The year 1830, that brought the July Revolution to France, led to
a change in the political temper of Sweden, and soon in the entire
political situation; it was a year that gave to liberalism a new
impulse, significantly modifying its aims and altering the language
of its press. Before 1830, the ideal of the Swedish liberals had
been freedom; now it became democracy. As a matter of course, the
advance of liberalism drove the conservative groups to the opposite
extreme. Upsala was the headquarters of the reactionary party; here
Geijer held sway, and the loyal students followed him so faithfully
that, in a serenade to Charles John they thus designated their party:
_"obéir, mourir, et se taire"_ (to obey, to die, and keep silence). In
retaliation the Stockholm liberal press called Upsala a foul nest of
Tories, and the university professors, dried-up moles. A new style of
journalism developed itself, which, owing to the prevailing absolutism,
could only obtain a hearing through a personal, unrestrained tone. The
style of this press was frivolous and sharp; it wounded with pin pricks
and _persiflage._ Neither the court nor the person of Charles John was
spared. If this tone pleased in certain circles of the metropolis, it
excited lively displeasure elsewhere, especially in the provincial
towns, and no one was more thoroughly annoyed by it than Tegnér, whose
shattered mind was too thoroughly out of tune to permit him to see
the good that might possibly arise one day from all these sins against
good taste and against respect for the name of the old king. He offered
a passionate protest against it, and the liberal papers attacked him
like a swarm of wasps. The consequence was that he soon turned wholly
against the liberal press as well as against the doctrines promulgated
by it. Intellectual aristocrat as he was, the demagogic tendency was
repulsive to him; an ideal conception of the people he had never
attained in his best days, and now, after all faith in human purity and
spiritual beauty was destroyed in him, he was less able than ever to
acquire it. Amid these circumstances he was obliged to come upon the
scene as a professional politician, his position as bishop compelling
him to take part in parliamentary affairs at Stockholm. It cannot be
wondered at that this was done in a conservative direction; indeed,
Tegnér came forward as a true _enfant terrible_ of conservatism, for
when the old martial spirit came over him he spared neither friend
nor foe. Henceforth, through all his writings, as well as through his
speeches in parliament, ring bitter sallies against the new form of
journalism, which seems to him a symptom of Sweden's decay. Listen to
his words:
"The Swedish colors were yellow and blue,
And strength and honor of yore in them were clad;
But now the mire is your national hue, falsehood
Your Epic Song, and slander is set free
Six days each week, nor scarcely rests the seventh.
Its eye doth pierce the life of every mortal,
At every key-hole it doth place its ear.
Ye men of Sweden, is this your boasted freedom?"
His illness, from the first outbreak, had given him no peace. A trip to
the baths at Carlsbad in the year 1833 brought him no relief, to say
nothing of recovery. The most substantial value of the journey was the
purely intellectual result that Tegnér became rather better acquainted
with Germany than he had hitherto been. He had but little sympathy for
this country, its obscure philosophy of that time being repellant to
him, and he thought that it had spent its energies in the appropriation
of foreign literary productions without having the ability to impart
to these an individual stamp. He compares the Germans with the Caspian
Sea, which is watered by a number of streams, yet being without
an outlet, evaporates in mist. On his journey, during which great
attention, both from private sources and from orders of the king,
Friedrich Wilhelm IV. himself, was shown the poet whose fame had spread
throughout Germany, he received at least a superficial impression of
the positive qualities of the people. He writes, among other things:
"Germany, in spite of her chaotic nebulous state, has undeniably
been for a long time the seat of learning of Europe, and Prussia is
undoubtedly the present centre of intelligence of the civilized world."
He was too old, however, to begin his school-days afresh; and doubly
weary of life, now that all hopes of improvement were at an end, he
returned to his stultifying calling and his vain struggle against the
political development of Sweden.
His loathing of the press, which he sought in vain to subdue, went so
far that his heart finally became estranged from both the government
and the people of Sweden. He writes: "O my poor fatherland! At the
public leaders themselves I do not wonder; they live by their calumnies
just as the executioner lives by his heads, and the flayer by his
scourge; but what shall be said of a people, of the body of most
worthy Swedish people, that not only endures this miserable, paltry
state of affairs, but encourages, bribes, permits, admires it? It
can only be explained by the supposition that our nation, with a few
rare exceptions, has degenerated into a vulgar mob. As far as I can
see, nothing remains for us but to bid farewell, if not to the land
of Sweden, at least to the Swedish language, and to write Finnish,
or Lappish." In another place we read: "My dream of the honor and
sound reason of the Swedish people is long since ended and forever
dissipated." And with a turn that is interesting, because it proves how
nearly related, in Tegnér's own estimation, to his opposition to the
romantic school was his warlike attitude to the liberals, he writes:
"You can readily fancy my opinion of the royal Swedish public. The
thought--it was but a dream--that anything great could be accomplished
by such a mob, I have long since abandoned. These people are and always
will be degraded. In whatever form folly may appear, political or
literary, as Phosporism or Rabulism, the masses are always ready to
fall into it. So pitiful a race is not worth wasting powder on."
These utterances all date from the year 1839 and the first month
of 1840. Such a burden of hopelessness and misanthropy might cause
the strongest spirit to succumb; how much more one that was already
undermined by sixteen years of disease! When Tegnér was in Stockholm
during the session of parliament of 1840, the catastrophe occurred.
Insanity broke out. He gave vent partly to wild outbursts of sensuality
in the height of delirium, partly and most frequently he occupied
himself with colossal plans, gigantic financial operations, schemes of
emigrations on a large scale, and magnificent conquest. His star was
extinguished.
It was kindled anew, to shine with a milder, fainter light for several
years longer, but its red Mars-like glow was never seen again. What
must not the unhappy man of genius have suffered before insanity came
to a decisive outbreak! As early as 1835 he told Adlersparre that his
soul was on fire and his heart was bleeding, but that his malady to
which people were wont to give the pet name of hypochondria, should be
called by its real name, madness. "It is an inheritance," he added,
"and it is beyond my power to free myself." On the occasion of his last
visit to Wermland, he said: "I am the personification of Antisana; I
stand with my feet in the snow, but my head bums and I spit fire."
He prophesied that he had not long to live, but spoke with a wail of
anguish of the manner in which he was doomed to die. It was: "to be
devoured bit by bit by that thousand-tongued monster hypochondria."
What did he not suffer? I made use of the expression that the furies
had crossed his threshold. He himself saw his calamity under a similar
form. "You do not know the influence of the fury to whom I have been
wedded, without the aid of parson or bridesmaid; indeed, without
the slightest wooing," he wrote. "She is begotten of the union of a
nightmare and a vampire; and even when she is not riding on my breast
or sucking my heart's blood, she gives me to understand that she is
near, and meditates honoring me in a short time with a visit." Actual
delirium, after such a preparatory state, must have come almost as
a deliverance. The physicians ordered a journey to a hospital in
Schleswig, then in high standing.
The sojourn at the insane asylum did not last long; but it is
interesting to follow the poet even there, so beautiful and peculiarly
individual were the ravings by which he was tormented. A person who
accompanied him to the place has preserved for us the following
outburst of his while the malady lasted: "The whole confusion arises
from the damnable zeal of the people here about the diadem they wished
to put on my head. You might otherwise think it was a superb affair:
pictures in miniature, not painted, but living, truly existing
miniatures of fourteen of the noblest of poets, formed a wreath. There
were Homer and Pindar, Tasso and Virgil, Schiller, Petrarch, Ariosto,
Goethe, etc. Between each pair there glowed a radiant star, not of
tinsel, nor yet of diamonds, but of actual cosmic material. In the
centre of the brow there was a diadem in the form of a lyre, which had
borrowed something of the sun's own light. As long as this lyre stood
still all was well; but suddenly it began a rotary motion. Swifter
and swifter became its movements, until it made every nerve in my
body quiver. Finally it fell to whirling round with such speed that
it was transformed into a sun. Then my whole being became agitated
and broken; for, you must know, the diadem was not entwined about my
head, but about the brain itself. And now it swung round with a wholly
incomprehensible violence, until all at once it burst. Darkness,
darkness, darkness and night spread over the whole world, whichever
way I might turn. I became bewildered and feeble; I who have always
despised weakness in men, I wept and shed hot, scalding tears. All was
over."
Is not this rather the poetry of insanity than insanity itself? And how
the true nature of the poet comes out even in this singular dream,--the
youthful dream of wreaths and crowns, heated red-hot in the forge of
insanity! In place of the cool laurel wreath which he had wound about
Oehlenschläger's head, the norns had now placed this fiery ring about
his brow. Happily, it grew cool again, and in the spring of 1841 the
poet was able to return home.
In his last great poem, "The Crowned Bride" (Kronbruden), in which he
has described himself, we see the aged bishop as a village patriarch
surrounded by a venerating parish. The years glide by in that milder
frame of mind which age brought with it; a stroke of paralysis in the
year 1843 announced that death was not far distant, and Nov. 2, 1846,
the weary poet breathed his last.
If we take a retrospective view of the development of this nature
in whose rich soil the germs of genius and insanity lay as close
together as in a double nut, we shall see the vigorous and cheerful
temperament burst forth like a spark of fire from the flint-like
ground of the Swedish peasantry. He draws nourishment from the natural
beauties of Sweden and from the old sagas of Scandinavia. He raves
about deeds of valor and combat, and expresses his enthusiasm in
language of flame-gilded imagery. He makes the acquaintance of the
spirit of antiquity, and the innate defiance of his character becomes
softened into a Greco-religious harmony. His religious freethinking
leads him to political freethinking, and his religious conciliatory
spirit brings with it an attempt at the political conciliation of the
opposing tendencies of the century. His spiritual standpoint determines
his literary standpoint, the promulgation of the Gospel of lucidity,
of light, and of song, as the expression of spiritual healthfulness.
From this lofty height he completes the most important work of his
life, the ideal picture of northern antiquity, as it was dreamed by
its own contemporaries. In order to be just to his work, we must bear
firmly in mind the period in which it arose. If we compare it with a
northern master-work of our own day (with Björnson's "Bergliot," for
instance), we shall find it neither Norwegian nor characteristically
northern. It is only relatively northern, but its most beautiful
cantos are unconditionally beautiful. This work, which was destined to
afford, in the great struggle of the day, the decisive testimony of the
significance of poetic healthfulness, was scarcely completed before
it became apparent that the germs of disease in the poet's soul had
attained such vigorous growth that some great spiritual crisis alone
was needed to wither all the life-courage about which the ill-favored
parasite had entwined its tendrils. The summer of life was over. The
late autumn yielded yet a few beautiful fruits, and the tree was dead.
The impression I most desire to convey is that the man who gave
world-wide fame to the name Esaias Tegnér, was beyond all else entirely
human, in faults as well as in virtues, a thoroughly conscientious,
upright soul, highly excitable, but with a radiant love of beauty and
truth. His human earthly presence is so full of worth that in spite of
all its weaknesses it is of profound interest even to foreigners, while
the purely ideal image of Tegnér as a poet, will always stand forth in
glorified outlines before the people in whose language he wrote, and
upon whom he has acted like a radiant beam of the sun of the nineteenth
century.
[1] A strong kind of beer, first brewed by Chr. Mumme, of Brunswick,
Germany, in 1492. Pope says: "The clamorous crowd is hushed with mugs
of mum."--TR.
[2] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 143.
[3] Translated by J. S.
[4] Longfellow's translation.
[5] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 159.
[6] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 240.
[7] Referring to Sveaborg, Finland, built according to the plans of
Field-Marshal Count Augustus Ehrensvärd, whose name is hewn in gigantic
characters on the granite rock from which the great ship-basin is
constructed.
[8] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 171.
[9] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 175.
[10] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 356-7.
[11] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 308.
[12] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 196.
[13] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.
[14] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.
[15] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 237.
[16] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 341.
[17] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.
[18] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.
[19] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, pp. 97, 98.
[20] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 82.
[21] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 292.
[22] "Lovely Rose" is a passionate love-song, whose interest centres in
the anguish of a butterfly at being removed from the rose at night, and
only being permitted to caress her during the day.
[23] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 269-271.
[Illustration: GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.]