Essays on Scandinavian Literature

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

Having this conception of the episcopal office, he could not escape emphasizing his function as the supervisor of the schools of his diocese. If he was to be a civilizer on any great scale, the chance which was here afforded him to impress his ideals upon the rising generation was not one to be neglected. And, as a matter of fact, Tegnér was indefatigable in his labors as an educator. His many speeches at school celebrations preached, as ever, a gospel derived from Greece rather than Judæa; and half-improvised though some of them appear to be, they contain passages of lofty eloquence.

It was inevitable that a bishop of such commanding personality, who wielded his authority at times somewhat ruthlessly, should make enemies. But, on the other hand, the beautiful beneficence and sincere humanity of the man often obliterated the ill-feeling which his official severity had aroused. To the widows of deceased clergymen in his diocese he was a veritable guardian, to their children a father, to his peasantry a friend, adviser, and monitor. He was an expert at detecting errors in ecclesiastical balance-sheets; and woe to the cleric who dared present to him inaccurate accounts of income and expenditures. By sheer dint of his personal superiority and that quality of soul which George Eliot calls dynamic, he impressed himself strongly upon all with whom he came in contact; and though he was feared, he was also beloved as few. A very delightful instance of the reverence with which he was regarded is recorded by Böttiger.

One summer evening he arrived at a remote parsonage which had never, in the memory of man, been visited by a bishop. Some time after his arrival Tegnér observed two young ladies, the daughters of the house, coming across the yard carrying between them a big tub, full of water. When he asked them, in a friendly way, why they subjected themselves to such hard labor, one of them replied: "Should we not regard it as an honor to be allowed to water the bishop's horses?"

In order to give a clear and coherent idea of Tegnér in his prime, I have been obliged to anticipate events. Many literary achievements which I have left unrecorded belong to the period previous to his assumption of the bishopric of Wexiö. Unhappily Professor Böttiger's edition is very chary of dates, and as Dr. Brandes has truly observed, is arranged with the obvious purpose of falsifying the sequence of Tegnér's poems and confusing the reader. The three periods—previous to 1812, 1812-40, and 1840-46—are entirely arbitrary, and plainly devised with a view to concealing, in so far as they are capable of concealment, the unhappy events which undermined the strength of the Titan and wrecked his splendid powers. But such a purpose is utterly futile, as long as the poems themselves had once escaped into publicity.

It was during the period while his sky was yet unclouded that Tegnér enriched Swedish literature with a series of lyrics which in point of lucidity of thought and brilliancy of diction have rarely been surpassed. It may be admitted, without materially detracting from his merit, that in some of them the foreign models from which they were in a measure fashioned shimmer through. Just as the Germans, Gottsched and Bodmer, held foreign models to be indispensable, and only disagreed as to which were the best, so the Swedish Academy, which in its predilections was French, had no scruple in recommending this or that literary form for imitation. That degree of literary independence which Germany reached with Goethe and Schiller, who discarded all models, the Scandinavian countries did not reach until a much later period; and Tegnér was one of those who stimulated that national self-respect without which independence is impossible.

A strong spiritual kinship drew him to Schiller, whose splendor of imagery and impassioned rhetoric were the very gifts which he himself in a superlative degree possessed. The breath of political and religious liberalism which pervades the writings of the German poet was also highly congenial to Tegnér, and last, but not least, they were both light-loving, beauty-worshipping Hellenists, and, though externally conformists, hid joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegnér that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegnér at his best. Schiller's "Three Words of Faith," in which liberty, virtue, and God are declared to be the only essentials of religion, finds a parallel (which even retains the metre) in Tegnér's "The Eternal," in which truth, justice, and beauty are substituted. A kindred poetic creed is far more consciously proclaimed in the famous poem Sangen (Poetry), which was primarily a protest against the gloomy and morbid view of poetry entertained by the Swedish Romanticists (the so-called Phosphorists). Tegnér here declares that the poet "with heavenly joy embraces life," that "he knows no weak lament" (at its misery), "no dissonance which is not dissolved" (in harmony). His temple stands in light and flame; and at its base a fountain gurgles, a draught from which is an elixir of strength and a panacea for all ills.

"Well, then," he continues, "from this fountain will I drink, if I am worthy of such a draught. With healthy eyes will I look about me in the sick world. My golden lyre shall not resound with sorrows which I myself have invented. For the poet's sorrows are none; and the sky of song is forever bright."

Peter Amadeus Atterbom, the leader of the Phosphorists, replied with much moderation and good sense to the obvious reflections upon his school which this poem contained. He intimates plainly enough that Tegnér's philosophy of life, in so far as it ignores sin and sorrow, which are too real to be banished by song, is a hopelessly shallow one.

"The undissolved dissonances," he says, "in the sense in which Mr. Tegnér uses the expression, certainly betray a disease of the soul, but this disease is not peculiar to a temperament which is fostered by a personal emotional affinity for lugubrious topics and ideas given by birth and developed by circumstances; but it is inherent in the weakness (which at times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as absolutely true and fundamentally valid for all. Sorrow, as such, is no more a diseased state than is joy; both are alike primordial, necessary, indispensable elements and halves of human life. Who would venture to assert that the day might dispense with the night? And does not the latter's glorious starry sky rival in majesty (though different in kind) the former's bright and dazzling blitheness?"

The fact was that Tegnér's cheery sun-worship was as much temperamental as was Atterbom's sentimental reveries and nocturnal melancholy. The Phosphorist is unquestionably right, however, in asserting that as a theory of life the one is as limited and imperfect as the other. It was because of the abhorrence of all the darker phases of existence that Tegnér's bright Hellenic muse never struck those notes which thrill with deepest resonance through the human heart. Tegnér's acquaintance with suffering during the early part of his career was chiefly a literary one, and like Goethe he went far out of his way to avoid the sight of it. As there can be no victory without combat—no laurel without dust—the Mount of Transfiguration is not reached except through the valley of the Shadow of Death.