"Man is the flower of the metallic race of the earth, and his language
is the magnetic fluid of this race, which, by the force of his will,
is shed upon the world. If all speech is at bottom music (the ear of
nature is of metal, and what the spirit of the world whispers into it
is music), we need to seek a long time before we can discover the kind
of kinship that transforms it into material substance for the poetic
fancy."
This hard piece of eloquence is given here as a sample of the style
of which Atterbom, the leader of the romantic school, made use in his
youth. It contains so decided a challenge to parody that it is no
wonder Tegnér yielded to the temptation to aim some mocking darts at it.
The religious and political views of Tegnér, combined with his literary
standpoint, gave him a lofty watchtower, situated far above the two
contending parties of the old and the new school, but from which he
almost exclusively aimed his shafts at the latter. He who had entered
the new century in early youth, and who was but twenty years old when
he had experienced, in Lund, Sweden's upward soaring flight of poetic
fancy, could not possibly feel his poetic needs satisfied by the
insipid didactic and comic poems of the Gustavians. There was nothing,
however, that incited him to combat against them, and they passed
away all too soon, one after the other, until Leopold alone remained
as the last surviving representative of the ancient _régime._ When
Tegnér was in the full vigor of his manhood, Leopold was blind, and
even had he otherwise been inclined to attack the old man, it was now
impossible for him to do so. On the other hand, the first appearance
of the "Phosphorists" upon the scene had provoked his displeasure in
the highest degree. They discoursed in a philosophic idiom, which was
intelligible neither to himself nor to any other uninitiated person.
They opposed the academy as foreign,--that is to say, French,--and
were themselves German to the core. Moreover, to Tegnér the French
traditions were much dearer than the German. Not even his predilection
for Grecian lore had estranged him from the classic French rules of
taste. In his eyes Grecian characteristics very early became synonymous
with self-control in art, and French poetry was in every respect
well governed. It was no mere chance, therefore, that led him to the
remark that the French national spirit "in many instances is more
nearly allied to the Grecian than the Germans and their apes, since
Lessing's time, have been willing to admit." His admiring attitude
toward the old academicians during the sharp controversy against
the "Phosphorists" recalls vividly, indeed, strikingly, Byron's
contemporaneous enthusiasm for Pope and contempt for the lake school.
The causes were in part akin: fidelity to childhood's impressions,
delight in contradiction, partiality to intelligent lucidity and Latin
rhetoric; but this attitude had still deeper ground in the relation to
the Grecian peculiarities, and to the French studies of the antique,--a
relation which is not found in Byron, but which characterizes Tegnér.
Byron's art was employed in giving an organ to passion: Tegnér, like
the ancients, desired that passion might be clad in strict decorum, in
order to avoid a pathological effect. He had never liked reality, and
had as little fancy for metaphysics; but the ideal form he loved. The
inner schisms which he conceived to be the problem for art to solve
were not deep; at heart he did not wish to see more violent struggles
between body and soul, condition and desire, duty and happiness, etc.,
represented in poetry than could be reconciled with the harmony of
healthfulness. It was rather the pure, polished form that fascinated
him than the natural freshness of the Greeks, consequently the quality
which the French classic style had in common with the Grecian. All
these instincts brought him very near to the old school, and removed
him from the new.
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 quarter
A flood of light, while through the pillared forest
The 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 borrow
Sad 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._