Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

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.

IX

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."44

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."45

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."46

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!"47

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!"'48

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."49

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."50

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 voluptas is 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."51

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."52