Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century

"Synnöve Solbakken" was the plastic harmony within the limitation of Norwegian life, and the hero Thorbjörn was the type of the vigorous, stubborn youth, whose nature could only ripen to maturity through calming, soothing influences. "Arne," on the other hand, represented the lyric, yearning tendency of the people, that impulse of the viking blood which has been transformed into desire for travel, and the hero the type of the tender-hearted, dreamy youth who needed to be steeled in order to become a man. Much of the deepest, most elementary propensity of the Norwegian people, much of the peculiar youthful yearning of the poet himself, was committed to Arne's principal song which has become so celebrated. A sigh from the heart of the people may be heard in the following lines: —

"Shall I the journey never takeOver the lofty mountains?Must my poor thoughts on this rock-wall break?Must it a dread, ice-bound prison make,Shutting at last in around me,Till for my tomb it surround me?"Forth will I! forth! Oh, far, far, away,Over the lofty mountains!I will be crushed and consumed if I stay;Courage tow'rs up and seeks the way;Let it its flight now be taking,Not on this rock-wall be breaking!"61

The yearning expressed in this poem is that which drove the sea-kings of old to the West and to the South, that which led Holberg, the great founder of the Norwegian-Danish literature, to roam over half of Europe on foot, and which at the present day is manifested in the emigration of so many Norwegian artists of all kinds.

If the two larger stories "Synnöve" and "Arne" formed such perfect complements of each other, the third story "En glad Gut" (A Happy Boy) was like a refreshing breeze bringing deliverance from the brooding melancholy that oppresses the Norwegian mind, and sweeping it away in the name of a healthy temperament. This production contained the joyous message of unsophisticated vital powers and love of life; it was like a fresh song, bubbling over with laughter and purifying the atmosphere.

III

Then followed dramas and poems. The strong personality of Björnson gradually worked its way out of the swaddling-clothes of the national mind. In "Between the Battles," "Sigurd Slembe" (Sigurd the Bad), and "Amljot Gelline," will be found the same grand type, the hero born to be a chieftain, created to be the benefactor of his people, a being alike powerful and noble, but whose rights are withheld from him, and who is compelled, owing to the injustice under which he suffers, to cause a large amount of evil on his way to the goal, although he desires only good. Whole towns are left in flames behind Sverre, wherever he may fare. He tells of this with the bitterest anguish in "Between the Battles." "I know a chieftain," he exclaims, "who longed to be a blessing to his country, but who became its curse. He shudders with horror at his own wretched fate, and would have fled from all the hideous corpses that stare him in the face from border to border of the land; would have fled as an exile from his own hereditary kingdom, had there not been those who clung to his mantle. So he is led, as by an inexorable fate, from one bloody deed of violence to another, from conflagration to conflagration, over reeking corpses and heaps of ruins, while shrieks and wails of lamentation pursue him, and all hell is let loose about him, and people say the devil walks at his side; in truth, some say he is the devil! I know – ah! I know that while those about him are slaughtering one another like so many cattle, he has not the heart to lay his hand on a single man, lest he should intensify his own misery. And masses are sung before the battle, and masses after the battle; he strives to make atonement and to heal; he brings relief to the suffering and assuages ills; to those who ask it of him he gives peace; but there is one to whom it will be long ere he can bring peace, and that is himself." Sigurd, the hero of the trilogy "Sigurd Slembe," is despised and persecuted because he who desired only justice for himself and happiness for Norway, betrayed into the hands of his enemies by his half-brother, the feeble-minded Harold Gille, becomes the murderer of the latter. He had gone to his brother, after long renunciation and bitter inward struggles, with the best intention in the world, and the most ardent desire to come to a peaceful understanding with him, and he leaves him, having escaped from the guard to whom the murder was entrusted, "a king in the armor of revenge, with the eye of despair and a flaming sword." Amljot, who in the innermost depths of his soul is so good, so humble, becomes an incendiary and a pillager until the day when, as the knight of Olaf, he meets his death at Stiklestad. These characters are deeply rooted in the poet's soul. He had early encountered passionate opposition, had felt himself misunderstood and hated by his opponents. With his indomitable ambition, with the vehemence that was inherent in his nature, and the tenderness that belonged to his temperament, he felt himself wondrously akin to those saga forms, and whenever he was conscious of being misunderstood and unjustly scorned by his people, he laid the burden of his longing to elevate this people, and to harmonize them with himself, and his consciousness that with all his good designs he had estranged his people from him at times, upon the characters of these old chieftains; this Sigurd, for instance, who when excited becomes a changed being, "hard as a steel-spring, bounding without a footfall o'er the floor, with flashing, evil eyes, and voice that seemed to come from a long, dark passage," but who, nevertheless, conceals within his soul a veritable horn of plenty, overflowing with magnificent plans for the public weal. Profoundly, indeed, must Björnson have suffered in his youth to be able to write Sigurd's soliloquy in the winter night, or the one toward the end of the drama, beginning with the words, "The Danes have forsaken me? Lost the battle? Thus far – and never farther?" in which mighty plans, – to assemble an army, to sail far away, to become a merchant, a crusader, – arise with giddy swiftness and are rejected, until the impression of approaching dissolution again obtrudes itself. Then the words "Thus far – and never farther," return no longer as a question, but refrain-like as an answer. Even in the midst of despair love of fatherland, which in this case is love of the enemy, thus finds utterance: "Ah, this beautiful land was not by me to be governed. Great is the wrong I have done it! How, ah! how was this possible? When absent I saw in ev'ry cloud thy mountains; I yearned for home like a child for Christmas; and yet I sought not my home, – and I gave thee wound on wound."

Great personality with Björnson is not encased in Michael-Angelo-like pride; it works its way out of the national spirit only to strive, yearningly, to return to it again. Its most ardent desire is to become united with this spirit, and profound, indeed, is the tragedy where this union is prevented.

In this point Björnson forms the sharpest contrast to the man who is his peer among contemporary Norwegian poets, Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen is solitary by nature. "In distant lands I rest lonely," he cries. These lines, which are the refrain of the well-known poem, "Langt borte" (In Distant Lands), written on the occasion of the trip of the Scandinavian students to Upsala in 1875, form the motto of his life. He penetrates the depths of the earth, like his miner.

"Make way for me, thou heavy hammer,To the heart's most secret chamber."

Ibsen seeks the solitary silence of night. In his poem "Lysræd" (Afraid of Light), he declares that as a child he was afraid of being in the dark; but that everything has become changed, the glare of daylight now bewilders him, the noise of life makes him weak and ready to swoon away. Only hid beneath the shelter of night's veil of terror, his will is armed for deeds of daring. Without the cover of night he is helpless, and he well knows that if ever he accomplishes a great work, it will be a deed of darkness.

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.: —