Closely allied to the lyric inspiration with Tegnér is the supplemental
faculty which makes him witty in social intercourse, happy in epigram
and impromptu, prominent as a professor, remarkable as a letter writer,
orator and preacher, and beyond all else great in his metrical flow
of poetically constructed language; a faculty which cannot be called
outright a talent for rhetoric, but which provisionally, although
perhaps rather vaguely, might be designated, in his case, as the
intellectual faculty. His intellect was not the French _esprit_.
The latter, in its most characteristic form, as with Voltaire, is
pure understanding unadorned by imagery. The _esprit_ of Tegnér, on
the contrary, ran continually into imagery. He thought in figures,
consequently he spoke in figures. The gift of abstract thought was
lacking in him, indeed he was so wholly devoid of it that he did not
even believe in its results in others: metaphysics was to him an
abomination as a phantom of the brain, woven of threads which he could
not discern; dogmatics were his terror, as a tissue of absurdities,
to which his understanding could find no outlet. And he had a good,
healthy, self-reliant understanding which instinctively abhorred
all obscurity of thought and of speech. He had so lively an impulse
to render perceptible all that he thought and felt, that figure
after figure crowded upon him. It was this that gave his language
those electric flashes of sparkling light which so captivated his
contemporaries; it was this that rendered his epistolary style so
entertaining, and caused exasperated critics to compare his poetry
to gorgeous-colored empty soap-bubbles; it was this finally that
made him witty, for there is a certain kind of wit that depends
on the surprising succession of swiftly-dissolving images. This
intellectuality might be called the fruitfulness of form. The mood into
which he was transported by intellectual productiveness sprouted and
blossomed incessantly; it was only by way of exception that it could
project grand, wholly-completed images, or simple figures, formed of
a few main outlines, but it produced a continuous flow of miniature
figures which stood antithetically or contrastingly opposed to one
another, which glided one over the other, were united and transmitted
onward. His mind was loaded, revolver-like, with fancies, and they
followed one another in swift succession, shot after shot, all aimed at
the same point, striking surely, but each thrusting aside the one that
had preceded it. Idea and figure were not separated in his mind, nor
were their relations far-fetched, as Tegnér's opponents believed and
asserted; and yet they were not purely one and the same.
In his imagination, thought and figure were related in about the same
degree as the initial letters in the old monastic manuscripts were
related to the miniature paintings with which they were interwoven
and illuminated. If we call up before our mind's eye a manuscript in
which the overwhelming majority of characters, not single ones alone,
are thus illuminated, we can form a certain conception of the series
of harmonious associations of ideas and figures which Tegnér's brain
incessantly produced. Or if we recall one of those marble designs
from the early days of the Italian Renaissance, in which the artist
has executed at his pleasure small images on the larger statue, where
he has chiselled, for instance, on the helm fallen from the head of
Goliath, and lying at David's feet, a little bas-relief of a quadriga
in full galop, which forms, it is true, a part of the whole, but which,
owing to its loose connection with it, as well as to its independent
claims to consideration, dissipates the interest. If we think of a
poetic mind calculated to conceive such bas-reliefs, and of a diction
inclined to color these, we can form an approximately correct idea of
Tegnér's manner of treating his poetic motive. His style is a sort of
chromatic architecture and sculpture, and possesses the attractive
and the repellent qualities of both. Colored sculpture is generally
looked upon in our day as a species of barbarism; and yet the Greeks
have employed it, nor was it ever wholly discarded by them. It cannot
be called un-Grecian, and yet to most people in our day, it appears
tasteless and antiquated. Those poems and speeches in which Tegnér's
most characteristic manner stands forth with its utmost strength and
distinctness, may be compared to those Grecian and Roman statues that
produce quite as much effect through their exterior splendor as through
their ideal beauty. The goddesses had golden chains about their necks,
wore beautiful long veils, and ear-rings; they possessed a complete
wardrobe, and an entire casket of jewels. Precisely in the same way
have the jeweller and the artist worked together in Tegnér. In many
instances the result has been a successful and attractive whole, which
could be rejected by a pedant or a doctrinist alone. Not rarely,
however, the result has been an excessive exaggeration. A pamphleteer
of Tegnér's time (the witty Palmär), once censured this tendency in
words which suit the comparison just used. "Greet your muse," said he,
"and beg it not to overburden itself with metaphors, as is its wont.
These jewels, even when they are genuine, must be worn with moderation.
Let these trinkets be placed about the neck, in the ears, and on the
fingers, if you will, but--on the toes--fie, for shame!"
I can more accurately explain my meaning through examples. Mary, in
"Axel," resolves to follow the Russian army as a soldier.
"Beneath a soldier's cap
She hides away her ringlets, dark as night;
In a buff vest her slender form is laced;
Alas, for such fair form in such array!
O'er shoulder, known by Grecian poet's song,
Death's spy-glass, the dread carabine, is hung."[3]
The expression, "death's spy-glass," for the dread carabine, is
picturesque, and so far not bad; but none the less must it be said
that the figure is not altogether appropriate. Not only has it nothing
whatever to do with Mary's form, but it answers only to a gun in
general, not to the particular weapon on her shoulder; for this would
scarcely kill a Swede. Upon me this figure produces the same effect
as if I were to see on the margin of the text, a carefully executed
miniature of the dismal skeleton, with the scythe in one hand, and
holding the carabine to its eye with the other, in order to take aim.
In the "Children of the Lord's Supper," the old priest beseeches the
children he is about to confirm, to choose prayer and innocence as the
guides of their lives. Both are personified with a few strokes, and
then the figure is engraved in a small biblical relief, of the kind
that is seen in Italy on the bronze doors of churches and baptisteries.
"Innocence, child beloved, is a guest from the world of the blessed;
Beautiful, and in her hand a lily; on life's roaring billows
Swings she in safety; she heedeth them not, in the ship she is
sleeping."[4]
Or an example may be taken from Tegnér's epistolary style. He waxes
eloquent (1817) against the European reaction. "Gaze at the signs
of the times from the North, and from the South! Do you know any
vulgarity, any barbarism, any insane prejudice their regeneration
does not promise? The serpent of time often sheds its skin; but more
perverse than at this precise moment, it has never been, as far
as history extends, even though it hissed nothing but hymns, and
though its back were as completely covered with biblical texts as a
tombstone." Is there not in this energetic but thoroughly unaffected
effort at clear perception, something that reminds us of chromatic
sculpture. Do we not see before us, in due form, the serpent of time,
with its red outlines; and does not its back, all covered with peculiar
ciphers, look like the image of a god, in the shape of a beast, covered
with hieroglyphics, or tile inscriptions, on some ancient Assyrian or
Egyptian wall? And when finally the similitudes are read with which
Tegnér, in "Fridthjof," endeavors to paint female beauty, can it not
readily be comprehended why attention should be called to the hard
metallic glow of the coloring of an antique idol?
"The bards praise Gerda's fair cheeks too high,
Fresh snows which playful north-lights dye!
I cheeks have seen whose daylights clear,
Two dawnings blushing in one sphere."[5]
It would be unjust to cite this last stanza as an adequate specimen of
Tegnér's picturesque method; nevertheless there is something typical
in it. Most of the similitudes produced by the fancy of Tegnér, so far
exceed the brilliancy of nature, that to me they appear very much the
same as the image he makes his Ingeborg weave of Fridthjofs falcon:--
"Here on his hand,
Work I thy form on the cloth's broad band;
Pinions of silver, and glowing
Gold talons sewing."[6]
With a predilection of this kind, something conventional and stiff can
scarcely be avoided. The inclination to transform every idea into a
figure beguiles Tegnér, in uninspired moments, into a common-place use
of once-applied similes, which keep recurring in an almost stereotyped
way. Thus he has (merely to keep to the birds) a few bird forms which
he never wearies of dragging in eagle, nightingale, and dove. They
stand as equivalents for strength, poetry, and piety. The eagle used
for this purpose by Tegnér retains no more of the nature of the real
eagle than may be seen in the eagles that adorn royal escutcheons;
Tegnér's eagle is purely heraldic. In his poetry may be found lines
like these: "Alas! poor Psyche, fly as she will, on earth she is but an
eagle with butterfly's pinions"; or similes like the following: "Within
her throat a nightingale she carried, and a snow-white dove by night
and by day did linger in her bosom." An eagle with butterfly pinions
is a creature totally contrary to nature, and when a nightingale is
firmly fixed in a female throat, it does not exactly contribute to the
perspicuity of the thought.
In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself
figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of
poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it
the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the
poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although
he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once
made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be
sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main
lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and
prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at
his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct
it.