Chapter IV

Closely allied to the lyric inspiration with Tegnér is the supplemental faculty which makes him witty in social intercourse, happy in epigram and impromptu, prominent as a professor, remarkable as a letter writer, orator and preacher, and beyond all else great in his metrical flow of poetically constructed language; a faculty which cannot be called outright a talent for rhetoric, but which provisionally, although perhaps rather vaguely, might be designated, in his case, as the intellectual faculty. His intellect was not the French _esprit_. The latter, in its most characteristic form, as with Voltaire, is pure understanding unadorned by imagery. The _esprit_ of Tegnér, on the contrary, ran continually into imagery. He thought in figures, consequently he spoke in figures. The gift of abstract thought was lacking in him, indeed he was so wholly devoid of it that he did not even believe in its results in others: metaphysics was to him an abomination as a phantom of the brain, woven of threads which he could not discern; dogmatics were his terror, as a tissue of absurdities, to which his understanding could find no outlet. And he had a good, healthy, self-reliant understanding which instinctively abhorred all obscurity of thought and of speech. He had so lively an impulse to render perceptible all that he thought and felt, that figure after figure crowded upon him. It was this that gave his language those electric flashes of sparkling light which so captivated his contemporaries; it was this that rendered his epistolary style so entertaining, and caused exasperated critics to compare his poetry to gorgeous-colored empty soap-bubbles; it was this finally that made him witty, for there is a certain kind of wit that depends on the surprising succession of swiftly-dissolving images. This intellectuality might be called the fruitfulness of form. The mood into which he was transported by intellectual productiveness sprouted and blossomed incessantly; it was only by way of exception that it could project grand, wholly-completed images, or simple figures, formed of a few main outlines, but it produced a continuous flow of miniature figures which stood antithetically or contrastingly opposed to one another, which glided one over the other, were united and transmitted onward. His mind was loaded, revolver-like, with fancies, and they followed one another in swift succession, shot after shot, all aimed at the same point, striking surely, but each thrusting aside the one that had preceded it. Idea and figure were not separated in his mind, nor were their relations far-fetched, as Tegnér's opponents believed and asserted; and yet they were not purely one and the same.

In his imagination, thought and figure were related in about the same degree as the initial letters in the old monastic manuscripts were related to the miniature paintings with which they were interwoven and illuminated. If we call up before our mind's eye a manuscript in which the overwhelming majority of characters, not single ones alone, are thus illuminated, we can form a certain conception of the series of harmonious associations of ideas and figures which Tegnér's brain incessantly produced. Or if we recall one of those marble designs from the early days of the Italian Renaissance, in which the artist has executed at his pleasure small images on the larger statue, where he has chiselled, for instance, on the helm fallen from the head of Goliath, and lying at David's feet, a little bas-relief of a quadriga in full galop, which forms, it is true, a part of the whole, but which, owing to its loose connection with it, as well as to its independent claims to consideration, dissipates the interest. If we think of a poetic mind calculated to conceive such bas-reliefs, and of a diction inclined to color these, we can form an approximately correct idea of Tegnér's manner of treating his poetic motive. His style is a sort of chromatic architecture and sculpture, and possesses the attractive and the repellent qualities of both. Colored sculpture is generally looked upon in our day as a species of barbarism; and yet the Greeks have employed it, nor was it ever wholly discarded by them. It cannot be called un-Grecian, and yet to most people in our day, it appears tasteless and antiquated. Those poems and speeches in which Tegnér's most characteristic manner stands forth with its utmost strength and distinctness, may be compared to those Grecian and Roman statues that produce quite as much effect through their exterior splendor as through their ideal beauty. The goddesses had golden chains about their necks, wore beautiful long veils, and ear-rings; they possessed a complete wardrobe, and an entire casket of jewels. Precisely in the same way have the jeweller and the artist worked together in Tegnér. In many instances the result has been a successful and attractive whole, which could be rejected by a pedant or a doctrinist alone. Not rarely, however, the result has been an excessive exaggeration. A pamphleteer of Tegnér's time (the witty Palmär), once censured this tendency in words which suit the comparison just used. "Greet your muse," said he, "and beg it not to overburden itself with metaphors, as is its wont. These jewels, even when they are genuine, must be worn with moderation. Let these trinkets be placed about the neck, in the ears, and on the fingers, if you will, but--on the toes--fie, for shame!"

I can more accurately explain my meaning through examples. Mary, in "Axel," resolves to follow the Russian army as a soldier.

"Beneath a soldier's cap
She hides away her ringlets, dark as night;
In a buff vest her slender form is laced;
Alas, for such fair form in such array!
O'er shoulder, known by Grecian poet's song,
Death's spy-glass, the dread carabine, is hung."[3]

The expression, "death's spy-glass," for the dread carabine, is picturesque, and so far not bad; but none the less must it be said that the figure is not altogether appropriate. Not only has it nothing whatever to do with Mary's form, but it answers only to a gun in general, not to the particular weapon on her shoulder; for this would scarcely kill a Swede. Upon me this figure produces the same effect as if I were to see on the margin of the text, a carefully executed miniature of the dismal skeleton, with the scythe in one hand, and holding the carabine to its eye with the other, in order to take aim.

In the "Children of the Lord's Supper," the old priest beseeches the children he is about to confirm, to choose prayer and innocence as the guides of their lives. Both are personified with a few strokes, and then the figure is engraved in a small biblical relief, of the kind that is seen in Italy on the bronze doors of churches and baptisteries.

"Innocence, child beloved, is a guest from the world of the blessed;
Beautiful, and in her hand a lily; on life's roaring billows
Swings she in safety; she heedeth them not, in the ship she is
sleeping."[4]

Or an example may be taken from Tegnér's epistolary style. He waxes eloquent (1817) against the European reaction. "Gaze at the signs of the times from the North, and from the South! Do you know any vulgarity, any barbarism, any insane prejudice their regeneration does not promise? The serpent of time often sheds its skin; but more perverse than at this precise moment, it has never been, as far as history extends, even though it hissed nothing but hymns, and though its back were as completely covered with biblical texts as a tombstone." Is there not in this energetic but thoroughly unaffected effort at clear perception, something that reminds us of chromatic sculpture. Do we not see before us, in due form, the serpent of time, with its red outlines; and does not its back, all covered with peculiar ciphers, look like the image of a god, in the shape of a beast, covered with hieroglyphics, or tile inscriptions, on some ancient Assyrian or Egyptian wall? And when finally the similitudes are read with which Tegnér, in "Fridthjof," endeavors to paint female beauty, can it not readily be comprehended why attention should be called to the hard metallic glow of the coloring of an antique idol?

"The bards praise Gerda's fair cheeks too high,
Fresh snows which playful north-lights dye!
I cheeks have seen whose daylights clear,
Two dawnings blushing in one sphere."[5]

It would be unjust to cite this last stanza as an adequate specimen of Tegnér's picturesque method; nevertheless there is something typical in it. Most of the similitudes produced by the fancy of Tegnér, so far exceed the brilliancy of nature, that to me they appear very much the same as the image he makes his Ingeborg weave of Fridthjofs falcon:--

"Here on his hand,
Work I thy form on the cloth's broad band;
Pinions of silver, and glowing
Gold talons sewing."[6]

With a predilection of this kind, something conventional and stiff can scarcely be avoided. The inclination to transform every idea into a figure beguiles Tegnér, in uninspired moments, into a common-place use of once-applied similes, which keep recurring in an almost stereotyped way. Thus he has (merely to keep to the birds) a few bird forms which he never wearies of dragging in eagle, nightingale, and dove. They stand as equivalents for strength, poetry, and piety. The eagle used for this purpose by Tegnér retains no more of the nature of the real eagle than may be seen in the eagles that adorn royal escutcheons; Tegnér's eagle is purely heraldic. In his poetry may be found lines like these: "Alas! poor Psyche, fly as she will, on earth she is but an eagle with butterfly's pinions"; or similes like the following: "Within her throat a nightingale she carried, and a snow-white dove by night and by day did linger in her bosom." An eagle with butterfly pinions is a creature totally contrary to nature, and when a nightingale is firmly fixed in a female throat, it does not exactly contribute to the perspicuity of the thought.

In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct it.