Chapter VI

Tegnér is instructor (docent) at the University of Lund; he is twenty-two years old, and is passing his summer vacation on the Rämen estate in the Myhrmann family, with whose youngest daughter, Anna, he is betrothed.

Here one day in September there appears, on a visit, the afterward so celebrated historian and poet, Erik Gustav Geijer, a young man of Tegnér's own age, who is freighted with the latest wisdom of the day, and bubbling over with a youthful impulse to impart and discuss his ideas. He makes attempt after attempt to approach Tegnér, but fails to find common ground on which they can meet. The slender son-in-law elect of the house is variable and full of moods, an enamored dreamer, a laughing mocker. There is a glitter of merriment in his eyes, his words are flashes of lightning. It is no more possible to follow the channel of his thoughts than the course of the sunbeam through the foliage. The two young people are taking a walk together and have entered into a discussion on the way. Let us listen to what they are saying. The leader of the conversation is Geijer, who asks,--

"What Tegnér really thinks of the civilization of this locality? If he does not believe that all the so-called popular enlightenment is an evil? He, Geijer, looks on the sound reason of the masses as the most unfortunate delusion that it could ever occur to any one to venerate. Only the chosen ones of humanity had the higher sense which enabled them to grasp science in its full truth. Was not that the opinion also of the _Herr Docent?_"

"No, not by any means; he would call that mysticism."

"Mysticism! What did Tegnér understand by mysticism?"

"Well, to lie flat on one's back, to take a little nap and allow one's self to be shadowed by the power of the Most High."

"Seriously speaking, did Tegnér admit of no intellectual intuition?"

"No, he cared nothing for the Teutonic mania--but he cared all the more for blueberries;" and just here there were growing some most excellent ones in the enjoyment of which he became profoundly absorbed: "Moreover, he did not doubt that Geijer understood the matter better than he did; he (Tegnér) had always heard Geijer called a genius, and such people only could meddle with philosophy. He, for his part, who knew of himself that no more reason than was absolutely necessary to carry him through the world had fallen to his lot, was not very fond of playing blindman's-buff, except with pretty young girls, and enjoyed least of all to do it with such learned gentlemen as Kant and Schelling."

"But without mysteries and without mysticism there was no religion."

"Did Geijer recognize the faculty in Lund, or not? This honorable body of pedants had accorded to him, Tegnér, the well-merited testimony that he led a quiet, God-fearing life, something that in these latter days was rare enough. On the other hand, so far as the dogma deemed so highly essential to salvation, the doctrine of the Trinity, was concerned, it was wholly beyond his intellectual horizon."

"Nevertheless, it could very easily be explained. There was no contradiction in the idea of the Trinity; for the antithesis already presupposed unity. God as the absolute being was not created, but had been from all eternity, and yet, must be conceived as an existing Being, for He is the creator of all things, and is in all things. The simple solution of this seeming contradiction was, that the parts which mutually presupposed one another were in reality one; the Redeemer and the Father, speculatively comprehended, were one, although not a unit.... Was not that clear to every nobly born mind?"

Tegnér, who was quite lost in the contemplation of the gambols of a wagtail, replied absently, "That he did not recognize the privileges of nobility."

"In what sense not? Geijer, in the highest degree, advocated hereditary aristocracy."

"And I," replied his opponent, his mouth full of blueberries, "I was always, from childhood up, a bit of a Jacobin."

This word had, as already indicated, a less terror-inspiring significance in Sweden than in France, apart from the fact that from Tegnér's lips it came half as a jest. But in the jest there lay the earnest verity that he belonged to the honest friends of freedom in civil life and in thought, who had not been intimidated by the bloody deeds of the Revolution. With genuine horror he had perceived, in the beginning of the century, the approach from the South of the religio-political reaction in Sweden, and it was as yet an unenrolled soldier in the army of the civilization of enlightenment that here ran against one of the first and farthest removed outposts of romantic feudalism.

Tegnér, in common with all the prominent men whose youth fell at the close of the eighteenth century, came into the world early enough to steer out into life with sails inflated by the great cosmopolitan wind of freedom, then sweeping over the earth. His earliest reading was the Gustavian classics of Sweden, which were based on Locke, so far as their philosophy was concerned, and on Voltaire in regard to their literary tendencies. Both Kellgren and Leopold were disciples of Voltaire, and both were political liberals, who did not even attempt to conceal their convictions at court. They were careful not to wound the religious sentiments of the multitude by scoffing; but they cherished all the traditions of the century, and fought in their behalf a brilliant fight. Kellgren's satiric poem, "The Enemies of Light," was a banner. In the same direction as the poetry of these men, only fraught with even more poetic fruitfulness, Schiller's influence guided young Tegnér. On the boundary line of youth, like Schiller, he celebrates enlightenment in a poem on Rousseau, and he writes reflective verses, in the spirit of the times, on such themes as religion, culture, and tolerance.

Neither family tradition nor the force of education led the priest's son to opposition to Christian dogmas. Together with all the rest of his intellectually awakened contemporaries he had received, when yet a boy, the cold douche of Voltaire. When sixteen years old he wrote: "I am now reading Voltaire; but I do not see how I can get through even the most important and most essential parts. It is all admirable, and it is difficult to choose among so many beauties." Most of the young men of his day who had entertained similar presumptions, were quickly borne by the altered spirit of the times to religious conservatism. For this Tegnér was too honest and too great. What insured him from losing his independence in religious matters was that vigorous element of his being, called by himself the pagan element, that was the natural result of the solid structure and the genuine steadfastness of his character. Two classes of men about him were swept onward in the reaction against the eighteenth century, with such force that they were borne by it to orthodoxy, and to feudalism. One class was composed of authors whose natures were inclined to run through the whole scale of the emotions of the Middle Ages, that is,--rather in fancy than in reality,--to give way to contrition and self-contempt in order to be uplifted by the supernatural aid of grace to everlasting bliss, and whose poetry was distinguished by an excess of nervous excitability of all forms,--by mystic Platonic devotion, sighing, melancholy, intensely sensual erotic tenderness, alarming arrogance. This class formed the romantic phalanx proper, called in Sweden the Phosphorists. The characteristics mentioned are apparent in an unequal degree in Atterbom, Stagnelius, Hammerskjöld, etc., but are found in all. The second class of men had broader shoulders and healthier spirits; they were historic enthusiasts who had been blinded by the national sentiment, by the love of the faith and the institutions of the past, to all that was just and great in the criticism of the preceding century; such men as Geijer, and the Gothic union of Upsala, whose centre he was, and to whose national efforts Tegnér lent his aid without entering into either the religious or the political sympathies and doctrines of the society.

The pagan element that Tegnér discovered in his own nature, derived its nourishment from two sources in his earliest studies; first from his relations to northern antiquities, and second from his devotion to Greek poetry. In a letter of 1825, he wrote: "A certain spiritual kinship with our barbaric ancestors, which no culture can wipe out, always impelled me to turn back to their grotesque but magnificent forms." What he especially had in mind when he referred to this spiritual kinship was that wilfulness of the ancient Norseman which betrayed itself in his case in a challenging manner, and in that tendency to melancholy which had been one of the characteristics of the ancients. In Tegnér it was not revealed by romantic lamentations, but by a grave and sometimes gloomy temperament, which, after his fortieth year found such abundant food that it degenerated into weariness of life and contempt for humanity. The poetic symbol for this Titanic element in his composition, for gigantic strength of nature, for inner unrest beneath the weight of a mighty pressure, he sought now among the Scandinavians, now among the Grecians; and thus the old Norse and the old Greek mythology became blended in his fancy. The old Norse giant speaks to him in the same way as Goethe's Prometheus:--

"I hate the radiant Asas
And Ask's fair children,
Who bow before the Gods
That I despise."

And his lament, "The Age of the Asas" (Asatiden), is so nearly allied to Schiller's "Gods of Greece" that the poet must unquestionably have derived his ideas from this poem.

"Ye lofty mem'ries, engraved on historic page,
Like empty harness that no one can wear, all lonely;
With shrinking awe ye're viewed by this trifling age,
For hero life in the North is a saga only.

"Sleep calmly, thou Past! In vain would I dun to-day
Drag forth thy deeds from their graves as some rusty token;
Here strangers only to unknown gods now pray,
The sinews of song and the blade of action lie broken."

Here, too, Norse and Greek paganism are blended in the author's memory.

In fact, the pagan element in Tegnér's composition first attained its higher consecration when he became acquainted with old Hellenic literature. In it he found a pre-Christian culture, which gained its climax in propitiatory beauty, not in defiant personal struggles. He saw in it human nature rounded and polished in a manner that was at once poetic and religious. Viewed from the standpoint of this world of beauty, that supernatural element which had waged such passionate warfare against the past century, no longer rose offensively before the mind, but rather fell away as superfluous. Tegnér's deism overshadowed his polemic tendency, and assumed the form of a Hellenic adoration of reason and beauty. The purely human element, which had been the source of beauty in Grecian poetry, soon became in his eyes the essential poetic element, and this is the reason why throughout his life he refused to recognize devotional poetry as true poesy. This was made manifest on sundry occasions, as, for instance, in reference to the poetic writings of Franzén. In 1823, he writes to Brinkman of Franzén: "But the beautiful rests finally on the rational, precisely as the dome, no matter how high it may arch, has its invisible points of support in the temple walls. But the temple walls of our dear Franzén are a trifle too well adorned with crucifixes which obscure the impression." Of the "Columbus" of the same poet, he writes nine years later, after he is bishop, therefore: "How much nearer to the heart would be a fresher and more vigorous romantic tone, without legends, without attempts at Conversion, and without missionaries. I hate, God forgive me! the pious tone in life as well as in poetry," and with a significance closely allied to this, he expresses himself in his last years (1840) in regard to a little volume of poetry: "Such excess of piety always appears to me, poor heathen, a trifle sickly and dull." For this reason, also, quite contrary to the custom of the priesthood, he passionately protested to Adlersparre against allowing the unchristian traits in the great modern heroes of genius, such as Goethe or Byron, to be effaced. His open, thoroughly honest nature was immediately on its guard against pious frauds.

Poetry in and for itself seemed to him a power of a religious nature; or more accurately speaking, he called poesy the highest, purest, most human expression of humanity, and all else that we are in the habit of revering as high and noble, he pronounced mere modifications of poetry. Religion itself is to him "a practical poesy, a branch of the great parent stem of poetry, engrafted on the tree of life." In other words, religion is a poesy which is believed; its dogmatic part, therefore, forms a metaphysical poem, whose value depends on the worth of the practical teachings that can be evolved from it,--an inference which Tegnér, it is true, never draws without a proviso, but which can always be read between the lines in his writings.

With all the more freedom from reserve he has given voice to his unprejudiced humanism in expressions of sympathy for purely human greatness, and for those pagan virtues which are condemned by the church fathers as vices. To Geijer who, to be sure, was not strictly orthodox, but who was an unconditional believer in divine revelation, he wrote in the year 1821: "As concerns your opinion that a special revelation, Christianity, for instance, is theoretically necessary to the human mind, I must say a doubt may be entertained. It were difficult to explain why the highest human development, the actual years of jubilee of our race, should have occurred in the south, as well as in the north, before the name of Christianity was ever heard. Let us thank God for our purer faith, but do not let us forget that the records of the nobility of the human race are full of pagan names." Whenever Tegnér desires to glorify a character, he does not rest until he has shown a side from which it appears truly Grecian or Roman. In order to place this unconscious, purely instinctive effort in the sharpest light, I choose two examples where he has depicted heroes of the Christian faith as champions of the days of antiquity, and later arrives at the conclusion that, owing to preconceived sympathies, he has erred. In his reformation speech, he had incorporated in the person of Luther everything that the champions of classic culture of that day, an Ulrich von Hutten or a Franz von Sickingen, had fought for and gained. Seven years later, when forced by his official position to more emphatic historic-theological studies, he writes in deep dejection: "The lofty conceptions which I cherished in former times, regarding Luther and the reformation, are greatly modified. How many Luthers are not yet needed?" In his Festival speech of 1832, he had said of Gustavus Adolphus that his was "a heroic nature of the great and purely human stamp of which Greece and Rome had presented so many prototypes," and these words, as a whole series of epistolary passages testify, were chosen with a polemic design, because he knew that the other orators would represent the king essentially as a theologian in armor, and a "martyr of the concordance book." Five years later he himself writes concerning Gustavus Adolphus: "To the height of the now current cosmopolitan ideas, he was, to be sure, wholly incapable of soaring; as a forerunner of a new epoch he can scarcely be considered. The freedom of thought for which he did combat was nothing else than freedom of conscience, and it is very doubtful if Protestantism ever presented itself to him from any point of view but the purely theological." More profound investigation had in this instance, too, brought the honest poet to renounce the position he had once assumed. But this repeated withdrawal from an audacious, yet passionately maintained attempt to find the purely human, the colossal pagan element, in all heroes,--as though they were every one cast in a perfect mould,--even in those about whose brow orthodoxy had so firmly laid its iron ring, that no room remained for Tegnér's free Grecian laurel wreath, conclusively manifests how vigorously a free classic humanitarianism had penetrated through every pore into the poet's soul.

He had begun by intense admiration for all that was knightly, adventurous, or defiant, for honor, as such alone, with all its tinsel. In this enthusiasm, which he never lost, his feelings were those of a child of nature and a child of his people. "For," declares Tegnér's poem to Charles John (Karl Johann), "beyond all else in the Swedish mind stands honor, true or false, it matters not; it still lives in the memory." Tegnér is not only a child of nature, however; he is also a child of history, and history places him between the enlightenment period of the eighteenth, and the religious reaction of the beginning of the nineteenth century. He follows neither. With vigorous individuality he makes his choice among the elements of culture that are offered to him, until an independent mode of contemplation of human life, especially the relations between religion and poetry, is formed in his mind; and we see him, with his warm poetic temperament, rousing himself to involuntary, and often fruitless, efforts to bring reality into harmony with the great humanist ideal in which his method of contemplation finds its outlet. What injustice Runeberg did Tegnér when, in the year 1832, he wrote: "In him scarcely the glimmer of an ideal can be seen, indeed, not so much as an inner struggle that allows us to detect any traces of a dim foreboding that there is such a thing." Forty-four years later, the great Finnish rival of Tegnér indicated in a footnote that this assertion now seemed to him almost too presumptuous, but this was not enough; it would have been a simple act of justice had he contradicted his former statement.