Chapter 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.

[1] A strong kind of beer, first brewed by Chr. Mumme, of Brunswick, Germany, in 1492. Pope says: "The clamorous crowd is hushed with mugs of mum."--TR.

[2] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 143.

[3] Translated by J. S.

[4] Longfellow's translation.

[5] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 159.

[6] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 240.

[7] Referring to Sveaborg, Finland, built according to the plans of Field-Marshal Count Augustus Ehrensvärd, whose name is hewn in gigantic characters on the granite rock from which the great ship-basin is constructed.

[8] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 171.

[9] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 175.

[10] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 356-7.

[11] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 308.

[12] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 196.

[13] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.

[14] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 157.

[15] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 237.

[16] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 341.

[17] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.

[18] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 213.

[19] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, pp. 97, 98.

[20] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 82.

[21] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 292.

[22] "Lovely Rose" is a passionate love-song, whose interest centres in the anguish of a butterfly at being removed from the rose at night, and only being permitted to caress her during the day.

[23] R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 269-271.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

1881.

Gustave Flaubert was born at Rouen, in the year 1821. When, in 1880, he was snatched away by sudden death, he did not leave European literary art in the same condition in which he had found it. No artist, as such, could desire to hand down to posterity a better renown. The work of his life marks a step in the history of the novel.

He was a prose author of the first rank; for several years indeed no one stood higher than he in France. His strength as a prosaist reposed upon an artistic and literary conscientiousness, which was exalted almost to the dignity of genius. He became a great artist because he was unsparing in his efforts, both when he was making preparations to write and when he was engaged in writing; he collected the results of his observations, facts, and illustrations, with the painstaking of a mere savant, while striving, with the passionate eagerness of a mere adorer of form, to fashion his materials in a plastic and harmonious manner. He became a master of modern fiction because he was sufficiently self-denying to be willing to represent real psychological events alone, and to shun all effects of poetic eloquence, all pathetic or dramatic situations which appeared beautiful or interesting at the expense of the truth. His name is synonymous with artistic earnestness and literary rigor.

He was not a savant who was at the same time a writer of fiction, or who, in the course of his life, became a writer of fiction. His literary work is based on earnest, slowly acquired preparatory studies. His books have nothing in them that is juvenile or frivolous, nothing that is smiling or versatile. These books are the results of a slowly developed and late maturity. He did not make his début until he was thirty-five years old, and, although he devoted his whole time to literature, he left behind him in his fifty-ninth year but seven works.[1]

His was a profoundly original, but by no means elementary character. His originality was dependent on the fact that two literary currents united in his temperament and there formed a new well-spring. In his youth he received simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, two impulses, which determined his intellectual career.

The first current that reached him was the romantic-descriptive tendency in literature originating with Chateaubriand, a tendency characterized by a style fraught with lyrical emotion and brilliant coloring, which charmed the French reading public for the first time in "Atala" and "Les Martyres," and which later gained a far firmer and more powerful rhythm, as well as a far superior picturesque vigor, in Victor Hugo's "Les Orientales," and "Notre Dame de Paris." Like all poets, indeed like all human beings, Flaubert was inclined in youth to the lyrical, and his lyric muse, through the historic development of French poesie, became a varied-hued and melancholy homage to the religion of beauty. The second current directed into his inner being, was the tendency of Balzac's novels against the modern, their employment of what was hideous and brutal as characteristic, their passionate realistic bias, and their fidelity of observation.

While these two currents flowed at one and the same time through his inner being, and after the lapse of some time became blended together, they received a new coloring and a new name.

As a youth he had composed for the drawers of his writing-table many descriptive and pathetic lyrics, in Hugo's, Gautier's, and Byron's style; but justly feeling that his originality could not assert itself in this direction, and that, upon the whole, there was no longer room for anything original in this department, he withheld his productions from the public, and reconciled himself to the idea of appearing comparatively ungifted, or, at all events, unproductive. About the same time he made literary efforts in an opposite direction; he spoke himself sometimes of a tragi-comedy on the smallpox; but this attempt, too, he refrained from publishing. Not until Chateaubriand and Balzac had fostered in his mind a new poetic form, did he feel sure of his originality, and made his first public appearance.