Perhaps the need of losing consciousness justifies the axiom of the pessimists that consciousness is the beginning of suffering. Wine makes one naive and unconscious as a child; or even as an animal. Is it the lost paradise which one wishes to recover? But the remorse which follows it? Remorse and acidity of the stomach have the same symptoms. Is there then a confusion, and are sensations called "remorse" which are only heart-burn? Or does the drinker returned to consciousness regret that he has exposed himself by daylight and betrayed his secrets? There is something to feel remorse for in that! He is ashamed that he has been taken by surprise, he feels afraid because he has exposed himself and given away his weapons. Remorse and fear are close neighbours.
Yet once more the members of the club drowned their consciousness in drink and then got into the boat to proceed home. John and Thurs began a dispute about Bellmann[3] which lasted till they reached Skeppsholm, and closed with sharp remarks on both sides.
John had an old grudge against this poet. Once as a child, he had been ill for a whole summer, and had by chance taken Bellmann's Fredman's Epistles out of his father's book-case. The book seemed to him silly, but he was too young to form a well-grounded opinion on it. Later on, it sometimes happened that his father sat at the piano, and hummed Bellmann's songs. The boy found it incomprehensible that his father and uncle admired them so much. Subsequently one Christmas he saw a violent controversy break out between his mother and his uncle on the subject of Bellmann. The latter set the poet above everything—Bible, sermons and all. There were depths, he said, in Bellmann. Depths indeed! Probably Atterbom's romanticist one-sided criticism had filtered through the daily papers to the middle classes. As a school-boy and student, John had sung "Up, Amaryllis" and other idylls of Bellmann's, naturally without understanding them or thinking of the meaning of the words. He sang in a quartette, or choir, for it sounded well. Finally, in 1867, he read Ljunggren's lectures and a light broke upon him, but not one of Ljunggren's kindling. He thought the latter mad. Bellmann was a ballad-singer, that was true, but a great poet, the greatest poet of the North?—impossible!
Bellmann had sung his songs composed on the French model for the Court and his own friends, but not for the common people, who would not have understood "Amaryllis," "Eol," "The Tritons," "Fröja" and all the rococo stock-in-trade. He died and was forgotten. Why had he been disinterred by Atterbom? Because the pugnacious romantic school required an embodiment of irregularity to set up against the classicists, as they had nothing of their own to boast of. Thus the romantic school gained the day; and when one considers how cowardly most people are in the face of public opinion, and the tendency of the middle-class to ape its superiors and reverence authority, one ceases to be surprised at the elevation of Bellmann. Ljunggren and Eichhorn outstripped Atterbom in finding beauty and genius in his writings they were reinforced by the clerical element, and thus the idol was set up for worship. Bystrom, the sculptor, had already magnified the little lottery-secretary and court-poet into a Dionysus and lent him the features of an antique bust of Bacchus.
Bellmann's idylls are careless, extemporised compositions with forced rhymes, and as disconnected as the thoughts in the brain of a drunkard. One does not know whether it is day or night, the thunder rolls in the sunshine, and the weaves beat while the boat is floating calmly on the waters. They simply provide a text for music, and for that purpose one might use a book of addresses. The meaning of the words does not matter, as long as they sound well.
According to his custom Thurs took the matter personally. It was an attack on his good taste and on his honour, for John said that his admiration of Bellmann was mere humbug; that he had read himself into it, and that it was not genuine. Thurs on the other hand declared John to be presumptuous, because he wished to criticise the greatest Swedish poet.
"Prove that he is the greatest," said John.
"Tegner and Atterbom say so."
"That is no proof."
"Simply because you have a spirit of contradiction."