Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

In the spirited and beautiful words of the poem the author has depicted his own temperament. The nature of Björnson, on the contrary, does not strive downward; its aspirations rise upward and outward. His genius has open arms.

Another contrast between the two poets may be felt in the Northern dramas penned by both during their first period. As a born dramatist, Ibsen has no bent, no inclination, for descriptions of nature. His principal dramatic characters, in his youth, were personifications of an idea, not modelled directly from nature, and in his almost exceptionally dramatic poems, exterior nature necessarily plays but an evanescent rôle. Even where nature is introduced by him, with most thrilling effect, as in the "ice-church" in "Brand," it is rather as a symbol than as a reality; the ice-church is the church in which he who forsakes the established churches runs great danger of meeting his end. The freer, more expansive spirit of Björnson dwells lingeringly on the natural surroundings of Norway and imparts the impressions received from them to his dramas. Let us give as an example of this the scene between Sigurd and the Finnish maiden, one of the most beautiful scenes that Björnson has written. When the maiden, announced by her long quavering shout of exultation, steps upon the stage, she brings with her the entire nature of the Northland, as her realm. The daughter of the Finnish chieftain reveals herself as a glimpse of the radiance of the Northern Lights; her words have the brilliant charm of the midnight sun; her glad love of life, of the sunshine of summer, her unreciprocated love for Sigurd, the delicate and transitory nature of her sorrow, – all this is a fragment of the living poetry of nature. Masterly, indeed, is the description of her appearance given by Sigurd.

"The Finnish Maiden.– Can you feel how beautiful it is here?"

"Sigurd.– Oh, yes! at times I can. When I stand before my cavern and gaze upon the eternal snow; – o'er it the tree-tops by twilight resemble weird spectres, each other approaching. Then you, on your snowshoes, come stormily down the mountains; all your dogs are around you, your troop follows after, and the size of all seems to grow three times larger. O'er your wild and blustering train, and this world of enchanting romance around it, the Northern Lights, with their brilliant colors and forms, now congregating, now spreading wide their splendor…"

This keen sense of nature is common to all Björnson's Norse characters of the olden time. He has imparted to them his own modern feelings. The little epic poem, "Amljot Gelline" (consisting of fifteen brief cantos), in particular, is unsurpassed for the beauty of its descriptions of nature. The song, "During the Springtime Inundation," describing the plunge which the mountain streams, swollen by the water from the melting snow, make into the valleys below, and the anxious huddling together in the mountain caves of the terrified wild beasts, paints in indelible colors an annual episode of Norwegian nature, transplanted some eight hundred years into the past, and which is consequently rendered wilder and more forcible than at the present day. The canto "Amljot's Yearning for the Ocean," in whose rhythm we feel the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea, is one of the most beautiful of all the poems that have ever portrayed the poetry of the sea. Byron had depicted the unruliness, the inexorableness, the fury of the ocean; Björnson paints the deep melancholy, the phlegmatic coldness, the ransoming freshness of the surging billows. Listen to the opening stanzas of the poem: —

"The sea I long for, the mighty ocean,That onward rolls in its calm majestic;With banks of billowy vapor freighted,To meet itself it doth ever wander.The sky may lower, the shore may signal,The sea recedes not, nor pauses ever;In summer nights, 'mid the storms of winter,Its billows murmur the self-same yearning."The sea I pine for, ah, yes! the ocean,With brow so cold tow'rd the heaven lifted.Behold how earth in the sea casts shadows,And whispering mirrors there all her sorrows!The sun tho' strokes it with warm, bright touches,Of life's delights utters words intrepid;Yet ever ice-cold, mournfully peacefulIt buries sorrow and consolation."The full moon draws it, the tempest rouses,Yet vain all effort to stay its current;Laid waste tho' the lowland, tho' mountains crumble,It grandly sweeps tow'rd eternity.Yet all it draws must its waves close over;What once is sunk in the sea never rises.No shrieks are heard, and reveal'd no message,The ocean's language there's none can interpret."Then seek the sea, go out on the ocean,All ye who never can know atonement!To all who sorrow it brings deliv'rance,Yet onward carries its own enigma.That singular bond with Death but consider,It gives him all but itself – the ocean."Thy melancholy allures me, O ocean!My feeble plans how they fade and dwindle;I swiftly banish my anxious yearnings;Thy cold, cold breath brings peace to my bosom."

The music of the waves here produces the effect of a magnificent cradle song. It is one to the dreaming hero whose great hope is that he may be able to see the nails give way in the planks of his ship, as death opens the portals to the stream of ransoming waters, and himself, covered by eternal silence, rest in the depths below, while in sublime moonlight nights, when the silver sheen of the moonbeams plays on the mighty surface, "the waves his name tow'rd the strand are rolling."

IV

Twice in his life Björnson has officiated as theatre-director: 1857-59 in Bergen, 1865-67 in Christiania. In the autumn of 1857, in pursuance of an invitation from Ole Bull, he undertook the management of the stage in the former provincial city, which is always alive with political and intellectual agitations, and he brought the theatre, which had greatly run down, to a high degree of excellence, while at the same time he passed happy days of his youth in the society of Ole Bull. As director of the stage in Christiania he had a successful but all too brief career. He himself possesses so many of the qualities of a great actor that he was well calculated to make an admirable manager; the scenic art of his native land owes much to him, for it was he who guided the first wavering efforts to make a national stage.

His experiences as a stage-manager have served him in very good stead as a play-writer; nevertheless, he has never attained technical perfection in this capacity. His dramas contain far more poetry than skilful manipulation. "Sigurd," the great trilogy, is not adapted to the stage, and, as far as I am aware, has never been performed.62 His vigorous and wildly passionate youthful drama, "Hulda," gains little or nothing by being put on the stage. Two of the plays of his first period, however, have met with a complete stage success. "Maria Stuart in Scotland" (1864) and "De Nygifte" (The Newly Married Couple, 1865).

"Maria Stuart" is a rich and powerful work, full of dramatic life, almost too violently intense. All the details of the plot are admirably linked together, – Rizzio's murder, Damley's death, and Bothwell's elopement with Maria; the finale alone is weak, or more correctly speaking, the drama has no finale. It is my belief that the poet succeeded so well simply because on Scottish soil he still felt himself encompassed by the atmosphere of Norway. These Scots of his are of Norse origin. Bothwell says: "Since the hour when my will struck root in events, I have seen it grow. One day in a tempest I sought refuge with my fleet among the Orkney Islands; the sea tossed us wildly, the clouds drifted o'er us like bits of wet sails, the billows broke with loud rumbling on the sharp and treeless shore. Ah, then I felt my kindred near at hand, the Norse Viking race that drifted in days of yore to this coast, and from which we are descended. Aye, it was a tree of ragged will, that took root in the rocks, but 'neath the shelter of this tree a people build to-day." In this Norwegian-Scottish world, the poet feels perfectly at home, and the characters, created by him without any breach with local coloring, have traits very nearly akin to the forms from the Norse Middle Ages that he was so well accustomed to portray. The most marked of the main characters are the Puritan John Knox, the gloomy yet pleasure-loving, wildly energetic Bothwell, and the weak, boyishly revengeful and unworthily humble Damley; Bothwell a genuine Renaissance personality, Damley almost too modern. Maria Stuart herself is not so successfully drawn; the traits of her character are too effeminately indistinct. She is conceived as a being, the mysterious foundation of whose nature is revealed in two opposite poles, – that of absolute feminine weakness, and that of absolute feminine strength. Her fate is dependent on her nature, so far as this weakness is the cause of her power over men, and this strength is useless in the affairs given her to manage in that violent age. She is, however, by virtue of Northern idealism, by virtue of the innate modesty of the poet who is a priest's son, entirely too lacking in the sensuous element, moreover, too passive to be the heroine of a drama. She is delineated less through what she says and does than through enthusiastic or deprecatory mention and the direct influence exercised by her personality. She is enveloped in a cloud of adjectives designating her character, hurled at her in masses by the other characters in the drama. "Maria Stuart" owes its origin to a period in the progress of Björnson's development, when he had a tendency, perhaps owing to Kierkegaard's influence, to describe his characters psychologically, instead of allowing their natures to unfold of themselves without any commentary. All the personages in these dramas are psychologists; they study one another, explain one another's temperaments, and experiment with one another. Even the page, William Taylor, understands and describes the spiritual condition of Damley, as a physician understands and draws a diagnosis of a disease. Murray and Damley paint themselves, Lethington portrays Bothwell and Murray, Maria queries about the key to Rizzio's character, Knox about that to Damley's; indeed, the murder of Rizzio is a psychological experiment performed by Damley on Maria, in view of winning her back through terror, as he has failed to win her through love. While all the characters thus think like psychologists, they all speak like poets, and this Shakespearean splendor of diction, so true to life because the people of the Renaissance period, being poetic throughout in their feelings, used a flowery, highly figurative language, enhances the charm with which the profound originality of the main characters invests the drama.

The little drama, "The Newly Married Couple," treats of a very simple yet universal human relation, the severing of the ties that bind a young wife to the parental home, the collision in the soul of a young woman between the inbred and familiar affection for her parents, and the yet new and feeble love for her husband, – a revolution, or rather an evolution, which is preceded by the natural conditions and the pangs of a spiritual birth. Under ordinary, normal circumstances the significance of this breach is not brought into such sharp prominence, because it is accepted as something which cannot be otherwise, and which frequently bears the stamp of a release rather than of a rupture. If, however, the relations be conceived as a trifle less normal, if the affection of the parents be uncommonly egotistical or tender, and if the love of the good and dutiful daughter for her husband be far less developed than her well-cultivated feeling of reverence for her father and mother, there arises a problem to be solved, a dramatic collision, and a struggle with an uncertain dénouement. It is greatly to Björnson's credit and honor that he has grasped this idea.

Its execution suffers under a twofold defect. The fact is, the tone of this drama, as well as of "Maria Stuart," is weakened, in the first place, by excessive Northern modesty, and in the second place, by the psychological caprice of the author. Necessarily the question forces itself upon the spectator: Is Laura, in the beginning of the play, Axel's wife, in the full sense of the word, or is she not? She must be his wife, for her coldness is not of a character that would explain the opposite; and yet, how can it be that she is his wife? for if she were, the difficulties would be removed, and tenderness would gradually take effect without all this noise in the presence of witnesses. A still more serious objection to the plan of the little drama is the following: How can Axel, when he has already, by a most energetic effort, tom Laura from the parental home, be weak and stupid enough to permit this home, in the form of Mathilde, to accompany Laura on her journey? Without Mathilde, everything would, of course, have been far more easily managed and have gone far more smoothly. To be sure, we are told at the end of the play that without her the husband and wife would never have truly found each other. This is, however, by no means obvious, and is not at all happy. The poetic task proper would have been to show how the young couple, without any outside aid, became truly wedded; it is a very poor expedient to have a dea ex machina write an anonymous novel, which startles Axel and Laura by its treatment of their position, and drives them into each other's arms. In this I see a token of the epoch in which this little drama arose. The air was filled with the Kierkegaard ideas. The method of the natural sciences (observation and essay), applied to the intercourse between one human being and another, the psychologic experiment that plays so large a rôle with Kierkegaard, and that became so expansive in "Maria Stuart," is represented in "The Newly Married Couple" by the household friend Mathilde. The manner in which love and passion are treated throughout this drama is peculiar to that period in the spiritual life of Björnson, and of Norwegian-Danish literature in general. Northern people took very little interest at that time in the tender passion for itself alone; the emotions were studied and portrayed in their relation to morality and religion. The representation of love before marriage, or outside of marriage, was looked upon as trivial or frivolous, and what was demanded of the poet was conjugal love, which Kierkegaard in his "Either – Or" had extolled as by far the higher love. The love that in "The Newly Married Couple" is pointed out as great, is described as the debt the wife owes her husband, and is held up before her eyes, from every side, as that which is chiefly required of her. It is no plant of free, wild growth; it unfolds itself in the hot-house of duty, nurtured by the tenderness of Axel, artificially forced into growth by the jealousy, unrest, and dread of loss with which Mathilde heats the hot-house, A little French folk-song says: —

"Ah! si l'amour prenait racine,J'en planterais dans mon jardin,J'en planterais, j'en semeraisAux quatre coins,J'en donnerais aux amoureuxQui n'en out point."

These lines have always come into my mind whenever I have read or seen "The Newly Married Couple." Yet the fault lies, perhaps, in my partiality; I love beautiful, great Eros, but I find no satisfaction in those little, pale, erotic offshoots that have to be wearisomely nurtured from the bottle. The public has not shared my opinion, however, for few plays have had so marked a success on the stage, or lived through so many editions in book form.

V

An enterprising Danish bookseller, some time during the sixth decade of the present century, issued a calendar, for which he solicited short vignette poems by well-known authors, each one of whom was requested to choose his own month. When the man applied to Björnson, the latter wrote: —

"Young April's praise I'll sing!The old in April falleth,The new is firmly planted;Its turmoil wild appalleth, —And yet, if peace were granted,Nor will, nor deed, 'twould bring."Yes, April's praise I'll sing!Because it stormeth, sweepeth,Because, with forces living,It smileth, melteth, weepeth,Because it is life-giving, —For summer's born in spring."

It would scarcely have been possible to give a better characterization of his entrance into his own first period. The beautiful novel, "Fiskerjenten" (The Fisher Maiden), 1868, which, less idealistic than the author's tales of peasant life, yet more nearly approaching his later style, conveyed in the poem introduced into it, called "The Young Viking," a remarkable presentation of the poet's own first struggles and his speedily gained mastership. Although Björnson has not written a large number of lyric poems, and is no correct versifier, he has, nevertheless, accomplished some ever-memorable and imperishable results in the domain of lyrics. His popular songs are noted for their purity and genuineness. His patriotic poems have become national songs. His few old Norse descriptions or monologues have hit that style of the ancient North which Oehlenschläger and Tegnér never attained. Read in the drama "Hulda" the little poem written in dialect, which Gunnar sings, and of which Lobedanz, the German translator, appropriately remarks, "In the Norwegian summer, which knows no nightingale, winter has a terror-inspiring influence as it appears in the song of Nils Finn, a sort of ballad that may be ranked with Goethe's "Erl-King." It is the story of a little boy who has lost his snow-shoes, and who, dragged downward by the powers of the deep, is swallowed up in the snow. This simple occurrence, however, is represented with a power of imagination that renders it immortal, especially the concluding lines, in which the two long snow-shoes are represented as being all that was left behind, are most impressive and awe-inspiring. Let me here cite the last stanzas, viz.: —

"The rock laughs with scorn, snow covers its side,But Nils knit his fist, and swore that it lied.'Have a care!' was heard below."But the avalanche yawns, the clouds break asunder,Thought Nils Finn: 'My grave I see yonder.''Art ready?' was heard below."Two shoes stood in the snow and looked around,They saw not a thing, and heard not a sound.'Where is Nils?' was heard below."

It is only needful to study a few lines of Björnson's patriotic poems in order to comprehend fully why it was they became national songs. Let me choose by way of example four lines of the most peculiarly Björnsonic national song, which has completely supplanted the older national songs of Norway. The lines read as follows, in the metrical translation: —

"Yes, we love with fond devotionNorway's mountain domes,Rising storm-lashed, o'er the ocean,With their thousand homes."63

Literally they read thus: "Yes, we love this country, as it rises furrowed, weather-beaten, from the ocean, with its thousand homes." It would be impossible to reproduce in a more accurate, genial way, the impression which the coast of Norway makes upon the son of the land when he approaches it from the ocean.

Among all the shorter compositions of Björnson the most eminent is the monologue "Bergliot." It is the wail of a chieftain's wife over her assassinated husband, Einar Tambarskelver, and her only son who lies slain at his side. I know of nothing in the modern reproduction of old Norse poetry that has ever made so deep an impression on me as the refrain-like recurrence of the words with which Bergliot addresses the driver of the cart on which she had had the dead body of her husband lifted: —

"Drive slowly; for thus drove Einar ever —Even so will home be reached soon enough."

The first line represents with wonderful simplicity the calm and proud dignity of the slain chieftain, the second embraces in the fewest possible words the profound bitterness of the desolated life.

VI

This eminence was early reached by Björnson. When but thirty-one years of age he had written all the best works of his first period, and they were even then viewed by the public as a completed whole. No one could overlook his magnificent endowments; it produced rather a painful effect, however, that no development of them could be detected. His creative power for a long time remained centered in one and the same point; but his views of life did not expand; they remained childish and narrow. Sometimes he could actually be trivial. Now and then he wrote poems that almost had the tone and coloring of Northern songs of the people's school-teacher style. Too strong traces of the influence of Grundtvig could be detected in them. It is to the credit of this great man (1783-1872), the intellectual awakener of the Northern peasant classes, that he gave a vigorous impulse to the education of the people through the establishment of numerous peasants' high schools. For a leader of the people, however, the culture represented by his high schools was not adequate, and for a long time Björnson vainly endeavored to make poetic progress in the wooden shoes of the Grundtvigians. He kept himself, for the most part, at a distressing distance from the life and the ideas of his contemporaries. Or rather, if he did represent the ideas of his contemporaries, it was involuntarily; they were brought forward in the theatrical costumes of the ancient Norsemen or of the Scottish Middle Ages. In "Sigurd Slembe," Helga and Frakark discuss in the year 1127 the relation between the immortality of the individual and that of the race in phrases which remind us too strongly of the year 1862; and the same chieftains, whose minds are filled with almost modern political reflections, who use such expressions as vocation and fundamental law, and speak of establishing order on a foundation without law, etc., have the imprisoned Sigurd, from motives of revenge, broken limb by limb on the wheel; in other words, they are guilty of an action which would presuppose a far more barbarous inner life than they have otherwise displayed. People that express themselves in terms indicative of so much culture do not break their enemies on the wheel; they scourge them with their tongues.

To this lack of unity in passion and thought was added the unhappy necessity of the poet to so group and combine his principal dramatic forms that the mantle of the orthodox church faith should be draped about them at the moment when the curtain falls. In "Maria Stuart" the form of John Knox is not subject to the dramatic irony that governs the other personages. Björnson does not reserve to himself a poetic supremacy over him: for Knox is destined to step forth from the theatrical framework at the conclusion of the play, with the pathos of the poet on his lips, and, as the representative of the people, receive the political inheritance of Maria. The vigorous combats in "Sigurd," as well as the passionate emotions in "Maria Stuart," find their outlet in a hymn. The action in both dramas is brought to so fine a point that in one it flows into the crusader's song of the pious Danish poet Ingemann, in the other into the mystic hymn of the Puritans. Gradually it began to appear as though the once so rich vein of the poet was well nigh drained. His later stories ("The Railroad and the Churchyard" and "A Problem of Life") bore no comparison to his earlier ones, and the drama "Sigurd Jorsalfar" (Sigurd the Crusader) could be compared quite as little to the older Norse dramas of the poet. The last cantos of "Amljot Gelline," which were written several years later than the rest, are decidedly inferior to those composed in the first glow of inspiration. Evidently no new ideas germinated in Björnson's mind. People began to ask if the history of this author was to be that of so many Danish authors who had grown mute in the prime of their manhood because their genius lacked the capacity to shed its chrysalis. Björnson had apparently exhausted his original intellectual capital. The public wondered if he could acquire new wealth, as the others had been unable to do.

These years are indelibly stamped on my memory. The mind of youth experienced somewhat of a pang in comparing the literary condition of the greater part of Europe with that of the North. There was a sense of being shut out from the cultured life of Europe. In Denmark, the elder generation, through its repugnance to everything German, had interrupted the intellectual intercourse with Germany; the canal through which European civilized thought had hitherto been received was obstructed; at the same time, French culture was shunned as frivolous, and English culture was but rarely comprehended, as the English language was excluded from the course of studies in the schools of learning. In Denmark people looked to Norway as the land of literary revival; in Norway all eyes were turned to Denmark as the land of older civilization, and people scarcely noticed the lull in Danish culture. Now while intellectual life faded and drooped, as a plant becomes blighted in a damp place, the cultivated classes of both countries believed themselves to be the salt of Europe. People did not know that the foreign nations they had dreamed of rejuvenating through their idealism, their Grundtvigianism, their faith, had taken a great start in advance of them, especially in literary culture. In the leading social circles of the Scandinavian countries, people spoke of David Strauss and Feuerbach, as the most narrow-minded circles of Germany had spoken of them in the period from 1840 to 1850; Stuart Mill, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer were scarcely known by name, and there was not the slightest conception of the development of English poetry from Shelley to Swinburne. Modern French literature was condemned without any conception of the significance of the fact that the drama and the romance in France had long since forsaken historical and legendary material, and had grasped subjects from the immediate present, the only ones a poet can observe with his own eyes and study. People scarcely dared raise for themselves so much as a corner of the curtain that concealed the contemporary world from their gaze.