He is always just and inclined to be generous in his judgment of every one except himself. It is necessary, however, after the year 1824, to make due allowance for the terrible strain upon his mind which disposed him to give violent and hyperbolical expression to the mood of the moment. The unhappy passion which he could at times smother, but never subdue, went boring away into his heart like a subterranean fire, consuming his vitals, and occasionally breaking forth into a wild blaze. The following reference to it, in his letter to Franzén (November 13, 1825), is very pathetic:
"It is to-day my forty-third birthday. I have thus long since passed the highest altitude of life where the waters divide. With every year one now becomes smaller and smaller; one star is extinguished after another. And yet the sun does not rise. One dies by degrees and by halves. Therefore only children and youth ought to celebrate their birthdays with joy; we who have passed into the valley of age, which with every step is growing darker and chillier, are right in celebrating them with—whims.... However, this is not my only or my greatest affliction, I have had and have others. But the night is silent and the grave is dumb, and their sister, Sorrow, should be as they. Therefore—let this suffice."
December 29th. "Alas, this old year! What I have suffered in it no one knows, if not, perhaps, the Recorder beyond the clouds. But I am indebted to this year. It has been darker, but also more serious than all the others put together. I have learned at my own expense what a human heart can endure without breaking, and what power God has deposited in a man under his left nipple. As I say, I am under obligation to this year, for it has enriched me with what is the real sinking fund of human wisdom and human independence—a mighty, deeply rooted contempt for man.... My inner nature emerges from the crisis like the hibernating bear from his den, emaciated and exhausted, but happily with my ursine sinews well preserved; and by and by some flesh will be growing on them again. It seems to me that my old barbaric, Titanic self, with its hairy arms, is constantly more and more rubbing the sleep out of its eyes. I hope that some vine may still grow upon the scorched and petrified volcano of my heart."
January, 1826. "But when one is compelled to despise the character of a human being, especially of one who has been or is dear to one, then that is the bitterest experience which life can afford; then it is not strange if a frank and ardent soul turns with loathing from this false, hypocritical generation and shuts himself up, as well as may be, in the hermitage of his own heart.
"My mind is unchristian, for it has no day of rest. Generally I think that my disease has its seat in the abdomen or in the waist. Mineral waters I can no more drink this summer. But is there not a mineral water which is called Lethe?
"Whether my little personality returns thither whence it came, with or without consciousness, a few months later or earlier, in order to be drowned in its great fountain-head, or to float for some time yet like a bubble, reflecting the clouds and an alien light—this appears to me constantly a matter of less and less consequence."
There is to me a heartrending pathos in these confessions. It is easy to stand aloof, of course, like a schoolmaster with his chastising rod, and lash the frailties of poor human nature. It is easy to declare with virtuous indignation that the man who covets his neighbor's wife is a transgressor who has no claim upon our sympathy. And yet who can help pitying this great, noble poet, who fought so bravely against his "barbaric, Titanic self with its hairy arms"? His passionate intensity of soul was, indeed, part of his poetic equipment; and he would not have been the poet he was if he had been cool, callous, and self-restrained. The slag in him was so intimately moulded with the precious metal that their separation would have been the extinction of the individuality itself. The fiery furnace of affliction through which he passed warped and scorched and cracked this mighty compound, but without destroying it. A glimpse of this experience which transformed the powerful, joyous, bright-visaged singer into a bitter, darkly brooding pessimist, fleeing from the sinister shadow which threatened to overtake him, is afforded us in the poem "Hypochondria[40]":
"I stood upon the altitude of life,
Where mingled waters part and downward go
With rush and foam in opposite directions.
Lo, it was bright up there, and fair to stand.
I saw the sun, I saw his satellite,
Which, since he quenched his light, shone in the blue;
I saw that earth was fair and green and glorious,
I saw that God was good, that man was honest.
"Then rose a dread black imp, and suddenly
The black one bit himself into my heart;
And lo, at once the earth lay void and barren,
And sun and stars were straightway drenched in gloom.
The landscape, glad erewhile, lay dark, autumnal;
Each grove was sere, each flower stem was broken;
Within the frozen sense my strength lay dead,
All joy, all courage withered within me.
"What is to me reality—its dumb,
Dead bulk, inert, oppressive, grim, and crude?
How hope has paled, alas, with roseate hue!
And memory, the heavenly blue, grown hoary!
And even poesy! Its acrobatic
Exertions, leaps—they pall upon my sense;
Its bright mirage can satisfy no soul—
Light skimmings from the surface fair of things.