Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

While I was viewing these words, partly as a subterfuge employed to escape passing judgment on the relations of near friends, partly as a symptom of the French characteristic desire to represent every national peculiarity, however unfortunate it may be, as an unalterable quality of the race, a gentleman who was present, one of the most unprejudiced of French authors, laid his hand on the head of his little daughter, a child of two years old, and said: "Do you think it would be right for me to give my little girl to the first man that might appear on the scene, and without appealing to us, her parents, manage to steal away her heart? Remember how great is the inexperience of a young girl, and do not forget the conditions of the actual world, nor what scoundrels there are abroad, nor what a past, what diseases, what bestial appetites a young man may have, which a father's eye may detect, but whose existence the innocent mind of a young maiden neither can nor should deem possible. The world is an enemy. Should not I with all my might defend my little daughter against this enemy? If, some day fifteen years hence, suitors for her hand announce themselves, we parents, if we are then living, will act as follows: we will discard those who cannot suitably be taken into consideration, either because of their social position, or because of moral or physical weaknesses; we will make a choice selection, and from this permit the young girl to choose as she pleases." To account for this mode of contemplation, the secluded education of young girls in convents, or in boarding-schools, should be borne in mind. Viewed in this light, even when consideration is taken of the greater ardor and sensuality of the Latin races, the conclusion arrived at is perhaps not unreasonable.

III

I was in London when the Franco-German war broke out, and being so fortunate as to have intercourse with some wholly unbiased men of great political insight, I foresaw sooner than my French acquaintances all the disasters the war must inevitably bring upon France. On my return to Paris, I found the people full of hope and confidence; indeed, there was, as is well known, a manifestation of arrogance that could not but affect every stranger unpleasantly. This arrogance, however, was by no means shared by men of science. As yet there had been no battle; but already the news of the suicide of Prévost Paradol in North America had filled with the most painful forebodings every one who knew him and was aware how thoroughly posted he was in the preparations and resources of France. The terrible event occurred immediately after an attack of fever, yet no one doubted that Paradol had laid hands on himself with a full consciousness of what he was doing, and with a plain design. That he had not merely sent in his resignation was because – so it would seem – he was altogether too proud to admit that he had in any way been in error; he was not even willing to make such an admission in an argument, and now he had been guilty of a triple error: believing in the justice of the constitutional tendency of the emperor; seeking the post of ambassador to Washington; and finally not giving up his post at once, when the odious comedy of universal suffrage in May had shown what the constitutional temper of the emperor indicated. The declaration of war, in his eyes identical with the downfall of France, caused him to prefer death to a position in which he could not consistently remain, and from which he was unable to withdraw without a humiliation far worse to him than death. This solitary pistol-shot, resounding across the ocean as the signal of many hundred thousand terrible volleys, deeply affected the friends and companions of Prévost Paradol's youth. Taine, who had been making a brief trip to Germany, where he went to collect materials for an essay on Schiller, which had been interrupted by the war, was profoundly moved by the thought of the impending crisis. "I have just come from Germany," said he, "and have conversed with so many industrious and excellent men. When I consider how much trouble it costs to bring a human child into the world, to tend it, bring it up, educate it, establish it in life; when I, furthermore, consider how many struggles and hardships this child must itself undergo in order to gain preparation for life, and then reflect that all this must now be cast into a ditch as a mass of bloody flesh, I can do nothing but mourn! With two regents of the nature of Louis Philippe, we might have succeeded in escaping the war; with two chieftains like Bismarck and Louis Napoleon, it became a necessity." He was at that time the first Frenchman whom I heard take into consideration the possibility of German superiority.

Then came a series of shocks in the first tidings of great defeats, only varied by false rumors of victory directly after the battle at Weissenburg. Dejected and sorrowful was the prevailing mood in the city in those days, when the proclamations at the street comers told of armies put to rout and lost battles; but more fearful still was the mood on that 6th of August, when the first half of the day was passed in the mad intoxication of triumph over victory, the last half in mortified despondency. How great would have been the humiliation had there been the slightest foreboding of the battle of Wörth, whose fate was at the same moment sealed! When, early in the morning, the news of great victories spread through the city, all Paris covered itself with banners; the citizens walked the streets with little flags in their hats; all the horses had little flags on their heads. I sat in front of a café, opposite the "Hôtel de Ville," gazing at the houses about the public square that were decked with hundreds of small flags, when suddenly there appeared, at the window of a house near me, a hand that hastily drew in the flag there floating in the breeze. Never shall I forget that hand, or that act. Trifling as was the occurrence, it startled me; for there was something so sorrowful about the movement of the hand; something in its appearance testifying so plainly of disappointment, that the thought immediately flashed through my mind: "The news of victory must be false!" Soon hands were seen at all the surrounding windows; the flags quickly disappeared, and in quarter of an hour the whole banner decoration seemed as though it had been blown away by the wind. A proclamation from the government had declared that nothing at all was reported that day from the scene of war, and that the police were on the track of the promulgators of false news, in order to punish them severely. The promulgators of false news! As though the hungering imaginations and the languishing yearning of the great city were not the only guilty ones!

About a week later, on the 12th of August, I met Renan. He had returned from the far North before the appointed time. I have never seen him so deeply moved. He was desperate; this trivial word is the only appropriate one. He was beside himself with exasperation. "Never," said he, "was an unhappy people so governed by imbeciles as we are. One might have supposed that the emperor had had an attack of insanity. But the fact is, he is surrounded by the most contemptible flatterers. I know officers of high rank, who were well aware that the Prussian cannons far surpassed our much-lauded mitrailleuses, but; who dared not tell him so, because he had taken an active part in the preparation of these machine-guns himself, had done a little drawing on the design, which is expressed in official language by the statement that he is the inventor of the mitrailleuse. Never was there so great a lack of brains (si peu de tête) in an imperial ministry; he was himself sensible of it. I am acquainted with a person to whom he said so, and yet he undertook a war with such a ministry. Was ever such folly known? Is it not heart-rending? As a people, we are vanquished for a long time to come. And to think that all that we men of science have been striving to build up for the past fifty years – sympathy between nations, mutual understanding, fruitful co-operation – is overthrown with one blow. How such a war destroys the love of truth! What lies, what calumnies, will not for the next fifty years be eagerly believed by one people of the other, and separate them from one another for immeasurable time! What a delay of European progress! We cannot raise up again in a hundred years what these people have tom down in a day."

No one could have been more grieved at the rupture between the two great neighbors than Renan, who had so long stood in France as the representative of German culture. Nor could any one have spoken with greater gratitude than he, of German thought. One of his favorite remarks was: "There is nothing that can hold so much as a German head." He seemed to have little liking for the Germans personally, but he spoke with respect of their noble intelligence. To the South German, however, in every other respect than in a capacity for the affairs of government, he ascribed a far higher endowment than to the North German, an opinion shared by the majority of cultivated Frenchmen.

In speaking of his journey, Renan said: "We were in Bergen when the first ambiguous tidings of the threatened war reached us from France. None of us could deem it possible. The prince and I looked at each other. He who possesses so rare and so keen an intellect merely said, 'It cannot be,' and gave orders to continue our journey. We sailed to Tromsöe. When we reached that place two despatches awaited the prince, one from his secretary in Paris, and another from Emile Ollivier with these words: 'Guerre inévitable! 'We held a brief council, but so irrational did the affair appear to us, since Leopold von Hohenzollern had withdrawn his candidacy; so impossible did it seem that this pretext could incite all Europe, and especially all Germany, against us; and, finally, so great was our desire to sail to Spitzbergen and see 'the great icebergs,' that we resolved to depart the next morning. We went to bed. My room was situated next to that of the prince's adjutant. Early in the morning I heard the valet awaken the adjutant with a despatch. I rose, we went on board, the ship set sail, and you may fancy my astonishment when I saw that we were taking a southward course. The prince sat in despair, staring fixedly before him. The first words he uttered were: 'Voilà leur dernière folie, il n'en feront pas d'autres.' He was a true prophet; this will be their last folly." "I myself," added Renan, "was of the same opinion. I knew how badly we were prepared, but who could have dreamed that the crisis would come so soon! Do not say that we may yet be victorious. We will never be victorious again; we have never, under this emperor, conquered, in a definite way, any tribes whose subjugation could serve as a happy omen, when Prussia was in question. The Arabs are the poorest tacticians in the world." More than once he broke out with the words: "Was such a thing ever heard of before! Poor prince! Poor France!" He was so vehement that he exhausted himself in imprecations on all the leading men; according to his words, at this time uttered with little regard to shades of meaning, they were all weak-minded creatures, or villains. "What is this Palikao?" he cried. "A thief, a pronounced thief, to whom our best houses are closed; and does not every one know that one of his colleagues is a criminal, a murderer, who has only escaped capital punishment by flight! And in the hands of such men lies our fate!"

I saw tears in his eyes, and I bade him adieu. I have never seen him since that day. He quickly regained his composure and the control of his grief; but in that sorrowful outburst Renan was another man than when he wrote, "The savant is a spectator in the universe. He knows that the world belongs to him only as an object for study; and even if he could reform it, he would perhaps find it so curious an object that he would lose all desire to do so." It is scarcely likely that Renan was altogether in earnest when he uttered these audacious and aristocratic words; but even if he was, the emotions he experienced in the year 1870 would have inclined him to repudiate them.

It is difficult to estimate how demoralizing an influence, during the second empire, life under the dominion and pressure of the "fait accompli" exercised on the French savant. A tendency to quietism and fatalism, to the approval of everything that had once been accomplished, characterized beyond all else French moral science under Napoleon III. Traces of its influence could be observed everywhere in social life and in conversation. Entire freedom from enthusiasm was looked upon as almost equivalent to culture and ripe scholarship. A young foreigner had daily opportunity to marvel over the reserve and the passiveness of even the best of these people, as soon as there arose any question of a practical reform; and I remember well coming home one evening in May, 1870, very much out of humor, and writing in my note-book: "There was once another France." Once, indeed, there had been a wide-awake, enthusiastic, poetic France, keenly alive to the needs of humanity. It seems as though such a France must gradually arise from the debasement, which, even if it brought with it no other good, at least has given all aspiring souls a new impetus toward the truth.

With changeful emotions Renan has watched the development of republican France. Although the republicans almost immediately restored to him his professorship, their demeanor toward him, as well as toward the other friends of Prince Napoleon, was rather cool and reserved. Thoroughly aristocratic in his views as he is, he gave the democrats to understand in his "Caliban" how exceedingly little he esteemed them; yet in a letter written shortly afterward to a German friend, in explanation of his speech on entering the French Academy, he said: "What now, if, while your statesmen are absorbed in this thankless task of chastising and trampling under foot, the French peasant, with his rude understanding, his unvarnished politics, his labor, and his savings, should happily found an order-loving and enduring republic! Would it not be droll?" He is patriot and philosopher enough to become friendly, in the course of time, to any form of government which satisfied the majority of his fellow-countrymen, and corresponded to their intellectual standpoint.

Renan, as it is well known, is a native of Brittany, and has all the peculiarities of his race. The Bretons, in modern French literature, are distinguished by a common trait. Like Chateaubriand and Lamennais, Renan hates the commonplace, the easy-going, frivolous tone; and although a victim of doubt, he has the most ardent need of a faith and an ideal. For his narrow fatherland he cherishes a most profound attachment. In a hopeful moment he has even apostrophized his race with the words: "O simple clan of farmers and seamen, to whom, in an extinguished land, I owe the strength to preserve my soul alive!" We must not place too literal an interpretation on this outburst of feeling. No one realized more profoundly than Renan how far from being extinguished was that France of which he wrote to Strauss, that it was essential to Europe as "a lasting protest against pedantry and dogmatism." But the remark is characteristic of the at once obstinate and restless, enthusiastic and sceptical child of Brittany. If he renounce his faith in any one particular, as he here lost faith in France, it is only to adhere elsewhere with all the warmer enthusiasm to an ideal. In religion, too, he has a Brittany in which he believes.

ESAIAS TEGNÉR

1878

Literary fame in the Scandinavian countries is for the most part a matter of mere local importance. Works written in languages which are spoken by a few million people only, and which in no portion of the world are studied or read as polite languages, are likely to have every chance of European and American renown against them. As a general thing, but few poetic productions are translated into other tongues; and, indeed, to a work that appeals to the sense of beauty, above all to a metrical work, the outer form of language is what the enamel is to the teeth: it invests it at the same time with durability and brilliancy.

Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that certain northern authors have succeeded in finding more recognition in foreign countries than at home; they represent, as it were, to the entire reading-world, the poetic life of their fatherland, and their names are blended in the public consciousness with the name of their native land. Such fame has been attained by but one of the poets of Sweden, – Esaias Tegnér.

He is not the greatest among those who have contributed to the poetry of the Swedish language; before him and after him another greater poet produced in this tongue creations superior to his in clearness of style and fidelity to life. With Bellman and Runeberg, however, he must be classed; and, while inferior to them in poetic fancy, he may be said to surpass both in intellectual vigor.

Three times in the course of history, the Swedish people has succeeded in combining the classic and the popular in its poetry. The first time was when Bellman, during the reign of Gustavus III., selected his types from life among the people and in the inns of Stockholm, and sang "The Songs of Fredman" to a zither accompaniment, with a mimic display of masterly skill. The second time was when Tegnér, fifty years later, turned back to the heroic life of the ancient North, found in an old saga materials for a romance cycle, and gave Sweden a picture of Viking life and Viking love in the North, as his contemporaries conceived it. Finally this combination of the classic and the popular occurred about a generation ago, when – forty years after Finland had been tom from her old mother country – the greatest of Finland's sons, inspired by recollections of his childhood, depicted the honorable struggle of his fatherland against Russian supremacy, and thereby the national characteristics of the Finnish people, in a more realistic style than any one else had yet ventured to employ. Runeberg, in his soul-stirring bivouac poetry, has compressed into the smallest limits war idyls and tragedies of the battlefield.

Neither in a drama nor in an epic poem, therefore, has one of these three Swedish poets found the possibility of presenting to the world the best fruits of his genius. All three, however widely they may otherwise differ, have triumphed in the same species of art, one that is lyric in form, and whose contents compose an epic cycle of short poems. The first of these poets has produced burlesque dithyrambs; the second, old Norse heroic lays; the third, anecdotes of modern warfare; but each one has arranged his choicest poems in a connected series, and these three groups of songs alone invest Swedish poetry with cosmopolitan rank.

The most celebrated of these three cycles is the "Fridthjof's Saga," and when Tegnér is mentioned outside of Sweden, it is exclusively as its author. This work has become the national poem of the Swedish people, and translations into all European tongues – among others, eighteen different German, and twenty-two different English translations – have spread it broadcast over the earth. Sweden has not been lacking in gratitude to the man to whom she owes so much. Such noble and eloquent words have been spoken, written, and sung throughout Sweden, in honor of Tegnér, that no one could bestow on him greater praise than has already been accorded him by the children of his native land. Sweden has exalted the glorified form of the poet, in supernatural size, upon a mighty pedestal, proved by closer scrutiny to be a miniature mountain of massive eulogies, biographies, and festal songs, while at the base incense without stint has been burned. What then remains for the critic? Nothing, unless perchance to cleanse from the beautiful face, with tender hand, the blinding fumes of the incense, in order that the delicate features may stand out clearly, and seem more human, more lifelike. Perchance, too, it may devolve on him to compare the statue carefully with the original, and draw a pen-and-ink sketch of the latter, in which it is plainly indicated where the statue lacks precision or has a too abstract conception. The writer of these pages, at all events, enters on his task with the innate sympathy of the Scandinavian, the impartiality of one who is not a Swede, and the honest purpose of the critic, to represent the form in the sharp sun-light of truth.

I

The ancestors of Esaias Tegnér, both on his father's and on his mother's side, were Swedish peasants. As in so many other instances of the prominent talent of the north, his descent may be traced from the peasant class through the ranks of the priesthood. This generally comes to pass in the following way: the grandfather plows his fields with his own hand, the son displays a thirst for knowledge, and through many sacrifices on the part of his parents, and the support of kindly disposed people, progresses far enough in his studies to enter on a theological course; for during many centuries the priest was the absolute representative among the peasants of the learned class. In this son, the vigorous, untutored peasant-nature becomes subjected to its first rude polish; the preacher no longer plows his own fields, although he may supervise their cultivation; the preacher begins to think, although the final result of his studies is not the consequence of his thought. In the grandson, or great grandson, the original fundamental nature finally becomes so refined, that it produces scientific, technical, or poetic talent. Thus it was in the case before us. The father of Tegnér was a priest, the mother a priest's daughter, and these clerical progenitors were the children of peasants. The aristocratic sounding name was formed when the father, Esaias Lucasson, from the little village Tegna (Tegnaby), was entered in the Latin register of the gymnasium as Esaias Tegnerus.

The parsonage was early blessed with sons and daughters, and at Kyrkerud, on the 13th of November, 1782, was born the fifth son of the house, the eventually so celebrated Esaias. He was only nine years old when the home was broken up by the death of his father. The latter left his family without means of support, and his widow, whose heart was filled with anxiety for the future of her six fatherless children, joyfully seized the opportunity offered her to place her youngest son as clerk with a highly esteemed state official living in the vicinity. In the office of Assessor Bran ting, through tasks in penmanship and keeping accounts, the boy acquired habits of industry which lasted through life; and of even greater value to the little clerk was the opportunity afforded him, at the early age when all impressions are the most profound, of making the acquaintance, from the travelling carriage, of the picturesque, natural beauties of the home region, during the extensive trips he was permitted to share with his worthy chief, whose duties as assessor compelled him to traverse every portion of Wermland. Although active and industrious when at work, young Esaias was inclined to be forgetful and absent-minded at times, to become wholly absorbed in his book, or waking dreams, and he would often be found wandering along some solitary road soliloquizing in a low tone. He read poetry, works of history, above all else northern sagas; and in a collection of the latter, Björner's "Kämpadater," he discovered "The Saga of Fridthjof the Bold," which lingered twenty-five years in his fancy before it began to germinate.

These two impressions, that of Sweden's nature and of the old Norse myths and sagas, were inseparable; they mingled together, gliding softly one into the other in the young soul. Often, when perched on the back seat of Branting's carriage, the future poet was driven between forest-decked mountains, through deep ravines, along the banks of those mighty waters that stream through the land, it seemed to him as though Nature were vieing with him in freaks of fancy. Romantic indeed were the landscapes presented to his view in the long summer days, when twilight and dawn flowed gently together, and the roseate glow never vanished from the horizon, while an old northern landscape charmed him in winter, when the snow was piled in high banks, when the brooks hung in long icicles from the rocks, and the youth felt as though he actually saw, in the moonlight playing on the snow, winter personified, in the colossal form of a god, with a snow-storm in his beard, and a wreath of fir upon his head.