Tegnér was born about the middle of the reign of Gustavus III. The
assassination took place when he was ten years old; consequently he,
who in later years was so fond of styling himself a Gustavian, had
childish reminiscences alone of that period, and no other personal
impressions of the character of Gustavus than those gained at second
hand from a legend, embellished or idealized by tender hands. Even
this was scarcely needed to make the period seem like one of rare
brilliancy, in comparison with the leaden epoch which followed.
Gustavus III. was a man of great energy, endowed with remarkable
talents, unusual virtues, and dazzling vices; he was a vain despot, yet
had an enlightened mind; he was one of the many crowned followers of
Voltaire that were the product of the eighteenth century; he was full
of superstition and yet a free-thinker, frivolous yet intellectual,
in matters of trifling import displaying a petty spirit, but having
traits of true greatness; he was brave, magnanimous, a hero of the
stage, with genuine courage in his breast. During his whole life he
attracted about him, through the magic of his mental powers, all the
gifted literary men of his land, especially the poets, who saw in
him a colleague; not one of them could boast so distinctly marked a
dramatic talent as his. Thus it was that for a long time he imprinted
upon the manners, the forms of speech, the literature of Sweden, the
stamp of an exquisitely refined, light, frivolous culture; and it is
the conversational tone of his day that invested Tegnér's letters, even
in the reign of Charles John (Bernadotte), with their grace and their
soaring flights of fancy. His was a form that had remained fixed in
history, like one of Bernini's admirable statues; full of mannerism,
coquettish, affected, if you will, with airily rustling drapery, but
presenting an attitude that was bold and unflinching, and producing an
impression of the most profound significance. Nor could this be denied,
however little satisfaction might be taken in the figure. And what had
come after him? First, the regency of the brother of Gustavus, the
duke of Södermanland, which embraces the period from Tegnér's tenth to
his fourteenth year. The regent, a wretched imbecile, who had grown
prematurely gray in the service of Venus, and who was well adapted to
be the prey of every Phryne and every Cagliostro, was wholly governed
by his favorite Reuterholm, who represented the type of brutal and
incompetent passion for rule. Not from love of freedom, but simply
as an indirect way of censuring the murdered king, these empty-pated
men introduced freedom of the press into Sweden, and, without any
preparation or gradual transition, all the inflammatory writings of the
French Revolution now flooded the land. The long-continued ignorance
concerning what was transpiring in France and throughout Europe was
followed by a tumultuous and immature enthusiasm for freedom. During
the reign of Gustavus the word republican was still synonymous with the
word philosopher; so that in the year 1789 a courtier like Rosenstein
could commend his nephew to the king by stating that the young man,
although somewhat infected with republican views, had kept these so
well within bounds that they "only served to increase his love for
his _king,_ his fatherland, and honor." Later, as contrasted with the
pitiful wreck on the throne, the word became invested with a more
accurate significance. With eager suspense the people followed the
defensive war of the French Republic; its victory was decisive for
public opinion; the peaceful citizens of the small towns of Sweden
spoke in the same tone as the extreme left of the French convention.
No sooner had that misfortune occurred than the freedom of the
press, established half a year earlier with so much false pathos,
was abolished, and throughout Sweden the persecution of Jacobinism
became rife; even the loyal Swedish Academy, because it voted against
admitting to its membership the totally uncultured favorite of the
regent, was treated as a Jacobin club, and closed.
An act of baseness of the worst sort caused contempt to reach its
climax. The conspiracy of Armfelt, the Swedish Alcibiades, was
discovered, and the duke-regent endeavored to avail himself of this
opportunity to make the fair young Mlle. Rudenskjöld, one of the
ornaments of the court, cruelly atone for the obstinacy with which she
had rejected the gallant propositions of the aged married libertine.
Intercepted letters furnishing proofs that Armfelt had been her lover,
she was arrested, and accused of being a participator in his crime; but
when the duke, through his chancellor, judicially ordered her to be
whipped on the public market-place for her immorality, the exasperated
populace branded him with so deep a stigma that it could neither be
effaced by time, nor covered with the white hairs of old age; not
even the deportment of Bernadotte toward Charles XIII., with its wily
assumption of simplicity, could bury it in oblivion.
While all these events were taking place, Tegnér was still too young to
be able to enter into or understand them; but the after effects on his
mind were profound and strong. No remote corner of the land was too far
distant to be reached by the sparks from the crater of the revolution;
no youth, whose intelligence had once been aroused, was so absorbed in
his studies that he escaped hearing outbursts of contempt for royalty
and government, which he at once applied to his own land. Persecuted
"Enlightenment" became a magic, a beloved word to every youth. The
Swedish Academy, which under other circumstances might readily have
become an object of his displeasure, simply as an academy, as an
official and antiquated institution for the gilding of mediocrity, very
early appeared to Tegnér as a knightguard of the light, the worth of
which had been fully tested. The prevailing revolutionary spirit had
no power over his harmonious soul, and only led him to the conditional
royalism which is revealed throughout his writings. He was in favor of
royalty when the king was worthy of his throne, not otherwise.
In the year 1796 the regency came to an end, and from that time until
1809 (that is, from Tegnér's fourteenth to his twenty-seventh year),
Gustavus (IV.) Adolphus reigned as king. Pedantically honorable,
rigidly grave, rigorously frugal as this monarch was, he could not but
produce, when he first appeared upon the stage, a pleasing contrast to
his uncle. It soon became apparent, however, that this youthful form
was wholly unnational. The physiognomy proved to be rather Spanish
than Swedish. Gustavus IV. bears a striking resemblance to the type
of regents of the Spanish decadence, with character modelled after
the great, lamentable shadow of Philip II., who held sway in Madrid
so long after his death. The same petty adherence to etiquette, the
same haughty gloom, the same awkward formality, the same melancholy
piety, combined with fanatic faith in royalty by the grace of God.
The court which, ten years earlier, had presented the appearance of
a festal painting by Watteau, was now as quiet and as ceremonious
as the Spanish court under Charles II., and even the great Philip
could not have punished the crime of lèse-majesty with more severity
than Gustavus, the fault of neglecting to raise the hat in the street
to him. In Rosenstein he had had a noble tutor, with a thoroughly
independent mind. Gustavus III. had permitted this most honorable
instructor to have full sway. "Rosenstein has my full consent to
educate my son as a philosopher," said he; "the boy will be a royalist
as soon as he ascends the throne." This father, as a matter of course,
was in nowise responsible for that inflexible faith in revealed
religion which allowed his son to read in the Apocalypse prophecies
concerning his own destiny. The fact was, the reaction with which, amid
the fitful changes of the century, the air was everywhere freighted,
had stolen through secret by-paths into the mind of the crown prince,
and had completely overpowered it. The frivolity of the father, to
be sure, had served as a warning, and had given the first backward
impulse; the murder of the father gave the second. Soon Gustavus IV.
had gone farther in his ever-present consciousness of majesty than
any Bourbon. He forbade the daily papers to use the pronoun "we" in
such applications as, "We are waiting with impatience for news," "We
have had a severe winter," because this seemed to him equivalent to
an encroachment on that royal prerogative which is known as _Pluralis
majestatis._ All the publications that appeared in the land were
subjected by his orders to the strictest supervision; and personally he
cherished so great a horror of books that he burst into loud utterances
of delight whenever he heard that a printing-house had failed. He
himself never read anything except his Bible and the regulation work on
military tactics.
And this was the king, who, in the foolish war against Napoleon, never
rested until he had lost Stralsund and Rügen, and whose insane war
against Russia led to the definite conquest of all Finland by a Russian
army. Runeberg in his poem "The King" in "Fänrik (Ensign) Staal," has
erected for Gustavus IV. the monument he deserved. In the year 1809 a
couple of courageous officers compelled him to abdicate the throne.
The duke of Södermanland followed him as Charles XIII., and it was
shortly afterward, when the adopted son of the latter died, that the
French party in Sweden, through a mistaken idea of pleasing Napoleon
and the illusory hope of thus winning back Finland, had Bernadotte
chosen crown prince. His form emerged in a brilliant light from the
gloomy background of the shadows of his predecessors. During a period
of thirty-three years, the celebrated commander-in-chief guided the
politics of Sweden; and this king whose reign is contemporaneous with
Tegnér's most vigorous years, shares with Tegnér the honor of having
given the name to the generation he ruled over. The period from 1810 to
1840 belongs to Charles John, and to Tegnér.
Such are the pictures of the rulers who at that time, one after
another, imprinted their physiognomies on Sweden, and whose profiles
are stamped on the coins that passed through the fingers of Tegnér when
he was a child, a clerk, a student, and a _magister._