ESAIAS TEGNÉR
[ESAIAS TEGNÉR.]
1878.
Literary fame in the Scandinavian countries is for the most part a matter of mere local importance. Works written in languages which are spoken by a few million people only, and which in no portion of the world are studied or read as polite languages, are likely to have every chance of European and American renown against them. As a general thing, but few poetic productions are translated into other tongues; and, indeed, to a work that appeals to the sense of beauty, above all to a metrical work, the outer form of language is what the enamel is to the teeth: it invests it at the same time with durability and brilliancy.
Nevertheless, it is a well-known fact that certain northern authors have succeeded in finding more recognition in foreign countries than at home; they represent, as it were, to the entire reading-world, the poetic life of their fatherland, and their names are blended in the public consciousness with the name of their native land. Such fame has been attained by but one of the poets of Sweden,—Esaias Tegnér.
He is not the greatest among those who have contributed to the poetry of the Swedish language; before him and after him another greater poet produced in this tongue creations superior to his in clearness of style and fidelity to life. With Bellman and Runeberg, however, he must be classed; and, while inferior to them in poetic fancy, he may be said to surpass both in intellectual vigor.
Three times in the course of history, the Swedish people has succeeded in combining the classic and the popular in its poetry. The first time was when Bellman, during the reign of Gustavus III., selected his types from life among the people and in the inns of Stockholm, and sang "The Songs of Fredman" to a zither accompaniment, with a mimic display of masterly skill. The second time was when Tegnér, fifty years later, turned back to the heroic life of the ancient North, found in an old saga materials for a romance cycle, and gave Sweden a picture of Viking life and Viking love in the North, as his contemporaries conceived it. Finally this combination of the classic and the popular occurred about a generation ago, when—forty years after Finland had been tom from her old mother country—the greatest of Finland's sons, inspired by recollections of his childhood, depicted the honorable struggle of his fatherland against Russian supremacy, and thereby the national characteristics of the Finnish people, in a more realistic style than any one else had yet ventured to employ. Runeberg, in his soul-stirring bivouac poetry, has compressed into the smallest limits war idyls and tragedies of the battlefield.