Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

The objections that may be raised to the historic reliability of this presentation are not unknown to me. But what a superb piece of prose from an ethnographic and picturesque point of view! How plainly the narrative brings the whole naïvely burlesque scene before the mind's eye!

Whoever has beheld in the Berlin museum the little clay image of an old Norse goddess, can form a vivid conception of these odious little idols which the pious women hold on their laps, anointing them and warming them by the fire. Everything is admirable here; the old northern piety which leads the people to see a Balder in the puppet, with the same burning faith that in our day leads men and women of the people in the South to see the Queen of Heaven in another puppet, and the surrounding scenery with the smoking wood-pile in the centre and the drinking knights in the adjoining hall. A more modern poet with a lively appreciation of the coloring of time and locality would not have had the heart to alter the slightest trifle in such a scene; he would have viewed it as a treasure-trove. I do not speak of the realists; realists do not write romance cycles; I have in mind the great stylists among the poets of the present day. It is a scene which might have been introduced into Victor Hugo's "La légende des siècles" (The Legend of the Centuries); but still better adapted would it have been for so rigid an artist as Lecomte de Lisle, who might have interwoven it in his "Poèmes barbares." To Tegnér, however, this scenery only seemed rude, odious, wholly unavailable for poetic art. The sharp contrasts between barbaric and Hellenic poetry did not exist for him; he strove to the best of his endeavors to Hellenize his barbaric material. From principle he refrained from mingling the wild burlesque element with a pathetic or beautiful whole. Instead, he painted – and with profound art – a night in which the midnight sun stands high in the heavens; in which Balder's pyre, the symbol of the sun, bums on the consecrated stone, while pale priests, with silvery white beards, stand with flint-knives in their hands around the temple wall. The statue of Balder towers up on a pedestal, with Fridthjofs ring entwined about its arm, and the king, with his crown on his head, is busied about the altar. This scenery is far more beautiful than that of the saga, but it is abstract and much less individual.

Besides the scandalous and burlesque elements in his material, there is a third thing which Tegnér recoils from and avoids. It is guilt.

It belongs to Tegnér's poetic system to shun all sharply pronounced guilt, no less than all that is decidedly odious or quaint. His hero is too benignly good to be carried to extremes of passing rage, revenge, or fierceness. He makes an assault and controls himself at once. He does not take revenge, as in the saga, for the mortification and grief the kings have inflicted on him; he does not scuttle their ship on his return home in order to punish them for the injustice they have done him; his weapon-brothers sink the vessel later, in order to facilitate Fridthjofs flight. We saw, furthermore, that Fridthjof, in his relations to Ingeborg, according to Tegnér's treatment, was guilty of no actual profanation of the temple. But most strikingly does the poet's solicitude to avoid profound guilt reveal itself where Fridthjofs relation to the burning of the temple is described. In the saga Fridthjof always displays a haughty spirit towards Balder. He declares that he rates the favor of Ingeborg of more account than that of Balder. When the return of the kings compels him to give up his nightly visits in Baldershage, he speaks with a certain irony concerning Balder to Ingeborg, saying, "Well and handsomely have you treated us, nor has the bonde Balder been angry with us."53 And finally, when through his heedlessness fire has arisen in Balder's temple, in his destructive rage he flings a flaming firebrand at the roof. Tegnér gives the scene quite differently. The state of mind of his Fridthjof toward Balder is most pious; he kneels before him at Ingeborg's side, and commends to his protection their mutual love; he makes energetic efforts to extinguish the fire in the temple, and when these fail, he moves away weeping and full of anguish.

Thus transformed, the character as a whole is more human and more noble, although undeniably less primitive, but the idealizing and modernizing process rendered it impossible to avoid a certain conflict between the character as it was represented by the poet, and several of the energetic traits that were attributed to it by the saga, and that passed unaltered into the poem. During the completion of the work, the poet must many times have queried within himself, whether it were after all worth while to treat ancient materials, when the antiquarian and the poetic elements could not be harmonized without incessant and useless compromises. His letters are full of evidences of this doubt; when the work was at length finished, after a struggle with the materials that lasted fully five years, they criticise "Fridthjof" most severely; they remind the admirers of the poem that poetry must be a "growing and not a preserved fruit"; they ring continued changes on the theme that "Fridthjof" is too much of an ancient saga to be a modern poem, and is in too high a degree modern poetry to be an old Norse saga; they declare that all poetry must be modern, "in the same sense that flowers are so in the springtime," and they condemn all that is archæological in the poem, as newly built ruins. Nevertheless, the universal critical mood has not erred when it rather took umbrage at the too modern than at the too antique element of the poem. A rigid stylist would not have had Fridthjof forbid the presence of women on board ship in his "Viking Code," with such a sentimental play of words as the following: —

"For the dimple deceives on her cheek, and her tressesWould net-like entrap thee above."54

Tegnér himself draws a parallel between his work and such studies as Goethe's "Iphigenia" and Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." The last parallel has more truth than the first, although Tegnér himself says, "the Scotch particularism in Scott, like the Judaical tone in the Old Testament, limits and suppresses what might otherwise have freer and higher flight." Tegnér finds himself in a literary-historic station, which is half-way between the two extremes, Walter Scott and Byron. Half a century of his life falls within the lifetime of Goethe, and he witnessed the whole of Byron's life. From Goethe, whom it was difficult for him to understand, he learned but little; he showed himself most susceptible to his influence when it approached him through Oehlenschläger; for the Byronic impression his temperament was more open, yet he held himself bravely above all contamination, and the effort to do so was facilitated in a higher degree by the romantic idealistic vaccine with which he had early been inoculated. As a poet he was too filled with his own ego to comprehend the impersonal element in the creative powers of Goethe; on the other hand, his egotism was not sufficiently profound to enable him to follow Byron on his voyages of discovery within subjectivity. Like Scott and Oehlenschläger he is national, closely bound to his country, his people and its heroic past; but there is in his nature a tendency against distinctly marked personality: he approaches the Byronic type at a certain remoteness.

As soon as the sixteenth to the nineteenth cantos of "Fridthjof" appeared in the year 1820, a universal cry of admiration rang through Sweden. Even the members of the romantic school, deeply moved, extended their hands for reconciliation. Before the entire work was completed (1825) Tegnér's fame had spread to the neighboring countries, especially to Germany, where Tegnér's first translator, Frau Amalia von Helwig, so well known as the friend of Goethe, made the aged poet acquainted with fragments of "Fridthjof," and won for it his favor. He called the attention of the German public to the poem, and although what he wrote about Tegnér in the vigorless style of his old age scarcely amounts to a dozen lines, it can readily be understood what an event a recognition on the part of Goethe grew to be in a small country like Sweden. Goethe's words read as follows: "We need not enter into any detailed statement to prove to those readers already friendly to the North, how admirable these cantos are. May the author as speedily as possible complete the entire work, and may the excellent translator continue to take pleasure in her labors that we may possess this sea-epic complete in the same purport and tone as what has already appeared! We would only add the brief remark that the vigorous, gigantic, barbaric style of antique poetry, approaches us, in a manner nearly incomprehensible to ourselves, with a new, musingly tender, yet undisfigured and highly agreeable form." To this day the Swedes never weary of referring to these words of praise. The admiration for Tegnér in his fatherland increased with the growing popularity of the poem; indeed, after his death it became so strong that it drowned almost all criticism, and finally reached its climax in such exaggerations as that of Mellin, who proclaimed Tegnér to be the "greatest poet of the Teutonic race." That homage to the man, however, which is and will always remain the best, is that which is at the same time homage to the truth.

X

"On life's exalted summit, where the watersOf living streams are parted, once I stood,And watched the current seeking divers quarters;Around me all was bright and fair and good.* * * * * * * * * *"A melancholy demon then did waken,Who suddenly my heart's warm blood did taste;And lo! the scene grew gloomy and forsaken,The sun and moon extinguished were in haste,My glowing landscape autumn hues had taken,Each flow'r was withered, ev'ry grove a waste;All vigor from my frozen senses vanished,All courage, all rejoicing now was banished."

While Tegnér was still occupied in putting the last touches to his "Fridthjof," the furies that had been lurking on his threshold shook their snaky locks before his eyes and stretched forth their long, lank arms to embrace him. They were the furies of disease, of passion, of life-weariness, and of dawning insanity, and they joined hands and danced round him in a circle.

The year 1825, the same in which "Fridthjof" appeared and proclaimed his fame to every quarter of the globe, was the year that marked the great crisis of his life. Physical as well as mental was the crisis. It has, to be sure, a purely bodily side; yet apart from the fact that this must be obscure even to a physician, it is only the mental and emotional side that the critic can study, and in it seems undoubtedly to have been the prime cause of the disorder. The mental and emotional catastrophe, however, is almost as obscure as the physical. It has hitherto remained unnoticed, chiefly because the editions of Tegnér's poems have been made, in usum delphini, by his surviving relatives. Their division into periods is thoroughly confusing; the poems are sparingly dated; indeed, as I have discovered, most of the love poems are pre-dated twenty-five years, in order to make the reader believe they were intended for Tegnér's wife when she was his betrothed bride. "The Ode to Melancholy" (Mjeltsjukan), the poem of which a strophe and a half have just been given, is inserted in the last edition, not dated between a poem of 1812 and another one of 1813. Tegnér's letters prove that it dates from 1825.

This year begins for Tegnér with violent illness; even on New Year's day of the year he is so ill that he believes death to be nigh at hand. In March he writes that his mind becomes every day more and more clouded. "God preserve me from melancholy and misanthropy," he says. In July he writes: "Blindness seems to me one of the most horrible of earthly misfortunes – next to one which I myself have experienced." Everything that formerly gave him pleasure is now distasteful to him. His disease continues as an inner restlessness, yet without any actual bodily pain. "My fancy, which was very excitable at the outset, is now like a whirlpool, that casts into swift rotation and soon destroys everything it can draw into its vortex."

The physicians think his liver is affected. "The fools! the soul is affected, and for it there is no medicine but that which is obtained in the great universal drug-shop beyond the grave." He declares that he cannot impart to his friends the cause of his sufferings. In November the violence of his malady seems to yield to a certain repose. He makes, so he says, fine daily progress in indifference, in which the happiness and wisdom of life consists. The destiny of the wise man, he thinks, is to become ever more and more of a tortoise. As long as he has a single exposed nerve, his whole being is a prey to torture. He feels "how thoroughly the dregs of contempt for the biped race are lodged in the depths of his soul." "Ah!" he exclaims, "genuine inner grief that attacks the strong soul nourishes itself, just as it does with war when it is rightly organized, or a wild beast when it has attained its full growth." On his birthday, Nov. 13, he sinks into the deepest melancholy; he thinks it would be better to celebrate, as do the Egyptians, the day of death. What puts him especially out of tune is the fact that this birthday is the last one that he will pass in Lund, where he has made his home for twenty-six years; having been appointed bishop he will be compelled to hold intercourse with strangers who will not understand him; as bishop he will come into possession of a disorganized diocese, and will be decried as a despot. In former times this would have been a matter of total indifference to him, nor would he have concerned himself in the least about the mob; but now he is nervous, hypochondriac, and out of tune, and he begins to comprehend the meaning of fear of man. "And yet this is not my only, not even my greatest, sorrow. Night, however, keeps silence, and the grave is mute; it behooves her sister, Sorrow, equally well to hold her peace." When finally, on the last day of the year, he draws the balance of what he has learned and gained in it, he writes:

"Ah, the old year! what I have suffered in it no one knows, unless it be the Great Recorder above yonder clouds. Nevertheless, I am indebted to the year. It has been more gloomy, but also more earnest, than all the others combined. I have learned at my own expense how much a human heart can endure without breaking, and what power God has deposited beneath the left side of a man's breast. As I said before, I am indebted to the year, for it has made me rich in what is the standing capital of human wisdom and independence: a vigorous, deeply rooted contempt for the human race." The excitability of his nervous system permits him to have no rest by day or by night. "My mind is in an unchristian state, for it has no Sabbath… I cannot drink mineral water in the coming summer. But is there not a mineral water that is called 'Lethe'?"

What has happened? That bodily pain and disease exist here in a high degree is undoubted. Esaias Tegnér had had an elder brother, Johann, whose brain was diseased, and who, at thirty-nine years of age, died of insanity; the younger brother was continually brooding over the thought that insanity was a family inheritance. Thomander, later a bishop, who visited Tegnér in March, 1825, writes of him: "He has now more gloomy hours than formerly; many a one, but no one more than himself, fears for his reason; it is a fixed idea of his that he will become insane, because his brother and other relatives have been so." No one, however, can doubt that the melancholy which so suddenly warped the cheerful and fresh disposition of Tegnér had other causes than bodily disease; too many utterances point to a defined, concrete fact, – a fact, to be sure that Tegnér himself will not communicate, but the nature of which is, nevertheless, plainly indicated. It is "the heart" that is affected. It is contempt for humanity that has overpowered him. It is contempt for "the character" of another person that is the first cause of his weariness of life, and this person "is or has been dear" to him. We need not have studied Tegnér very profoundly to conclude that there is a woman behind all this, and that every one of these outbursts may be traced back to an unhappy or an unsatisfied erotic passion.

Among the letters of Bishop Thomander there is one dated 1827, in which it is mentioned that Tegnér, while he was still in Lund, cherished warm sentiments of affection for the beautiful wife of one of his friends. From her piano he never moved when she was singing. "Lovely Rose,"55 by Atterbom, was his favorite song. Thomander writes that in a house where he met Tegnér, he warned the elder daughter not to sing "Lovely Rose," because he knew that if she did "the evil spirit would come over Saul"; but owing to a misunderstanding the forbidden song was sung, and Tegnér's good humor was banished for several days. In one of Tegnér's letters of May, 1826, we read in corroboration of this: "To listen to singing was something to which I had become especially accustomed during the last years of my stay in Lund, where I had daily opportunity of hearing a female voice that still echoes in my heart." To the lady here in question, Tegnér had written for his friend, in 1816, a sort of versified love-letter, in which her beauty, her goodness of heart, and her singing are extolled to the skies. He speaks in it of the danger of looking into her eyes. It appears that what was then called a danger in jest became a real danger for Tegnér several years later. His admiration for the disposition and talents of this beautiful woman seems gradually to have kindled a flaming passion, and this passion was evidently reciprocated. Local tradition has not a little to tell of his relation with her, which, moreover, could not have left his domestic happiness undisturbed. At all events, it certainly added much to his grief at parting from Lund. Still living contemporaries of Tegnér have, furthermore, communicated to me an occurrence which served as an essential motive for his contempt for humanity, especially his contempt for woman. He discovered that a very distinguished lady, with whom he was captivated, had yielded to the advances of a wholly unpolished, boorish man. Did it so greatly shock him who was himself faithless to find faithlessness everywhere, that he gave way completely to weariness of life? Did he simply tell himself that he was scorned because he was old and almost gray, and was he cast into a state of despair because the happiness of youth was at an end for him? Was he so agitated at finding animal passion where he had honored the crown of female culture and beauty, that in his morbid condition this indignation at a single individual grew to universal loathing of life? I cannot decide the question. I can only see that the bitter melancholy bored, in the once so trusty ship of his destiny, the hole through which the black waters of misanthropy and of insanity rushed in and deluged everything. During the shipwreck he wrote the melancholy lines: —

"For thee, mankind, with praise I am o'erflowing,God's image, thou, of true and perfect plan!And yet two lies betray thy record glowing, —The one is woman hight, the other man.From songs of old were truth and honor flowing,They best were sung when cheating erst began.Thou child of heav'n! One truth thou ownest now, —The mark of Cain, deep branded on thy brow."A fiery mark, by God's own finger given,Why did I never heed the sign before!This smell of mould beneath yon starry heavenDoth poison vernal bloom for evermore;And by the grave alone the smell is given,Tho' wardens strict may guard the marble door.Alas! corruption is the soul of life,No pow'r can crush it; ev'rywhere 'tis rife."

The state of discord into which the soul of Tegnér sank during the latter part of the time when "Fridthjof" was in the course of progress, has left its traces even in this cheerful and harmonious poem. One of the last-written cantos is that which bears the title "Fridthjof's Return." Its contents, by way of exception, are not modeled after the old Norse poem. Fridthjof returns home, learns that Ingeborg has been persuaded to become King Ring's wife, and in the first burst of his indignation exhausts himself in a stream of wrath at the faithlessness of the beloved object of his affections. No critical reader can fail to see how nearly related the following outburst is to the just-cited strophes of "The Ode to Melancholy."

'O woman, woman!' cried Fridthjof, madly,'When thought with Loke first sheltered gladly,A lie it was! and he sent it thenIn woman's shape to the world of men!Yes! a blue-eyed lie, who with false tears ruleth,Enchanteth always, and always fooleth;A rose-cheek'd lie, with rich swelling breast,And in spring-ice virtue and wind-faith drest.With guileful heart she, deceitful, glances,And perjury still on her fresh lips dances!And yet how dear to my soul was she —How dear was then, ah! yet is, to me!* * * * * * * * *"'In human bosom all faith is spent,Since Ing'borg's voice has to guile been lent;* * * * * * * * *"'Where sword-blades scatter the barrows' seed,O'er hill, o'er dale shall my footsteps speed;All crown'd, perchance, I may meet a stranger,I'd know if then I shall spare from danger!Some youth, perchance, I may meet, all calm,And full of love 'mid the shields' alarm, —Some fool on honor and truth depending,From pity I'll hew! – his poor life quick ending;I'll save from shame; he shall glorious die;Not guil'd, betray'd, nor despis'd – as I!'"56

We detect here in Fridthjofs inner being the same spiritual process we have just observed in the character of Tegnér. Not content with condemning the one woman for her faithlessness to himself, he extends his condemnation to the entire sex. "Woman is a lie," says Fridthjof, as well as the author of the "Ode to Melancholy." He who builds on "fidelity and honor" is a fool, are Tegnér's words in one instance as well as in the other. One single bitter experience increases in proportions with Fridthjof, as well as with his author, until it becomes contempt for the human race, and weariness of life. No wonder, since they are more nearly akin than are father and son.

From this time forth the chapter of woman's faithlessness as woman is the standing theme with Tegnér. His letters are variations on this theme. It is impossible for him, for instance, to mention a good or a bad translation without either remarking that beautiful translations, like beautiful women, are not always the most faithful, or that fidelity and beauty are rarely good friends. He cannot speak of a gift from a woman without calling her heart the worst, the most dangerous, present she could make. Woman in general he regards henceforth as a sort of "society machine or musical box that sounds very nicely indeed, when properly wound up." As for love, it becomes so inclined to suicide that the moment it is no longer compelled to sigh in vain, it dies by its own hand. Of Ingeborg, he writes, "In the nature of the heart of woman, there certainly exists reason sufficient for her faithlessness to her lover, yet this fact must receive some sort of gilding from a poet who desire to behave politely to the fair sex." Indeed, so confirmed did Tegnér gradually become in this habit of describing woman as unreliable and fickle that many years later, when in the capacity of bishop he made his school addresses, he was unable to refrain from edifying the schoolboys with his theory. In an address of the year 1839 he calls the boys happy because of the wealth of hope that belongs to their youth. Then he adds, "Hope, in all languages known to me, is of the feminine gender, nor does it deny its sex. True, it deceives; but believe gladly, believe long in the fair deceiver, and clasp her to your bosom." Tegnér must undeniably have been very full of bitterness to give vent to it at so inopportune a moment and to so very unsuitable a public. But not this single passionate disharmony alone can be dated from the crisis indicated in the life of the poet; from this period, a more vehement, more passionate tone altogether began to manifest itself in his letters and in his poetry. Indeed, a truly Shakespearean tragic passion may be found in them. The world is out of joint, and how can it ever be set right again by Hamlet's arm. He no longer places reliance on Ophelia; she must get her to a nunnery if she will remain pure. For, frailty, thy name is woman! What is life? "A brief reprieve under the gallows." And what is the history of the world? "A dog's dance." A loathsome comedy is everything that Hamlet sees about him: "painted decorations for the stage with paper roses and theatrical sunshine." He could easily go mad over it; very likely it will at last make him mad; but first the lie and pitiful wretchedness of life must be unmasked, without mercy, without forbearance.