Though he started in his general æsthetic views on the career
pointed out by Heiberg, he nevertheless struck ere long into his own
independent course. Heiberg was only a moralist in the name of true
culture and of good taste; Paludan-Müller became one in the name of
stem religious discipline. In religious questions, Heiberg had espoused
the cause of Hegelian speculative Christianity; Paludan-Müller became
an orthodox theologian. Thus his path for not an inconsiderable
distance ran parallel with that of Sören Kierkegaard. Not that he was
in any way influenced by this solitary thinker. He cherished but little
sympathy for him, and was repelled by his broad, unclassical form, for
whose merits he had no comprehension, and whose inner harmony with the
mind of the author he did not perceive. It was the general spirit of
the times which produced the intellectual harmony of these two solitary
chastisers of their contemporaries. Step by step, Danish literature had
departed from the ideals of the period of enlightenment, which had
still continued to exist in the poetic creations of Oehlenschläger,
as well as in the popular scientific works of Hans Christian Oersted.
Their life had been of but brief duration. The Danish churchman to
whom Schleiermacher corresponded was Mynster, but there is a wide gulf
between Schleiermacher's freethinking and Mynster's orthodoxy. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, a single theologian, Clausen, was
the sole spokesman of rationalism; he soon, however, turned completely
toward the religious reaction then beginning. Rationalism, it is true,
for a short time seemed to have become metamorphosed and developed into
Hegelian philosophy of religion; but this movement, too, was wholly
unproductive of results. Heiberg, who was its leader, became a follower
of that speculative theologian of the Hegelian right flank, Martensen,
and Martensen, in his turn, became thoroughly converted to high-church
dogmatism. Nothing was now lacking for the completion of this spiritual
movement but to deduce from it the practical, ethical results of
dogmatic faith. This was done when the race of Oehlenschlägers and
Oersteds had begotten the race of Kierkegaards and Paludan-Müllers.
In Kierkegaard's "Either--Or" is found the sentence, "There are poets
who, through their poetic creations, have found themselves." This
remark can well be applied to Paludan-Müller. For what else has a poet
done who has traversed the path from coquetry to simplicity, from
the intellectual to the true, from the sportive and brilliant to the
transparently clear, and from the pleasing to the great?
Paludan-Müller appeared in his early days to be the _virtuoso_ among
the contemporary poets of Denmark. The themes of his first works were
almost completely buried beneath the trills of caprice and the delicate
gradations of wit. In his "Kjærlighed ved Hoffet" (Love at Court,
translated into German by E. v. Zoller, 1832), a comedy-after the
pattern of the times which was partly inspired by Shakespeare, partly
by Gozzi, pastoral poetry and lyrical court phraseology, puns and
witticisms, dreamy enthusiasm, and fool's bells, all jingled together.
The fact was, the work had been enriched from the horn of plenty of a
highly endowed youth, who was free from care and without any defined
plan. In the poem "Danserinden" (The Dancing-Girl), whose form and
rhythm remind the reader so strongly of Byron's "Beppo," or Alfred de
Musset's "Namouna," the virtuosity was more unbridled and capricious;
the smooth-flowing stanzas narrated, lamented, laughed, mocked, played
pranks, and glided one into the other with a loquacious flexibility,
recalling the manner in which one arabesque passes into another. The
serious portions of the narrative do not impress the reader as having
actually occurred; the satirical remarks do not seem to be meant in
earnest. When, however, a command to believe in the immortality of
the soul is interwoven, for instance, with a recommendation of tea,
a warning against the insipid poets, and other warnings of a still
more captious nature, the cause may be traced less to a frivolous
state of mind than to the youthful exuberance that fills the poet
from the moment he feels his favorite form of verse, the eight-line
stanza, galloping and prancing beneath his efforts. "The Dancing-Girl"
is a mingling of intellect and inspiration, out of which neither
clear colors nor distinct forms have developed themselves. It is a
musical composition that now expresses the light dance of jig, now the
yearning of melancholy, as these emotions alternate in the years of
puberty, with their bold hopes, their uncomprehended yearnings, their
thoughtless squandering of the powers of life. "The Dancing-Girl" was
followed the next year by "Amor and Psyche," a new work of artistic
virtuosity, which impresses itself most harmoniously upon the reader's
favor, but has no power to bum forms or images into the soul. It is a
music that is at once apprehended, but almost as promptly forgotten,
one continual melodious solo and chorus song of spirits, zephyrs, and
nymphs, whose sole fault is that it is too perfect in artistic form,
too polished and smooth. The whole long dramatic poem does not contain
a single characteristic or individual peculiarity, either in diction or
in the mode of treatment, and yet something characteristic, that is to
say, something unusually marked or sharply defined, would have had a
most pleasing effect. As astonishing as is the _technique,_ it is not
felt, and only where the _technique_ is present can we speak of style
in the true sense of the word. Not those parts which are loaded with
the greatest metrical display contain the most vital strophes, bearing
most distinctly the impress of the poet's genius; they are found in
the following words of Sorrow, where she casts her dark veil over the
sorrowing Psyche:--
"Round each mortal's cradle flying,
Close the mother's couch beside,
Hordes of woes are softly sighing,
Gloom and care with them abide.
Tears the tender eyes bedewing,
Fears the budding smile subduing,
Shrieks the infant's lips are parting,
While dawn's heralds onward glide.
And when childhood's time is vanished,
Youth's brief joy has had its day,
Garlands won are faded, banished,
Gone is love's bewitching play--
When, alas! the dreams have perished,
Once so fondly, proudly cherished,
Hide e'en dead delights and pleasures
In the pangs of death away."
In these stanzas the melancholy that was peculiar to Paludan-Müller
becomes apparent. There is here betrayed that view of death which
developed into a tendency to dwell on the thought of death, and which
was destined eventually to burst forth in the love of death manifested
by a Tithon, a Kalanus, or an Ahasuerus. We here detect the interest
in the law of destruction which later produced the poem "Abels Död"
(The Death of Abel), the belief that dead happiness embraces within
itself all the pangs of death which found expression in "Tithon," and
the feeling that dissolution lurks ever on the threshold of life and
of joy, which so often breaks through the poetry of Paludan-Müller.
Pay heed, for instance, to the following lines from the poem entitled
"Dance Music":--
"Lo! the sunshine, golden, gleaming,
Lights with smiles the azure skies!
Yonder cloud speeds onward, beaming;
Like a bird, with wings, it flies.
Hear the ringing
Now of singing
That is filling
Lofty trees with music thrilling,--
All this glory swiftly dies."
We may call this tone shrill, yet it did not jar like a false note
in the ear of Paludan-Müller. On the contrary, he found a certain
satisfaction, a certain consolation, indeed, in keeping before his
own eyes and those of others the inexorable, the inevitable fate of
all that is finite. When the custom of circulating the photographs of
celebrated men, with a brief autograph inscription, came into vogue,
he wrote beneath a picture that represented him reading a book, the
characteristic words:--
"All earthly things, 'tis written here,
Go up and down by turns;
So he who stands above to-day
What is before him learns."
Justice, however, has not been accorded to the drama "Amor and Psyche,"
if attention be merely called to the fact that it is the harbinger of
the poet's most beautiful and profound works. As intellectual poetry
it has a connected and complete symbolism which obliges the author
to be more rigid than ever before in handling his materials, and it
is distinguished by that peculiar tinting which is so characteristic
of Paludan-Müller's mythological poems. It is not a strong tinting,
now gray in gray, now light in light; yet the poem is by no means
colorless. The truth is, its hue is that of the reflection of pearls,
the glimmer of mother of pearl, the delicate play of prismatic shades
that might have radiated from the shell in which Venus emerged from the
sea. The Phantasus of Paludan-Müller paints the portrait of Psyche for
Amor on just such a "pearl-white" shell; and this is almost symbolic of
the way in which the poet himself has executed the form of Psyche. This
class of his creations, indeed, is not of an earthly nature; earth is
not their true home, and even those among them who like Psyche are of
earthly descent, must bid to earth a final imperative farewell.
_Psyche_ (kneeling).
"Gaia, thou hallowéd mother,
Who gave me birth and protection.
Thou from whose lips ever tender,
I heard life's earliest accents,
Take thou thy daughter's farewell!
Nevermore shall I behold thee,
Never again shall I wander
Over the loved spots of memory.
* * * * * * *
Yonder, in heavenly mansions,
Earthly sorrows will vanish."
The entire poetic endeavor of Paludan-Müller in this period was, upon
the whole, one magnificent, many-shaded leave-taking of Gaia. What
else, indeed, was the tendency of romance! It feared and shunned the
life about it, and the era so wholly devoid of character in which its
poets, to their sorrow, found themselves born. Paludan-Müller with his
whole soul shared this repugnance of the romantic school for the actual
surroundings of the poet, as well as its aversion to lingering, even
in fancy, about this heavy, dark globe which kept up its ceaseless
revolutions with the poet and all his air-castles, whether he would
have it so or not. The age in which he lived was loathsome to him, and
he had his own era and his own contemporaries in mind when he permitted
Tithon to say of his:--
"What fruits thinkest thou this era will develop?
An era 'tis that needs a mighty storm
To rouse its energies from heavy slumber;
An era full of dreams instead of efforts,
Of petty competition, not of action bold;
An era when each crowns himself with glory
And sees himself in heroes of the past,
When mortals would be lofty as immortals
And yet have servile minds--how I abhor them!"
True, this description concerns Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan
War; but it is one that accords marvellously well with that given in
"Adam Homo" of the reign of Christian VIII. in Denmark:--
"It was a time when mediocre mortals
Were puffed up everywhere with boastful pride;
* * * * * * * * * * *
A time when there were those together clustered
Who something great to pass proposed to bring,
While they at best accomplished not a thing."
It is readily comprehensible that a poet who cast so gloomy a gaze upon
his surroundings should have preferred, like Tithon, a sojourn in the
"realm of the aurora" to that among his own contemporaries.
The most singular fact of all was that he was not alone in his
predilection for this higher sphere. All the best brains of the period
had instituted the same comparison and made the same choice; there was
a poetic vein in most of them, and so it came to pass that in the realm
of the aurora the poet found himself in a numerous company.
This wrought a change in the poetic tendency of Paludan-Müller. He
paused suddenly in his flight from reality, wheeled about, and took the
direction back to earth again. In the poem "Tithon" he paints life on
the island of the morning dawn, on the coast of the sea of ether, to
which the love of Aurora has uplifted Tithon. It is an existence such
as that of Rinaldo in the enchanted gardens of Armida, and a veil of
roseate hue is spread over all the surroundings, over the skies, as
well as over the beautiful women of the island. It is a life passed
amid song, clinking of goblets, love, and music, and sails on the sea
of ether in eternal youth, during an eternal spring. And yet this
life is never spiritless and insipid, nor are its enjoyments ever
commonplace; they are blissful enjoyments. It is akin to the life of
which so many noble enthusiasts among the Danish contemporaries of our
poet dreamed; the life that hovered before Carsten Hauch, for instance,
when he sang of that "sea of the milky way, where the spirits of the
redeemed, freed from care and sorrow, their eyes illumined with the
brilliant light of immortality, glide onward through unknown clouds."
It is that _alibi_ of enjoyment that Ludwig Bödtcher and so many other
similar artist natures, during the best years of their lives, sought
beneath the skies of Italy; it is that never-ending spring and that
eternal youth which Christian Winther and Hans Christian Andersen, and
all those men of their generation who like themselves did not know how
to grow old, permitted themselves to cling to and conjure up. It is
a strong proof, however, of the greatness of Paludan-Müller's spirit
that this life and this beauty did not long attract him. His poetic
muse depicts Tithon, in the midst of his forgetfulness of earth and
his revelling in enjoyment, devoured with half-unconscious yearning
for his country, his people, his relations, and the entire un-ideal
reality which he has forsaken. Nor is this yearning without foundation;
for nothing less than Priam's ascension to the throne, the abduction
of Helen, the ten-years' war of which Homer is supposed to have sung,
and the complete destruction of Troy, has taken place while Tithon is
revelling in the cloud-land of the morning dawn. Thus it was once upon
a time, when the French Revolution was enacting from beginning to end
its magnificent drama, that certain people on the coast of the Sound
were singing drinking-songs and club-songs. Thus it was that Copenhagen
played its private comedy during the battle of Waterloo, and Denmark
rioted in beautiful verses and rejoiced in æsthetic tilting-matches
while the July Revolution was in full blast.
Paludan-Müller has his Tithon compel Aurora to give him permission
to return to earth, and the following words uttered by Tithon at the
moment when, after long absence, he once more sets foot upon earth,
indicate perhaps the most significant turning-point of the poet's own
course of development--
"O Earth, thy air is heavy! Like a burden
It falls upon my limbs and on my bosom;
A deadly weight, it presses on my shoulders.
Unfriendly is thy greeting--cold and sharp,
To meet me sendest thou thy wind inclement,
And in thy winter garb hast clad thyself.
Where'er I gaze, thy plains look bare and dreary;
The leaves upon thy trees are sere and yellow;
Thy grass is withered; decked hast thou already
Yon hill-tops far away with wreaths of snow.
Wilt thou alarm me? Is so stern thy visage?
Because in utter folly I forsook thee?
All hail to thee, O thou, my native soil!
With this fond kiss my tears of joy I tender!
Thou fill'st my heart e'en tho' thou'rt bare and dreary."
The territory here trodden by Paludan-Müller with Tithon is the
territory of Adam Homo. At the moment when the atmosphere of earth
weighs heavily on Tithon's shoulders, Paludan-Müller once more hails
Gaia. He had at that time already completed the first part of "Adam
Homo."