CARL JONAS LUDWIG ALMQVIST — POET AND PHILOSOPHER.
It is said of Almqvist, With winged steps, he is gone in advance of his time, stirring it with deep interrogation, prophesying its future with infinite hope.
He gives the fullest expression of the new-time consciousness, not only of that which exists now at the end of the century, but also that which will come in the future.
HISTORICAL SKETCH.
In the library of his grandfather the child Almqvist was often seen lost in the studies of manuscripts and books.
In 1820 he married a young girl, very poor and uneducated, who lived in the house of his parents. With his wife and under another name, Love Carlsson, and in the disguise of a peasant, he fled from the life of conventionality to that of nature, in order, as he said, to "fashion his life in one straight way."
In 1830 Almqvist became the leader of Sweden's reform school and was soon surrounded by a host of pupils, who for the first time were learning through his genial and true human method of education that one can be happy in a school, that a teacher can fill its halls with marvelous visions, and the soul with great thoughts. He was admired and honored by his contemporaries, both as a genial and productive poet and for his distinguished capability as a teacher.
In 1840 Almqvist was obliged to resign from his rectorship, for his very open, sincere, and sometimes prophetic speeches and writings on religion, philosophy, art and society did not accord with public opinion. In his school, too, he lacked the sense of order. He then began work as a publisher of his own many writings, as a map-drawer, as a copier of music, a proof-reader, copyist, etc., in order to sustain himself, his wife, son and daughter. For a long time the Swedish Academy seemed not to know anything of his pitiable circumstances. At last a bishop said to King Oskar I.: "The greatest genius in Sweden ought not to starve to death." This was followed by an appointment as "Regiment Pastor," a name under which he is well known. In the month of June, 1851, Almqvist fled from Sweden, accused of falsification and of murder by poison. His family never thought him guilty, nor did his true friends, amongst whom was the great poet Runeberg. The guilty one seems to have been a jealous housekeeper, who had tried to make the murdered man suspect Almqvist.
As the emigrant "Pastor Gustavi," he traveled in America's great towns, visited its forests, Niagara, and places of note. In the year 1860 he returned to Bremen an old man. There he lived under the name of Professor Westermann, content and peaceful, busy with his books and papers. When he fell ill he was sent to a public hospital and there died and was buried in the "Potter's Field."
ALMQV1ST AS FATHER.
His still living daughter tells of her father as follows:
"My father would sit alone for long at a time, serene and quiet, drinking coffee or smoking, and then his expression was deep and meditative; but for us children, for our wishes and well-being he always was awake. In his home life he often jested very wittily in a subdued way, but in society he was modest, silent, and almost impossible. In small circles he set the people on fire. His personality had an extraordinary fascination through his serene, deep intensity, and his always vibrating passion for ideas, for the essential great whole. Trifle he treated as trifle. He never made much of his person, or brought himself forward or posed. He was seldom in a hurry, but would come serene and friendly from his work and take us children for long outings. He spoiled us, but never permitted any license. He also was our best playmate and friend. He did not like to see us idle, we always must work or play, but he detested nothingness. He did not feign pleasure, he really enjoyed our pleasures, as we his. How often, too, he went with us on different outings; we always were delighted, though he sometimes for a long while would be silent. We forgot the silence when he waked up and observed us. No one could tell us things so funny or so tender as he. When I was in a boarding school in Stockholm, he used to take me and all my comrades during the hot summer days on outings from our tiresome needlework.
"He always was wide awake for nature, and for different occupations. He would talk with old men and women; they told him, as did people in general, their deepest secrets — no one had such power as he of gaining confidence. We confided to him everything; he always understood our feelings, though he never flattered our weaknesses. He never waked our ambition or praised our progress, but told us that diligence was only a duty. As a child, I wrote verses, but he never made anything of it. To write verses, he said, is a token of the fulness of life, and we only ought to do so when we feel it irresistible and impossible to withstand.
"His manners were so gentle that I never saw him impetuous, and therefore I believed the world would vanish when he once told my brother, who really had failed, that he was a veritable blockhead. My brother never had any real pleasure when separated from his father, — which is not usually the case with youths in general. Only to be near him was for us both a fortune."
AS AUTHOR.
His principal work is: ''The Book of the Rose." It contains many of his writings, and it is said of it that he therein seeks to "mirror all the world." It is at the same time, "tone, color, fragrance, sorrow, joy, poetry, religion and philosophy." For Almqvist tones became colors; colors, fragrancy; these give taste-sensation, like juicy fruits. If we desire to be fully acquainted with him as an author his other writings must also be studied, as, "Amorina," "The Monagrafy," "Miriam," etc.
AS PHILOSOPHER AND ARTIST.
He dreamed of a future, "when art contains both poetry, music and picture." In a poem, "The Night of the Poet," he expresses his innermost feelings as to the ideal of art: "During the darkness of night, in agony and almost a swoon, I heard a voice: 'Choose! — If thou wilt be strong, choose the lot of the strong, which is strife and no rest. Against everything thou wilt have to fight; nothing on earth wilt thou find without fault, and thou wilt ever have to fight against and reform error. But if thou wouldst be as a lamb, come unto me; then wilt thou have peace, innocence and rest, with me in my home. I will embrace thee, and thou shalt not be drawn away by separateness, or be torn by the deeds of misery." 'Lord!' my soul answered and sank together — 'O that I could be a lamb as thou sayest!' 'All may be and do as It will." "And the same voice told him further: " 'Only remember to stand on nothing, and to lean on nothing; for nothing can concern or touch thee, and thou thyself canst possess nothing; but thou wilt obtain power over all things. Thou canst not possess It, for thou shalt possess nothing and stand on nothing; but thou wilt have the best of all power which is to play (sport).'
"At these words my head sank in a golden cloud, and I lost the universe. When I awakened and arose I was glad. Art awakened anew within me, and robed in a white dress I saw her, the sweet one. Dead was now death and only life lived for me. I heard the thunder rise on the clouds, and the terrified vault of heaven spread its wings trembling over the earth. I smiled and said: 'The lightning is beautiful." The rain streamed in showers over the land; all fell, melted and was drowned together. I was not wet. Tempests speeded through the forests and over the meadows; the deer fled and men freezed through marrow and bones. My hand was warm and I painted. Flowers I saw bud and fade. I painted. Children I saw grow up into boys and girls. Girls flourished into maids, beautiful as the flowers of life. I saw them grow old, wither and pass away. Boys I saw grow and become men; I heard them talk prudently and keenly; then I saw them grow old, wither and turn gray. I continued to be the same as I am and always was, — nothing. I only paint."
Almqvist is said to have been so dependent on the harmony of his sensations and imagination that he liked to write different scenes with different colored ink, as black, red, blue, complaining of not having ink in all colors. He also says that a poet seeks to speak through symbols: "Such inner meanings give joy and awaken a marvelous light in the soul. We understand the allegories of life if we are of nature, as we live the true artist's life." "Great," he says, "we do not require to be in order to be artists, we need only to look at life with glances of innocence as do little children and artists. Then we live with the whole, we have a wonderful intercourse with the universe: then we flourish in undisturbed union: then we celebrate the true worship of God; then we offer roses to the Lord."
HIS VIEWS ON SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS MATTERS.
Almqvist once said of prisons: "They ought to be considered as hospitals for the soul, where only through mild expedients we should try to restore the health of the convicts." In "Amorian," he makes an assault on the liberty of the will and sets "a sharp-pointed sword on the most sensitive nerve of humanity.' He was a mystic, a pantheist. "The most sublime life," he said, "was to be unconscious as a lyre, whose strings God touches. To be embraced by, to be hid in the whole, to let thought be lost, to be unseen by oneself, to sink down in the unnamed silent ground. This is the highest power to heal the soul."
To him all nature was endowed with soul: "The daffodils have freedom and thought; the rubies, imagination, through which within their own natures they proclaim the purple poem of the eternal." "The fragrances of the forests are astonished by the air, coming to them from the flowers of the garden. The bird is the artist of the wilderness. The eagle is a poem soaring on deep-gray, glittering wings, a poem of God; for God himself cannot conceive of his own dark being, but has to discover it; therefore he puts his feelings and thoughts before himself, and together they make the world. These changing objects are the paintings; the painter behind the clouds paints in order to stand clear before himself."
Thus everything in nature for Almqvist is an expression of the divine. The "Fall of Man" through which existence is broken, was to him reason killing intuition, conventionality confusing instinct. In a little poem, "Tears of Beauty," which Almqvist thinks crowns all his poems, he makes a rough giant pursue an escaping nymph, — a drop of blood floats together with a tear from her eyes, and this drop, which neither could rise, weighed down by the dark blood, nor fall to the ground, lifted as it was by the clear water, is still hanging and floating in space — and, "this tear is the world whereon thou livest, my friend."
Of religion he says: "Devoted leaders are needed, to prepare the second advent of Christ." "The second advent signifies the victory of gentleness, for man's best strength from God is gentleness, which is love and intelligence. Gentleness can do everything, fresh, orderly, cheerful, and peaceful." "Christ was the mediator only in the sense of sacrificing himself for the good of the whole, and by fully revealing the nature of the life of love."
Directing himself to God, he once said: "I love thy poor Son and thy other sons." "In Ormuzd and Ariman," he confesses "that kindness even in the meanest garb is that alone which can unite where every thing is scattered, which alone can build up where everything is destroying."
In moments of deepest agony he utters about God: "I would prostrate myself before It with all the powers of my being. I would love, I would he annihilated by devotion to It, by inclination to It, by an eternal, unquenchable desire fur It. I would die for It, that It may live."
AS REFORMER.
His reformations of the world aimed at the christianizing of humanity. All must work under simple natural relations; through the diligence and happiness of all, the evil man will recover, and crime will starve to death by want of nourishment. In "Ariman" he lets the well-meaning men in the most minute way regulate the state, the family, art, agriculture, the towns. "They also with fatherly care and according to plan proclaim where and what kind of roses are to grow, and in what forests nightingales must sing under penalties of showers and thunder."
But "Ormuzd" fails, for though the flowers, animals and men, during the day, obediently follow the thousand prescribed ways of happiness, beauty and success he ordains for them; yet in the night a marvelous creature in a manifold changing form goes around the world. Without plan, without design, without order, it came, it went, it worked and succeeded. This mysterious creature upset all the plans of Ormuzd both as regards bodies and souls; it so acted that the inner beauty of their respective natures blossomed in a sweetness before unknown. The real heart of things awakened where, this wondrous being passed by. Ormuzd noted the unknown in his big book as a "suspected person." But the well-meaning Ormuzd himself was, the whole world around, a "suspected person," and the great public that obeyed was not glad. ''Men would have been more glad if they were trusted to be a little good; if they permitted themselves to bring forth in the light some fruits of reason, force and goodness."
He also says elsewhere: "it is through crime that humanity is progressing, and the virtue of every cycle of evolution has been the principal deadly sin of the preceding one, and by it the most forbidden, which by all means possible, by argument and reasoning, by all legislative power, it has tried to hinder; and this from a very natural cause, that every mode of culture will defend its own life and seek to prevent its own death. The last truth a human tongue can pronounce is: that the crimes of the world have carried the world forward, or in general have caused something to be done. After this proclamation not much is to be added. By no means am I talking of all crimes or vices — nor of most of them, nor do I mean the small defects, the small vices, small sins, but that which in every time is regarded as the greatest, the most consummate, the very deadly sin of the age. It is usually this for which all the culture of the age shudders and trembles, as for its own destruction. It is he who points out the gates through which the new cycle is to come, by which humanity is to rise and to progress. Therefore Christ was crucified by the Jews, while what he preached enlarged the borders of Judaism."
And further, he says: "No cycle of culture has existed on earth, where man did not think crime against himself to be crime against God; and such sins, such vices, every art of culture has always judged the greatest, the most dreadful, the most unpardonable of the age."
Thus he himself committed the greatest sin of his time.
VIEWS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN.
Here he touches the most sensitive thought of his time, influenced by Swedenborg and Thorild (a Swedish poet). Himself married, he probably lacked possibilities of being happy. He was the same kind, tolerant, helpful man toward all; he neither felt deep love nor hatred; therefore probably he was too impersonal for matrimonial happiness.
In a pamphlet, "What is Love?" and in a novel, "Permajouf," he treats of this question. With deep grief he says: "Children come into the world without spiritual, true or deep love between their parents, therefore the poor creatures are brought forth mean to the very core of their being." Then he says: "We hang forgers, but whoever for a thousand other reasons than love unites himself with one he does not love, and thus forms a useless domestic circle — does he not commit a crime so great and with consequences so incalculable, relating to both the present and the future, that it will result in more terrible disasters than the forgers of millions?" And further: "Mutual happy love is as an electric stream between souls. The solitary warm heart is deprived of light; the solitary luminous head lacks warmth, but the electricity of love gives to the head warmth and to the heart light." He regards man and woman as equal: "neither is above nor below; neither is a monster below the other. Therefore woman ought to learn trade and to have full right of self-sustenance in order not to be forced for her livelihood to commit the great sin of marrying a man she does not love, and no man can be really happy if he is not loved by his wife."
Almqvist looked with the eye of a seer on every question of importance, whether of labor, peace, politics, etc. All his works will some day be published and then we shall have opportunity for studying this very extraordinary man and do him justice.