he had had a noble tutor, with a thoroughly independent mind. Gustavus III. had permitted this most honorable instructor to have full sway. "Rosenstein has my full consent to educate my son as a philosopher," said he; "the boy will be a royalist as soon as he ascends the throne." This father, as a matter of course, was in nowise responsible for that inflexible faith in revealed religion which allowed his son to read in the Apocalypse prophecies concerning his own destiny. The fact was, the reaction with which, amid the fitful changes of the century, the air was everywhere freighted, had stolen through secret by-paths into the mind of the crown prince, and had completely overpowered it. The frivolity of the father, to be sure, had served as a warning, and had given the first backward impulse; the murder of the father gave the second. Soon Gustavus IV. had gone farther in his ever-present consciousness of majesty than any Bourbon. He forbade the daily papers to use the pronoun "we" in such applications as, "We are waiting with impatience for news," "We have had a severe winter," because this seemed to him equivalent to an encroachment on that royal prerogative which is known asPluralis majestatis.All the publications that appeared in the land were subjected by his orders to the strictest supervision; and personally he cherished so great a horror of books that he burst into loud utterances of delight whenever he heard that a printing-house had failed. He himself never read anything except his Bible and the regulation work on military tactics.
And this was the king, who, in the foolish war against Napoleon, never rested until he had lost Stralsund and Rügen, and whose insane war against Russia led to the definite conquest of all Finland by a Russian army. Runeberg in his poem "The King" in "Fänrik (Ensign) Staal," has erected for Gustavus IV. the monument he deserved. In the year 1809 a couple of courageous officers compelled him to abdicate the throne. The duke of Södermanland followed him as Charles XIII., and it was shortly afterward, when the adopted son of the latter died, that the French party in Sweden, through a mistaken idea of pleasing Napoleon and the illusory hope of thus winning back Finland, had Bernadotte chosen crown prince. His form emerged in a brilliant light from the gloomy background of the shadows of his predecessors. During a period of thirty-three years, the celebrated commander-in-chief guided the politics of Sweden; and this king whose reign is contemporaneous with Tegnér's most vigorous years, shares with Tegnér the honor of having given the name to the generation he ruled over. The period from 1810 to 1840 belongs to Charles John, and to Tegnér.
Such are the pictures of the rulers who at that time, one after another, imprinted their physiognomies on Sweden, and whose profiles are stamped on the coins that passed through the fingers of Tegnér when he was a child, a clerk, a student, and amagister.
Tegnér is instructor (docent) at the University of Lund; he is twenty-two years old, and is passing his summer vacation on the Rämen estate in the Myhrmann family, with whose youngest daughter, Anna, he is betrothed.
Here one day in September there appears, on a visit, the afterward so celebrated historian and poet, Erik Gustav Geijer, a young man of Tegnér's own age, who is freighted with the latest wisdom of the day, and bubbling over with a youthful impulse to impart and discuss his ideas. He makes attempt after attempt to approach Tegnér, but fails to find common ground on which they can meet. The slender son-in-law elect of the house is variable and full of moods, an enamored dreamer, a laughing mocker. There is a glitter of merriment in his eyes, his words are flashes of lightning. It is no more possible to follow the channel of his thoughts than the course of the sunbeam through the foliage. The two young people are taking a walk together and have entered into a discussion on the way. Let us listen to what they are saying. The leader of the conversation is Geijer, who asks,—
"What Tegnér really thinks of the civilization of this locality? If he does not believe that all the so-called popular enlightenment is an evil? He, Geijer, looks on the sound reason of the masses as the most unfortunate delusion that it could ever occur to any one to venerate. Only the chosen ones of humanity had the higher sense which enabled them to grasp science in its full truth. Was not that the opinion also of theHerr Docent?"
"No, not by any means; he would call that mysticism."
"Mysticism! What did Tegnér understand by mysticism?"
"Well, to lie flat on one's back, to take a little nap and allow one's self to be shadowed by the power of the Most High."
"Seriously speaking, did Tegnér admit of no intellectual intuition?"
"No, he cared nothing for the Teutonic mania—but he cared all the more for blueberries;" and just here there were growing some most excellent ones in the enjoyment of which he became profoundly absorbed: "Moreover, he did not doubt that Geijer understood the matter better than he did; he (Tegnér) had always heard Geijer called a genius, and such people only could meddle with philosophy. He, for his part, who knew of himself that no more reason than was absolutely necessary to carry him through the world had fallen to his lot, was not very fond of playing blindman's-buff, except with pretty young girls, and enjoyed least of all to do it with such learned gentlemen as Kant and Schelling."
"But without mysteries and without mysticism there was no religion."
"Did Geijer recognize the faculty in Lund, or not? This honorable body of pedants had accorded to him, Tegnér, the well-merited testimony that he led a quiet, God-fearing life, something that in these latter days was rare enough. On the other hand, so far as the dogma deemed so highly essential to salvation, the doctrine of the Trinity, was concerned, it was wholly beyond his intellectual horizon."
"Nevertheless, it could very easily be explained. There was no contradiction in the idea of the Trinity; for the antithesis already presupposed unity. God as the absolute being was not created, but had been from all eternity, and yet, must be conceived as an existing Being, for He is the creator of all things, and is in all things. The simple solution of this seeming contradiction was, that the parts which mutually presupposed one another were in reality one; the Redeemer and the Father, speculatively comprehended, were one, although not a unit.... Was not that clear to every nobly born mind?"
Tegnér, who was quite lost in the contemplation of the gambols of a wagtail, replied absently, "That he did not recognize the privileges of nobility."
"In what sense not? Geijer, in the highest degree, advocated hereditary aristocracy."
"And I," replied his opponent, his mouth full of blueberries, "I was always, from childhood up, a bit of a Jacobin."
This word had, as already indicated, a less terror-inspiring significance in Sweden than in France, apart from the fact that from Tegnér's lips it came half as a jest. But in the jest there lay the earnest verity that he belonged to the honest friends of freedom in civil life and in thought, who had not been intimidated by the bloody deeds of the Revolution. With genuine horror he had perceived, in the beginning of the century, the approach from the South of the religio-political reaction in Sweden, and it was as yet an unenrolled soldier in the army of the civilization of enlightenment that here ran against one of the first and farthest removed outposts of romantic feudalism.
Tegnér, in common with all the prominent men whose youth fell at the close of the eighteenth century, came into the world early enough to steer out into life with sails inflated by the great cosmopolitan wind of freedom, then sweeping over the earth. His earliest reading was the Gustavian classics of Sweden, which were based on Locke, so far as their philosophy was concerned, and on Voltaire in regard to their literary tendencies. Both Kellgren and Leopold were disciples of Voltaire, and both were political liberals, who did not even attempt to conceal their convictions at court. They were careful not to wound the religious sentiments of the multitude by scoffing; but they cherished all the traditions of the century, and fought in their behalf a brilliant fight. Kellgren's satiric poem, "The Enemies of Light," was a banner. In the same direction as the poetry of these men, only fraught with even more poetic fruitfulness, Schiller's influence guided young Tegnér. On the boundary line of youth, like Schiller, he celebrates enlightenment in a poem on Rousseau, and he writes reflective verses, in the spirit of the times, on such themes as religion, culture, and tolerance.
Neither family tradition nor the force of education led the priest's son to opposition to Christian dogmas. Together with all the rest of his intellectually awakened contemporaries he had received, when yet a boy, the cold douche of Voltaire. When sixteen years old he wrote: "I am now reading Voltaire; but I do not see how I can get through even the most important and most essential parts. It is all admirable, and it is difficult to choose among so many beauties." Most of the young men of his day who had entertained similar presumptions, were quickly borne by the altered spirit of the times to religious conservatism. For this Tegnér was too honest and too great. What insured him from losing his independence in religious matters was that vigorous element of his being, called by himself the pagan element, that was the natural result of the solid structure and the genuine steadfastness of his character. Two classes of men about him were swept onward in the reaction against the eighteenth century, with such force that they were borne by it to orthodoxy, and to feudalism. One class was composed of authors whose natures were inclined to run through the whole scale of the emotions of the Middle Ages, that is,—rather in fancy than in reality,—to give way to contrition and self-contempt in order to be uplifted by the supernatural aid of grace to everlasting bliss, and whose poetry was distinguished by an excess of nervous excitability of all forms,—by mystic Platonic devotion, sighing, melancholy, intensely sensual erotic tenderness, alarming arrogance. This class formed the romantic phalanx proper, called in Sweden the Phosphorists. The characteristics mentioned are apparent in an unequal degree in Atterbom, Stagnelius, Hammerskjöld, etc., but are found in all. The second class of men had broader shoulders and healthier spirits; they were historic enthusiasts who had been blinded by the national sentiment, by the love of the faith and the institutions of the past, to all that was just and great in the criticism of the preceding century; such men as Geijer, and the Gothic union of Upsala, whose centre he was, and to whose national efforts Tegnér lent his aid without entering into either the religious or the political sympathies and doctrines of the society.
The pagan element that Tegnér discovered in his own nature, derived its nourishment from two sources in his earliest studies; first from his relations to northern antiquities, and second from his devotion to Greek poetry. In a letter of 1825, he wrote: "A certain spiritual kinship with our barbaric ancestors, which no culture can wipe out, always impelled me to turn back to their grotesque but magnificent forms." What he especially had in mind when he referred to this spiritual kinship was that wilfulness of the ancient Norseman which betrayed itself in his case in a challenging manner, and in that tendency to melancholy which had been one of the characteristics of the ancients. In Tegnér it was not revealed by romantic lamentations, but by a grave and sometimes gloomy temperament, which, after his fortieth year found such abundant food that it degenerated into weariness of life and contempt for humanity. The poetic symbol for this Titanic element in his composition, for gigantic strength of nature, for inner unrest beneath the weight of a mighty pressure, he sought now among the Scandinavians, now among the Grecians; and thus the old Norse and the old Greek mythology became blended in his fancy. The old Norse giant speaks to him in the same way as Goethe's Prometheus:—
"I hate the radiant AsasAnd Ask's fair children,Who bow before the GodsThat I despise."
And his lament, "The Age of the Asas" (Asatiden), is so nearly allied to Schiller's "Gods of Greece" that the poet must unquestionably have derived his ideas from this poem.
"Ye lofty mem'ries, engraved on historic page,Like empty harness that no one can wear, all lonely;With shrinking awe ye're viewed by this trifling age,For hero life in the North is a saga only."Sleep calmly, thou Past! In vain would I dun to-dayDrag forth thy deeds from their graves as some rusty token;Here strangers only to unknown gods now pray,The sinews of song and the blade of action lie broken."
Here, too, Norse and Greek paganism are blended in the author's memory.
In fact, the pagan element in Tegnér's composition first attained its higher consecration when he became acquainted with old Hellenic literature. In it he found a pre-Christian culture, which gained its climax in propitiatory beauty, not in defiant personal struggles. He saw in it human nature rounded and polished in a manner that was at once poetic and religious. Viewed from the standpoint of this world of beauty, that supernatural element which had waged such passionate warfare against the past century, no longer rose offensively before the mind, but rather fell away as superfluous. Tegnér's deism overshadowed his polemic tendency, and assumed the form of a Hellenic adoration of reason and beauty. The purely human element, which had been the source of beauty in Grecian poetry, soon became in his eyes the essential poetic element, and this is the reason why throughout his life he refused to recognize devotional poetry as true poesy. This was made manifest on sundry occasions, as, for instance, in reference to the poetic writings of Franzén. In 1823, he writes to Brinkman of Franzén: "But the beautiful rests finally on the rational, precisely as the dome, no matter how high it may arch, has its invisible points of support in the temple walls. But the temple walls of our dear Franzén are a trifle too well adorned with crucifixes which obscure the impression." Of the "Columbus" of the same poet, he writes nine years later, after he is bishop, therefore: "How much nearer to the heart would be a fresher and more vigorous romantic tone, without legends, without attempts at Conversion, and without missionaries. I hate, God forgive me! the pious tone in life as well as in poetry," and with a significance closely allied to this, he expresses himself in his last years (1840) in regard to a little volume of poetry: "Such excess of piety always appears to me, poor heathen, a trifle sickly and dull." For this reason, also, quite contrary to the custom of the priesthood, he passionately protested to Adlersparre against allowing the unchristian traits in the great modern heroes of genius, such as Goethe or Byron, to be effaced. His open, thoroughly honest nature was immediately on its guard against pious frauds.
Poetry in and for itself seemed to him a power of a religious nature; or more accurately speaking, he called poesy the highest, purest, most human expression of humanity, and all else that we are in the habit of revering as high and noble, he pronounced mere modifications of poetry. Religion itself is to him "a practical poesy, a branch of the great parent stem of poetry, engrafted on the tree of life." In other words, religion is a poesy which is believed; its dogmatic part, therefore, forms a metaphysical poem, whose value depends on the worth of the practical teachings that can be evolved from it,—an inference which Tegnér, it is true, never draws without a proviso, but which can always be read between the lines in his writings.
With all the more freedom from reserve he has given voice to his unprejudiced humanism in expressions of sympathy for purely human greatness, and for those pagan virtues which are condemned by the church fathers as vices. To Geijer who, to be sure, was not strictly orthodox, but who was an unconditional believer in divine revelation, he wrote in the year 1821: "As concerns your opinion that a special revelation, Christianity, for instance, is theoretically necessary to the human mind, I must say a doubt may be entertained. It were difficult to explain why the highest human development, the actual years of jubilee of our race, should have occurred in the south, as well as in the north, before the name of Christianity was ever heard. Let us thank God for our purer faith, but do not let us forget that the records of the nobility of the human race are full of pagan names." Whenever Tegnér desires to glorify a character, he does not rest until he has shown a side from which it appears truly Grecian or Roman. In order to place this unconscious, purely instinctive effort in the sharpest light, I choose two examples where he has depicted heroes of the Christian faith as champions of the days of antiquity, and later arrives at the conclusion that, owing to preconceived sympathies, he has erred. In his reformation speech, he had incorporated in the person of Luther everything that the champions of classic culture of that day, an Ulrich von Hutten or a Franz von Sickingen, had fought for and gained. Seven years later, when forced by his official position to more emphatic historic-theological studies, he writes in deep dejection: "The lofty conceptions which I cherished in former times, regarding Luther and the reformation, are greatly modified. How many Luthers are not yet needed?" In his Festival speech of 1832, he had said of Gustavus Adolphus that his was "a heroic nature of the great and purely human stamp of which Greece and Rome had presented so many prototypes," and these words, as a whole series of epistolary passages testify, were chosen with a polemic design, because he knew that the other orators would represent the king essentially as a theologian in armor, and a "martyr of the concordance book." Five years later he himself writes concerning Gustavus Adolphus: "To the height of the now current cosmopolitan ideas, he was, to be sure, wholly incapable of soaring; as a forerunner of a new epoch he can scarcely be considered. The freedom of thought for which he did combat was nothing else than freedom of conscience, and it is very doubtful if Protestantism ever presented itself to him from any point of view but the purely theological." More profound investigation had in this instance, too, brought the honest poet to renounce the position he had once assumed. But this repeated withdrawal from an audacious, yet passionately maintained attempt to find the purely human, the colossal pagan element, in all heroes,—as though they were every one cast in a perfect mould,—even in those about whose brow orthodoxy had so firmly laid its iron ring, that no room remained for Tegnér's free Grecian laurel wreath, conclusively manifests how vigorously a free classic humanitarianism had penetrated through every pore into the poet's soul.
He had begun by intense admiration for all that was knightly, adventurous, or defiant, for honor, as such alone, with all its tinsel. In this enthusiasm, which he never lost, his feelings were those of a child of nature and a child of his people. "For," declares Tegnér's poem to Charles John (Karl Johann), "beyond all else in the Swedish mind stands honor, true or false, it matters not; it still lives in the memory." Tegnér is not only a child of nature, however; he is also a child of history, and history places him between the enlightenment period of the eighteenth, and the religious reaction of the beginning of the nineteenth century. He follows neither. With vigorous individuality he makes his choice among the elements of culture that are offered to him, until an independent mode of contemplation of human life, especially the relations between religion and poetry, is formed in his mind; and we see him, with his warm poetic temperament, rousing himself to involuntary, and often fruitless, efforts to bring reality into harmony with the great humanist ideal in which his method of contemplation finds its outlet. What injustice Runeberg did Tegnér when, in the year 1832, he wrote: "In him scarcely the glimmer of an ideal can be seen, indeed, not so much as an inner struggle that allows us to detect any traces of a dim foreboding that there is such a thing." Forty-four years later, the great Finnish rival of Tegnér indicated in a footnote that this assertion now seemed to him almost too presumptuous, but this was not enough; it would have been a simple act of justice had he contradicted his former statement.
From Tegnér's humanistic contemplation of the world followed, with inner consistency, the political standpoint he took during the first fifty years of his life, and from his combined religious and political views followed, of a necessity, his literary party-standpoint.
He was not, like the majority of the poetic minds in Germany and Denmark of that day (a Tieck, an A. W. Schlegel, an Oehlenschläger, a Heiberg), indifferent to politics. While, for instance, a phenomenon like the holy alliance scarcely embittered an hour of the lives of the poets just named, the letters of Tegnér overflow with an indignation and a scorn at this confederation of rulers, which can only be distinguished from similar emotions of Byron by the fact that the proud and independent Englishman gave public expression to his wrath in great works of poetry, whose plain language lashed the despots of Europe with scorpions, while the civil officer and professor at Lund was obliged to confine himself chiefly to private outbursts of indignation: yet not altogether. Throughout his entire youth, his political sentiments find voice in fugitive poems, and even though they do not occupy much space in his poetry, their significance can scarcely be estimated highly enough; for it was the seething, fermenting element in his soul that gave breadth to it, and prevented Tegnér from being made petty by the petty circumstances amid which fate had cast his lot. Had not the politics of Sweden and of Europe thrown his mind into a continual state of oscillation between indignation and enthusiasm, his poems would never have attained the grandeur of style which occasioned their transmission beyond the borders of their native land.
His first political poems owed their origin to Sweden's debasement under Gustavus IV. So it is with that "Svea," in which he writes:—
"O Finland, home of truth! O Ehrensvärd's[7]monument!So lately like a bloody shield from Sweden's bosom rent!A monarch rules our fens, whose name is scarcely known,And where our herds once grazed stands now the stranger'sthrone!"
Yet very early the poet's gaze turned from the special concerns of his fatherland to the world's politics. The fanatic hatred of Gustavus IV. for Napoleon had evoked in the youthful soul of Tegnér only admiration for the hated emperor; the alliance of Bernadotte with the armies in league against Napoleon had no power to break the sympathy of the poet; and while the romantic school, as early as 1813, allowed itself to be transported to such outbursts of joy over the deeds of the crown prince as: "In Charles John's footsteps walks Sweden's angel," or the following absurd panegyric concerning the French-speaking Gascon: "At the head of the army flashes Thor, with his mighty, luminous hammer, and Charles John the god of thunder is called," Tegnér devoted a series of poems to the defence of the revolutionary element in the mission of Napoleon. At the final downfall of the latter he wrote that bitter and severe poem, inspired by despair at the triumph of the reaction, "The New Year, 1816." Hearken to its energetic finale:—
"Huzzah! religion is Jesuit hightAnd Jacobin every human claim;The world is free and the raven is white;Long life to the Pope and him we'll not name!I'll go to Germany, famed in story,There sonnets I'll write to our age's glory."Thou'rt welcome, New Year, with thy lies and deceit,Thy mysteries, murders, and dubious worth!A ball from thy arquebus now would be sweet,I trust thou wilt fire on our earth.Her brain is aglow, she is restless and dreary,One shot, and she need no longer be weary."
This public expression of opinion strictly corresponds to Tegnér's private letters of the same period. In 1813 he writes:—"Whoever fancies that Europe can be free helped by Russians and their consorts, or that the success of the Cossacks is of advantage to Sweden, may be right, but his views and mine widely differ. I was born and I grew up in hatred of the barbarians, and I hope, too, to die in the same frame of mind, untainted by modern sophistry." In 1814 he gives vent to still greater dejection, as follows: "Who can believe in the restoration of European equilibrium; or rejoice at the victory of absolute worthlessness over power and genius?" In 1817, finally, with marvellous accuracy, he characterizes the spiritual reaction, in the following words: "Politics is the main essential; the inner revolution of the tendency of thought is on the whole political; the religious and scientific transformations we are experiencing, are both more or less chance results and reactionary processes, and are, therefore, without significance or permanence. When the masonry of a house is completed, the scaffolding falls away. It is true that these results at the first glance appear serious enough; but does not their exaggerated and caricature-like nature, the hair-splitting tendency of science, and the monastic flavor of religion, betray conclusively that they are merely a reaction against the former practical and freethinking spirit? Does it not seem now as though people were both profound and pious out of spite, and because twenty years ago it was deemed boorish to be either? ... The most important thing of all would doubtless be a change of base in religious dogmas, for religious movements when genuine, are also practical; but what reason have we to conclude that such a change exists among the majority, except as a fashion and a grimace, and with many perhaps from still worse motives?"
Meanwhile, this reaction had most emphatically made its appearance on Sweden's own soil. In opposition to the old Franco-Swedish tendency in literature, represented by the Swedish Academy, the "Phosphorists" proclaimed, in all essentials, the principles of the German romantic school; metaphysical proofs were furnished of the mysteries of Christianity, the period of enlightenment was derided, the academy was treated as an assembly of old powdered periwig blocks, and the advocates of Alexandrines were pursued with sonnets. As for the rest, there was the Madonna and the Calderon worship, incense was burned at the altars of Schlegel and Tieck, contempt for Schiller and enthusiasm for the kingdom by the grace of God, were the fashion.
When Charles John assumed the reins of government, he, "the Republican on the throne," as he was at first called, the marshal of Napoleon, with all the traditions of the Revolution behind him, could not possibly feel warranted in entering into closer relations with the men of the new school. They manifestedtrop de zèle; they did not recognize the sovereignty of the people, by which both himself and his dynasty must be supported; they had their friends abroad in the camp, where endeavors were made for the restoration of the old legitimist royal family to the European throne. The adherents to the romantic school naturally desired nothing more ardently than to convince the king that his doubts of their loyalty were wholly groundless. Count Fleming, in order to prove the harmlessness of the young school, translated into French for the king, an essay by Geijer. The king declared that he did not understand it. "What is the true meaning of this new school?" he asked. A courtier replied: "Nothing in the world, your majesty, but this: when you ask any one in the old school, what is two and two, he will answer, four; but if you ask a person in the new school, his answer will be, it is the square root of sixteen, or a tenth of forty, or something else that requires a little reflection." "That is precisely what I thought," said Charles John. Atterbom was appointed instructor in German literature to Prince Oscar; Geijer filled precisely the same place to Charles John that Chateaubriand at one time held toward Napoleon I. Ere long the unhappy influence of the conservative youth of thedoctrinaireparty became apparent. The reactionary elements of society made use of the doctrines of this party, and soon there arose in Sweden a bold and powerful reaction, which, the moment it became apparent at court, frightened Charles John from further attempts at reform, and drove him into paths which were in disharmony with the previous course of his life. He was, for instance, most unfavorably inclined at first to hereditary nobility, all the more so because the earliest parliamentary opposition to his government had proceeded from the nobility, but after his alliance with Geijer and his comrades, he even wished to force a hereditary nobility on Norway, where all aristocracy had long been abolished.
Under these circumstances, Tegnér felt himself, as it were, a member of the great European opposition. He pronounces the holy "Mohammedan" alliance to be a stillborn embryo, "whose burial on the gallows-hill he had every hopes of living to see;" he calls the politics of the period "infernal"; he writes to Franzén: "Concerning European politics of the present day, no honest man, not even a German, can express himself without a sense of shame and horror. In poetry it can be at best but the object of a Juvenal satire. To name the truly diabolical tendency of the obscurantism of the day, whenever there is a question of anything noble or great, whether it be in verse or in prose, may be designated a bitter irony." In the politics of the interior, he demands ministerial responsibility, equality before the law, the right of voting supplies, parliamentary representation,—in short, the usual programme of the opposition in liberal Europe. Such were the views to which he gave publicity in his great speech at the marriage of Prince Oscar, in 1823,—a noble wine served in polished crystal. In modern times, according to his conception of affairs, two powers were confronting each other,—personal merit, which had no other support than itself, and inherited rank; a plebeian and a patrician principle. This contrast had appeared in its sharpest form during the struggle between the despotism that arose from the Revolution, and that which came from the legitimists. Tegnér calls attention to the fact that the prince's young bride, who had but shortly before landed in Sweden, combined through her birth the two contending elements, and thus, as it were, united the past with the present. For her father (the son of the Empress Josephine, Eugène Beauharnais), "like so many other distinguished men, was a son of his own deeds, whose pedigree was an outgrowth of his sword," and on the maternal side she was descended from one of the oldest princely families of Europe (the mother of the bride was Amalie of Bavaria, of the house of Wittelsbach).
It does not occur to me to see in this attempt to symbolize the origin of the august lady anything more or less than a well-planned, well-expressed compliment. But from the lips of Tegnér it is interesting; for to him this marriage between the son of the general of the Revolution and the daughter of ancient royalty had a profound significance. At the time when he made this speech, he was engaged in writing a poem designed to end with a similar reconciliatory union, in the long-delayed marriage between the son of a peasant, Fridthjof —who, through his deeds of valor, had fought his way up to equal rank with the most renowned of heroes—and the king's daughter, Ingeborg, who traced her origin to the gods of Valhal, and whose brothers, in their princely arrogance, had denied Fridthjof her hand. In "Fridthjof's Saga," the same two principles—that of personal merit and that of the nobility of birth—form the two poles through which passes the axis of the poem. Even in the second canto of this poem, where the friendship between King Bele and Thorstein, Viking's son, is described, the ancient yeoman says:—
"Obey the king. With force and skillShall one the sceptre sway."[8]
and the aged king on the other hand tells of that
"Warrior-might which always moreWas prized than royal birth."[9]
In the last canto the aged priest of Balder exclaims:—
"Thou hatest Bele's sons! but wherefore hate them?Forsooth, because that to a yeoman's childThey would not give their sister,—she, descendedFrom Seming's blood, th' illustrious Odin's offspring!Yes, sprung from Valhal's throne is Bele's race,—Bright genealogy, just source of pride!But birth is chance, is fortune, thou observest,And cannot be a merit. Know, my son,That man still boasts of fortune, not of merit.Say! is't not gen'rous gods who were the givers,Should any noble quality adorn us?With haughty pride thou art thyself inflamedAt all thy hero exploits, all thy fierce-nerv'dResistless strength; but did'st thou give thyselfThis force?'"[10]
The speech on Oscar's wedding-day, and the final chord in "Fridthjof's Saga," mark an epoch in the career of the poet, when his political views of life had found repose in a fitful harmony, for which he had struggled with unwearied persistence. A few years earlier and the Revolutionary fermentation was seething with passionate impatience within his breast; a few years later and his displeasure at the early stages of Swedish liberalism drove him to the opposite extreme; but on the dividing line that separated these two currents, there was vouchsafed to him a bright and inspired moment, with a free poetic horizon on either side.
"Man is the flower of the metallic race of the earth, and his language is the magnetic fluid of this race, which, by the force of his will, is shed upon the world. If all speech is at bottom music (the ear of nature is of metal, and what the spirit of the world whispers into it is music), we need to seek a long time before we can discover the kind of kinship that transforms it into material substance for the poetic fancy."
This hard piece of eloquence is given here as a sample of the style of which Atterbom, the leader of the romantic school, made use in his youth. It contains so decided a challenge to parody that it is no wonder Tegnér yielded to the temptation to aim some mocking darts at it.
The religious and political views of Tegnér, combined with his literary standpoint, gave him a lofty watchtower, situated far above the two contending parties of the old and the new school, but from which he almost exclusively aimed his shafts at the latter. He who had entered the new century in early youth, and who was but twenty years old when he had experienced, in Lund, Sweden's upward soaring flight of poetic fancy, could not possibly feel his poetic needs satisfied by the insipid didactic and comic poems of the Gustavians. There was nothing, however, that incited him to combat against them, and they passed away all too soon, one after the other, until Leopold alone remained as the last surviving representative of the ancientrégime.When Tegnér was in the full vigor of his manhood, Leopold was blind, and even had he otherwise been inclined to attack the old man, it was now impossible for him to do so. On the other hand, the first appearance of the "Phosphorists" upon the scene had provoked his displeasure in the highest degree. They discoursed in a philosophic idiom, which was intelligible neither to himself nor to any other uninitiated person. They opposed the academy as foreign,—that is to say, French,—and were themselves German to the core. Moreover, to Tegnér the French traditions were much dearer than the German. Not even his predilection for Grecian lore had estranged him from the classic French rules of taste. In his eyes Grecian characteristics very early became synonymous with self-control in art, and French poetry was in every respect well governed. It was no mere chance, therefore, that led him to the remark that the French national spirit "in many instances is more nearly allied to the Grecian than the Germans and their apes, since Lessing's time, have been willing to admit." His admiring attitude toward the old academicians during the sharp controversy against the "Phosphorists" recalls vividly, indeed, strikingly, Byron's contemporaneous enthusiasm for Pope and contempt for the lake school. The causes were in part akin: fidelity to childhood's impressions, delight in contradiction, partiality to intelligent lucidity and Latin rhetoric; but this attitude had still deeper ground in the relation to the Grecian peculiarities, and to the French studies of the antique,—a relation which is not found in Byron, but which characterizes Tegnér. Byron's art was employed in giving an organ to passion: Tegnér, like the ancients, desired that passion might be clad in strict decorum, in order to avoid a pathological effect. He had never liked reality, and had as little fancy for metaphysics; but the ideal form he loved. The inner schisms which he conceived to be the problem for art to solve were not deep; at heart he did not wish to see more violent struggles between body and soul, condition and desire, duty and happiness, etc., represented in poetry than could be reconciled with the harmony of healthfulness. It was rather the pure, polished form that fascinated him than the natural freshness of the Greeks, consequently the quality which the French classic style had in common with the Grecian. All these instincts brought him very near to the old school, and removed him from the new.
His chief warfare against the latter was waged by the young instructor (magister) in his great metrical speech delivered at Lund in 1820, the celebrated "Epilog," in which he demanded of the young academicians the banner-oath to the banner of light. The popularity of this poem was so great that during the summer following its delivery no two young students could talk together ten minutes without devoting at least five of them to quoting and interpreting the "Epilog." Certain lines of this speech have an almost proverbial force and truth.
"Heed not, tho' indolence to you may whisper,That far too mighty is the strife for powers like yours,That 'twill be fought as well without your aid.Alone a general never wins a battle;'Tis won for him by solid ranks of soldiers."
He ends by placing the Temple of Truth, as the ancients conceived it, face to face with the Tower of Babel, erected by the adherents to the romantic school, the heavy, barbaric structure, "whose obscurity peeps through the narrow windows." If we pay strict heed, however, to the architecture of the Pantheon, which he describes as that of the ancients, we shall observe that its style, with its singular mingling of Roman and Gothic, far from being antique, is an involuntary reproduction of Tegnér's own personal art ideal, which is the fruit of so many classic and romantic combinations.
"The ancients built to Truth a lofty temple,A fair rotunda, glowing as the firmament.The open dome let in from ev'ry quarterA flood of light, while through the pillared forestThe winds of heaven with tender music frolicked,But now our people build a Tower of Babel."
A rotunda whose light is obtained from every quarter, not from above alone, and which does not rest on simple masonry, but is combined with pillared forests, is rather a reminder of St. Peter's church with its complex style than of any structure built by the ancients. It was, in truth, rather a temple for all mankind, like this church, than the simple Roman house of gods, that floated before Tegnér's eye as the symbol of truth. What he wished to extol was simply transparency and lucidity in the realm of poetry, as in that of thought. The adoration of the hidden roots of life, of the obscurity of night, the mother of all things, and of the shadows, the source of color, as preached in Germany by Novalis, in Denmark by Hauch, in Sweden by Atterbom, seemed to him suspicious, indeed odious; he viewed it in the same spirit with which an ancient Apollo worshipper might have attended a Moloch service, and protested against it in the name of the light.
In the name of the light, and above all else in the name of poetic art, of whose psychologic origin he had early formed an original conception. By the romantic schools of all lands poesy was comprehended as the dearly purchased product of suffering and sorrow, as the pearl which is the result of diseased secretions. To Goethe it was the ideal confession of the soul, the noblest means of salvation from impressions and memories, that laid siege to the healthfulness of the character. Kierkegaard compared the poet to the unhappy being who is tortured by a slow fire in the brazen steer of Phalaris, and whose cries resound like music in the ears of the tyrant. Heiberg has the poet sing that if he had been good he would have produced poor poetry; but since he is bad he has written good poetry, for that touches him the most deeply which is denied himself. All these views accord in the one idea that poetry has its origin in yearning, in regret, in pain; in short, in something negative.
Tegnér traces its origin to healthfulness. Over and over again he attacks in his letters what he calls the hysteric cramps of the romantic school. "Nothing is so repulsive to me as this eternal litany over the torments of life, which belongs to reality and not to poetry. Is not poetry the healthfulness of life? Is not song the jubilee of humanity, bravely streaming forth from fresh lungs?" And this application is not the expression of a momentary mood with Tegnér; it keeps recurring again and again as a stereotyped definition. He does not comprehend how poetry, "which is nothing else than the healthfulness of life, nothing but a leap of joy from the borders of every-day life, can color the fresh round cheek with a hectic flush."
The definition assumed poetic proportions and melodious form in the sportive poem "The Song," called forth by a romantic elegy of the same name. It contains the programme of Tegnér's poetry, as follows: "The poet has no cause for lament, he has never been driven from the Garden of Eden. With heavenly delight he embraces life, as a bride,
'For song is not eternal longing,'Tis one glad shout of victory.'
Disharmony that has no solution is unknown to him.
'My golden harp shall never borrowSad tones that I have brought to light;The poet was not made for sorrow,The sky of song is ever bright.'"
It was a hard and bitter Nemesis that condemned him, who, in the year 1819 possessed sufficient vital strength and flow of spirits to write these lines, to become, only six or seven years later, wellnigh mute as a poet, after he had produced one of the most despairing poems of all literature; yet both before and after his "Ode to Melancholy" (Mjeltsjukan) was written, the doctrine of the inner equilibrium of the poet and of poetry's consciousness of victory was still realized in the writings of Tegnér. As his soul passed through crisis after crisis, as disappointment and sorrow undermined his cheerful and sanguine temperament, he preferred silence rather than to permit the depressed state of his soul to have a depressing influence on his art; and if he still intoned an occasional song, it was in order to reveal himself in poetic composition as the mobile, youthful nature he no longer was in actual life.
The muse of Tegnér never had that melancholy fundamental quality that is common to the folk poetry of all northern lands. It has, indeed, nothing corresponding to the folk-song, nothing of its naïveté, nothing of its simple minor chords. Tegnér admired popular poetry; he did not believe his songs superior to it, as the artistic poets of the preceding century had felt; but he considered it, and justly, an unattainable model. The artistic type of his lyric muse, therefore, is not the folk-song,—neither that of the Finns, as in the case of Franzén, nor that of the Servians, as with Runeberg, nor that of the Swedes, as with Atterbom,—but the cantata, now in the style of the heroic song, and now in the style of the bravour-aria. The last word is not used in the sense of a vocal selection calculated to shine through its embellishments alone, but is meant to represent the abundantly ornamented and full outburst of an overflowing vital courage. All the art forms of which Tegnér avails himself,—the hymn, the ballad, the love-song,—receive under his treatment a character which I know not how to characterize more sharply than with the word,bravour.
We find the poet in the humble white house at the corner of Franciskan and Kloster streets in Lund, pacing the floor of his spacious two-windowed study, murmuring and humming his verses to himself, and now and then pausing before an open cabinet that serves him for a desk, to write down his strophes as he completes them. In the room two canary birds are warbling; accompanied by their song he is composing his "Fridthjof." He is at this time about forty years old; neither passion nor disease have as yet imprinted their traces on his visage The furies are lurking on his threshold; but it almost seems as if they purposed to await the completion of the main work of his life before they crossed it, and seized upon him for their prey. His brow is clear and arched; his gaze bright and free.
"Both earnest and profoundly trueIs every feature of his noble face,"
as he says of his Axel.
He has chosen his theme, or more correctly speaking, his theme has emerged from the memories of his childhood and presented itself so alluringly before him that he has designed the outlines of its treatment, and commenced his work within them. He wishes to furnish a picture of life in the ancient north. With full conviction he had formerly joined the "Gothic" union; for he saw in the national historic and poetic tendency of this society the true medium course between the cosmopolitan rationalistic culture and the exaggerated Teutonic enthusiasm of the "Phosphorists." He soon experienced the grief, however, of seeing how his worthy and ardent ally, Pehr Henrik Ling, who had taken a position in the intellectual life of Sweden similar to that of Arndt and Jahn in Germany, drove the Swedish public in alarm from the poetry of northern antiquity by his boasting language and his colossal disregard of form. His awkward touch on harp strings made of northern bear sinews destroyed the superb material which, in the hands of Oehlenschläger, had won all hearts in Denmark. Tegnér concluded to take one single saga as a central point about which to gather all the most characteristic images of the ancient north: viking life and brotherhood in arms, the wisdom of the Hávamál and the vows made on Frey's boar at Yuletide, the heroic song and the election of kings at the Thing, the self infliction of wounds with the point of the sword and the runic stone, the poesy of life and of death in ancient times. There must be a good, pure atmosphere in the poem; a sharp, fresh breeze must blow through it; Scandinavians should feel at home in it; but beyond all else there must be none of the icy temperature of the old Norse poems of the worthy Ling! This saga was, of course, a love story, and with the yearnings and sorrows of love the hard web of his material must be permeated. The material was Norse, but the treatment must be Swedish; Norway and Sweden which not long before had been divided, must now be blended together in song. There was a rustling in his mind's ear as of the clash of shields and the whizzing of a shower of arrows, the rattling of quivers and the clinking of foaming beakers, the stamping of fiery coursers and the restless flight of hooded falcons, blows on the sword and strokes with the sword, and through it all the long, languishing, cooing, dreamy nightingale note and the still more thrilling call of the quail in the stillness of the summer night. As regards the scenery he truly had no need to transplant himself in fancy into its midst; he had become too thoroughly familiar with it in his childhood and youth in the country to require any such effort. He knew them well, these trees with white trunks and drooping crowns; one of them bore two characters in its birch trunk: were these the letters, "E" and "A," or was it an "F" and an "I" in runes? He knew, between fir-overgrown coasts, this smooth icy path over which the steel-footed warrior sped, while behind him came rushing the sledge in which sat that fair young queen who would soon pass over her own name on the ice.
"And many a rune, too, on the ice he engraves;Fair Ing'borg drives o'er her own name on the waves."[11]
And when the springtime came, when the billows beckoned enticingly, when the sea spoke aloud of deeds of valor, while the boats along the coast seemed most urgent in their invitations to come on board and seek a knowledge of the world, he was well aware what a viking must have felt at such a moment.
"Ellide, too, now has no sport on the sea;Now ceaseless her cable she jerks to get free."[12]
But it was not possible to journey forth into the world. At the foster-father's house, at Hilding's,—at Myhrman's, on the Rämen estate,—dwelt the fairest of the fair, the beloved one whom it was impossible to forsake. And all the memories of youth, sweet and childlike, overpower him at this thought. He remembers how it was his wont to carry to Anna the first anemone that blossomed and the first strawberry,
"The first pale flow'r that spring had shed,The strawberry sweet that first grew red."[13]
And he dreams of so many good times when he and she (or was it Fridthjof and Ingeborg?) paused in their wanderings by the rustling waters of the forest streamlet, and there was no other way for Ingeborg to cross than to let him bear her over in his arms, and smiling he wrote,
"So pleasant feels, when foam-rush 'larms,The gentle ding of small white arms!"[14]
And unconsciously there blends with these memories another erotic enthusiasm of a more recent date, another form, that of the fully matured Ingeborg—not Anna Myhrman, whose footsteps are heard in the adjoining room. The footsteps of the excellent housewife who is now in the meridian of life do not reach his ear; no, it is a younger, more attractive face, a slenderer form, another, more musical voice; he dare not love this woman, it were contrary to divine and human law; she is married to King Ring, to Fridthjof's friend, whose confidence in him is unbounded. Fridthjof must away, far out to sea, to deaden his yearning with deeds of valor and victories. But one day—late though it may be, one day will come the hour of atonement, and the stormy heart of Fridthjof will find repose.
The old Norse Fridthjof's Saga is a narrative written in Iceland about the year 1300; it is assumed that the historic portions of the incidents took place about the year 800. Fridthjof, the son of a bonde, who was brought up with the king's daughter Ingeborg, sues for her hand and is rejected. In order to be revenged on her brothers, he refuses to give them his powerful aid in the war against King Ring, and avails himself of their absence to enter into a betrothal with Ingeborg, who has been shut up by her brothers in Baldershage a place consecrated to Balder, where it was forbidden man to embrace a woman, for it was supposed that Fridthjof would not dare seek a rendez-vous in that sacred spot. But Fridthjof defies the gods, visits Ingeborg, and violates the temple. Meanwhile peace is concluded with Ring on condition that the brothers give the aged king their sister to wife. Of Fridthjof they demand that he go forth on their errand to collect tribute from Angantyr, on the Orkney Islands. During his absence they set fire to the home of his fathers. Fridthjof returns, finds the king sacrificing in Baldershage, and casts the purse of silver he has brought with him into Helge's face with such force that Helge falls down in a swoon. Through an accident Balder's image is cast into the fire, and the whole house becomes wreathed in flames. Fridthjof flees, returns, visits King Ring, saves the life of the old king, and, when finally the latter dies, marries Ingeborg.
In this plot Tegnér's poetic eye detects the main features of an object of universal human interest, and susceptible of generalizing symbolism. Fridthjof struggles for his love with reckless defiance; in spite of all the powers that be, he is determined to conquer his happiness amid storm.
"His good sword pointing to the norn's fair bosom,Thou shalt,' saith he, 'thou shalt give way!"'[15]
He refuses to obey a royal mandate. In the prime of his manhood he becomes, first a violator of the temple, then a temple burner, then the outlawed, proscribed "Wolf in the Sanctuary" (varg i veum). He flees and does penance, renounces and is purified, and receives at last the hand of the beloved object of his affections as a reward, not for his struggle, but for his persistent fidelity. Not the maiden but the widow, not happiness itself but the pale reflection of happiness, he embraces as his bride. Was not this in itself a symbol of human life?
One step more and the symbol stands completed in all its radiance. There was a central point to the saga which, beneath the poet's gaze, must necessarily become transformed to a fruitful germ. This was the sanctuary of Balder. About a Balder's temple everything revolves; here Ingeborg is imprisoned; here Ingeborg and Fridthjof meet; here the kings offer sacrifice. The temple was honored; it was violated; it was burned to the ground.
Balder was a peculiar god; in him paganism, as the contemporaries imagined it, was brought into contact with the Christianity many would gladly have adapted to it. Balder represented paganism without fierceness, Christianity without dogmatism. The Jesus in whom Tegnér believed, like him whom Oehlenschläger acknowledged, had more of the nature of a Balder than of a Christ. And it was the temple of Balder that Fridthjof, in his youthful arrogance, had burned. This burning of the temple must necessarily be made the main catastrophe of the saga; it determined, with overwhelming force, a highly spiritual conclusion. Fridthjof must necessarily end by rebuilding the temple which he had burned to ashes.
For is not youthful vigor in its uncurbed impetuosity always a violator of the temple, and do we not all end in our years of maturity with an honest effort to atone for the profanation committed in the heat of youthful passion? Do we not all, to the best of our ability, build the temple larger, stronger, more beautiful than we found it? As it was with that emperor who found a metropolis of wood and left behind him one of marble, so it will be at all times with energetic and earnest natures who discover their surroundings to be swayed by a hallowed temple of poor wood; they will bum it to ashes, and leave behind them another Balder's temple, and the strongest among them one like that of Fridthjof.
"Of granite blocks enormous, joined with curious careAnd daring art, the massy pile was built, and there(A giant work intendedTo last till time was ended)It rose like Upsal's temple, where the NorthSaw Valhal's halls fair imag'd here on earth."[16]
Thus conceived, the poem grouped itself about a grand, simple, fundamental thought, and with this before his eyes Tegnér proceeded, first of all, to plan the final romance.
Of course, every feature of the old narrative could not be used. But of the changes he undertakes, only those have psychologic interest in which his poetic character is to be recognized.
First of all, he removes everything that from an erotic point of view could give offence to a reader, above all, to a lady reader of his day. For this reason all family bookcases were thrown open to his poem. According to Tegnér's own confession, he gained the idea for his "Fridthjof" from Oehlenschläger's "Helge," and in Denmark people have never been quite able to comprehend how it was that the imitation attained so much greater fame than the vigorous original; but how was it possible that a poem which, like that of Oehlenschläger, from beginning to end treated of a northern Vendetta, of fratricide, arson, drunkenness, rape, tarring, and incest, could ever vie for public favor with a poetic work like "Fridthjofs Saga," which was made, as it were, for a birthday or a Christmas present, and which, in fact, for more than twenty years, has been a standing confirmation gift for young girls in Germany? To be sure, Tegnér keeps up an incessant play (with a relish, too, that to me personally is very distasteful) on words and expressions, with which, according to accepted literary standards, the idea of something sensual is connected; he compares Ingeborg's bosom to "budding roses" and other protuberances, which a female bosom is as wholly unlike as it is possible to be; but in this harmless dalliance of the poet is exhausted all tendency to sensuality in the poem. His Scandinavians of old love like a well-bred couple of affianced lovers in modern Sweden. Yet, while they do not for one instant forget themselves, the poet is less strict, and we sometimes feel his eye fixed on Ingeborg's white neck. It would certainly have been better had the poet's eye been more chaste and had Fridthjof been more human. From the way in which the sexual element of this love story is treated, we are strongly reminded that the poet is not only invested with an academician but with a priestly office, and is about to mount to a still higher one. Plainly enough Tegnér has wished to make the poem conform thoroughly to modern views of heroic virtue and female chastity. Therefore, although he allows Fridthjof to pass the night with Ingeborg in Baldershage, it is done in all propriety and honor, and he has Fridthjof, when accused in the Thing, solemnly declare that he had not broken Balder's peace. Thus Tegnér does not hesitate to rob his poem of its actual ideal centre of gravity, the conscious and defiantly executed desecration, if by so doing he succeeds in preserving the decorum of his narrative. Fridthjof declares that his love belongs rather to heaven than to earth; at his rendez-vous with Ingeborg he wishes that he were dead, and, with the pale maid in his arms, could wander to Valhal—certainly a most unnatural thought for an impassioned lover in the hour of his bliss.
"To that far heaven my love belongeth,More than this earth,—receive it then;In heav'n 'twas nurtured, and it longethTo reach its starry home again."[17]
Strange words from the lips of a poet who, moreover, was never weary of pursuing Platonic love with mockery, and with pretty sharp mockery too. His own was a fiery, passionate temperament. Notwithstanding his marriage, his years, and his office, he was an ardent and, as rumor declared, frequently a successful adorer of the fair sex. His conversational tone with ladies was often so loose as to scandalize people; and in letters, aphorisms, and poems published after his death, he made no concealment of his realistic conception of love. He does not even pay homage to the spiritualistic presentation of the relation of the sexes in poetry. He writes, for instance:—
"Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptasis not only poetized by the ancients, but deified as well. Our sentimental, nervous contemplation of love is by no means the only one, still less the most vigorous. How pale and weak, even from a purely poetic point of view, are most of the modern erotics with their water-colored tintings when compared to the eternal fresco paintings of the ancients!" And yet I should hesitate to believe that Tegnér would allow himself to be guided in this point exclusively by conventional motives. He was educated in far too idealistic doctrines ever to draw, with full consciousness, from a model, nor has he had a defined model for Ingeborg, as can plainly be detected in the poem itself, which on that account lost in individual realistic life what it gained in typical grandeur. Yet wholly without a model no artist can paint, and entirely without remodelling the dispositions and impressions of real life no poet can compose, least of all so subjective a poet as Tegnér. In the beginning of the poem he was inspired by the memories of his intercourse with his betrothed bride on the country estate of her parents; the idyllic element of Fridthjofs love undoubtedly arises from these memories, but not its dreamily enthusiastic pathos. Numerous indications point to the fact that Tegnér, who, like most poets, was always half in love, was thoroughly enamored during the years when he was writing his "Fridthjofs Saga."
At the time when the canto in which Fridthjofs love attains its highest lyric expression was written (1824), Tegnér's affections may perchance have still been in a state of ecstatic, half-unconscious frenzy, now intersected with budding desire, now with that languishing for death, which sometimes accompanies even prosperous love, when an excess of passionate yearning, filling and torturing the soul, calls forth the wish that the heart might break:—
"How bless'd were he already yonder!How bless'd who now with thee could die,—And, conqu'ring, 'mong the gods could wander,Embracing his pale maid on high."[18]
Perhaps he was simply not in a condition to carry into poetic practice his own poetics of love. As there are, undoubtedly, poets who, with full justice, can take for their motto the line,—
"Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi,"
so, too, there are poets who, especially at the time when romantic idealism governed poetry, have felt themselves constrained by an inner impulse to realize the formula of the opposing ranks.
The second modification of his materials—in which Tegnér's literary individuality vigorously betrayed itself—is the removal of all that might strike us as burlesque in the ancient narrative. The burlesque features appeared to the idealistic poet simply disturbing and odious. I choose a prominent example.
The ninth chapter of the old saga, in which Fridthjof brings the tribute to the sacrifice-offering kings, represents Balder-worship in the following vivid manner: "Then Fridthjof went in and saw that there were but a few people in the hall of the dises; the kings were there at the time sacrificing, and sat drinking. Fire was burning on the floor, and the wives of the kings sat at the fires and warmed the gods, whereas other women were anointing the gods and wiping them with napkins. Fridthjof went before King Helge, and said, 'Here you have the tribute.' Herewith he swung the purse wherein was the silver, and threw it at his nose so violently that two teeth were broken out of his mouth, and he fell into a swoon in his high seat; but Half-dan caught him, so that he did not fall into the fire.... But as Fridthjof walked over the floor toward the door, he saw that goodly ring (which he had given Ingeborg) on the hand of Helge's wife while she was warming Balder at the fire. Fridthjof took after the ring, but it stuck fast to her hand, and so he dragged her along the floor toward the door, and then Balder fell into the fire. But when Half-dan's wife caught after him quickly, the god that she had been warming also fell into the fire. The flame now blazed up around both the gods, as they had previously been anointed, and thence it ran up into the roof, so that the whole house was wrapped in flames. Fridthjof got hold of the ring before he went out."[19]