This hard piece of eloquence is given here as a sample of the style of which Atterbom, the leader of the romantic school, made use in his youth. It contains so decided a challenge to parody that it is no wonder Tegnér yielded to the temptation to aim some mocking darts at it.
The religious and political views of Tegnér, combined with his literary standpoint, gave him a lofty watchtower, situated far above the two contending parties of the old and the new school, but from which he almost exclusively aimed his shafts at the latter. He who had entered the new century in early youth, and who was but twenty years old when he had experienced, in Lund, Sweden's upward soaring flight of poetic fancy, could not possibly feel his poetic needs satisfied by the insipid didactic and comic poems of the Gustavians. There was nothing, however, that incited him to combat against them, and they passed away all too soon, one after the other, until Leopold alone remained as the last surviving representative of the ancient régime. When Tegnér was in the full vigor of his manhood, Leopold was blind, and even had he otherwise been inclined to attack the old man, it was now impossible for him to do so. On the other hand, the first appearance of the "Phosphorists" upon the scene had provoked his displeasure in the highest degree. They discoursed in a philosophic idiom, which was intelligible neither to himself nor to any other uninitiated person. They opposed the academy as foreign,—that is to say, French,—and were themselves German to the core. Moreover, to Tegnér the French traditions were much dearer than the German. Not even his predilection for Grecian lore had estranged him from the classic French rules of taste. In his eyes Grecian characteristics very early became synonymous with self-control in art, and French poetry was in every respect well governed. It was no mere chance, therefore, that led him to the remark that the French national spirit "in many instances is more nearly allied to the Grecian than the Germans and their apes, since Lessing's time, have been willing to admit." His admiring attitude toward the old academicians during the sharp controversy against the "Phosphorists" recalls vividly, indeed, strikingly, Byron's contemporaneous enthusiasm for Pope and contempt for the lake school. The causes were in part akin: fidelity to childhood's impressions, delight in contradiction, partiality to intelligent lucidity and Latin rhetoric; but this attitude had still deeper ground in the relation to the Grecian peculiarities, and to the French studies of the antique,—a relation which is not found in Byron, but which characterizes Tegnér. Byron's art was employed in giving an organ to passion: Tegnér, like the ancients, desired that passion might be clad in strict decorum, in order to avoid a pathological effect. He had never liked reality, and had as little fancy for metaphysics; but the ideal form he loved. The inner schisms which he conceived to be the problem for art to solve were not deep; at heart he did not wish to see more violent struggles between body and soul, condition and desire, duty and happiness, etc., represented in poetry than could be reconciled with the harmony of healthfulness. It was rather the pure, polished form that fascinated him than the natural freshness of the Greeks, consequently the quality which the French classic style had in common with the Grecian. All these instincts brought him very near to the old school, and removed him from the new.
His chief warfare against the latter was waged by the young instructor (magister) in his great metrical speech delivered at Lund in 1820, the celebrated "Epilog," in which he demanded of the young academicians the banner-oath to the banner of light. The popularity of this poem was so great that during the summer following its delivery no two young students could talk together ten minutes without devoting at least five of them to quoting and interpreting the "Epilog." Certain lines of this speech have an almost proverbial force and truth.
"Heed not, tho' indolence to you may whisper,
That far too mighty is the strife for powers like yours,
That 'twill be fought as well without your aid.
Alone a general never wins a battle;
'Tis won for him by solid ranks of soldiers."
He ends by placing the Temple of Truth, as the ancients conceived it, face to face with the Tower of Babel, erected by the adherents to the romantic school, the heavy, barbaric structure, "whose obscurity peeps through the narrow windows." If we pay strict heed, however, to the architecture of the Pantheon, which he describes as that of the ancients, we shall observe that its style, with its singular mingling of Roman and Gothic, far from being antique, is an involuntary reproduction of Tegnér's own personal art ideal, which is the fruit of so many classic and romantic combinations.
"The ancients built to Truth a lofty temple,
A fair rotunda, glowing as the firmament.
The open dome let in from ev'ry quarter
A flood of light, while through the pillared forest
The winds of heaven with tender music frolicked,
But now our people build a Tower of Babel."
A rotunda whose light is obtained from every quarter, not from above alone, and which does not rest on simple masonry, but is combined with pillared forests, is rather a reminder of St. Peter's church with its complex style than of any structure built by the ancients. It was, in truth, rather a temple for all mankind, like this church, than the simple Roman house of gods, that floated before Tegnér's eye as the symbol of truth. What he wished to extol was simply transparency and lucidity in the realm of poetry, as in that of thought. The adoration of the hidden roots of life, of the obscurity of night, the mother of all things, and of the shadows, the source of color, as preached in Germany by Novalis, in Denmark by Hauch, in Sweden by Atterbom, seemed to him suspicious, indeed odious; he viewed it in the same spirit with which an ancient Apollo worshipper might have attended a Moloch service, and protested against it in the name of the light.
In the name of the light, and above all else in the name of poetic art, of whose psychologic origin he had early formed an original conception. By the romantic schools of all lands poesy was comprehended as the dearly purchased product of suffering and sorrow, as the pearl which is the result of diseased secretions. To Goethe it was the ideal confession of the soul, the noblest means of salvation from impressions and memories, that laid siege to the healthfulness of the character. Kierkegaard compared the poet to the unhappy being who is tortured by a slow fire in the brazen steer of Phalaris, and whose cries resound like music in the ears of the tyrant. Heiberg has the poet sing that if he had been good he would have produced poor poetry; but since he is bad he has written good poetry, for that touches him the most deeply which is denied himself. All these views accord in the one idea that poetry has its origin in yearning, in regret, in pain; in short, in something negative.
Tegnér traces its origin to healthfulness. Over and over again he attacks in his letters what he calls the hysteric cramps of the romantic school. "Nothing is so repulsive to me as this eternal litany over the torments of life, which belongs to reality and not to poetry. Is not poetry the healthfulness of life? Is not song the jubilee of humanity, bravely streaming forth from fresh lungs?" And this application is not the expression of a momentary mood with Tegnér; it keeps recurring again and again as a stereotyped definition. He does not comprehend how poetry, "which is nothing else than the healthfulness of life, nothing but a leap of joy from the borders of every-day life, can color the fresh round cheek with a hectic flush."
The definition assumed poetic proportions and melodious form in the sportive poem "The Song," called forth by a romantic elegy of the same name. It contains the programme of Tegnér's poetry, as follows: "The poet has no cause for lament, he has never been driven from the Garden of Eden. With heavenly delight he embraces life, as a bride,