Esaias Tegner by Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen — Read

The genius of the Scandinavian north has never found a more complete and / brilliant incarnation than the Swedish poet Esaias Tegner. Strong, / cheerful, thoroughly wholesome, with a boyish delight in prowess, / adventure, and daring deeds, he presents a most agreeable contrast to / the moonshine singers and graveyard bards of the phosphoristic school, / who were his contemporaries. To Tegner, in his prime, life was a brisk / and exhilarating sail, with a fresh breeze, over sunny waters; and he / had no patience with those who described it as a painful and troublous / groping through the valley of the shadow of death. There was, in other / words, a certain charming juvenility in his attitude toward existence, / which presented to him no riddles that a man with a strong arm and an / honest heart might not solve with comparative ease. All problems were to / him soluble with the sword; and Alexander, when he cut the Gordian knot, / must have appeared to him wiser, as he was surely more admirable, than / either Plato or Socrates. This scorn of all metaphysical subtleties, and / reliance upon strength and Swedish manhood, are, perhaps (from an / advanced European point of view), indicative of a little intellectual / immaturity; but they are thoroughly characteristic of the Scandinavian / nationalities. The love of brave words and brave deeds, the exaltation / of the man of action above the man of thought, the pleasure in reckless / gallantry and foolhardy adventure, are, however, not confined to Swedes / and Norwegians, but are characteristic of the boyhood of every nation. / In the Scotchman, Robert Louis Stevenson, this jaunty juvenility, this / rich enjoyment of bloody buccaneers and profane sea-dogs, is carried to / far greater lengths, and the great juvenile public of England and / America, both young and old, rises up and calls him blessed.

There is, however, a vast difference between Tegner's youthfulness and / that of Stevenson. The latter (in spite of the charm of his style, which / is irresistible) strikes me as a sort of mediaeval survival -- a boyish / feudal sixteenth-century spirit astray in the nineteenth. I am by no / means insensible to the fascination of his capricious confidences, his / beautiful insight, and his exquisite humor; but for all that, he always / leaves me with a vague regret at his whimsicality and a certain lack of / robustness in his intellectual equipment. In Tegner, on the other hand, / it is primarily the man who is impressive; and the author is interesting / as the revelation of the man. He has no literary airs and graces, but / speaks with a splendid authority, _e plena pectore_, from the fulness of / his manly conviction. He seems a very personification of the national / genius -- fair, vigorous, and beautiful -- with the glow of health in his / cheeks and the light of courage in his eye. His vision of the world is / bright and vivid, and he swims with a joyous ease in the high-tide of / the moment, like a beautiful fish in the luminous summer sea.