Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

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.

VII

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's40 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 manifested trop 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 the doctrinaire party 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."41

and the aged king on the other hand tells of that

"Warrior-might which always moreWas prized than royal birth."42

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?'"43

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.

VIII

"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 ancient régime. 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.