Sweden's Laureate: Selected Poems of Verner von Heidenstam/The Poetry of Verner von Heidenstam
THE POETRY OF VERNER
VON HEIDENSTAM
The English-reading countries of the world, more particularly the United States, have in the late decade or so been growing rapidly cosmopolitan. This has come about from the increase of culture through education and travel, from the growth of immigration and commerce, and of late, naturally, from the war. Never have Americans given nearly such attention to contemporary foreign literature as they have been giving recently. The situation is analogous to that of Elizabethan England, when everyone was talking about the latest French or Italian or Spanish writer; and the auguries are fair that this country may be developing a Renaissance of art that will far outstrip our somewhat meager achievements in the past.
With this remarkable stimulus of interest in European and even Asiatic literature, it seems purely an accident that our attention has only very tardily been directed to the beauties of Swedish poetry. In the influx of foreign books, novels have led the way: Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, and South American novels. Plays, too, have been arriving to a considerable extent. But even foreign poets, thanks to recent advances in the art of verse translation, have in many cases gained a foothold here. We have only to think of Tagore, Verhaeren, Vildrac, Carducci, and Dario. People have heard the names at least. The pioneer of modern Scandinavian authors was the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, but he was soon followed by the Swedes, August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. Now that the Swedish play and the Swedish novel have won their place, we should be quite ready for the entrance of Swedish poetry.
There are many reasons why this poetry should appeal particularly to American readers. In the first place, it may well trust to its intrinsic merits. Critics such as Mr. Edmund Gosse, who are conversant with the best in nearly every literature, agree that Swedish narrative and lyric poetry during the last hundred and fifty years will compare favorably, both in form and substance, with the poetry of any literature during a like period. There are at least nine poets of a rank similar to that of Burns, Byron, Shelley, Browning, and Poe. Furthermore, the Scandinavian genius is closely akin to us; it has the same seriousness, the same vigor, the same nobility of feeling. With a fine range of imagination it combines a closeness to earth which conveys a distinctively national flavor.
The Swede, having tilled his ancestral soil for longer than any other European race, has the deepest attachment to it and has furthermore inherited a treasure of legend and historic association. Love of nature is an almost universal trait, as is testified by the splendid landscape paintings which were recently exhibited in this country. Added to these qualities, the Swede is usually a traveled, cultivated man, well grounded in the classics and apt in picking up modern languages. His success in engineering and other forms of modern industry shows him to be alert and thoroughly up to the times. He has also been quick to face modern social problems: feminism, class privilege, and internationalism. In short, the Swede is worth knowing and worth hearing. He is proficient in all the arts; in music, painting, sculpture, and literature; but native and foreign observers unite in maintaining that he probably shows himself best in poetry.
As to the fact that we have remained so long ignorant of Swedish verse, it can only be said, "the more's the pity." Many people have known of this hidden treasure. A century ago Goethe, and a generation afterwards Longfellow, admired the genius of Tegnér, and the latter translated one of his best poems. Runeberg, ranked as one of the world's greatest patriotic poets, has been frequently, though seldom adequately, done into English. The Encyclopedia Britannica also gives separate biographies to Bellman, Snoilsky, Viktor Rydberg, and Levertin. Theodore Roosevelt in his Autobiography tells us that he found time to read and enjoy the works of Topelius. Scholars have always known about Swedish poetry, but this knowledge has never happened to become popular. Verse rendition from Swedish to English is not especially difficult, as the principles of rhythm and stanza are the same for both literatures, but satisfactory translations have never happened to be made.
Another excuse for the delayed recognition of Swedish poetry is the fact that it has only very recently attained its zenith. Out of nine or ten stars of the first magnitude, six have arisen since 1870, and four of these since 1888. Although Heidenstam is unquestionably the most important living poet of Sweden, E. A. Karlfeldt is not far behind him, with his deep, quaintly humorous, but very delicately wrought lyrics of nature and peasant life. Besides these two there are Daniel Fallström, K. G. Ossiannilsson, Oscar Stjerne, Bertel Gripenberg, and a dozen others of noteworthy attainments, some of them young enough to promise great things for the future.
It is to be regretted that we have had to make so long a preamble before coming to our immediate subject, but we have had to face the truth that most otherwise well-informed persons have never heard the name of a single Swedish poet. Nothing could be more unjust, in speaking of the merits of Heidenstam, than to give the impression that he is the only, or even the greatest, master his country has produced. The present writer has recently brought out an anthology of translations which, though by no means widely inclusive, contains lyrics by forty-five poets. To this work the reader is referred for further illustration and details on the subject of Swedish poetry in general.
Fortunately, Verner von Heidenstam is such an individual genius that we can sketch his immediate literary background very briefly. Between 1850 and 1870 Swedish poetry languished in a sort of mid-Victorian back-water. About the latter date a new vitality came into being with the work of Viktor Rydberg and Count Snoilsky. Rydberg sent a glow of humanity into his classic and philosophic lyrics. Snoilsky, beginning with a colorful volume of Italian poems, developed from an aesthete into a democrat, writing ballads from Swedish history and affirming the doctrine that art should minister to the hungry multitude, not to "culture's overladen boards." The popular impulse which appeared to a modified degree in the poetry of Rydberg and Snoilsky was exhibited as the crudest and most violent realism in the novels and plays of August Strindberg, who held the center of the literary stage during the eighties.
Thus it was upon a field of combat that Heidenstam made his début with his first volume of poems in 1888. The old sentimentalism had largely disappeared and a fierce war was being waged between the extreme, unmitigated realists and the new, more vital idealists. Into this combat Heidenstam at once plunged on the side of the idealists along with two other distinguished poets, Gustaf Fröding and Oscar Levertin.
Fröding is at once the Burns and the Heine of Swedish poetry; he not only represents with inimitable spirit the life of the peasant, he can also—in moods ranging from whimsical humor to deep pathos—reveal the tragedy of his own brief career. This most brilliant of Swedish poets, who is still today the idol of his countrymen, broke down from dissipation in 1898 and, though he recovered his reason and lived on until 1911, never regained the lost magic of his art. Oscar Levertin, of Spanish-Jewish descent, has a more mystical and aesthetic bent. He is the typical poet of the ivory tower, a notable critic and finished stylist, whose ill health gave his imagination a somewhat morbid tinge. He died in 1906. The genius of Heidenstam, if not the most dazzling, has at least proved itself the most healthy and robust of the group. Though he was the eldest of the three, he has survived them both and still preserves his full physical and mental powers.
We now pass to the external events of Heidenstam's life. He was born July 6, 1859, of noble family, in southern Sweden, the seat of one of the earliest continuous civilizations in Europe. Families of that region trace back their descent a thousand years or so and reach no record of having come from anywhere else. The landscape is mostly flat, but broken by many lakes and largely covered by the wild forest of Tiveden. Within sight of the poet's present home stands the castle of Vadstena, built by Gustaf Vasa. It is here, in the midst of ancestral traditions, that Heidenstam has been living for the past thirty years.
As a boy the poet was shy and a great reader, especially of poetry and battle stories. Like Roosevelt he was an admirer of Topelius, as well as of the narrative poets Tegnér and Runeberg, and the dramatic, but rather overstrained lyrist, Lidner. At school he was fondest of Latin and geography. When sixteen years old he had a nervous illness and by the doctor's advice was sent to the South, where he sojourned mainly in Italy, Greece, and the Orient, His wanderings lasted many years with occasional visits home, during one of which he was married. Finally, impressed by the visual beauty of the scenes in which he lived, Heidenstam resolved to become a painter and, despite the dissuasion of his family, went to Paris and studied for a time under Gerome. Though he enjoyed the care-free life he was dissatisfied with being only able, as he felt, to touch the surface of things.
He longed for home but, having become estranged from his family, he was obliged to remain an exile. In a fit of discouragement he isolated himself from the world at the old castle of Brunegg in Switzerland. Here he saw no one but his wife and occasionally Strindberg. At last, however, his real talent came to light, and amid these gloomy surroundings Heidenstam composed a series of dramatic poems and poetic sketches which fairly glowed with the warmth and color of Paris, Italy, and the East. In 1887 he was summoned home to the death-bed of his father and in 1888 his poems were published under the title. Pilgrimages and Wanderyears.
Heidenstam's first book, despite the fact that it was considered "exotic" and "peculiar," had a brilliant success; it was in fact pronounced one of the most remarkable debuts in Swedish literature. Of the poetry in itself we shall speak later. Suffice it here to say that Heidenstam, no longer in doubt as to his true vocation, settled down once more in his native region to fulfill his artistic destiny. From then on his life has been the succession of prose and poetry volumes that came from his pen.
Heidenstam's next important book, the novel Hans Alienus, was another succession of travel-pictures through which the hero passes in search of his ideal. This he partly finds on his return to Sweden in the worship of a simple and austere beauty. His life, however, appears to him to be a negation, a sacrifice of being to the desire of merely knowing.
In his Poems, published in 1895, Heidenstam comes much nearer to finding himself. These are alternately narrative, descriptive, and reflective, and are nearly all about Sweden. There is a concentration, a firmness, a strength in them as of Antaeus in contact with his mother earth. The same spirit pervades his collections of tales from Swedish history and legend, works which by their vivid and forceful style ranked their author as high in prose as he already stood in poetry. The most popular of his prose works is Karolinerna, a group of tales which depict the heroism of the Swedish people under Charles XII.
His third poetical volume, New Poems, appeared in 1915. This contains a majority of the lyrics for which he is most beloved, which have made his name nearly synonymous with Sweden in the hearts of his five and a half million compatriots. These poems are like a trumpet-call to his people, a summons to awake and renew in the present the glories of the past. Heidenstam's former doubts and struggles are largely replaced by a calm dignity of outlook. The self-centered man has forgotten his despondency by merging himself into the larger soul of his country. He sings:
Weave of our lives thy glory and thy blessing!
To those familiar with his claims to the honor, it came as no surprise that in 1916 Heidenstam was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Where indeed is there in Europe today a writer of more sincerity and inborn originality? To be sure he is by no means always easy to follow. His style is compressed and abrupt. With his intense, imaginative, and penetrating mind, he is perhaps most like Browning. He does not, however, often complicate his poetry with parentheses or diffuse himself in abstract speculation. With a painter's eye, he is consistently visual.
We shall best appreciate his work by determining his artistic creed. The present writer has elsewhere denominated him an "imaginative realist," but Heidenstam might properly resent being called a realist of any sort. Above all things he abhors uninspired naturalism; "gray-weather moods," he calls it. To his thinking Strindberg merely "let the cellar air escape through the house." He likewise repudiates pessimism no less than sentimentalism. Yet, he is no dodger of issues, no apostle of easy acquiescence. The solution of this apparent anomaly is that what Heidenstam seeks is not external fact but underlying truth. He wrestles with life for the deeper meaning of life. We may therefore call him an applied idealist, or perhaps better still, a vitalist.
Taking his three poetical volumes in detail, we can observe Heidenstam gradually winning his mastery over art and life. In the Pilgrimages we discover not mere description, but a series of striking ideas powerfully presented. Like most youthful poets, Heidenstam attacks superficiality, hypocrisy, and narrow moral restrictions. Most typical is the poem where Mahmoud Khan reveals by a blow of his sword that the people's god is the priests' money-chest. The chief inspiration of the volume lies in its positive revelation of beauty; not of remote, ethereal beauty, however, but of the beauty of actual, or vividly imagined scenes and people; the beauty perceived by the artist, though it may seem inextricably mingled with ugliness.
Besides this, we are struck by an unusual dramatic sense. Heldenstam knows how to develop a stirring narrative up to an inevitable, but often unexpected conclusion. As in the novels of George Meredith, the climaxes are often apparent anti-climaxes, as when in "Djufar's Song" the old poet is so overcome by the beauty of an oriental morning that he can only express it in weeping. The imagery is often daring, as when a negro's lips are compared to the crimson gash on a wine skin, but such realistic details are only used to verify the central idea. For instance, the negro just referred to is not made ultimately to forfeit our sympathy; he becomes for us not a comic or degraded man, but simply an actual man. Heidenstam, though one of the most daringly earnest of poets, is sufficiently an artist to relieve his style by touches of humor and of the deeper sort of romance.
The most frequent motive of the oriental poems and poetic-prose sketches is the duty of enjoying the moment, of living and not spending one's youth in getting ready to live. It is thus that Heidenstam interprets the text: Take no thought for the morrow! In "The Fig-Tree" he pictures Christ as ministering to the immediate wants of the disciples, while Judas hastens away, reflecting that with thirty more pieces of silver he will be able to buy a house and settle down as a man of property. There is a democratic impulse in Heidenstam's philosophy of pleasure, a belief that a true symposium begets fraternity:
Sharing the loaf and the goat-skin flask, we are sitting together,
In the convivial air sprouts the seed from which may in secret
Grow the all-brothering hour
The idea has been followed, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the French poet Charles Vildrac in his piece "The Two Drinkers."
Most of the poems in Pilgrimages and Wanderyears are objective narratives, but the "Thoughts in Solitude" consist of short, personal lyrics in an introspective, often gloomy vein which Heidenstam has never ceased to cultivate. We find him in these "Thoughts" as an agnostic boldly searching for, as he puts it, the "spark" that "dwells deep within his soul." Some of these searchings will shock the orthodox, but they reveal with wonderful insight the depths of the poet's inmost nature. The ecclesiastical dogma of the atonement is repugnant to his manhood; he wishes to suffer in person for whatever wrong he has committed. He will not pray on his death-bed to a hypothetical god or to "deaf Nature," but to his living fellow-men that they may forgive him as he forgives them. Above all we learn here that through all his wanderings the deepest passion of Heidenstam's heart was for Sweden, especially because of its early associations,
He longs to be worthy of his heritage, to give his life for some sacred cause. He believes it is only in moments of great exaltation that we really live.
In the Poems, which appeared seven years later, the development of the poet is extremely marked. We find the same sincere, penetrative self-analysis as before, but it is a far larger self that Heidenstam now has to offer. He has found his great cause, has made himself a part of his country, its past glories and its present problems. It is most characteristic that, with all his devotion to his native district, he describes both landscape and people in the most unflinching terms.
And loose stones rattle beneath his plough.
How gray, how clad in joylessness
Are all of the scenes that meet me!
My native soil, in the ragged dress
Of poverty you greet me.
Heidenstam sees his country as it is but does not love one whit the less for seeing it so veraciously.
Besides descriptive and reflective pieces, the Poems include three very notable longer compositions. The first is the "Pilgrim's Song" reprinted from Hans Alienus. This poem symbolizes the way in which Alienus (or Heidenstam) has become lost in the "world of shadows" through which his travels led him. With deep imaginative truth the poet depicts the mind which has been so filled with visions of the past that the present becomes unmeaning and unreal. The compressed description and beautiful handling of a difficult stanza form render the poem in all respects a masterpiece.
More unusual is the long narrative "Childhood Friends." The story of the girl who breaks her engagement with the man she loves because, after a long separation, she finds herself too old for him, is partly paralleled by the case of Louise Smith in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.
When Annabelle returned to the village
From the Seminary, ah me!
If I had let my love for him alone
It might have grown into a beautiful sorrow—
In Heidenstam's poem the heroine does just what Louise Smith should have done, she lets her love grow into a beautiful sorrow. There is, furthermore, a courage in the Swedish woman's renunciation which is no less memorable because it is so quiet. But the most original passage of the poem is where the hero, disillusioned after one of his amours, attacks relentlessly the glorification of sensual love. Care must be taken to regard the brutal downrightness of this speech for exactly what it is, i.e., the tirade of an undeceived sentimentalist.
The noblest poem of the volume is "Singers from the Steeple." After the (as we should now call him) Bolshevist husband has in his imagination rung in destruction for the race of tyrant money-lords, his wife in turn mounts to the steeple. She beholds not "savage and weaponed men" or "kindled cities aflame," which would be but a repetition of former evils, but a festal "brothering-day" of mutual forbearance and love, with the motto:
Our toil and our pleasure alike we share.
Other types and themes are included in the Poems. There are historical and imaginative narratives reminiscent of his earlier work. In "The Cradle-Songs of Goldilocks" he approaches the folk-song quality of Fröding, though with much more sophistication. The short lyrics of self-scrutiny continue, in a tone that would be morbid except for its intensity. Heidenstam's increase of mastery is mainly shown in his contact with the Sweden of today.
After a long interval filled with prose works, appeared in 1915 the New Poems. In these we find that Heidenstam has evolved from an inspired thinker to a leader. His style, wholly lucid and direct, has assumed a ring of command. His words awaken now not merely admiration, but enthusiasm. Without his saying so, we feel in him the quality of St. Paul affirming: "I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith." In him is the just self-confidence of the man who is "the captain of his soul." He has found a deeper joy than pleasure. "Happiness is a woman's jewel," he says.
Scanty bread—aye, that 's the cruel,
Bracing life for men.
It is the man behind the poem that has won a nation for his audience. When he adjures his fellow-countrymen to emulate the deeds of their ancestors in the modern fields "of science and art and letters," he is heeded because he has himself shown the way. There are no finer modern poems of patriotism than the series entitled "A People," where Heidenstam prays for years of misfortune to "smite us and lash us into one." It is the fighting optimist who inveighs against weighing men in a money-scale and dividing the head of the nation from the heart, and it is he again who in "A Day" bids the new-born day
To flash the road before us.
There are still gloomy pieces in this last volume. These are, however, relieved by poems of reconciliation and tolerance. From the vantage-ground of maturity Heidenstam can look back and behold where
He can in imagination look down at the world after his death and perceive that
That the man is not other than his work is borne witness to by all who know him. He is over six feet in height and powerfully built, with strongly-marked aquiline features. A man who never valued fame for its own sake, he is in the least possible danger of being weakened by success. Generous to all but himself, he is in especial the patron of all promising literary aspirants.
Little has been said of Heidenstam's poetic style except that it is intense, colorful, and abrupt. In a sense Heidenstam at first seems to have no style, for he is so swept along by the current of compelling inspiration that he has little time to stop for decorative embellishment. He is one of the most compressed of poets; often indeed he runs the risk of being too compressed. And yet, as said before, he never fails to make an attentive reader behold a landscape or grasp a dramatic situation. With a few impressionistic touches he both actualizes and individualizes a situation. Take, for example, the picture of a galley setting forth at sunset over the calm Mediterranean:
His imagery is extraordinarily direct and first-hand, as in
Whether it be a description of the Orient or the presentation of some complex spiritual emotion, Heidenstam's interpretative genius rises alike to the occasion in giving our senses the very feel of what he presents. As we have noted, he never rejects a homely or even a grotesque figure if it suits his purpose, as in the comparison of Jerusalem with its walls and cupolaed houses to a basket of eggs. In imagery Heidenstam ranks with the greatest poets and need not even shun comparison with Dante.
In his verse-form Heidenstam, like Browning, lets his verbal music be too much overruled by his substance. He sticks almost always to rhyme and to a regular metric foot, but his variation of stanza-scheme and of the length of his line is at times confusing and rather too casual. One would like to have a clearer pattern, to become used to a definite stanza and lose oneself in the rhythm. However, Heidenstam's type of "freed verse," as the French call it, is not unsuited to his abrupt changes of thought. Heidenstam is said to resemble Byron in having a poor ear for music. Without striking the reader as either harsh or unskilful, he is certainly below the average of the best Swedish poets in melodic beauty. Not many, even of the great poets, can combine all felicities.
After our survey of Heidenstam's poetry we may naturally ask in how far his message may carry to the world at large. May not this largely patriotic master be of importance only to those of his own speech and land? To this we answer that there is nothing which Heidenstam writes for Sweden that is not almost equally applicable to any other country.
The problems he deals with, whether national or personal, are our problems. As one of the great fighting minds of this generation, he cannot fail to inspire all earnest thinkers with whom he comes in contact. Furthermore he is a great artist in presenting vivid scenes from the human drama, both subjective and objective. He boldly represents life as he knows it in the light of a militant, optimistic imagination. It can therefore hardly be doubted that, wherever his poetry can be made accessible, he will exercise a quickening and exalting influence at least equal to that of any poet now writing.