Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1939, Page 230
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LE NORD
we find that his life-story in reality was not too romantic. It
was, however, eventful.
In the seventeen-nineties we find him first as an under-
graduate in Lund and Uppsala, later as a clerk in an office in
Stockholm, and at the same time busy with literary work and
teaching languages. In the last year of the century he went to
Copenhagen, staying in the Danish capital until the autumn of
1804, when he returned to Sweden, to Lund.
In Copenhagen where he studied languages and continued his
authorship he met with a new era and became acquainted with
the new ideas of the Continent. The reaction against the Vol-
tairian taste had begun. It is flat, lacking poetical uplift, declared
Henrik Steffens, in his lectures in the Danish capital. Such a
prosaic time as this, history had probably never before witnessed.
It was a representative of romanticism that spoke. “Prose I call
everything that degrades that which bears the unmistakable mark
of the infinite, poetry that which in the finite sees the image of
the infinite.”
To this and still more to the ideas of modern romanticism,
Ling was a listener and what he heard was not without im-
portance to him. There are in his ideas many things that are also
characteristically romantic.
One often combines his poetry with past times, on account
of its matter, but it was also spiritually allied to early nineteenth-
century romanticism. In Copenhagen Ling became acquainted
with a revival other than the merely literary. The gymnastic
renaissance which in the later years of the eighteenth century
appeared in Germany had reached the Danish capital, and Ling
here entered a sphere, where he was to make his most famous
achievement.
Beside gymnastics he took up fencing. During three years he
practised arduously in a fencing-school, kept by some French
emigrants, and he became an unusually clever fencing-master.
There are many stories about his great skill. Here is just one from
an early period.
At the demonstrations which Ling gave with his pupils, he
used, at the same time, to give proof of his own skill in fencing.
It happened, that the Swedish crown-prince, (later Karl XIV
Johan) and the hereditary prince, later Oscar the First, were
present at the demonstrations. On a similar occasion, after the
students had gone through their programme, Ling himself did