Essays on Scandinavian Literature Part 11

My love false-hearted, My manor burned, My name departed, An outlaw, spurned, I now appealing From earth, will dwell With waves, for healing.

Farewell, farewell!"[39]

[39] Sherman's translation.

Frithjof now roams for many years over the sea as a viking, and gains much booty and honor. His viking code, with its swift anapestic rhythm, has a breezy melody which sings in the ear. It is an attempt to embody the ethics of Norse warfare at its best, and to present in the most poetic light the rampant, untamable individualism of the ancient Germanic paganism. In defiance of his friend BjOrn's advice, Frithjof, weary of this bootless chase for glory and pelf, resolves to see Ingeborg once more before he dies, and, disguised as a salt-boiler, he enters King Ring's hall. There he sees his beloved sitting in the high-seat beside her aged lord; and the sorrow which the years had dulled revives with an exquisite agony. He punishes with fierce prompt.i.tude one of the King's men who insults him; and his answer to the King's rebuke betrays him as a man of rank and station. He then throws away his disguise, without, however, revealing his name, but Ingeborg instantly recognizes him.

"Then even to her temples the queen's deep blushes sped, As when the northlight tinges the snow-clad fields with red, And like two full-blown lilies on racking waves which rest, With ill-concealed emotion so heaved her throbbing breast."

The king now invites the stranger, who calls himself Thjof, to remain his guest during the winter, and Frithjof accepts. He makes, however, no approach to Ingeborg, with whom he scarcely exchanges a single word.

During a sleigh-ride on the ice he saves, by a tremendous feat of strength, the life of the king and queen. With the coming of the spring preparations are made for a grand chase, in which Frithjof partic.i.p.ates.

"Spring is coming, birds are twittering, forests leaf, and smiles the sun; And the loosened torrents downward singing to the ocean run; Glowing like the cheek of Freya, peeping rosebuds 'gin to ope, And in human hearts awaken love of life and joy and hope."

The canto called "The Temptation" contains the most dramatic and altogether the most beautiful situation in the poem. The old king, feigning weariness, begs Frithjof to tarry with him alone, while he takes a rest. Frithjof tries to dissuade him, but in vain.

"Then threw Frithjof down his mantle, and upon the green sward spread; And the ancient king, so trustful, laid on Frithjof's knee his head; Slept as calmly as the hero sleepeth after war's alarms On his shield, calm as an infant slumbers in its mother's arms."

Then the temptation comes to Frithjof to slay the old man who had stolen his bride; but after a brief struggle he hurls his sword far away into the forest.

"Straight the ancient king awakens. 'Sweet has been my sleep,' he said.

'Pleasant 'tis to sleep in shadow, guarded by a brave man's blade.

But where is thy sword, O stranger, lightning's brother, where is he?

Who has parted one from other that should never parted be?'"

"'Not a whit care I,' said Frithjof, 'I shall find a sword some day; Sharp, O King, are tongues of falchions, words of peace they seldom say; In the steel dwell swarthy demons, demons strayed from Nifelhem, No man's sleep to them is sacred, silver locks embitter them.'

"'Youth, no moment have I slumbered, but to prove thee feigned to rest, Unproved men and weapons never trusts King Ring without a test.

Thou art Frithjof. I have known thee since thou first cam'st to my hall; Much that thou hast hidden from me; from the first I guessed it all.'"

Soon after this interview the aged king feels death approaching; and in order not to go to the dark abode of Hela, he cuts death-runes upon his breast and ascends to Odin's bright hall. But before dying he gives Ingeborg to Frithjof, and makes him the guardian of his son. The people, in _Thing_ a.s.sembled, glorying in Frithjof's great renown, desire, however, to make him King's successor; but he lifts the small boy above his head upon his shield and proclaims him king. He returns home and rebuilds Balder's temple, whereupon the sentence of outlawry is removed, and he is reconciled to Ingeborg's brothers and marries the beloved of his youth.

The last canto, called "The Atonement," is perhaps the most flagrant violation of historical verisimilitude in the whole epic. A h.o.a.ry priest of Balder actually performs the wedding ceremony in the restored temple, and p.r.o.nounces a somewhat unctuous wedding oration, which differs from those which Tegner himself had frequently delivered chiefly in the subst.i.tution of pagan for the Christian deities. As a matter of fact, marriage was a purely civil contract among the ancient Nors.e.m.e.n, and had no a.s.sociation with the temple or the priesthood, which, by the way, was no separate office but a patriarchal function belonging to the secular chieftainship. But Tegner's public were in nowise shocked by anachronisms of this sort; they probably rejoiced the more heartily in the happiness of the reunited lovers, because their marriage was, according to modern notions, so "regular."

It was soon after his publication of "Frithjof's Saga" that Tegner became Bishop of WexiO. He then removed from Lund and took up his residence upon the estate Oestrabo, near the princ.i.p.al town in his diocese. The great fame of his poem came to him as a surprise; and he even undertook to protest against it, declaring with perfect sincerity that he held it to be undeserved. In letters to his friends he never wearied of pointing out the faults of "Frithjof" and his own shortcomings as a poet. In a letter to the poet Leopold (August 17, 1825), who had praised the poem to the skies, he argues seriously to prove that his admiration is misplaced:

"My great fault in 'Frithjof' was not that I chose my theme from the old cycle of sagas, but that I treated it in a tone and with a manner which was neither ancient nor modern, neither antiquarian nor poetical, but hovered, as it were, on the boundary of both. For what does it mean to treat a subject poetically if not this, to eliminate everything which belongs to an alien and past age and now no longer appeals to any heart? The hearts to which it once did appeal are now all dust. Other modes of thought and feeling are current. It is impossible to properly translate one age into another. But to poetry nothing is really past. Poetry is the beautifying life of the moment; she wears the colors of the day; she cannot conceive of anything as dead.... But I am convinced that all poetic treatment of a theme belonging to a past age demands its modernization; and that everything antiquarian is here a mistake.

This holds good not only in regard to the northern tone but also in regard to the Greek. Look, for instance, at Goethe's 'Iphigenie.'

Who does not admire the beautiful, simple, n.o.ble, h.e.l.lenic form?

And yet who has ever felt his soul warmed by this image of stone?... No living spirit has been breathed into these nostrils; the staring eyes gaze upon me without life and animation; no heart beats under the h.e.l.lenically rounded marble bosom. The whole is a mistake, infinitely more beautiful than 'Frithjof,' but fashioned according to the game principles of art. The Greeks said that the Muse was the daughter of Memory; but this refers only to the material, the theme itself, which is everywhere of minor consequence. The question, then, is as to the proper treatment.

Where it tends toward the antiquarian it misses the mark; it represents, like 'Frithjof,' only a restored ruin."

This pa.s.sage is by no means the only one in which Tegner, with an utter absence of vanity or illusion, judged his work and found it wanting.

There is no mock modesty in his manly deprecation of the honors that were showered upon him; but as a father knows best the faults of his child whom he loves, so he knew the defects of his work, as measured by his own high standard, and refused to accept any more praise than was his due. Not even the fact that Goethe expressed his admiration of "Frithjof's Saga" could persuade him that he was ent.i.tled to the extravagant homage which his enthusiastic countrymen accorded him. There were even times when he disclaimed the t.i.tle of poet. Whether he was forgotten a little sooner or a little later, he said, was a matter of small moment.

"Speaking seriously," he writes in 1824 (accordingly before the publication of "Frithjof"), "I have never regarded myself as a poet in the higher significance of the word.... I am at best a John the Baptist, who is preparing the way for him who is to come."

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 pa.s.sion 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 Franzen (November 13, 1825), is very pathetic:

"It is to-day my forty-third birthday. I have thus long since pa.s.sed the highest alt.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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, t.i.tanic 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, n.o.ble poet, who fought so bravely against his "barbaric, t.i.tanic self with its hairy arms"? His pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 alt.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 h.o.a.ry!

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.

"Still I will praise thee, oh, thou human race.

G.o.d's likeness art thou, oh, how true, how striking!

Two lies thou hast natheless, in sooth, to show; The name of one is man, the other's woman!

Of faith and honor there's an ancient ditty, 'Tis sung the best, when men each other cheat.

Thou child of heaven, the one thing true thou hast Is Cain's foul mark upon thy forehead branded.

"A mark quite legible, writ by G.o.d's finger; Why did I fail ere now to heed that sign?

A smell of death pervades all human life, And poisons spring's sweet breath and summer's splendor.

Out of the grave that odor is exhaling.

The grave is sealed and marble guards its freight, But still corruption is the breath of life, Eludes its guard and scatters everywhere.

"Oh, watchman, tell me now the night's dark hour!

Will it then never wane unto its end?

The half-devoured moon is gliding, gliding, The tearful stars forever onward go, My pulse beats fast as in the time of youth, But ne'er beats out the hours of torment sore.

How long, how endless is each pulse-beat's pain!

Oh, my consumed, oh, my bleeding heart.

"My heart! Nay in my bosom is no heart, There's but an urn that holds life's burnt-out ashes; Have pity on me, thou green mother Earth, And hide that urn full soon in thy cool breast.

In air it crumbles, moulders; earth's deep woe Has in the earth, I ween, at last an end; And Time's poor foundling, here in school constrained, Finds then, perchance, beyond the sun--a father."

[40] The poem is written in the _ottava rime_, but in order to preserve the sense intact I have rendered it in blank verse.