Chapter V

Though he started in his general æsthetic views on the career pointed out by Heiberg, he nevertheless struck ere long into his own independent course. Heiberg was only a moralist in the name of true culture and of good taste; Paludan-Müller became one in the name of stem religious discipline. In religious questions, Heiberg had espoused the cause of Hegelian speculative Christianity; Paludan-Müller became an orthodox theologian. Thus his path for not an inconsiderable distance ran parallel with that of Sören Kierkegaard. Not that he was in any way influenced by this solitary thinker. He cherished but little sympathy for him, and was repelled by his broad, unclassical form, for whose merits he had no comprehension, and whose inner harmony with the mind of the author he did not perceive. It was the general spirit of the times which produced the intellectual harmony of these two solitary chastisers of their contemporaries. Step by step, Danish literature had departed from the ideals of the period of enlightenment, which had still continued to exist in the poetic creations of Oehlenschläger, as well as in the popular scientific works of Hans Christian Oersted. Their life had been of but brief duration. The Danish churchman to whom Schleiermacher corresponded was Mynster, but there is a wide gulf between Schleiermacher's freethinking and Mynster's orthodoxy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a single theologian, Clausen, was the sole spokesman of rationalism; he soon, however, turned completely toward the religious reaction then beginning. Rationalism, it is true, for a short time seemed to have become metamorphosed and developed into Hegelian philosophy of religion; but this movement, too, was wholly unproductive of results. Heiberg, who was its leader, became a follower of that speculative theologian of the Hegelian right flank, Martensen, and Martensen, in his turn, became thoroughly converted to high-church dogmatism. Nothing was now lacking for the completion of this spiritual movement but to deduce from it the practical, ethical results of dogmatic faith. This was done when the race of Oehlenschlägers and Oersteds had begotten the race of Kierkegaards and Paludan-Müllers.

In Kierkegaard's "Either--Or" is found the sentence, "There are poets who, through their poetic creations, have found themselves." This remark can well be applied to Paludan-Müller. For what else has a poet done who has traversed the path from coquetry to simplicity, from the intellectual to the true, from the sportive and brilliant to the transparently clear, and from the pleasing to the great?

Paludan-Müller appeared in his early days to be the _virtuoso_ among the contemporary poets of Denmark. The themes of his first works were almost completely buried beneath the trills of caprice and the delicate gradations of wit. In his "Kjærlighed ved Hoffet" (Love at Court, translated into German by E. v. Zoller, 1832), a comedy-after the pattern of the times which was partly inspired by Shakespeare, partly by Gozzi, pastoral poetry and lyrical court phraseology, puns and witticisms, dreamy enthusiasm, and fool's bells, all jingled together. The fact was, the work had been enriched from the horn of plenty of a highly endowed youth, who was free from care and without any defined plan. In the poem "Danserinden" (The Dancing-Girl), whose form and rhythm remind the reader so strongly of Byron's "Beppo," or Alfred de Musset's "Namouna," the virtuosity was more unbridled and capricious; the smooth-flowing stanzas narrated, lamented, laughed, mocked, played pranks, and glided one into the other with a loquacious flexibility, recalling the manner in which one arabesque passes into another. The serious portions of the narrative do not impress the reader as having actually occurred; the satirical remarks do not seem to be meant in earnest. When, however, a command to believe in the immortality of the soul is interwoven, for instance, with a recommendation of tea, a warning against the insipid poets, and other warnings of a still more captious nature, the cause may be traced less to a frivolous state of mind than to the youthful exuberance that fills the poet from the moment he feels his favorite form of verse, the eight-line stanza, galloping and prancing beneath his efforts. "The Dancing-Girl" is a mingling of intellect and inspiration, out of which neither clear colors nor distinct forms have developed themselves. It is a musical composition that now expresses the light dance of jig, now the yearning of melancholy, as these emotions alternate in the years of puberty, with their bold hopes, their uncomprehended yearnings, their thoughtless squandering of the powers of life. "The Dancing-Girl" was followed the next year by "Amor and Psyche," a new work of artistic virtuosity, which impresses itself most harmoniously upon the reader's favor, but has no power to bum forms or images into the soul. It is a music that is at once apprehended, but almost as promptly forgotten, one continual melodious solo and chorus song of spirits, zephyrs, and nymphs, whose sole fault is that it is too perfect in artistic form, too polished and smooth. The whole long dramatic poem does not contain a single characteristic or individual peculiarity, either in diction or in the mode of treatment, and yet something characteristic, that is to say, something unusually marked or sharply defined, would have had a most pleasing effect. As astonishing as is the _technique,_ it is not felt, and only where the _technique_ is present can we speak of style in the true sense of the word. Not those parts which are loaded with the greatest metrical display contain the most vital strophes, bearing most distinctly the impress of the poet's genius; they are found in the following words of Sorrow, where she casts her dark veil over the sorrowing Psyche:--

"Round each mortal's cradle flying,
Close the mother's couch beside,
Hordes of woes are softly sighing,
Gloom and care with them abide.
Tears the tender eyes bedewing,
Fears the budding smile subduing,
Shrieks the infant's lips are parting,
While dawn's heralds onward glide.

And when childhood's time is vanished,
Youth's brief joy has had its day,
Garlands won are faded, banished,
Gone is love's bewitching play--
When, alas! the dreams have perished,
Once so fondly, proudly cherished,
Hide e'en dead delights and pleasures
In the pangs of death away."

In these stanzas the melancholy that was peculiar to Paludan-Müller becomes apparent. There is here betrayed that view of death which developed into a tendency to dwell on the thought of death, and which was destined eventually to burst forth in the love of death manifested by a Tithon, a Kalanus, or an Ahasuerus. We here detect the interest in the law of destruction which later produced the poem "Abels Död" (The Death of Abel), the belief that dead happiness embraces within itself all the pangs of death which found expression in "Tithon," and the feeling that dissolution lurks ever on the threshold of life and of joy, which so often breaks through the poetry of Paludan-Müller. Pay heed, for instance, to the following lines from the poem entitled "Dance Music":--

"Lo! the sunshine, golden, gleaming,
Lights with smiles the azure skies!
Yonder cloud speeds onward, beaming;
Like a bird, with wings, it flies.
Hear the ringing
Now of singing
That is filling
Lofty trees with music thrilling,--
All this glory swiftly dies."

We may call this tone shrill, yet it did not jar like a false note in the ear of Paludan-Müller. On the contrary, he found a certain satisfaction, a certain consolation, indeed, in keeping before his own eyes and those of others the inexorable, the inevitable fate of all that is finite. When the custom of circulating the photographs of celebrated men, with a brief autograph inscription, came into vogue, he wrote beneath a picture that represented him reading a book, the characteristic words:--

"All earthly things, 'tis written here,
Go up and down by turns;
So he who stands above to-day
What is before him learns."

Justice, however, has not been accorded to the drama "Amor and Psyche," if attention be merely called to the fact that it is the harbinger of the poet's most beautiful and profound works. As intellectual poetry it has a connected and complete symbolism which obliges the author to be more rigid than ever before in handling his materials, and it is distinguished by that peculiar tinting which is so characteristic of Paludan-Müller's mythological poems. It is not a strong tinting, now gray in gray, now light in light; yet the poem is by no means colorless. The truth is, its hue is that of the reflection of pearls, the glimmer of mother of pearl, the delicate play of prismatic shades that might have radiated from the shell in which Venus emerged from the sea. The Phantasus of Paludan-Müller paints the portrait of Psyche for Amor on just such a "pearl-white" shell; and this is almost symbolic of the way in which the poet himself has executed the form of Psyche. This class of his creations, indeed, is not of an earthly nature; earth is not their true home, and even those among them who like Psyche are of earthly descent, must bid to earth a final imperative farewell.

_Psyche_ (kneeling).
"Gaia, thou hallowéd mother,
Who gave me birth and protection.
Thou from whose lips ever tender,
I heard life's earliest accents,
Take thou thy daughter's farewell!
Nevermore shall I behold thee,
Never again shall I wander
Over the loved spots of memory.
* * * * * * *
Yonder, in heavenly mansions,
Earthly sorrows will vanish."

The entire poetic endeavor of Paludan-Müller in this period was, upon the whole, one magnificent, many-shaded leave-taking of Gaia. What else, indeed, was the tendency of romance! It feared and shunned the life about it, and the era so wholly devoid of character in which its poets, to their sorrow, found themselves born. Paludan-Müller with his whole soul shared this repugnance of the romantic school for the actual surroundings of the poet, as well as its aversion to lingering, even in fancy, about this heavy, dark globe which kept up its ceaseless revolutions with the poet and all his air-castles, whether he would have it so or not. The age in which he lived was loathsome to him, and he had his own era and his own contemporaries in mind when he permitted Tithon to say of his:--

"What fruits thinkest thou this era will develop?
An era 'tis that needs a mighty storm
To rouse its energies from heavy slumber;
An era full of dreams instead of efforts,
Of petty competition, not of action bold;
An era when each crowns himself with glory
And sees himself in heroes of the past,
When mortals would be lofty as immortals
And yet have servile minds--how I abhor them!"

True, this description concerns Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan War; but it is one that accords marvellously well with that given in "Adam Homo" of the reign of Christian VIII. in Denmark:--

"It was a time when mediocre mortals
Were puffed up everywhere with boastful pride;
* * * * * * * * * * *
A time when there were those together clustered
Who something great to pass proposed to bring,
While they at best accomplished not a thing."

It is readily comprehensible that a poet who cast so gloomy a gaze upon his surroundings should have preferred, like Tithon, a sojourn in the "realm of the aurora" to that among his own contemporaries.

The most singular fact of all was that he was not alone in his predilection for this higher sphere. All the best brains of the period had instituted the same comparison and made the same choice; there was a poetic vein in most of them, and so it came to pass that in the realm of the aurora the poet found himself in a numerous company.

This wrought a change in the poetic tendency of Paludan-Müller. He paused suddenly in his flight from reality, wheeled about, and took the direction back to earth again. In the poem "Tithon" he paints life on the island of the morning dawn, on the coast of the sea of ether, to which the love of Aurora has uplifted Tithon. It is an existence such as that of Rinaldo in the enchanted gardens of Armida, and a veil of roseate hue is spread over all the surroundings, over the skies, as well as over the beautiful women of the island. It is a life passed amid song, clinking of goblets, love, and music, and sails on the sea of ether in eternal youth, during an eternal spring. And yet this life is never spiritless and insipid, nor are its enjoyments ever commonplace; they are blissful enjoyments. It is akin to the life of which so many noble enthusiasts among the Danish contemporaries of our poet dreamed; the life that hovered before Carsten Hauch, for instance, when he sang of that "sea of the milky way, where the spirits of the redeemed, freed from care and sorrow, their eyes illumined with the brilliant light of immortality, glide onward through unknown clouds." It is that _alibi_ of enjoyment that Ludwig Bödtcher and so many other similar artist natures, during the best years of their lives, sought beneath the skies of Italy; it is that never-ending spring and that eternal youth which Christian Winther and Hans Christian Andersen, and all those men of their generation who like themselves did not know how to grow old, permitted themselves to cling to and conjure up. It is a strong proof, however, of the greatness of Paludan-Müller's spirit that this life and this beauty did not long attract him. His poetic muse depicts Tithon, in the midst of his forgetfulness of earth and his revelling in enjoyment, devoured with half-unconscious yearning for his country, his people, his relations, and the entire un-ideal reality which he has forsaken. Nor is this yearning without foundation; for nothing less than Priam's ascension to the throne, the abduction of Helen, the ten-years' war of which Homer is supposed to have sung, and the complete destruction of Troy, has taken place while Tithon is revelling in the cloud-land of the morning dawn. Thus it was once upon a time, when the French Revolution was enacting from beginning to end its magnificent drama, that certain people on the coast of the Sound were singing drinking-songs and club-songs. Thus it was that Copenhagen played its private comedy during the battle of Waterloo, and Denmark rioted in beautiful verses and rejoiced in æsthetic tilting-matches while the July Revolution was in full blast.

Paludan-Müller has his Tithon compel Aurora to give him permission to return to earth, and the following words uttered by Tithon at the moment when, after long absence, he once more sets foot upon earth, indicate perhaps the most significant turning-point of the poet's own course of development--

"O Earth, thy air is heavy! Like a burden
It falls upon my limbs and on my bosom;
A deadly weight, it presses on my shoulders.
Unfriendly is thy greeting--cold and sharp,
To meet me sendest thou thy wind inclement,
And in thy winter garb hast clad thyself.
Where'er I gaze, thy plains look bare and dreary;
The leaves upon thy trees are sere and yellow;
Thy grass is withered; decked hast thou already
Yon hill-tops far away with wreaths of snow.
Wilt thou alarm me? Is so stern thy visage?
Because in utter folly I forsook thee?
All hail to thee, O thou, my native soil!
With this fond kiss my tears of joy I tender!
Thou fill'st my heart e'en tho' thou'rt bare and dreary."

The territory here trodden by Paludan-Müller with Tithon is the territory of Adam Homo. At the moment when the atmosphere of earth weighs heavily on Tithon's shoulders, Paludan-Müller once more hails Gaia. He had at that time already completed the first part of "Adam Homo."