Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

The next day, however, when Alexander, having slept off his intoxication, learns the resolution of Kalanus, he fears that he dealt too sternly the previous evening with his foreign adorer. So he hastens to Kalanus to gladden the hermit's heart with the assurance that he still enjoys the favor of Alexander. He arrives at the moment when Kalanus, thoroughly prepared in spirit for the sacrificial fires, has just been anointed by his mother for death. The potentate makes an effort to calm the ascetic, and learns to his surprise that Kalanus has not been swayed by fear of Alexander's wrath. He implores him to cast aside his resolve, but in vain. The tyrant in Alexander is aroused; he threatens Kalanus, he commands him to live; but his menaces rebound from him who is about to die of his own free will. On the wondering at the defiance of the Indian follows in the king's heart fury, and when the quiet thinker, remaining in an unruffled state of composure, only lays stress on the unworthy attitude of permitting the mind to be transported with anger, Alexander believes that scorn has followed in the footsteps of defiance. With the exclamation "slave!" he raises his hand to smite the ascetic. The blow, however, is parried, and the bitterness of the monarch, dispelled by the calm, tender efforts at persuasion, becomes transformed into noble entreaties, magnanimous promises, – all in vain. Alexander implores Kalanus to live out of friendship for him, entreats him to share with him his throne, to accept crown and sceptre from his hand, – his words produce as little impression as his previous threats. Then follows a sublime scene: Alexander casts himself upon his knees before Kalanus, and supplicates him to live.

This scene is the most beautiful, the most dramatic, the most spiritual that Paludan-Müller ever wrote. It is the crown of his dramatic scenes. It is the sum total of his thoughts and dreams. In the moment when Paludan-Müller allows Alexander to sink upon his knees, he casts all the greatness of the world, its splendor and its honor, genius and fame as well, at the feet of moral purity. This bending of the knee outweighs the prostration of Kalanus before Alexander in the first act. But even the utmost self-abasement of the hero is in vain, and the drama ends with the ascension from the funeral pyre of the spirit of Kalanus, purified in the sacred flames, to the heaven of Brahma. With all that Kierkegaard has to offer of intellectual endeavor, wit, learning, dialectics, and moral enthusiasm, in his "Either – Or," he has achieved no such brilliant triumph for the ethical mode of viewing life as that of Paludan-Müller in this one scene.

And as we must accept the obstinate adherences of Tithon to his resolution to return to earth as a symptom of the approach of the brief-lived yet so happy tendency of Paludan-Müller to realism, so we can see in the equally obstinate adherence of Kalanus to his resolve to forsake earthly life a symptom of the poet's return to the abstract poesy of his youth. The heathen mythological element reappears in his works "Paradise" and "Ahasuerus" as biblical myths. In the works that follow "Adam Homo," to be sure, there is a far deeper psychology than in those of the author's first youth; the psychological insight gained in the years of mature manhood could not possibly be lost; but these later works no longer treat of life in its breadth and with its motley coloring. They are works that withdraw from reality, and find vent in cloister life, in the hermit ideal, in expiatory death, or in the destruction of the universe; their poetry is that of renunciation, of the annihilation of self and of the universe.

VIII

The most vigorous product of this last period is the dramatic poem "Ahasuerus," an emphatic prologue of the Last Judgment. We experience, with the cobbler of Jerusalem, the last day of the world, learn from him of the course of earthly life since Christianity redeemed humanity, are informed how beastliness followed close upon the heels of humanity until the rule of the animal nature was followed by the Antichrist, as described in the poem. It is a drama to which Joseph de Maistre might with rapture have signed his name, and its attacks on constitutionalism and tolerancy form a versified commentary on the syllabus of the Vatican. The poem denotes, in common with some of the later writings of Kierkegaard, the crisis of the reaction in Danish literature against the eighteenth century. In its monologue there are some very tedious portions; but it has some dazzlingly superb, and at the same time, exceedingly touching passages in the songs of the choruses, which express the anguish of mortals in the contemplation of the coming misfortune, and no less in the exquisite song of the angels who lull Ahasuerus into eternal repose. Yet the most individual part of the poem, a passage which displays an almost Michael-Angelo-like grandeur, is that where the trumpet tones evoke annihilation in all that is finite. Let me cite the first three stanzas: —

"The Trumpet (from the clouds)."Kneel, kneel, O earth! in sack-cloth clad and ashes,Discard the mask with boastful pride that flashes!The angel hosts in the sky are now appearing;Your doom is nearing!"Down, down to dust, ye vanities resplendent,Ye stones of nature, works of art transcendent!Each crowned turret, and each lofty tower,Destroyed your power."Down, down to dust, the cup of death there draining,From dreams of honor, schemes of pride refraining,Down, down, and learn the worth, all steeped in degradation,Of reputation."

These trumpet tones are the résumé of Paludan-Müller's poetry.

As an antithesis to the repentant Wandering Jew in "Ahasuerus" is given the Antichrist. Unfortunately the weakness of this form is somewhat prejudicial to the effect of the poem. This Antichrist accords thoroughly with ecclesiastical tradition; he is no Lucifer, no fallen angel; in his commonplace, feeble attitude he vividly recalls the vacillating, deceitful Antichrist of Luca Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto. Moreover, it can readily be comprehended that Paludan-Müller, in his adherence to the orthodox impressions of his childhood, might fancy he could not paint the devil black enough, or, more correctly speaking, flat enough. Now, in order to invest the drama with play and counter-play, and thrilling interest, the Antichrist should have been equipped with powerful and brilliant qualities, that would in themselves have explained his authority. If Alexander was placed at a disadvantage, however, still less justice was done the Antichrist, and no better fate was reserved for the Lucifer in Paludan-Müller's double drama "Paradise." This Lucifer, to be sure, is enterprising and keen-sighted; he conceives, for instance, the original idea to split the kernel from which the Tree of Knowledge is to grow; but such a Lucifer after the "Cain" of Byron is after all only an Iliad after the Iliad of Homer. The first half of "Paradise" contains the most exquisite lyric strains. In the alternating song between spirit and nature, and in the song of the angel to the morning star, may be found a cosmic poetry which, in its purity and freshness, is only surpassed by that of Shelley; but the insignificance of Lucifer combined with the unsuccessful, and by far too childish naïveté of Adam and Eve, weakens the impression of the great plan of the poem. The orthodoxy of Paludan-Müller checked the flight of his fancy in "Ahasuerus" as well as in "Paradise": in majorem gloriam dei Antichrist became a prattler; Lucifer a spirit of the second rank.

IX

As an artist, Paludan-Müller presents the contradiction that in his entire intellectual tendency he is a pronounced spiritualist, with a marked bias for the supernatural and abstract, while in his unquestionably most important and most vital work, which would surely preserve his name from oblivion, even had he written nothing else, he proved himself a decided realist, and looked actual life in the face with a persistence that is very rare in Danish poetry. Now this contradiction in itself indicates still another, as follows: —

Only reluctantly, as a rule, did he approach earth, and yet it was extremely seldom that he engaged in spiritual poetry according to the traditional acceptation of the phrase. His Pegasus bore him quite as often to the heathen Elysium as to the Christian heaven, and even where he seems to be directly expressing the Christian ideal, he is merely touching upon it to leave it in the next breath. "Kalanus," for instance, appears at the first glance as though it should properly be called a Christian poem; for it unquestionably arouses the thought in the reader's mind that if Kalanus, instead of being the contemporary of Alexander, had been a contemporary of Christ, and if the latter, as the orthodox maintain, had called himself God, all the hopes and aspirations of the ascetic would assuredly have been fulfilled. If we regard it a little more closely, however, we shall find that the poem contains rather an Indian than a Christian enthusiasm for death. Suicide, which Christianity has always condemned, is represented as the one absolutely ideal action, and even if the flames of the funeral pyre be accepted as a purgatory, similar to that with which "Adam Homo" ends, it is, nevertheless, extremely singular that the sole dogma which seems to exercise an inspiring influence upon this Protestant poet is the dogma of purgatory that has been rejected by Protestantism, just as the sole moral type which he passionately extols is that of the hermit which Protestantism has discountenanced.

It was an honest and true remark that the brother of the poet uttered over his coffin, when, after the attempt made by Bishop Martens en to claim Paludan-Müller as the poet of the official Protestant Church, he said that he who had never employed his poetry in the service of the Church could not, without some reservation, be called a Christian poet. With all his private orthodoxy, Paludan-Müller never wrote a single hymn. With all his poetic predilection for the Bible and Christian legends, he always turned back to the heathen myth as to the mirror of his soul. He was a Christian because he was spiritual by nature, not the reverse, and his spirituality, therefore, accorded quite as fully with the withdrawal from earth in the holy Nirvana, and with the classical enthusiasm for Venus Urania, as with the Christian enthusiasm for saints and martyrs. Under all forms, self-abnegation, penance, mortification of the flesh and blood were dear to him.

He might well, like the Greek philosopher of old, have borne the surname Peisithanatos. He belonged, like Leopardi, to that little group of spirits that may justly be called the lovers of death. When his contemporary, the great Danish erotic poet, Christian Winther, became old, he wrote a poem in which he gave expression to his love of life, and declared that when his last hour should strike, he would "place himself in Charon's boat with sullen mien and deep chagrin"; Paludan-Müller, on the contrary, wanted to cry to Charon, like that Adonis about whom he wrote his last poem, "Take me, too!" and, before the ferryman could distinguish whence the voice came, he wanted to spring into the boat.

I do not speak here of his personal faith as a man; I know that he believed in a life after death; I even remember how, when he learned that David Strauss had dedicated a book to the memory of his deceased brother, he, in his naïve orthodoxy, conceived this to be a proof that Strauss had not been able to tear himself free from the idea of personal immortality. I merely wish to speak of Paludan-Müller as a thinker, as a poet; and as such he loved death, not immortality. How weary, how deadly weary of life is Tithon! With what earnestness Kalanus asks of Alexander: "O tell me, what can better be than death?" With what rapture does not Ahasuerus take refuge in his sheltered grave at the moment when all other poor mortals must arise from theirs, and with what blissful joy does not he repeat his refrain, "Away to repose, eternal!"

As an old man, Paludan-Müller wrote his lengthy novel "Ivar Lykke," which contains a beautiful testimony of his ardent patriotic love and his upright mode of thought, but which otherwise is a work of but little poetic merit. He, who for thirty years had lived the life of a recluse, could not write novels. The colossal work in three volumes is completely outbalanced by the short poem, occupying but comparatively few pages, "Adonis," which was his parting word to the reading world. The latter is a heathen apotheosis of death. Wearied of Venus and of her restless pleasures, Adonis takes refuge in the realm of Proserpine, and there reposes in a state of eternal meditation. Proserpine accosts him in the following tender words: —

"Consolation seek with me!None of passion's fancies learning,No regrets, no sighs, no yearning —Meditation first shall be."

And the poem ends with this solemn and beautiful stanza: —

"In the realm to death made blest,Lethe's waters round them closing,These two lovers sat reposing,As for everlasting rest.All is silent as can be,And the vaulted skies up yonderSwarm with many a starry wonder,While the moon sinks in the sea."

In this dreamy attitude, at the feet of the goddess of death, let us leave the noble poet.

There he sits, while his most beautiful poetic visions glide in nebulous form before his eyes. He sees the River Styx. Venus, Urania, and Endymion sail in a boat down the stream, while the crown which Venus wears casts a brilliant starry sheen over the gloomy waves and shores. He sees Amor and Psyche blissfully floating by in lofty Kassiopeia and proud Orion; he descries Adam and Alma gliding past, all closely wrapped in the purifying flames of purgatory; he beholds Alexander kneeling before Kalanus, and the slender, refined form of the Indian, with the white bandage about his brow, and singing his swan's song, ascend from the funeral pyre through the smoke and the black clouds to Brahma.

"At the feet of her, his goddess,Happy now he sits and dreams;All aglow death's kingdom seems,"

while his works survive him and render his name immortal.

There was always a great deal of sky in his paintings, but his name will be most enduringly united with that part of his pictures which portrays earth and the earthly.

BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON

1882

Beyond his fatherland Björnstjerne Björnson is known as a great poet. To Norway he is more than a poet. Not only has he written beautiful stories, songs, and dramas for his people; he lives the daily life of this people, and holds unbroken intercourse with them. He who has it in his power to create the most refined, the most delicate poetry, does not esteem himself above the rudest tasks, those of the journalist and the popular orator, where there is a question of furthering the moral and political education of the Norwegian people, by combating an error or a lie, or by ensuring the propagation of some simple, but as yet unrecognized truth. There emanates from him a breath of life. Where his spirit now penetrates there follows a development of self-knowledge and love of truth, national faults are shaken off, a growing interest is manifested in all intellectual topics, all public affairs, and a wholesome self-confidence appears side by side with this interest. He has grasped the significance of the poet's mission in its broadest sense.

In his oration at the unveiling of the Wergeland monument, May 17, 1881, Björnson said of his great predecessor, the European poet, who ranks next to Shelley: —

"You have all heard how Henrik Wergeland, during one period of his life, was in the habit of carrying his pockets full of the seeds of trees, ever and anon strewing a handful of these about him in his daily walks, and how he endeavored to persuade his associates to do the same, because no one could know what the results might be. This is so true-hearted, so touchingly poetic an instance of patriotism, that it stands on the pinnacle of the best he has written."

What is here related in a literal sense of Wergeland may be told in a higher sense of Björnson. He is the great seed-sower of Norway. This country is a mountainous land; it is rocky, rugged, and barren. The seed falls on stony ground, and many a grain is blown away by the wind. Nevertheless, Björnson perseveres unweariedly in his labors. A large quantity of his seed has already sprouted; many a tree planted by his hand is already in blossom, and so far as the fruit is concerned, his efforts were never designed for the present generation alone.

I

It is only necessary to bestow a glance upon Björnson, in order to be convinced how admirably he is equipped by nature for the hot strife a literary career brings with it in most lands, and especially in the combat-loving North. Shoulders as broad as his are not often seen, nor do we often behold so vigorous a form, one that seems as though created to be chiselled in granite.

There is, perhaps, no labor which so completely excites all the vital forces, exhausts the nerves, refines and enervates the feelings, as that of literary production. There has never been the slightest danger, however, that the exertions of his poetic productiveness would affect his lungs, as in the case of Schiller, or his spine, as in the case of Heine; there has been no cause to fear that inimical articles in the public journals would ever give him his death-blow, as they did Halvdan, the hero of his drama "Redaktoren" (The Editor), or that he would yield, as so many modern poets have yielded, to the temptation of resorting to pernicious stimulants or dissipations, as antidotes for the overwrought or depleted state of the nervous system, occasioned by creative activity. Nothing has injured Björnson's spine, his lungs are without blemish and know no cough, while his shoulders were fashioned to bear, without discomposure, the rude thrusts which the world gives, and to return them. As for his nerves, I am convinced that he has not learned from personal experience the significance of the word. As an author he is never nervous, neither when he displays his true delicacy, nor even when he evinces his most marked sentimentality. He has nothing of the refinement that a light degree of work, duty, or fatigue gives.

Strong as the beast of prey whose name twice occurs in his,60 muscular, without the slightest trace of corpulence, of an athletic build, he looms up vigorously in my mind, with his massive head, his firmly compressed lips, and his sharp, penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles. His exterior reveals the son of a preacher, his voice, play of features and gestures betray more of the actor's talent than poets usually possess. It would be impossible for literary hostilities to overthrow this man, and for him there never existed that greatest danger to authors (a danger which for a long time menaced his great rival, Henrik Ibsen), namely: that of having his name shrouded in silence. Even as a very young author (as a theatrical critic and political writer), he had entered the field of literature with such an eagerness for combat, that a rumbling noise arose about him wherever he appeared. Like his own Thorbjörn in "Synnöve Solbakken" he displayed in early youth the combative tendency of the athlete, but like his Sigurd in "Sigurd's Flight," he fought not merely to practise his strength, but from genuine, although often mistaken love of truth and justice. At all events, he understood thoroughly how to attract attention.

An author may possess great and rare gifts, and yet, through lack of harmony between his own personal endowments and the national characteristics or the degree of development of his people, may long be prevented from attaining a brilliant success. Many of the world's greatest minds have suffered from this cause. Many, as Byron, Heine, and Henrik Ibsen, have left their native land; many more who have remained at home have felt forsaken by their compatriots. With Björnson the case is quite different. He has never, it is true, been peacefully recognized by the entire Norwegian people; at first, because the form he used was too new and unfamiliar; later, because his ideas were of too challenging a nature for the ruling, conservative, and highly orthodox circles of the land; even at the present time he is pursued by the press of the Norwegian government and by the leading official society, with a fury which is as little choice in its selection of means as is in other countries the exasperation felt by the champions of thrones and altars. In spite of all this, Björnstjerne Björnson has his people behind him and about him, as perhaps no other poet, unless it be Victor Hugo. When his name is mentioned it is equivalent to hoisting the flag of Norway. In his noble qualities and in his faults, in his genius and in his weak points, he as thoroughly bears the stamp of Norway as Voltaire bore that of France. His boldness and his naïveté, his open-heartedness as a man, and the terseness of his style as an artist, the highly wrought and sensitive Norwegian popular sentiment, and the lively consciousness of the one-sidedness and the intellectual needs of his fellow-countrymen that has driven him to Scandinavianism, Pan-Germanism, and cosmopolitanism, – all this in its peculiar combination in him is so markedly national, that his personality may be said to offer a résumé of the entire people. None of his contemporaries so fully represent this people's love of home and of freedom, its self-consciousness, rectitude, and fresh energy. Indeed, just now he also exemplifies, on a large scale, the people's tendency to self-criticism, not that scourging criticism which chastises with scorpions, and whose representative in Norway is Ibsen, in Russia, Turgenief, but that sharp, bold expression of opinion begotten of love. He never calls attention to an evil in whose improvement and cure he does not believe, or to a vice which he despairs of seeing outrooted. For he has implicit faith in the good in humanity, and possesses entire the invincible optimism of a large, genial, sanguine nature.

According to his character, he is half chieftain of a clan, half poet. He unites the two forms most prominent in ancient Norway: that of the warrior, and that of the skald. In his intellectual constitution he is partly a tribune of the people, partly a lay preacher; in other words, he combines, in his public demeanor, the political and religious pathos of his Norwegian contemporaries, and this was yet more apparent after he broke loose from orthodoxy than it was before. Since his so-called apostasy, in fact, he has been a missionary and a reformer to a greater degree than ever.

He could have been the product of no other land than Norway, and far less than other authors could he thrive in any but his native soil. In the year 1880, when the rumor spread through the German press, that Björnson, weary of continual wrangling at home, was about to settle in Germany, he wrote to me, "In Norway will I live, in Norway will I lash and be lashed, in Norway will I sing and die." To hold such intimate relations with one's fatherland is most fortunate for a person who is sympathetically comprehended by this fatherland. And this is the case with Björnson. It is a matter dependent on conditions deeply rooted in his nature. He who cherishes so profound an enthusiasm for the reserved, solitary Michael Angelo, and who feels constrained, as a matter of course, to place him above Raphael, is himself a man of a totally different temperament, – one who is never lonely, even when most alone (as he has been since 1873 on his gard in remote Gausdal), but who is social to the core, or more correctly speaking, a thoroughly national character. He admires Michael Angelo because he reveres and understands the element of greatness, of profound earnestness, of mighty ruggedness in the human heart and in style; but he has nothing in common with the great Florentine's melancholy sense of isolation. He was born to be the founder of a party, and was, therefore, early attracted to enthusiastic and popular party leaders, such as the Dane Grundtvig and the Norwegian Wergeland, although wholly unlike either in his plastic, creative power. He is a man who needs to feel himself the centre, or rather the focus of sympathy, and insensibly he forms a circle about him, because his own nature is the résumé of a social union.

II

Björnstjerne Björnson was born Dec. 8, 1832, in a valley of the Dovre Mountains at a place called Kvikne, where his father was parish priest. The natural scenery of this region is cheerless, poor, and barren; the cliffs are mostly naked; here and there fir and birch may be dotted about, but the soil is so wretched, and the weather so severe, that the peasant can only count on a harvest one year out of every five. No grain-field would thrive in the vicinity of the parsonage. In the sparsely populated valley the farm-houses lay widely separated from one another. High banks of snow covered mountain and valley in the winter, surrounding every house with a bulwark, and inviting to trips in sledges and on snow-shoes. When the little Björnstjerne was six years old, his father was removed to Nässet in Romsdal, the region of all Norway most celebrated for its beauty. Lofty and majestic in their grandeur, the mountains rise up on either side of the valley with their boldly-formed pinnacles, which, as the plain sinks lower and lower, and the fjord is approached, gradually present themselves in more and more remarkable outlines to the eye. Very few Norwegian valleys can compare in wealth of varied beauty with Romsdal; even the flat character of the valley, as well as its unusual mountain formations, invest it with a peculiar stamp. The region was fertile and comparatively well populated; the farm-houses, most of them two stories high, were neat and pretty, and the inhabitants friendly, notwithstanding their silent reserve. The difference between this and the former place of residence was striking and impressive; it taught the child to reflect and to compare, to see the old in the light of the new, the new in the light of the old; to look upon himself with the eyes of others, and to become conscious of his own character. The grandeur of the surrounding nature and the busy, eager life of the people filled with glowing pictures the susceptible soul of the vigorous and richly endowed youth. Sent to the Latin school of the little town of Molde, he organized societies among the boys, and soon became a leader among his schoolmates. He read everything in the way of history and poetry he could get into his possession, the folk-lore tales of Asbjörnsen, the folk-songs of Landstad, – both but newly collected at that time, – the old Norse sagas of the kings, popular romances and poems, especially the works of Wergeland, which he devoured with passionate eagerness. At seventeen years of age he went to Christiania, in order to prepare for the entrance examination at the university. There he devoted himself chiefly to Danish literature, entered into intimate relations of friendship with the genial, although eccentric, Aasmund Vinje, who had already won a name as a dialect poet, as well as with the historian Ernst Sars, a young man of his own age, who did not become known to fame until later, and overflowing with youthful spirits, he led a life agitated by many and varied intellectual pursuits. The Danish theatre, at that time under the most careful management, interested him and exercised the most lively influence upon him. When, in the year 1852, he returned as a student to the parental roof, and passed there a year, the life of the people was revealed to him in a new light. He lived with the people, and wrote popular songs, which were often committed to memory and sung by the peasants.