Tegnér is instructor (docent) at the University of Lund; he is
twenty-two years old, and is passing his summer vacation on the Rämen
estate in the Myhrmann family, with whose youngest daughter, Anna, he
is betrothed.
Here one day in September there appears, on a visit, the afterward so
celebrated historian and poet, Erik Gustav Geijer, a young man of
Tegnér's own age, who is freighted with the latest wisdom of the day,
and bubbling over with a youthful impulse to impart and discuss his
ideas. He makes attempt after attempt to approach Tegnér, but fails to
find common ground on which they can meet. The slender son-in-law elect
of the house is variable and full of moods, an enamored dreamer, a
laughing mocker. There is a glitter of merriment in his eyes, his words
are flashes of lightning. It is no more possible to follow the channel
of his thoughts than the course of the sunbeam through the foliage.
The two young people are taking a walk together and have entered into
a discussion on the way. Let us listen to what they are saying. The
leader of the conversation is Geijer, who asks,--
"What Tegnér really thinks of the civilization of this locality? If he
does not believe that all the so-called popular enlightenment is an
evil? He, Geijer, looks on the sound reason of the masses as the most
unfortunate delusion that it could ever occur to any one to venerate.
Only the chosen ones of humanity had the higher sense which enabled
them to grasp science in its full truth. Was not that the opinion also
of the _Herr Docent?_"
"No, not by any means; he would call that mysticism."
"Mysticism! What did Tegnér understand by mysticism?"
"Well, to lie flat on one's back, to take a little nap and allow one's
self to be shadowed by the power of the Most High."
"Seriously speaking, did Tegnér admit of no intellectual intuition?"
"No, he cared nothing for the Teutonic mania--but he cared all the more
for blueberries;" and just here there were growing some most excellent
ones in the enjoyment of which he became profoundly absorbed:
"Moreover, he did not doubt that Geijer understood the matter better
than he did; he (Tegnér) had always heard Geijer called a genius, and
such people only could meddle with philosophy. He, for his part, who
knew of himself that no more reason than was absolutely necessary
to carry him through the world had fallen to his lot, was not very
fond of playing blindman's-buff, except with pretty young girls, and
enjoyed least of all to do it with such learned gentlemen as Kant and
Schelling."
"But without mysteries and without mysticism there was no religion."
"Did Geijer recognize the faculty in Lund, or not? This honorable body
of pedants had accorded to him, Tegnér, the well-merited testimony
that he led a quiet, God-fearing life, something that in these latter
days was rare enough. On the other hand, so far as the dogma deemed
so highly essential to salvation, the doctrine of the Trinity, was
concerned, it was wholly beyond his intellectual horizon."
"Nevertheless, it could very easily be explained. There was no
contradiction in the idea of the Trinity; for the antithesis already
presupposed unity. God as the absolute being was not created, but had
been from all eternity, and yet, must be conceived as an existing
Being, for He is the creator of all things, and is in all things. The
simple solution of this seeming contradiction was, that the parts which
mutually presupposed one another were in reality one; the Redeemer
and the Father, speculatively comprehended, were one, although not a
unit.... Was not that clear to every nobly born mind?"
Tegnér, who was quite lost in the contemplation of the gambols of a
wagtail, replied absently, "That he did not recognize the privileges of
nobility."
"In what sense not? Geijer, in the highest degree, advocated hereditary
aristocracy."
"And I," replied his opponent, his mouth full of blueberries, "I was
always, from childhood up, a bit of a Jacobin."
This word had, as already indicated, a less terror-inspiring
significance in Sweden than in France, apart from the fact that from
Tegnér's lips it came half as a jest. But in the jest there lay the
earnest verity that he belonged to the honest friends of freedom in
civil life and in thought, who had not been intimidated by the bloody
deeds of the Revolution. With genuine horror he had perceived, in
the beginning of the century, the approach from the South of the
religio-political reaction in Sweden, and it was as yet an unenrolled
soldier in the army of the civilization of enlightenment that here ran
against one of the first and farthest removed outposts of romantic
feudalism.
Tegnér, in common with all the prominent men whose youth fell at the
close of the eighteenth century, came into the world early enough to
steer out into life with sails inflated by the great cosmopolitan
wind of freedom, then sweeping over the earth. His earliest reading
was the Gustavian classics of Sweden, which were based on Locke, so
far as their philosophy was concerned, and on Voltaire in regard to
their literary tendencies. Both Kellgren and Leopold were disciples of
Voltaire, and both were political liberals, who did not even attempt to
conceal their convictions at court. They were careful not to wound the
religious sentiments of the multitude by scoffing; but they cherished
all the traditions of the century, and fought in their behalf a
brilliant fight. Kellgren's satiric poem, "The Enemies of Light," was a
banner. In the same direction as the poetry of these men, only fraught
with even more poetic fruitfulness, Schiller's influence guided young
Tegnér. On the boundary line of youth, like Schiller, he celebrates
enlightenment in a poem on Rousseau, and he writes reflective verses,
in the spirit of the times, on such themes as religion, culture, and
tolerance.
Neither family tradition nor the force of education led the priest's
son to opposition to Christian dogmas. Together with all the rest of
his intellectually awakened contemporaries he had received, when yet a
boy, the cold douche of Voltaire. When sixteen years old he wrote: "I
am now reading Voltaire; but I do not see how I can get through even
the most important and most essential parts. It is all admirable, and
it is difficult to choose among so many beauties." Most of the young
men of his day who had entertained similar presumptions, were quickly
borne by the altered spirit of the times to religious conservatism. For
this Tegnér was too honest and too great. What insured him from losing
his independence in religious matters was that vigorous element of his
being, called by himself the pagan element, that was the natural result
of the solid structure and the genuine steadfastness of his character.
Two classes of men about him were swept onward in the reaction against
the eighteenth century, with such force that they were borne by it to
orthodoxy, and to feudalism. One class was composed of authors whose
natures were inclined to run through the whole scale of the emotions of
the Middle Ages, that is,--rather in fancy than in reality,--to give
way to contrition and self-contempt in order to be uplifted by the
supernatural aid of grace to everlasting bliss, and whose poetry was
distinguished by an excess of nervous excitability of all forms,--by
mystic Platonic devotion, sighing, melancholy, intensely sensual
erotic tenderness, alarming arrogance. This class formed the romantic
phalanx proper, called in Sweden the Phosphorists. The characteristics
mentioned are apparent in an unequal degree in Atterbom, Stagnelius,
Hammerskjöld, etc., but are found in all. The second class of men had
broader shoulders and healthier spirits; they were historic enthusiasts
who had been blinded by the national sentiment, by the love of the
faith and the institutions of the past, to all that was just and great
in the criticism of the preceding century; such men as Geijer, and the
Gothic union of Upsala, whose centre he was, and to whose national
efforts Tegnér lent his aid without entering into either the religious
or the political sympathies and doctrines of the society.
The pagan element that Tegnér discovered in his own nature, derived
its nourishment from two sources in his earliest studies; first from
his relations to northern antiquities, and second from his devotion
to Greek poetry. In a letter of 1825, he wrote: "A certain spiritual
kinship with our barbaric ancestors, which no culture can wipe out,
always impelled me to turn back to their grotesque but magnificent
forms." What he especially had in mind when he referred to this
spiritual kinship was that wilfulness of the ancient Norseman which
betrayed itself in his case in a challenging manner, and in that
tendency to melancholy which had been one of the characteristics of the
ancients. In Tegnér it was not revealed by romantic lamentations, but
by a grave and sometimes gloomy temperament, which, after his fortieth
year found such abundant food that it degenerated into weariness of
life and contempt for humanity. The poetic symbol for this Titanic
element in his composition, for gigantic strength of nature, for inner
unrest beneath the weight of a mighty pressure, he sought now among the
Scandinavians, now among the Grecians; and thus the old Norse and the
old Greek mythology became blended in his fancy. The old Norse giant
speaks to him in the same way as Goethe's Prometheus:--
"I hate the radiant Asas
And Ask's fair children,
Who bow before the Gods
That I despise."
And his lament, "The Age of the Asas" (Asatiden), is so nearly allied
to Schiller's "Gods of Greece" that the poet must unquestionably have
derived his ideas from this poem.
"Ye lofty mem'ries, engraved on historic page,
Like empty harness that no one can wear, all lonely;
With shrinking awe ye're viewed by this trifling age,
For hero life in the North is a saga only.
"Sleep calmly, thou Past! In vain would I dun to-day
Drag forth thy deeds from their graves as some rusty token;
Here strangers only to unknown gods now pray,
The sinews of song and the blade of action lie broken."
Here, too, Norse and Greek paganism are blended in the author's memory.
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.