Essays on Scandinavian Literature by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (e book reader online .txt) 📖

The peasants of Stäfvie and Lackalänge were always welcome at his hospitable board; he gave them freely his advice, and in order to recall and emphasize his own kinship with them, he invited a peasant woman to become the godmother of his youngest son, and selected all the sponsors from the same class.

This was not the only occasion on which Tegnér demonstrated his superiority to all snobbish pretensions. He was not only not ashamed of his peasant descent, but he was proud of it. Once (1811) during a visit to Rämen, he took it into his head that he desired to know, from actual experience, the kind of lives which his ancestors must have lived; and to that end he dressed himself in wadmal, loaded a dray with pig-iron, greased its axles, harnessed his team, and drove it to the nearest city, a distance of ten to twelve miles. He induced three of his brothers-in-law, two of whom were army officers and one a government clerk, to follow his example. Up hill and down hill they trudged, and arrived late in the afternoon, footsore and with blistered hands, in the town, where they reported at the office of a commission merchant, sold their iron and obtained their receipts. That of Tegnér was made out to Esaias Esaiasson, which would have been his name, if his father had never risen from the soil. The four sham peasants now bought seed-corn with the money they had obtained for their iron, loaded again their wagons, and started for home. But they had forgotten to take into account the robustness of the rustic appetite, and before they had proceeded far their bag of provisions was empty. To add to their discomfort the rain began to pour down, but they would not seek shelter. After midnight they arrived at Rämen, hungry and drenched, not having slept for two nights, but happy and proud of their feat of endurance.

It was in 1811 that Tegnér's poem "Svea" received the prize of the Swedish Academy; and the fact that it recalled (in single passages at least) Oehlenschläger's "The Golden Horns," does not seem to have weighed in the verdict. It is not in any sense an imitation; but there is an audible reminiscence which is unmistakable in the metre and cadence of the short-lined verses, descriptive of the vision. Never, I fancy, had the Swedish language been made to soar with so strong a wing-beat, never before had it been made to sing so bold a melody. To me, I admit, "Svea" is too rhetorical to make any deep impression. It has a certain stately academic form, which, as it were, impedes its respiration and freedom of movement. When, for all that, I speak of wing-beat and melody, it must be borne in mind that Sweden had produced no really great poet[29] before Tegnér; and that thus, relatively considered, the statement is true. But Tegnér seems himself to have been conscious of the strait-jacket in which the old academic rules confined him, for in the middle of the poem he suddenly discards the stilted Alexandrines with which he had commenced and breaks into a rapturous old-Norse chant, the abrupt metres of which recall the _fornyrdhalag_ of the Elder Edda. Soon after "Svea" followed, in 1812, "The Priestly Consecration," the occasion of which was the poet's own ordination. Here the oratorical note and a certain clerical rotundity of utterance come very near spoiling the melody. "At the Jubilee in Lund" (1817) is very much in the same strain, and begins with the statement so characteristic of Tegnér:


"Thou who didst the brave twin stars enkindle,
Reason and Religion, guard the twain!
Each shines by other; else they fade and dwindle.[30]
Fill with clearness every human brain:
Faith and hope in every bosom reign!"

[29] Carl Michael Bellman, the Swedish Béranger (1740-1795), whose wanton music resounded through the latter half of the eighteenth century, would, no doubt, by many be called a great poet. But his Bacchanalian strain, though at times exquisite and captivating, lacks the universality of sentiment and that depth of resonance of which greatness can alone be predicated. Both his wild mirth and his sombre melancholy exhale the aroma of ardent spirits.

[30] This line reads literally: "Guard them both; they are willingly reconciled."


He was, in fact, never very orthodox; and if he had belonged to the American branch of his denomination would surely have been tried for heresy. Rarely has a deadlier foe of priestly obscurantism and mediæval mysteries worn the episcopal robes. With doctrinal subtleties and ingenious hair-splitting he had no patience; conduct was with him the main, if not the only, thing to be considered. The Christian Church, as he conceived it, was primarily a civilizer, and the expression of the highest ethical sentiment of the age.

"The Church," he writes, "can surely not be re-established in its former religious significance, for the system upon which it rests has slept away three centuries of history; and it is of no use that this man or that man yet pretends to believe in the somnambulist. But the church has also a civic significance as an integral part of the social order of humanity. If you abandon that to the spirit of laxity and drowsiness, I can see no reason why the clergy and the whole religious apparatus should not be, and ought not to be, abolished and their costs covered into the treasury."

These are not highly episcopal sentiments; but they are in keeping with Tegnér's whole personality and his conception of his duty. His first concern was to purge his diocese of drunken clergymen, a task in which he encountered many unforeseen difficulties.

"It is nowadays less difficult," he says, "to get rid of a king than a drunken clergyman."

He was, indeed, very moderate in his demands, stipulating only that no shepherd of souls should show himself drunk in public. But the bibulous parsons frequently had influential relatives, who exerted themselves with the government to thwart the bishop's reformatory schemes. If Tegnér had not been the masterful, tireless, energetic prelate that he was, his ardor would have cooled; and he would have contented himself with drawing the revenues of his office, and left with the lukewarm government the responsibility for frustrating his purposes. But this was contrary to his nature. He could not calmly contemplate abuses which it was his duty to remedy; and no discouragement ever sufficed to dampen his noble zeal. The marked and fanatical pietism which then was much diffused among the Småland peasantry he fought with his cheerful gospel of reason and sanity. Just as poetry to him meant the highest bloom of life, and his radiant lyre resounded with noble music like the statue of Memnon, when touched by the rays of the dawn; so religion was, in its essence, perfect sanity of soul, a beautiful equilibrium of mind, and complete self-mastery. His Christ was not primarily the bleeding, the scourged, the crucified, but rather a benigner and lovelier Phoebus Apollo, the bringer of clearness and light, the dispeller of the unwholesome mists and barbaric gloom that yet brood over the human soul. Like Goethe, he cherished a veritable abhorrence of the mystic symbolism of the mediæval church; and was rather inclined to minimize the significance of Christ's death and passion. He had undeniably imparted into his Christianity a great deal of sunny Hellenic paganism--a fact which in his familiar correspondence with Franzén he scarcely cares to disguise.

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