"On life's exalted summit, where the waters
Of living streams are parted, once I stood,
And watched the current seeking divers quarters;
Around me all was bright and fair and good.
* * * * * * * * * *
"A melancholy demon then did waken,
Who suddenly my heart's warm blood did taste;
And lo! the scene grew gloomy and forsaken,
The sun and moon extinguished were in haste,
My glowing landscape autumn hues had taken,
Each flow'r was withered, ev'ry grove a waste;
All vigor from my frozen senses vanished,
All courage, all rejoicing now was banished."
While Tegnér was still occupied in putting the last touches to his "Fridthjof," the furies that had been lurking on his threshold shook their snaky locks before his eyes and stretched forth their long, lank arms to embrace him. They were the furies of disease, of passion, of life-weariness, and of dawning insanity, and they joined hands and danced round him in a circle.
The year 1825, the same in which "Fridthjof" appeared and proclaimed his fame to every quarter of the globe, was the year that marked the great crisis of his life. Physical as well as mental was the crisis. It has, to be sure, a purely bodily side; yet apart from the fact that this must be obscure even to a physician, it is only the mental and emotional side that the critic can study, and in it seems undoubtedly to have been the prime cause of the disorder. The mental and emotional catastrophe, however, is almost as obscure as the physical. It has hitherto remained unnoticed, chiefly because the editions of Tegnér's poems have been made, in usum delphini, by his surviving relatives. Their division into periods is thoroughly confusing; the poems are sparingly dated; indeed, as I have discovered, most of the love poems are pre-dated twenty-five years, in order to make the reader believe they were intended for Tegnér's wife when she was his betrothed bride. "The Ode to Melancholy" (Mjeltsjukan), the poem of which a strophe and a half have just been given, is inserted in the last edition, not dated between a poem of 1812 and another one of 1813. Tegnér's letters prove that it dates from 1825.
This year begins for Tegnér with violent illness; even on New Year's day of the year he is so ill that he believes death to be nigh at hand. In March he writes that his mind becomes every day more and more clouded. "God preserve me from melancholy and misanthropy," he says. In July he writes: "Blindness seems to me one of the most horrible of earthly misfortunes—next to one which I myself have experienced." Everything that formerly gave him pleasure is now distasteful to him. His disease continues as an inner restlessness, yet without any actual bodily pain. "My fancy, which was very excitable at the outset, is now like a whirlpool, that casts into swift rotation and soon destroys everything it can draw into its vortex."
The physicians think his liver is affected. "The fools! the soul is affected, and for it there is no medicine but that which is obtained in the great universal drug-shop beyond the grave." He declares that he cannot impart to his friends the cause of his sufferings. In November the violence of his malady seems to yield to a certain repose. He makes, so he says, fine daily progress in indifference, in which the happiness and wisdom of life consists. The destiny of the wise man, he thinks, is to become ever more and more of a tortoise. As long as he has a single exposed nerve, his whole being is a prey to torture. He feels "how thoroughly the dregs of contempt for the biped race are lodged in the depths of his soul." "Ah!" he exclaims, "genuine inner grief that attacks the strong soul nourishes itself, just as it does with war when it is rightly organized, or a wild beast when it has attained its full growth." On his birthday, Nov. 13, he sinks into the deepest melancholy; he thinks it would be better to celebrate, as do the Egyptians, the day of death. What puts him especially out of tune is the fact that this birthday is the last one that he will pass in Lund, where he has made his home for twenty-six years; having been appointed bishop he will be compelled to hold intercourse with strangers who will not understand him; as bishop he will come into possession of a disorganized diocese, and will be decried as a despot. In former times this would have been a matter of total indifference to him, nor would he have concerned himself in the least about the mob; but now he is nervous, hypochondriac, and out of tune, and he begins to comprehend the meaning of fear of man. "And yet this is not my only, not even my greatest, sorrow. Night, however, keeps silence, and the grave is mute; it behooves her sister, Sorrow, equally well to hold her peace." When finally, on the last day of the year, he draws the balance of what he has learned and gained in it, he writes:
"Ah, the old year! what I have suffered in it no one knows, unless it be the Great Recorder above yonder clouds. Nevertheless, I am indebted to the year. It has been more gloomy, but also more earnest, than all the others combined. I have learned at my own expense how much a human heart can endure without breaking, and what power God has deposited beneath the left side of a man's breast. As I said before, I am indebted to the year, for it has made me rich in what is the standing capital of human wisdom and independence: a vigorous, deeply rooted contempt for the human race." The excitability of his nervous system permits him to have no rest by day or by night. "My mind is in an unchristian state, for it has no Sabbath.... I cannot drink mineral water in the coming summer. But is there not a mineral water that is called 'Lethe'?"
What has happened? That bodily pain and disease exist here in a high degree is undoubted. Esaias Tegnér had had an elder brother, Johann, whose brain was diseased, and who, at thirty-nine years of age, died of insanity; the younger brother was continually brooding over the thought that insanity was a family inheritance. Thomander, later a bishop, who visited Tegnér in March, 1825, writes of him: "He has now more gloomy hours than formerly; many a one, but no one more than himself, fears for his reason; it is a fixed idea of his that he will become insane, because his brother and other relatives have been so." No one, however, can doubt that the melancholy which so suddenly warped the cheerful and fresh disposition of Tegnér had other causes than bodily disease; too many utterances point to a defined, concrete fact,—a fact, to be sure that Tegnér himself will not communicate, but the nature of which is, nevertheless, plainly indicated. It is "the heart" that is affected. It is contempt for humanity that has overpowered him. It is contempt for "the character" of another person that is the first cause of his weariness of life, and this person "is or has been dear" to him. We need not have studied Tegnér very profoundly to conclude that there is a woman behind all this, and that every one of these outbursts may be traced back to an unhappy or an unsatisfied erotic passion.
Among the letters of Bishop Thomander there is one dated 1827, in which it is mentioned that Tegnér, while he was still in Lund, cherished warm sentiments of affection for the beautiful wife of one of his friends. From her piano he never moved when she was singing. "Lovely Rose,"[22] by Atterbom, was his favorite song. Thomander writes that in a house where he met Tegnér, he warned the elder daughter not to sing "Lovely Rose," because he knew that if she did "the evil spirit would come over Saul"; but owing to a misunderstanding the forbidden song was sung, and Tegnér's good humor was banished for several days. In one of Tegnér's letters of May, 1826, we read in corroboration of this: "To listen to singing was something to which I had become especially accustomed during the last years of my stay in Lund, where I had daily opportunity of hearing a female voice that still echoes in my heart." To the lady here in question, Tegnér had written for his friend, in 1816, a sort of versified love-letter, in which her beauty, her goodness of heart, and her singing are extolled to the skies. He speaks in it of the danger of looking into her eyes. It appears that what was then called a danger in jest became a real danger for Tegnér several years later. His admiration for the disposition and talents of this beautiful woman seems gradually to have kindled a flaming passion, and this passion was evidently reciprocated. Local tradition has not a little to tell of his relation with her, which, moreover, could not have left his domestic happiness undisturbed. At all events, it certainly added much to his grief at parting from Lund. Still living contemporaries of Tegnér have, furthermore, communicated to me an occurrence which served as an essential motive for his contempt for humanity, especially his contempt for woman. He discovered that a very distinguished lady, with whom he was captivated, had yielded to the advances of a wholly unpolished, boorish man. Did it so greatly shock him who was himself faithless to find faithlessness everywhere, that he gave way completely to weariness of life? Did he simply tell himself that he was scorned because he was old and almost gray, and was he cast into a state of despair because the happiness of youth was at an end for him? Was he so agitated at finding animal passion where he had honored the crown of female culture and beauty, that in his morbid condition this indignation at a single individual grew to universal loathing of life? I cannot decide the question. I can only see that the bitter melancholy bored, in the once so trusty ship of his destiny, the hole through which the black waters of misanthropy and of insanity rushed in and deluged everything. During the shipwreck he wrote the melancholy lines:—
"For thee, mankind, with praise I am o'erflowing,
God's image, thou, of true and perfect plan!
And yet two lies betray thy record glowing,—
The one is woman hight, the other man.
From songs of old were truth and honor flowing,
They best were sung when cheating erst began.
Thou child of heav'n! One truth thou ownest now,—
The mark of Cain, deep branded on thy brow.
"A fiery mark, by God's own finger given,
Why did I never heed the sign before!
This smell of mould beneath yon starry heaven
Doth poison vernal bloom for evermore;
And by the grave alone the smell is given,
Tho' wardens strict may guard the marble door.
Alas! corruption is the soul of life,
No pow'r can crush it; ev'rywhere 'tis rife."
The state of discord into which the soul of Tegnér sank during the latter part of the time when "Fridthjof" was in the course of progress, has left its traces even in this cheerful and harmonious poem. One of the last-written cantos is that which bears the title "Fridthjof's Return." Its contents, by way of exception, are not modeled after the old Norse poem. Fridthjof returns home, learns that Ingeborg has been persuaded to become King Ring's wife, and in the first burst of his indignation exhausts himself in a stream of wrath at the faithlessness of the beloved object of his affections. No critical reader can fail to see how nearly related the following outburst is to the just-cited strophes of "The Ode to Melancholy."