Essays on Scandinavian Literature - Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (best books to read non fiction txt) 📗

Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth in England, and Klopstock, Schiller, and a horde of lesser lights in Germany, had hailed the French uprising as the bloody dawn of a new and more glorious day; but the excesses of the Reign of Terror frightened them back into the old fastnesses of Conservatism. Tegnér (and to his honor be it said) was one of the few who did not despair of liberty because a people born and bred in despotism failed to exercise the wisdom and self-restraint which only liberty can foster. For the only road to the attainment of liberty is its practice and its abuse, and the slow education which can be acquired by no theoretical teaching, but only in the hard and expensive school of experience. For the terrible birth-pangs of liberty no despotically governed people can escape, unless it chooses to remain in thraldom.

This is the spirit that breathes through Tegnér's speeches and poems, during his most vigorous manhood; and even, when the rift in his lute made its music harsh and uncertain, the strain was yet essentially the same, though transposed into an alien key. It is very tempting to quote the many noble sayings of this master of the commanding phrase, but one or two must suffice. It is a delight to read his published correspondence, because of this power of strong and luminous utterance, which he wields with such Titanic ease. Then, again, there is no affectation or cant, but an engaging candor and straightforwardness which bespeak a true man, considering the time when they were written. What clarity of political vision there is in such passages as these:

(1813.) "He who fancies that Europe will be delivered by Russia and her confederates, or that the progress of the Cossacks is for the advantage of Sweden, may perhaps be in the right; but his views are very different from mine. In the hatred of the Barbarians I am born and bred, and I hope to die in it, unbewildered by modern sophisms."

(1814.) "Who can believe in the re-establishment of the European balance of power or rejoice in the victory of wretched mediocrity over power and genius. The upheavals of the age will soon affect us all--at least us Swedes."

(1817) "That we are living on an earth yet quaking from the French Revolution is undeniable; and extremely foolish seems to me the speech of those who insist that the Revolution is finished, or even approaching its end."

"Napoleon fell, not on account of his wretched opponents, but because despotism is the livery of all strong souls, because his spirit was opposed to the spirit of the age, with which he wrestled, and which was stronger than he."[33]


[33] Quoted from G. Brandes: Esaias Tegnér: En Litteraturpsychologisk Studie. Kjöbenhavn, 1878, pp. 87 and 88.


Living as he did in an age of general disillusion, Tegnér performed an important service in endeavoring to stem with the full force of his personality the rising tide of reaction. How much he accomplished in this direction is difficult to estimate, for we can never know what turn Swedish affairs might have taken, if his clarion voice had not been heard. But it could scarcely fail that such a speech as the one at the Festival of the Reformation (1817), delivered in the presence of a large assembly of scholars and public men, must have made a great impression, and in a hundred direct and indirect ways affected public opinion. Luther is to Tegnér a hero of liberty, a breaker of human shackles, a deliverer from spiritual bondage and gloom.

"Luther was one of those rare historical characters who always, in whatever they undertake, by their very manner, surprise, and indelibly impress themselves upon the memory. There was something chivalrous, I could almost say adventurous, in his whole personality, in his whole way of beginning and prosecuting an enterprise. He put upon whatever he did the stamp of an almost inconceivable greatness--of an almost overwhelming force. His mere word was half a battle, his deed was a whole one. He was one of those mighty souls which, like certain trees, can only bloom in a storm. His whole great, rich, marvellous life has always seemed to me like an epic with its battles and its final victory. Such a spirit must of necessity make room for itself, and decisively assert itself in history, in whatever direction its activity may be turned, under whatever circumstances and at whatever time it enters upon its career. The time when Luther came was one of those great historical epochs when the world-serpent sheds its skin and reappears in rejuvenated shape.... A great man, even the very greatest, is always the son of his age--only he is the eldest son; he is the deputy and executor of the age. The age is his, and he administers its substance according to his judgment. He finds the scattered elements to his hand, but usually tangled up and struggling in chaotic disorder. To gather and arrange them into a creation, to direct them toward a definite goal, ... this is his greatness; this is his creative powers.... In this ... sense Luther created his age."[34]


[34] Esaias Tegnér's Samlade Skrifter, vol. v., pp. 6, 7, 9, and 10.


Dr. Brandes has anticipated me in calling attention to the fact that the orator's characterization of Luther, though highly interesting, is one-sided. But as his admirable monograph on Tegnér is not accessible to English readers, I feel justified in repeating his argument in abbreviated form. There is a great uniformity, he says, in substance, in all Tegnér's heroes. They are all men of action--bold, strong, adventurous heroes, such as boys delight in. They have a striking family resemblance. With the change of a few attributes Tegnér applies his characterization of Luther to such a widely differing personality as King Gustavus III. of Sweden, a frivolous, theatrical, Frenchified, infidel monarch. And Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. are forced into the same livery, in spite of their diversity of structure, because Tegnér admired them all, and had practically but one type which appeared to his frank, open, and somewhat boyish fancy wholly worthy of admiration.[35]


[35] Georg Brandes: Esaias Tegnér, pp. 17-19.


In reading consecutively the whole series of Tegnér's collected works I am much struck with the force of this criticism. The brave man who defies the world single-handed, and plunges up to his ears into dangers, without counting the odds against him, is the typical juvenile hero; and it is strange, though by no means incomprehensible, that a man like Tegnér, who could betray such political insight as is shown in his letters to Franzén and Leopold had not really gotten beyond this primitive type of excellence. In a certain sense, perhaps, it was not desirable that he should. For the tremendous popularity which greeted "Frithjof's Saga" was due in no small measure to this half-juvenile robustness of its author's genius. As I cannot help regretting in myself the loss of my boyish appetite for swashbuckling marauders, and mysterious treasure-diggers, I am, indeed, far from deploring Tegnér's delight in the insane prowess of Charles XII., or the gay and chivalrous gallantry of Gustavus III. There is a sort of fine salubriousness in it which makes one, on the whole, like him the more.

It might well be said of Tegnér, as he said of Luther, that his word was half a battle. At all events he accomplished by his speeches a complete overthrow of his opponents the Phosphorists, without engaging in the barren polemics to which they invited him. He waited until some appropriate public occasion occurred, and then spoke out of the fulness of his conviction. And his words spread like undulating waves of light from one end of the land to the other, finding lodgement in thousands of hearts. Thus his beautiful epilogue at the "magister promotion"[36] in Lund (1820) was a direct manifesto (and a most incisive one) against that mystic obscurity which, according to the Phosphorists, was inseparable from the highest and deepest poetic utterance:


"In vain they call upon the lofty Truth
With sombre conjurations; for the dark
She ne'er endures; for her abode is light.
In Phoebus' world, in knowledge as in song,
All things are bright. Bright beams the radiant sun;
Clear runs and pure his bright Castalian fountain.
Whate'er thou canst not clearly say thou know'st not.
Twin-born with thought is word on lips of man;
That which is darkly said is darkly thought;
For wisdom true is like the diamond,
A drop that's petrified of heavenly light;
The purer that it is, the more its value,
The more the daylight shines and glitters through it.
The ancients builded unto Truth a temple,
A fair rotunda, light as heaven's vault.
And freely poured the sunshine from all sides
Into its open round; the winds of heaven
Amid its ranks of pillars gayly gambolled.
But now instead we build a Tower of Babel,
A heavy, barbarous structure. Darkness peeps
From out its deep and narrow grated casements.
Unto the sky the tower was meant to reach,
But hitherto we've only had confusion.
As in the realm of thought, in that of song
It is; and poesy is e'er transparent ..."

[36] A magister promotion corresponds approximately to our university commencements. It is the ceremony of bestowing the degree of master of arts.


This was certainly an attractive doctrine, and it did not fail to command public approval. But it suffers from exactly the same limitation as Tegnér's gospel of joy. It is only relatively (I might almost say temperamentally) true; and the opposite might be maintained with equal force, and in fact was so maintained by Atterbom, who declared (in the "Poetical Calendar for 1821") that there can be no such a conception as light without darkness. Darkness, he says, is the condition of all color and form. You distinguish the light and all things in it only by the contrasting effect of shadow--all of which, I fancy, Tegnér would not have denied. More to the point would have been the query whether in poetry darkness and indistinctness are synonymous terms. It is only the most commonplace truths which can be made intelligible to all. Much of the best and highest thinking of humanity lies above the plane of the ordinary untrained intellect. What is light to me may be twilight or darkness to you. What to you is clear as the daylight, may to me be as densely impenetrable as the Cimmerian night. Christ himself recognized this fact when he said to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now."

For all that, Tegnér's doctrine was in its effect wholesome. It discouraged the writers of the Romantic School, who under the guise of profundity gave publicity to much immature and confused thinking. He was no doubt right in saying that "a poetry which commences with whooping-cough is likely to end in consumption." His frequently repeated maxim, that poetry is nothing but the health of life, "occasioned by an abounding intellectual vigor, a joyous leap over the barriers of everyday life," applied, however, to his own poetry only so long as his vigor was unimpaired. His terrible poem "Hypochondria" (_Mjeltsjukan_) is to me no less poetical because it is not "a petrified drop of heavenly light," and mocks all the cheerful theories of its author's prime.

Tegnér had yet a few years in which to rejoice in this "health