BISHOP GRUNDTVIG.
THE news has just reached us from Denmark of the death of the most venerable man of letters in Europe, who had almost completed the round of ninety years, and whose faculties, a month ago, were as fresh and green as ever. To the last he preserved his old characteristics,—was a vehement lyrical poet, a fiery controversialist, and an unflinching reformer in Church and State, and has been writing this very year words as strong and clear as the utterances of a man in his prime. One must go back to Michael Angelo and Titian to find another instance of the active and unbroken exercise of the creative faculty through so long a range of years.
Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig was born in 1783, at the parsonage of Ud by, in the south of Zealand. All his relatives were Zealand folk ; both on the father's and mother's side the family had been Danes of the most Danish intensity for long generations. Perhaps this has had something to do with his great love of all that is national and homely ; of all the Northern writers, not one has so exclusively been a man of the people. When he was only nine years old he was sent away to school in Jutland, and while he was here the news came of the execution of Louis XVI. The poet was wont to declare that he could re- member it ; doubtless the great events in France were the subject of much excited talk iu the tutor's house at Tyregodlund. When he was fifteen he was sent to the Latin School at Aarhuus, but long before this his mind had begun to take in literary impressions. On the wild moors of Jut- land, he had learned to steal out alone with old chronicles and war-songs under his arm, and devour strange romances. At Aarhuus he made friends with a little old shoemaker, and, sitting by his fireside through the long winter nights, heard folk-song after folk-song, and story after story. In 1800 he became a student, and in 1803 we find him listening to the philo- sophical lectures of H. Steffens, a Norwegian by birth, but German in education and bias. The mystical rationalism of Steffens' teaching produced a strong effect on the young man's mind ; he seized with emotion doctrines that commended themselves so highly to his present condition of mind, and this circumstance served to direct his energy into the channel of, theoretic theology. The name of Steffens is almost forgotten now-a-days, but in the earliest years of the century he was a power in the North of Europe, more by the almost magnetic attraction of his personal presence than by any great depth or value in his words.
In a pretty country-house, in the island of Langeland, where he was tutor, Grundtvig now began to throw himself heart and soul into literature. He studied Icelandic, that he might make himself master of the ancient sagas ; German, that he might revel in Goethe and Tieck ; and English, that he might stand face to face with Shakespeare. But what roused the young Titan more than all was the publication of Oehlenschlmger's first volume of poems, which came to him in his solitude in Langeland, and fired him with a new ambition. Henceforth he was a poet, but his first two works, though published under the patronage of Rahbek, fell dead from the press. But he had many strings to his bow. In 1807 he published " On Religion and Liturgy," in which he stepped forward as a spiritual reformer, urging the necessity of a broader spirit in religious matters. The daring tone of the book drew people's attention to its author. In 1808 he appeared before the public in yet another guise, as author of " The Mytho- logy of the North," a first attempt at a philosophico-poetical interpretation of the Scandinavian myths, and this was followed by a long epic poem of similar drift. Literary work was carried by him to such an excess that in 1810 the nervous system gave way, and the young poet had to go home to his father's house to be nursed. Here he wrote " A Short Sketch of the World's Chronicle," an extraordinary and violent work, which roused a good deal of ill-feeling against him. In 1813 his father died, and he came to live in Copenhagen. There his literary ambitions blossomed out in the most fervid manner. The seven years of his stay in the city are filled with the record of ceaseless labour ; he published in that period a great mass of poetical, theological, and philosophical works, edited and wrote a newspaper, and translated into the best Danish, Snorro Sturleson, Saxo-Grammaticus, and Beowulf. In 1823 he came with his newly-wedded wife to live at Praisto, a little country town in Zealand, of which he had been made pastor ; but the provincial life proved unbearable, and in a few months he flitted back to the capital.
Hitherto his life had been one of constant and well-merited success, but now a hand was interposed to stop the onward course of victory. It must be confessed that his own unwisdom drew it on him. In the University of Copenhagen a Dr. Clausen was Professor of Theology ; Grundtvig, who had long thrown over the rationalism of Steffens, considered Clausen too much addicted to the same ideas, and openly, oven violently, charged him with heresy. The result was a law-suit for libel, and Clausen was suc- cessful. Grundtvig was heavily fined, and placed under ecclesiasti- cal censure, a ban which was not removed for sixteen years. He retired from publicity in consequence, and lived as a private man of letters ; the languages and popular literature of the peoples of the North continued to be his constant study. He interested him- self in Anglo-Saxon, and, that he might explore all the streams of that language at their fountain-head, he paid four successive visits to England. In 1842, especially, when the Tractarian movement at Oxford was beginning to work so powerfully in the English Church, Gruudtvig, who had watched the battle from afar, came over to us again, that he might study on the spot the various currents of excited religious opinion then dividing English society. A.I1 this while be was not entirely without public in- fluence in theological matters ; soon after his disgrace, he sought and at last obtained permission to preach in a single church in Copenhagen, where he, Sunday by Sunday, declaimed and exhorted in his peculiar manner to a select audience of disciples. At first his influence was very small, but his pupils, if few, were extremely enthusiastic, and his doctrines have so far spread as to have formed a sect who glory in the name of Grundtvigians, and who comprise within their numbers a large proportion of the inhabitants of Denmark and Norway, and not a few in Sweden. In his later years he has spent much labour in advo- cating a new scheme of education for the poor, by means of what are called Popular High Schools. These schools are carried on under Grundtvigian principles, — that is, everything the old poet has counselled is carried out on an extravagant scale, for he has remarked, it is said, that he never was a " Grundtvigian" himself, and never has sanctioned half the follies that are perpetrated in his name. These High Schools are now found all over Scandinavia and North Germany. The peasants meet together, men and women, in the winter nights, and are taught to read and write, if that is needful, but chiefly to sing and sew, to carve wood, and to use their hands cunningly, and above all, to study the history of their country in Grundtvig's rhythmical chronicles and songs. How this answers in Germany we know not ; in Denmark the schools are extremely popular, and the spirit of hatred towards the " German tyrant" is strongly fostered in them, for every Grundtvigian is, above all things, intensely a Dane.
In religious matters Grundtvig has never divided himself dis- tinctly from the Danish Church ; to the last he remained within the pale of it. But at the very time that he was confuting the neologism of Professor Clausen he was developing views at vari- ance with Danish orthodoxy. He opposed the usual view of the in- spiration of the Bible with great subtlety, and with evident sincerity, though his views were neither entirely logical nor entirely original. He first made public his convictions at the very time when an extremely interesting work of an analogous character was appear- ing in England, the " Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit," by S. T. Coleridge. But while Coleridge conscientiously refers to Leasing as the suggestor of his ideas, Grundtvig was under the impression that his own were entirely new. The formula upon which all that is peculiar in his teaching rests, is that " the Church of Christ is founded on a word, and not on a book ; " and so, without in any way rejecting the Bible, he considers it second- ary to the Creed, and would fain trace this last to the actual oracular word of Jesus. If this theory be vague, it is at the same time quite undeniable that Grundtvig has produced a great revival in the practical character of the Danish Church. He has introduced full congregations, hearty singing, and weekly com- munions, with a new and excellent hymn-book for general use, which has superseded the melancholy and old-fashioned collection of Kingo. At the same time, the most sober-minded theologians have looked askance at his doctrinal laxities ; and it is true that though the common people heard him gladly, and he made thousands of disciples, profound thinkers, like Bishop Mortensen and Dr. Fog, all the most eminent divines in fact, have held aloof from him. His title of Bishop was only an honorary one ; he never held a diocese.
As a poet, one of the greatest of Scandinavian critics has called him " the younger brother of Oehlenschlmger ;" but he differed greatly from that eminent man, and indeed from all later Danish poets, in being no artist, but essentially a fighter, a man of action. He never cared to address the polite world of letters, he wrote poems for the people, and in return there is no poet in our time whose works have been read and loved in the homes of the peasants as his have been. All his life be gloried in opposing him- self to conventional forms and conventional aspirations ; he even found an exhilaration in the mere sense of fighting ; he was a grand old literary bersark to the last. Slightly altering his own words, we may take them as describing his life's course :-
" The hero followed not the tide ;
He dashed the waves of thought aside,— Above his hair their wild spray passed, But only silvered it at last."
It was in lyrical composition that he achieved the greatest triumphs ; as a lyrist he will always rank high among the poets of the North.
It is scarcely a month since the writer of these words sat in the little workhouse church in Copenhagen, where the old poet preached every Sunday. Before the altar, exhorting the bowed group of would-be communicants, the grand old man stood in health. It seemed likely that our world might hold him for another decade ; and when he stood in the pulpit to preach, and in a slow voice warned his hearers to beware of false prophets and to try every spirit, there was nothing to show that the end was near. His great white head, like a forgotten Druid's, that has survived from Mona and cannot die, looking infinitely old without any of the usual frailties of old age, will remain photographed on the writer's memory for ever. He died on the 2nd of September, 1872.
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