Loe raamatut: «Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century», lehekülg 17

XI

No feature better illustrates Sweden's stage of civilization in the lifetime of Tegnér than the manner in which science and religion were connected. The relations between State and Church were so intimate, I had almost said so naïve, that a professor, simply as such, was at the same time a priest, and the natural, the looked-for advancement for a capable professor in Greek, botany, or history, was that he should be – made a bishop. It was a kind of government household arrangement that was a vivid reminder of the private housekeeping in Molière's "Harpagon." The university teacher, whose desk in Lund was exchanged on Sunday for the pulpit in the country, was a sort of Maître Jacque with his vestment above his professor's coat, and was in a position to ask the State, in the event of any perplexity, a question similar to that of the celebrated servant of the miser, who said: "If you please, is it your coachman or your cook whom you are addressing? I am both."

The original cause of Tegnér's desire for advancement was of a purely economic nature; he had debts, and the increase of income served him in very good stead. Like all the cultivated people of his day, he was accustomed to draw a line of distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric side of religion; and although in point of character he deemed himself a pagan, his frame of mind was often a most pious one. He was too thoroughly a poet not to yield to frequent and changeful impressions, and thus it was that he failed at first to consider his convictions any hindrance to his acceptance of the office of bishop. Yet scarcely did he bear the title of bishop before he began to despise, from the bottom of his soul, all the ambiguity and incompleteness in which he found himself involved, and to which his duty toward his family held him bound. And so his misanthrophy and his distaste for life, which had arisen during the years of the crisis indicated, increased more and more. Energetic and loyal to duty as he was, he threw himself with all his might into the exterior affairs of his office; he became the civilizer and organizer of his bishopric, an ardent and enterprising school director, a superior and daring educator of his clergy. The purely civil standpoint he took in his conception of the Church is very similar to that assumed at the same time in England by Coleridge, who was upon the whole far less of a freethinker. "The former religious significance of the Church can, of course, never be re-established," says Tegnér, "for the system on which it depends has now slumbered during three centuries of history, and it would be of no avail whatever for one or another to act as though he believed in the somnambulist. But the Church has also a civil significance, and this can and must be supported as an integral part of the human social order. If this significance, too, be allowed to fall victim to torpidity and lethargy, I see no reason why the clergy, together with the entire religious apparatus, be not suppressed for the benefit of the state treasury." In order to comprehend how strong he must have felt the demands upon him to be the low degree of culture and morals of the clergy in Sweden of that time must be fully realized. On him it devolved to impart to die priests under him the elements of human culture, and to remove from office the worst drunkards among them. There had been given to him an Augean stable to clean.

His dull, spiritless occupations wore on his already shattered health and spirits. "The examinations are now at hand, and I shall have to pass a whole week," he cries, "in the gymnasium. Then come the clerical examinations and the ordinations. After this there are no less than eight new churches to be consecrated during the summer. And through all this, addresses must be made, – continual addresses about nothing and for nothing. 'Words, words, words,' says Hamlet. Pity me; I am wearied to death with speeches and discontent, and yet must continue to torment myself without cessation. No one pays heed to what I say, nor do I myself take any interest in it, for that matter. That is what I call talking to the winds, and dissipating one's life in ceremonies." There came moments when everything of a priestly nature seemed an abomination to him. In such a moment he wrote jestingly to a friend, whom he was asking to purchase him a pair of horses: "Not black ones; I cannot endure the parson's color." It was a sorrowful mistake that so modern a spirit should be thus enveloped in a costume of the middle ages; the vestment had no power to transform him as it has transformed so many others; but it tormented him, slowly devouring his vitals, like some poisoned garment.

And yet the days of his brilliancy were not past. Before his sun set, a glorious rose-tinted sky was yet in store for him. The many scattered clouds that had gathered above his head and in his horizon, only served, as is so apt to be the case, to make his sunset richer and more glowing. The period of lyric enthusiasm was forever past for Tegnér; faith in the future and in progress, which is the source of life's courage, had long been exhausted. But one faculty he had yet in reserve, one talent which had hitherto been subordinated to the creative fancy and to lyric inspiration, and that was the poetic-rhetorical gift. This attained its highest bloom during the time that he officiated as bishop.

As Tegnér's talent for the production of what are by himself styled "lyric" characters, is closely allied to the lyric propensity of the whole Swedish nation, so, too, this second faculty of his harmonizes marvellously with fundamental qualities of his people. The Swedish nation has a peculiar gift for representation. The Swedes love what looks well, and understand better than the Danes and the Norwegians how to make advantageous arrangements; in customs, social life and speech, they have more form and, at the same time, a more formal manner than other Scandinavians. Their language itself is ceremonious; the word "you" is wholly lacking as a mode of polite address, so that the name or title of the person addressed must be incessantly repeated. No northern people understand as well as the Swedes how to conduct a procession, a festival, a public ceremony, a grand entrance, or a coronation, with the tout ensemble requisite to secure a good effect. To this national love of representation, whose nursery gardens, from readily intelligible reasons, were always the Church and the universities, corresponds a peculiar kind of national, festive eloquence. Swedish eloquence is at the same time more pathetic and more pompous than that of the other Scandinavian people. It has something of an ecclesiastical vibration, which the Church contributes, something of the professor-like stamp which the universities preserve, and finally, after the Swedish Academy was founded, it assumed an academic element of its own, which may be designated a proclivity for euphemism, an inclination to paraphrase thought and to call things by beautiful names. Of the deficiencies of this school Tegnér had but few, but he possessed all that vigor and richness of language, all the clearness and figurative splendor of diction, all the faculty to express different phases of sentiment and to bring an entire assembly into accord with them that had been developed by it. All this attained its finest bloom in Tegnér's festal addresses and poems. His most renowned festal poem was produced in the year 1829.

The students at Lund had invited Oehlenschläger to be present at their Commencement, and when Tegnér learned this he resolved to avail himself of the opportunity to crown Adam Oehlenschläger with one of the laurel wreaths destined for the magisters of the day. A Swedish idea, and a poetic one, too! Moreover, the idea of a noble, not vain poet! So far removed was Tegnér from every exaggerated effort to obtain recognition that it seemed to him quite natural to crown another as his master. He had finished his address and called upon the rector to confer the degrees of master of arts, when turning to Oehlenschläger, who stood by the high altar in the cathedral, he once more took up the word, and thus accosted the rector, —

 
"Ere you begin to distribute your laurels, hand one to me;
Not for myself, but for one through whom I to all would pay honor.
The Adam of skalds is here, the king of Northern poets.
Heir to the throne in poesy's realm, for the throne is Goethe's.
Oscar, if he but knew it, would surely sanction my action;
Now not in his name, far less in my own, but in that of song immortal,
That illustrious name, resounding in Hakon and Helge,
Would I proffer this wreath; it grew where Saxo lived.
Past is the age of division, – in realms of the free-born spirit
It should never have been, – and familiar tones now ringing
Across the Sound enchant us all, and yours more than others.
Therefore, Svea offers this wreath, I speak in the name of Svea;
Take from a brother's hand this gift, and wear it this day to remember."
 

And amid the din of kettle-drums, trumpets, and cannon, he placed the wreath on Oehlenschläger's head. May the ceremony belong to the moment alone, and the kettle-drums, trumpets, cannon, the entire janizary music vanish on the instant! It was, nevertheless, a grand and a beautiful moment, and the remembrance of it has tended to fraternize the northern peoples as little else could have done.

XII

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.