Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

This is apparent when Tegnér describes a hero so different from, and so vastly superior to, Charles XII., as the Deliverer of Protestantism, Gustavus Adolphus. What he commends in him is not so much his merits as a political leader and warlike commander-in-chief, as it is the qualities which place him, as much as possible, on a parallel with a soldier-general like Charles XII. He lingers with enthusiasm over the "sudden, lightning flashes of thought on the battlefield," which characterized him, as "every other warrior-like genius." He extols Gustavus because he loved danger for danger's sake, and delighted in toying with death. In short, he holds fast to the narrow old Norse measure of manliness, and endeavors to apply it even in cases where it is far surpassed by genuine greatness. For instance, he considers it almost ignominious in Wallenstein to have (for good reasons) declined the battle that Gustavus, "his chivalrous opponent," offered him at Nuremberg.

What gives this ideal of Tegnér its final retouche is the candor he demands of his heroes. His own honest and sturdy nature mirrors itself therein. Of Wallenstein he says that he might have been called a great man "had he been noble and candid." Magnanimity will not suffice; candor is equally essential. The old Norse berserkers, in their martial fervor, flung their shields on their backs, and this mode of action found so much favor in Tegnér's eyes that he would gladly have seen it transported to the intellectual battle-field. Indeed, frankness seemed to him even a sort of guaranty for nobility of thought, and he regards the former with more warmth than the latter; for in his derogatory characterization of Wallenstein, he lays especial stress on his gloomy, reserved nature, without charging him with a single really ignoble trait. With him he contrasts Gustavus Adolphus, as the luminous, frank nature, endowed with a candor which was less doubtful in Tegnér himself than in the king who was, as a rule, retiring and little accessible.

Thus every form with which Tegnér's muse is occupied, receives a gentle pressure which moulds it into the form of the ideal hero, ever hovering before the poet's own mind.

IV

Closely allied to the lyric inspiration with Tegnér is the supplemental faculty which makes him witty in social intercourse, happy in epigram and impromptu, prominent as a professor, remarkable as a letter writer, orator and preacher, and beyond all else great in his metrical flow of poetically constructed language; a faculty which cannot be called outright a talent for rhetoric, but which provisionally, although perhaps rather vaguely, might be designated, in his case, as the intellectual faculty. His intellect was not the French esprit. The latter, in its most characteristic form, as with Voltaire, is pure understanding unadorned by imagery. The esprit of Tegnér, on the contrary, ran continually into imagery. He thought in figures, consequently he spoke in figures. The gift of abstract thought was lacking in him, indeed he was so wholly devoid of it that he did not even believe in its results in others: metaphysics was to him an abomination as a phantom of the brain, woven of threads which he could not discern; dogmatics were his terror, as a tissue of absurdities, to which his understanding could find no outlet. And he had a good, healthy, self-reliant understanding which instinctively abhorred all obscurity of thought and of speech. He had so lively an impulse to render perceptible all that he thought and felt, that figure after figure crowded upon him. It was this that gave his language those electric flashes of sparkling light which so captivated his contemporaries; it was this that rendered his epistolary style so entertaining, and caused exasperated critics to compare his poetry to gorgeous-colored empty soap-bubbles; it was this finally that made him witty, for there is a certain kind of wit that depends on the surprising succession of swiftly-dissolving images. This intellectuality might be called the fruitfulness of form. The mood into which he was transported by intellectual productiveness sprouted and blossomed incessantly; it was only by way of exception that it could project grand, wholly-completed images, or simple figures, formed of a few main outlines, but it produced a continuous flow of miniature figures which stood antithetically or contrastingly opposed to one another, which glided one over the other, were united and transmitted onward. His mind was loaded, revolver-like, with fancies, and they followed one another in swift succession, shot after shot, all aimed at the same point, striking surely, but each thrusting aside the one that had preceded it. Idea and figure were not separated in his mind, nor were their relations far-fetched, as Tegnér's opponents believed and asserted; and yet they were not purely one and the same.

In his imagination, thought and figure were related in about the same degree as the initial letters in the old monastic manuscripts were related to the miniature paintings with which they were interwoven and illuminated. If we call up before our mind's eye a manuscript in which the overwhelming majority of characters, not single ones alone, are thus illuminated, we can form a certain conception of the series of harmonious associations of ideas and figures which Tegnér's brain incessantly produced. Or if we recall one of those marble designs from the early days of the Italian Renaissance, in which the artist has executed at his pleasure small images on the larger statue, where he has chiselled, for instance, on the helm fallen from the head of Goliath, and lying at David's feet, a little bas-relief of a quadriga in full galop, which forms, it is true, a part of the whole, but which, owing to its loose connection with it, as well as to its independent claims to consideration, dissipates the interest. If we think of a poetic mind calculated to conceive such bas-reliefs, and of a diction inclined to color these, we can form an approximately correct idea of Tegnér's manner of treating his poetic motive. His style is a sort of chromatic architecture and sculpture, and possesses the attractive and the repellent qualities of both. Colored sculpture is generally looked upon in our day as a species of barbarism; and yet the Greeks have employed it, nor was it ever wholly discarded by them. It cannot be called un-Grecian, and yet to most people in our day, it appears tasteless and antiquated. Those poems and speeches in which Tegnér's most characteristic manner stands forth with its utmost strength and distinctness, may be compared to those Grecian and Roman statues that produce quite as much effect through their exterior splendor as through their ideal beauty. The goddesses had golden chains about their necks, wore beautiful long veils, and ear-rings; they possessed a complete wardrobe, and an entire casket of jewels. Precisely in the same way have the jeweller and the artist worked together in Tegnér. In many instances the result has been a successful and attractive whole, which could be rejected by a pedant or a doctrinist alone. Not rarely, however, the result has been an excessive exaggeration. A pamphleteer of Tegnér's time (the witty Palmär), once censured this tendency in words which suit the comparison just used. "Greet your muse," said he, "and beg it not to overburden itself with metaphors, as is its wont. These jewels, even when they are genuine, must be worn with moderation. Let these trinkets be placed about the neck, in the ears, and on the fingers, if you will, but – on the toes – fie, for shame!"

I can more accurately explain my meaning through examples. Mary, in "Axel," resolves to follow the Russian army as a soldier.

"Beneath a soldier's cap
She hides away her ringlets, dark as night;
In a buff vest her slender form is laced;
Alas, for such fair form in such array!
O'er shoulder, known by Grecian poet's song,
Death's spy-glass, the dread carabine, is hung."[36 - Translated by J. S.]

The expression, "death's spy-glass," for the dread carabine, is picturesque, and so far not bad; but none the less must it be said that the figure is not altogether appropriate. Not only has it nothing whatever to do with Mary's form, but it answers only to a gun in general, not to the particular weapon on her shoulder; for this would scarcely kill a Swede. Upon me this figure produces the same effect as if I were to see on the margin of the text, a carefully executed miniature of the dismal skeleton, with the scythe in one hand, and holding the carabine to its eye with the other, in order to take aim.

In the "Children of the Lord's Supper," the old priest beseeches the children he is about to confirm, to choose prayer and innocence as the guides of their lives. Both are personified with a few strokes, and then the figure is engraved in a small biblical relief, of the kind that is seen in Italy on the bronze doors of churches and baptisteries.

"Innocence, child beloved, is a guest from the world of the blessed;
Beautiful, and in her hand a lily; on life's roaring billows
Swings she in safety; she heedeth them not, in the ship she is sleeping."[37 - Longfellow's translation.]

Or an example may be taken from Tegnér's epistolary style. He waxes eloquent (1817) against the European reaction. "Gaze at the signs of the times from the North, and from the South! Do you know any vulgarity, any barbarism, any insane prejudice their regeneration does not promise? The serpent of time often sheds its skin; but more perverse than at this precise moment, it has never been, as far as history extends, even though it hissed nothing but hymns, and though its back were as completely covered with biblical texts as a tombstone." Is there not in this energetic but thoroughly unaffected effort at clear perception, something that reminds us of chromatic sculpture. Do we not see before us, in due form, the serpent of time, with its red outlines; and does not its back, all covered with peculiar ciphers, look like the image of a god, in the shape of a beast, covered with hieroglyphics, or tile inscriptions, on some ancient Assyrian or Egyptian wall? And when finally the similitudes are read with which Tegnér, in "Fridthjof," endeavors to paint female beauty, can it not readily be comprehended why attention should be called to the hard metallic glow of the coloring of an antique idol?

"The bards praise Gerda's fair cheeks too high,
Fresh snows which playful north-lights dye!
I cheeks have seen whose daylights clear,
Two dawnings blushing in one sphere."[38 - R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 159.]

It would be unjust to cite this last stanza as an adequate specimen of Tegnér's picturesque method; nevertheless there is something typical in it. Most of the similitudes produced by the fancy of Tegnér, so far exceed the brilliancy of nature, that to me they appear very much the same as the image he makes his Ingeborg weave of Fridthjofs falcon: —

"Here on his hand,
Work I thy form on the cloth's broad band;
Pinions of silver, and glowing
Gold talons sewing."[39 - R. B. Anderson's Viking Tales, p. 240.]

With a predilection of this kind, something conventional and stiff can scarcely be avoided. The inclination to transform every idea into a figure beguiles Tegnér, in uninspired moments, into a common-place use of once-applied similes, which keep recurring in an almost stereotyped way. Thus he has (merely to keep to the birds) a few bird forms which he never wearies of dragging in eagle, nightingale, and dove. They stand as equivalents for strength, poetry, and piety. The eagle used for this purpose by Tegnér retains no more of the nature of the real eagle than may be seen in the eagles that adorn royal escutcheons; Tegnér's eagle is purely heraldic. In his poetry may be found lines like these: "Alas! poor Psyche, fly as she will, on earth she is but an eagle with butterfly's pinions"; or similes like the following: "Within her throat a nightingale she carried, and a snow-white dove by night and by day did linger in her bosom." An eagle with butterfly pinions is a creature totally contrary to nature, and when a nightingale is firmly fixed in a female throat, it does not exactly contribute to the perspicuity of the thought.

In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct it.

V

Tegnér was born about the middle of the reign of Gustavus III. The assassination took place when he was ten years old; consequently he, who in later years was so fond of styling himself a Gustavian, had childish reminiscences alone of that period, and no other personal impressions of the character of Gustavus than those gained at second hand from a legend, embellished or idealized by tender hands. Even this was scarcely needed to make the period seem like one of rare brilliancy, in comparison with the leaden epoch which followed. Gustavus III. was a man of great energy, endowed with remarkable talents, unusual virtues, and dazzling vices; he was a vain despot, yet had an enlightened mind; he was one of the many crowned followers of Voltaire that were the product of the eighteenth century; he was full of superstition and yet a free-thinker, frivolous yet intellectual, in matters of trifling import displaying a petty spirit, but having traits of true greatness; he was brave, magnanimous, a hero of the stage, with genuine courage in his breast. During his whole life he attracted about him, through the magic of his mental powers, all the gifted literary men of his land, especially the poets, who saw in him a colleague; not one of them could boast so distinctly marked a dramatic talent as his. Thus it was that for a long time he imprinted upon the manners, the forms of speech, the literature of Sweden, the stamp of an exquisitely refined, light, frivolous culture; and it is the conversational tone of his day that invested Tegnér's letters, even in the reign of Charles John (Bernadotte), with their grace and their soaring flights of fancy. His was a form that had remained fixed in history, like one of Bernini's admirable statues; full of mannerism, coquettish, affected, if you will, with airily rustling drapery, but presenting an attitude that was bold and unflinching, and producing an impression of the most profound significance. Nor could this be denied, however little satisfaction might be taken in the figure. And what had come after him? First, the regency of the brother of Gustavus, the duke of Södermanland, which embraces the period from Tegnér's tenth to his fourteenth year. The regent, a wretched imbecile, who had grown prematurely gray in the service of Venus, and who was well adapted to be the prey of every Phryne and every Cagliostro, was wholly governed by his favorite Reuterholm, who represented the type of brutal and incompetent passion for rule. Not from love of freedom, but simply as an indirect way of censuring the murdered king, these empty-pated men introduced freedom of the press into Sweden, and, without any preparation or gradual transition, all the inflammatory writings of the French Revolution now flooded the land. The long-continued ignorance concerning what was transpiring in France and throughout Europe was followed by a tumultuous and immature enthusiasm for freedom. During the reign of Gustavus the word republican was still synonymous with the word philosopher; so that in the year 1789 a courtier like Rosenstein could commend his nephew to the king by stating that the young man, although somewhat infected with republican views, had kept these so well within bounds that they "only served to increase his love for his king, his fatherland, and honor." Later, as contrasted with the pitiful wreck on the throne, the word became invested with a more accurate significance. With eager suspense the people followed the defensive war of the French Republic; its victory was decisive for public opinion; the peaceful citizens of the small towns of Sweden spoke in the same tone as the extreme left of the French convention.

No sooner had that misfortune occurred than the freedom of the press, established half a year earlier with so much false pathos, was abolished, and throughout Sweden the persecution of Jacobinism became rife; even the loyal Swedish Academy, because it voted against admitting to its membership the totally uncultured favorite of the regent, was treated as a Jacobin club, and closed.

An act of baseness of the worst sort caused contempt to reach its climax. The conspiracy of Armfelt, the Swedish Alcibiades, was discovered, and the duke-regent endeavored to avail himself of this opportunity to make the fair young Mlle. Rudenskjöld, one of the ornaments of the court, cruelly atone for the obstinacy with which she had rejected the gallant propositions of the aged married libertine. Intercepted letters furnishing proofs that Armfelt had been her lover, she was arrested, and accused of being a participator in his crime; but when the duke, through his chancellor, judicially ordered her to be whipped on the public market-place for her immorality, the exasperated populace branded him with so deep a stigma that it could neither be effaced by time, nor covered with the white hairs of old age; not even the deportment of Bernadotte toward Charles XIII., with its wily assumption of simplicity, could bury it in oblivion.

While all these events were taking place, Tegnér was still too young to be able to enter into or understand them; but the after effects on his mind were profound and strong. No remote corner of the land was too far distant to be reached by the sparks from the crater of the revolution; no youth, whose intelligence had once been aroused, was so absorbed in his studies that he escaped hearing outbursts of contempt for royalty and government, which he at once applied to his own land. Persecuted "Enlightenment" became a magic, a beloved word to every youth. The Swedish Academy, which under other circumstances might readily have become an object of his displeasure, simply as an academy, as an official and antiquated institution for the gilding of mediocrity, very early appeared to Tegnér as a knightguard of the light, the worth of which had been fully tested. The prevailing revolutionary spirit had no power over his harmonious soul, and only led him to the conditional royalism which is revealed throughout his writings. He was in favor of royalty when the king was worthy of his throne, not otherwise.

In the year 1796 the regency came to an end, and from that time until 1809 (that is, from Tegnér's fourteenth to his twenty-seventh year), Gustavus (IV.) Adolphus reigned as king. Pedantically honorable, rigidly grave, rigorously frugal as this monarch was, he could not but produce, when he first appeared upon the stage, a pleasing contrast to his uncle. It soon became apparent, however, that this youthful form was wholly unnational. The physiognomy proved to be rather Spanish than Swedish. Gustavus IV. bears a striking resemblance to the type of regents of the Spanish decadence, with character modelled after the great, lamentable shadow of Philip II., who held sway in Madrid so long after his death. The same petty adherence to etiquette, the same haughty gloom, the same awkward formality, the same melancholy piety, combined with fanatic faith in royalty by the grace of God. The court which, ten years earlier, had presented the appearance of a festal painting by Watteau, was now as quiet and as ceremonious as the Spanish court under Charles II., and even the great Philip could not have punished the crime of lèse-majesty with more severity than Gustavus, the fault of neglecting to raise the hat in the street to him. In Rosenstein he had had a noble tutor, with a thoroughly independent mind. Gustavus III. had permitted this most honorable instructor to have full sway. "Rosenstein has my full consent to educate my son as a philosopher," said he; "the boy will be a royalist as soon as he ascends the throne." This father, as a matter of course, was in nowise responsible for that inflexible faith in revealed religion which allowed his son to read in the Apocalypse prophecies concerning his own destiny. The fact was, the reaction with which, amid the fitful changes of the century, the air was everywhere freighted, had stolen through secret by-paths into the mind of the crown prince, and had completely overpowered it. The frivolity of the father, to be sure, had served as a warning, and had given the first backward impulse; the murder of the father gave the second. Soon Gustavus IV. had gone farther in his ever-present consciousness of majesty than any Bourbon. He forbade the daily papers to use the pronoun "we" in such applications as, "We are waiting with impatience for news," "We have had a severe winter," because this seemed to him equivalent to an encroachment on that royal prerogative which is known as Pluralis majestatis. All the publications that appeared in the land were subjected by his orders to the strictest supervision; and personally he cherished so great a horror of books that he burst into loud utterances of delight whenever he heard that a printing-house had failed. He himself never read anything except his Bible and the regulation work on military tactics.

And this was the king, who, in the foolish war against Napoleon, never rested until he had lost Stralsund and Rügen, and whose insane war against Russia led to the definite conquest of all Finland by a Russian army. Runeberg in his poem "The King" in "Fänrik (Ensign) Staal," has erected for Gustavus IV. the monument he deserved. In the year 1809 a couple of courageous officers compelled him to abdicate the throne. The duke of Södermanland followed him as Charles XIII., and it was shortly afterward, when the adopted son of the latter died, that the French party in Sweden, through a mistaken idea of pleasing Napoleon and the illusory hope of thus winning back Finland, had Bernadotte chosen crown prince. His form emerged in a brilliant light from the gloomy background of the shadows of his predecessors. During a period of thirty-three years, the celebrated commander-in-chief guided the politics of Sweden; and this king whose reign is contemporaneous with Tegnér's most vigorous years, shares with Tegnér the honor of having given the name to the generation he ruled over. The period from 1810 to 1840 belongs to Charles John, and to Tegnér.

Such are the pictures of the rulers who at that time, one after another, imprinted their physiognomies on Sweden, and whose profiles are stamped on the coins that passed through the fingers of Tegnér when he was a child, a clerk, a student, and a magister.

VI

Tegnér is instructor (docent) at the University of Lund; he is twenty-two years old, and is passing his summer vacation on the Rämen estate in the Myhrmann family, with whose youngest daughter, Anna, he is betrothed.

Here one day in September there appears, on a visit, the afterward so celebrated historian and poet, Erik Gustav Geijer, a young man of Tegnér's own age, who is freighted with the latest wisdom of the day, and bubbling over with a youthful impulse to impart and discuss his ideas. He makes attempt after attempt to approach Tegnér, but fails to find common ground on which they can meet. The slender son-in-law elect of the house is variable and full of moods, an enamored dreamer, a laughing mocker. There is a glitter of merriment in his eyes, his words are flashes of lightning. It is no more possible to follow the channel of his thoughts than the course of the sunbeam through the foliage. The two young people are taking a walk together and have entered into a discussion on the way. Let us listen to what they are saying. The leader of the conversation is Geijer, who asks, —

"What Tegnér really thinks of the civilization of this locality? If he does not believe that all the so-called popular enlightenment is an evil? He, Geijer, looks on the sound reason of the masses as the most unfortunate delusion that it could ever occur to any one to venerate. Only the chosen ones of humanity had the higher sense which enabled them to grasp science in its full truth. Was not that the opinion also of the Herr Docent?"

"No, not by any means; he would call that mysticism."

"Mysticism! What did Tegnér understand by mysticism?"

"Well, to lie flat on one's back, to take a little nap and allow one's self to be shadowed by the power of the Most High."

"Seriously speaking, did Tegnér admit of no intellectual intuition?"

"No, he cared nothing for the Teutonic mania – but he cared all the more for blueberries;" and just here there were growing some most excellent ones in the enjoyment of which he became profoundly absorbed: "Moreover, he did not doubt that Geijer understood the matter better than he did; he (Tegnér) had always heard Geijer called a genius, and such people only could meddle with philosophy. He, for his part, who knew of himself that no more reason than was absolutely necessary to carry him through the world had fallen to his lot, was not very fond of playing blindman's-buff, except with pretty young girls, and enjoyed least of all to do it with such learned gentlemen as Kant and Schelling."

"But without mysteries and without mysticism there was no religion."

"Did Geijer recognize the faculty in Lund, or not? This honorable body of pedants had accorded to him, Tegnér, the well-merited testimony that he led a quiet, God-fearing life, something that in these latter days was rare enough. On the other hand, so far as the dogma deemed so highly essential to salvation, the doctrine of the Trinity, was concerned, it was wholly beyond his intellectual horizon."

"Nevertheless, it could very easily be explained. There was no contradiction in the idea of the Trinity; for the antithesis already presupposed unity. God as the absolute being was not created, but had been from all eternity, and yet, must be conceived as an existing Being, for He is the creator of all things, and is in all things. The simple solution of this seeming contradiction was, that the parts which mutually presupposed one another were in reality one; the Redeemer and the Father, speculatively comprehended, were one, although not a unit… Was not that clear to every nobly born mind?"

Tegnér, who was quite lost in the contemplation of the gambols of a wagtail, replied absently, "That he did not recognize the privileges of nobility."

"In what sense not? Geijer, in the highest degree, advocated hereditary aristocracy."

"And I," replied his opponent, his mouth full of blueberries, "I was always, from childhood up, a bit of a Jacobin."

This word had, as already indicated, a less terror-inspiring significance in Sweden than in France, apart from the fact that from Tegnér's lips it came half as a jest. But in the jest there lay the earnest verity that he belonged to the honest friends of freedom in civil life and in thought, who had not been intimidated by the bloody deeds of the Revolution. With genuine horror he had perceived, in the beginning of the century, the approach from the South of the religio-political reaction in Sweden, and it was as yet an unenrolled soldier in the army of the civilization of enlightenment that here ran against one of the first and farthest removed outposts of romantic feudalism.

Tegnér, in common with all the prominent men whose youth fell at the close of the eighteenth century, came into the world early enough to steer out into life with sails inflated by the great cosmopolitan wind of freedom, then sweeping over the earth. His earliest reading was the Gustavian classics of Sweden, which were based on Locke, so far as their philosophy was concerned, and on Voltaire in regard to their literary tendencies. Both Kellgren and Leopold were disciples of Voltaire, and both were political liberals, who did not even attempt to conceal their convictions at court. They were careful not to wound the religious sentiments of the multitude by scoffing; but they cherished all the traditions of the century, and fought in their behalf a brilliant fight. Kellgren's satiric poem, "The Enemies of Light," was a banner. In the same direction as the poetry of these men, only fraught with even more poetic fruitfulness, Schiller's influence guided young Tegnér. On the boundary line of youth, like Schiller, he celebrates enlightenment in a poem on Rousseau, and he writes reflective verses, in the spirit of the times, on such themes as religion, culture, and tolerance.

Neither family tradition nor the force of education led the priest's son to opposition to Christian dogmas. Together with all the rest of his intellectually awakened contemporaries he had received, when yet a boy, the cold douche of Voltaire. When sixteen years old he wrote: "I am now reading Voltaire; but I do not see how I can get through even the most important and most essential parts. It is all admirable, and it is difficult to choose among so many beauties." Most of the young men of his day who had entertained similar presumptions, were quickly borne by the altered spirit of the times to religious conservatism. For this Tegnér was too honest and too great. What insured him from losing his independence in religious matters was that vigorous element of his being, called by himself the pagan element, that was the natural result of the solid structure and the genuine steadfastness of his character. Two classes of men about him were swept onward in the reaction against the eighteenth century, with such force that they were borne by it to orthodoxy, and to feudalism. One class was composed of authors whose natures were inclined to run through the whole scale of the emotions of the Middle Ages, that is, – rather in fancy than in reality, – to give way to contrition and self-contempt in order to be uplifted by the supernatural aid of grace to everlasting bliss, and whose poetry was distinguished by an excess of nervous excitability of all forms, – by mystic Platonic devotion, sighing, melancholy, intensely sensual erotic tenderness, alarming arrogance. This class formed the romantic phalanx proper, called in Sweden the Phosphorists. The characteristics mentioned are apparent in an unequal degree in Atterbom, Stagnelius, Hammerskjöld, etc., but are found in all. The second class of men had broader shoulders and healthier spirits; they were historic enthusiasts who had been blinded by the national sentiment, by the love of the faith and the institutions of the past, to all that was just and great in the criticism of the preceding century; such men as Geijer, and the Gothic union of Upsala, whose centre he was, and to whose national efforts Tegnér lent his aid without entering into either the religious or the political sympathies and doctrines of the society.

The pagan element that Tegnér discovered in his own nature, derived its nourishment from two sources in his earliest studies; first from his relations to northern antiquities, and second from his devotion to Greek poetry. In a letter of 1825, he wrote: "A certain spiritual kinship with our barbaric ancestors, which no culture can wipe out, always impelled me to turn back to their grotesque but magnificent forms." What he especially had in mind when he referred to this spiritual kinship was that wilfulness of the ancient Norseman which betrayed itself in his case in a challenging manner, and in that tendency to melancholy which had been one of the characteristics of the ancients. In Tegnér it was not revealed by romantic lamentations, but by a grave and sometimes gloomy temperament, which, after his fortieth year found such abundant food that it degenerated into weariness of life and contempt for humanity. The poetic symbol for this Titanic element in his composition, for gigantic strength of nature, for inner unrest beneath the weight of a mighty pressure, he sought now among the Scandinavians, now among the Grecians; and thus the old Norse and the old Greek mythology became blended in his fancy. The old Norse giant speaks to him in the same way as Goethe's Prometheus: —