In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct it.
V.
Tegnér was born about the middle of the reign of Gustavus III. The assassination took place when he was ten years old; consequently he, who in later years was so fond of styling himself a Gustavian, had childish reminiscences alone of that period, and no other personal impressions of the character of Gustavus than those gained at second hand from a legend, embellished or idealized by tender hands. Even this was scarcely needed to make the period seem like one of rare brilliancy, in comparison with the leaden epoch which followed. Gustavus III. was a man of great energy, endowed with remarkable talents, unusual virtues, and dazzling vices; he was a vain despot, yet had an enlightened mind; he was one of the many crowned followers of Voltaire that were the product of the eighteenth century; he was full of superstition and yet a free-thinker, frivolous yet intellectual, in matters of trifling import displaying a petty spirit, but having traits of true greatness; he was brave, magnanimous, a hero of the stage, with genuine courage in his breast. During his whole life he attracted about him, through the magic of his mental powers, all the gifted literary men of his land, especially the poets, who saw in him a colleague; not one of them could boast so distinctly marked a dramatic talent as his. Thus it was that for a long time he imprinted upon the manners, the forms of speech, the literature of Sweden, the stamp of an exquisitely refined, light, frivolous culture; and it is the conversational tone of his day that invested Tegnér's letters, even in the reign of Charles John (Bernadotte), with their grace and their soaring flights of fancy. His was a form that had remained fixed in history, like one of Bernini's admirable statues; full of mannerism, coquettish, affected, if you will, with airily rustling drapery, but presenting an attitude that was bold and unflinching, and producing an impression of the most profound significance. Nor could this be denied, however little satisfaction might be taken in the figure. And what had come after him? First, the regency of the brother of Gustavus, the duke of Södermanland, which embraces the period from Tegnér's tenth to his fourteenth year. The regent, a wretched imbecile, who had grown prematurely gray in the service of Venus, and who was well adapted to be the prey of every Phryne and every Cagliostro, was wholly governed by his favorite Reuterholm, who represented the type of brutal and incompetent passion for rule. Not from love of freedom, but simply as an indirect way of censuring the murdered king, these empty-pated men introduced freedom of the press into Sweden, and, without any preparation or gradual transition, all the inflammatory writings of the French Revolution now flooded the land. The long-continued ignorance concerning what was transpiring in France and throughout Europe was followed by a tumultuous and immature enthusiasm for freedom. During the reign of Gustavus the word republican was still synonymous with the word philosopher; so that in the year 1789 a courtier like Rosenstein could commend his nephew to the king by stating that the young man, although somewhat infected with republican views, had kept these so well within bounds that they "only served to increase his love for his king, his fatherland, and honor." Later, as contrasted with the pitiful wreck on the throne, the word became invested with a more accurate significance. With eager suspense the people followed the defensive war of the French Republic; its victory was decisive for public opinion; the peaceful citizens of the small towns of Sweden spoke in the same tone as the extreme left of the French convention.
No sooner had that misfortune occurred than the freedom of the press, established half a year earlier with so much false pathos, was abolished, and throughout Sweden the persecution of Jacobinism became rife; even the loyal Swedish Academy, because it voted against admitting to its membership the totally uncultured favorite of the regent, was treated as a Jacobin club, and closed.
An act of baseness of the worst sort caused contempt to reach its climax. The conspiracy of Armfelt, the Swedish Alcibiades, was discovered, and the duke-regent endeavored to avail himself of this opportunity to make the fair young Mlle. Rudenskjöld, one of the ornaments of the court, cruelly atone for the obstinacy with which she had rejected the gallant propositions of the aged married libertine. Intercepted letters furnishing proofs that Armfelt had been her lover, she was arrested, and accused of being a participator in his crime; but when the duke, through his chancellor, judicially ordered her to be whipped on the public market-place for her immorality, the exasperated populace branded him with so deep a stigma that it could neither be effaced by time, nor covered with the white hairs of old age; not even the deportment of Bernadotte toward Charles XIII., with its wily assumption of simplicity, could bury it in oblivion.
While all these events were taking place, Tegnér was still too young to be able to enter into or understand them; but the after effects on his mind were profound and strong. No remote corner of the land was too far distant to be reached by the sparks from the crater of the revolution; no youth, whose intelligence had once been aroused, was so absorbed in his studies that he escaped hearing outbursts of contempt for royalty and government, which he at once applied to his own land. Persecuted "Enlightenment" became a magic, a beloved word to every youth. The Swedish Academy, which under other circumstances might readily have become an object of his displeasure, simply as an academy, as an official and antiquated institution for the gilding of mediocrity, very early appeared to Tegnér as a knightguard of the light, the worth of which had been fully tested. The prevailing revolutionary spirit had no power over his harmonious soul, and only led him to the conditional royalism which is revealed throughout his writings. He was in favor of royalty when the king was worthy of his throne, not otherwise.
In the year 1796 the regency came to an end, and from that time until 1809 (that is, from Tegnér's fourteenth to his twenty-seventh year), Gustavus (IV.) Adolphus reigned as king. Pedantically honorable, rigidly grave, rigorously frugal as this monarch was, he could not but produce, when he first appeared upon the stage, a pleasing contrast to his uncle. It soon became apparent, however, that this youthful form was wholly unnational. The physiognomy proved to be rather Spanish than Swedish. Gustavus IV. bears a striking resemblance to the type of regents of the Spanish decadence, with character modelled after the great, lamentable shadow of Philip II., who held sway in Madrid so long after his death. The same petty adherence to etiquette, the same haughty gloom, the same awkward formality, the same melancholy piety, combined with fanatic faith in royalty by the grace of God. The court which, ten years earlier, had presented the appearance of a festal painting by Watteau, was now as quiet and as ceremonious as the Spanish court under Charles II., and even the great Philip could not have punished the crime of lèse-majesty with more severity than Gustavus, the fault of neglecting to raise the hat in the street to him. In Rosenstein he had had a noble tutor, with a thoroughly independent mind. Gustavus III. had permitted this most honorable instructor to have full sway. "Rosenstein has my full consent to educate my son as a philosopher," said he; "the boy will be a royalist as soon as he ascends the throne." This father, as a matter of course, was in nowise responsible for that inflexible faith in revealed religion which allowed his son to read in the Apocalypse prophecies concerning his own destiny. The fact was, the reaction with which, amid the fitful changes of the century, the air was everywhere freighted, had stolen through secret by-paths into the mind of the crown prince, and had completely overpowered it. The frivolity of the father, to be sure, had served as a warning, and had given the first backward impulse; the murder of the father gave the second. Soon Gustavus IV. had gone farther in his ever-present consciousness of majesty than any Bourbon. He forbade the daily papers to use the pronoun "we" in such applications as, "We are waiting with impatience for news," "We have had a severe winter," because this seemed to him equivalent to an encroachment on that royal prerogative which is known as Pluralis majestatis. All the publications that appeared in the land were subjected by his orders to the strictest supervision; and personally he cherished so great a horror of books that he burst into loud utterances of delight whenever he heard that a printing-house had failed. He himself never read anything except his Bible and the regulation work on military tactics.
And this was the king, who, in the foolish war against Napoleon, never rested until he had lost Stralsund and Rügen, and whose insane war against Russia led to the definite conquest of all Finland by a Russian army. Runeberg in his poem "The King" in "Fänrik (Ensign) Staal," has erected for Gustavus IV. the monument he deserved. In the year 1809 a couple of courageous officers compelled him to abdicate the throne. The duke of Södermanland followed him as Charles XIII., and it was shortly afterward, when the adopted son of the latter died, that the French party in Sweden, through a mistaken idea of pleasing Napoleon and the illusory hope of thus winning back Finland, had Bernadotte chosen crown prince. His form emerged in a brilliant light from the gloomy background of the shadows of his predecessors. During a period of thirty-three years, the celebrated commander-in-chief guided the politics of Sweden; and this king whose reign is contemporaneous with Tegnér's most vigorous years, shares with Tegnér the honor of having given the name to the generation he ruled over. The period from 1810 to 1840 belongs to Charles John, and to Tegnér.
Such are the pictures of the rulers who at that time, one after another, imprinted their physiognomies on Sweden, and whose profiles are stamped on the coins that passed through the fingers of Tegnér when he was a child, a clerk, a student, and a magister.