THE LITERATURE OF SWEDEN
Swedish literature is sublime and magnificent, like its history and its scenery; it is simple and glad, as well as sad, like the lives of its people. One of the great days in Sweden, or at least in Stockholm, is the celebration, on the 26th of July, of the anniversary of the birth, more than a century and a half ago, of the national poet Bellman.
His songs are as household words throughout the land. To the Stockholm born they speak of their daily life and surroundings, of the green isles and shady banks of the Malar, the flowery woods of Haga, the smiling park of Dijurgarden. Burlesque scenes of the life of the people, street tragedies, drinking bouts, and country junketings; broad humor and Nature's philosophy; lively fancies and exquisite landscape painting—such are the themes of his song, which from one generation to another has held the heart of the people spellbound. Every man, woman, and child knows his favorite ditties by heart, has sung or hummed them in moments of joy or sorrow. For his song is both joyful and sad. His joy is the joy of the simple hearted, his gladness a Dionysian gladness, the very enjoyment of existence; his sadness that of sympathy with suffering humanity, of anguish at the evanescence of life and happiness. His fancy oscillates between constant extremes and ever-recurring contrasts. It makes of his song, as Tegnér has so aptly defined it, "a sorrow decked in roses." Bright, gay, enraptured, full of sunshine and glamour, like the summer day around Stockholm, it is traversed by a strain of melancholy like a smile through tears, the laugh which conceals a sob. There is symbolism and there is parody in his rustic figures, but they are so living, so real, they appeal so strongly to the innermost feelings, that they seem the embodiment of one's thoughts. His pictures are like those of the Dutch painters: every trait in the rustic scene tells the life-story of some humble existence.
It is this characteristic which has made the poet appeal so powerfully to the minds of the people. He seems to see with their eyes and feel with their hearts, and to have experienced all the vicissitudes of their own life. And yet he eminently reflects his own time, the gay, the light-hearted Gustavian era, with its classical fancies and rococo tastes. Venus and Bacchus, the Nymphs and the Dryads, Hebe and Amor are mixed up incongruously with the homely scenes of Scandinavian life. His Dutch pictures assume then a Watteau-like coloring of extraordinary effect, as fancy and contrast enhance the sharp outlines of his figures and give their vitality still greater relief. They are so lifelike and so various that the whole of the every-day life of Sweden, and more especially of Stockholm, of the eighteenth century, is unrolled before our eyes. It is said that if every other book descriptive of the period were to fail, his verses would suffice to inform us how the middle classes then lived, thought, and felt. Around the poet's monument—his bust in bronze on a white marble column—there gather, on the anniversary of his birth, the crowds who love him and love his song. Every heart beats high as the Bellman choirs burst forth in turn into the well-known melodies, composed or adapted by the poet himself to his words, and sung by him to the accompaniment of his lute. And song alternates with enthusiastic orations, addressed to the crowd by improvised orators, teeming with quotations of well-known lines. It is an orgy of Bellman's verse, such as the Stockholmer specially delights in. Bellman's songs generally form a sequence, a continuous chain of lyrical romance. His Fredman's Epistles are a sort of epic cycle of lyrics. This is a form often adopted by Swedish poets. We find it in Tegnér's Frithiof's Saga, in Runeberg's Sayings of Sergeant Stal, and in the works of other poets. It is a question, however, whether even by these Master Singers, in their more elaborate conceptions and genial flights of poetry, Bellman has ever been surpassed. In lyric power and vivid realism, his popular ditties are unrivaled.
The next to incarnate the genius of the Scandinavian race was Tegnér. His love of brave deeds and reckless adventure and his exaltation of the man of action above the man of thought are typical. His heroes, fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the national ideal. His whole vision of life is Scandinavian, bright and vivid, with a tinge of melancholy. Tegnér was, with Geijer and Ling, the first to adopt national subjects, to use the Scandinavian myths and folk-lore in their poetry, in opposition to the classical themes and the Hellenic mythology, until then exclusively in vogue in the poetical field.
Geijer was a romantic by nature, in politics as well as in literature, but he was above all an ardent Scandinavian, opposed to exotics, and passionately devoted to the great traditions of the past, a hero-worshiper, an enthusiast, and a Goth. The Goths were members of a society formed to revive the old national manners and customs, the freedom of the age of the Vikings, and the ardor of the heroes of Walhalla. Their organ was the Idun, an exclusively literary publication. In a letter written by Geijer from Stockholm to his fiancee, then living in the country, dated March 7, 1811, he says: "We have formed a society which meets nearly daily. We talk, smoke, and read together about Gothic Viking deeds. We call each other by Gothic names, and live in the past." And Anna-Lisa, his future wife, writing to a friend, says: "My fiancee has become a Goth; instead of loving me, he is in love with Valkyries and shield-bearing maidens, drinks out of Viking horns, and carries out Viking expeditions—to the nearest tavern. He writes poems which must not be read in the dark, they are so full of murders and deeds of slaughter." Ling, who also belonged to this society, was a fervent admirer of the Eddas and Sagas, of the Scandinavian myths and folk-lore. Tegnér, despite his classical education and Hellenic turn of mind, was an ardent Norseman in feeling and instinct. "Go to Greece for beauty of form," he would say, "but to the North for depth of feeling and thought." He scorned alike the metaphysical subtleties of French philosophy and the moonshine heroics of German romanticism. But he was at one with Geijer and Ling in the desire to make Scandinavian heroes and myths the subjects of poetry.
The result of the movement was Frithiof's Saga, by Tegnér, Geiger's Viking, and Ling's heavy epics of Walhalla warriors. But Geijer and Ling alone had followed out the theory in all its consequences. Their heroes were simply Eddic, of their time, in spirit and in thought. Ling's realism went so far that his Northern gods and warriors, "everlastingly killed but to revive again," were deemed "pork-eating and mead-drinking yokels." They were soon forgotten, and Ling himself is best known as the inventor of gymnastic exercises on scientific principles, an art now practiced all the world over as "Swedish gymnastics." Geijer, whose Viking gave a pure and true picture of Viking life seen in its own light, was himself disappointed. He abandoned poetry and took to history, though Tegnér says of him that if he had devoted himself to poetry, he would have surpassed all his contemporaries. As historian he rose to the highest rank; and he is perhaps the greatest historian Sweden has ever produced.
Tegnér had modernized his hero and heroine in Frithiof's Saga. He gave them Viking garbs and surroundings, but modern thoughts and sentiments. By the more copious development of the inner life, and by placing woman on an equality with man, love had received a higher meaning, and his poetry unfolded inspirations unknown to the ancient world, such as melancholy and the love of nature. He did no more than Tennyson did later in making of King Arthur the type of an English gentleman. Frithiof and Ingeborg were representatives of the national ideal. The success of his poem was immense. It had a lyrical intensity which set the Scandinavian mind vibrating. Unmindful of the anachronism, youth gloried in the noble disinterestedness of Frithiof, in his generosity to his rival, his melancholy philosophising and his high-minded love, as well as in his daring and his love of adventure. Manly breasts heaved in sympathy with him, and women's tears flowed at the story of Ingeborg's love. As the poet Snolisky has said—
From the highest to the lowest throughout the land
The poet had created a bond of union.
In every home, within every school door,
His verses were read and conned and loved,
And Sweden's youth felt its cheek glow
At Frithiof's courage and manly mood.
While Ingeborg's love to the maiden's dream
Gave life and thoughts to her weaving and sewing.
In his Children of the Lord's Supper, so beautifully translated for us by Longfellow, Tegnér conveyed a true image of Sweden's religious life. The scene in the country church, decked out with flowers and evergreens for the solemn ceremony, the rustic boys and girls bowing and curtseying as they make their responses before the assembled congregation, and the attitude and words of the patriarchal pastor are all true to life. The somewhat declamatory tone of the oration is not less consistent with the character of the rural parson, the trend of Swedish religious thought, and the solemnity associated with these occasions.