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.
Returned to Christiania, he came before the public as a critic,
especially as a dramatic critic, wrote with all the vehemence of
genial youth, with all the injustice of a rising poet, and gained
many enemies. In his reading at this period, he gave the preference
to Danish thinkers of the epoch in literature then drawing to a
close,--Heiberg, Sibbern, Kierkegaard,--and a little later he became
gradually absorbed in the emotional world of Grundtvig. The latter's
doctrine of a "cheerful Christianity" attracted Björnson as the
antithesis of the gloomy pietism of his native land, the strong
faith in the lofty endowments and mission of the Scandinavian North,
which he found in Grundtvig, could not but captivate this typically
northern youth who was so wholly unacquainted with Europe. Until a
very few years ago traces of Grundtvig's influence could be detected
in him. Even at the present time it is not wholly obliterated. In
those early days he found within the boundaries of Grundtvigianism
all that which later, when he had torn himself free from the magic
spell of Grundtvig's sphere, he sought and found, outside of these
limits,--humanity in its highest freedom and beauty. This was the
result of the narrowness of his horizon. The conclusions of modern
philosophy and social science had not been introduced in those days
into the university of Christiania. Valuable results were accomplished
in specialties, but intellectual intercourse with Europe was otherwise
cut off here as well as in Denmark. In fact there was no European
consciousness at the university. The priest's son from a retired
village, the scholar from a small city, was not removed, even in the
metropolis, from the circles of variously shaded orthodoxy. Hence the
circumscribed, sometimes childish element in Björnson's first works;
hence the self-sufficient naïveté, so unique of its kind, which at this
period constitutes his strength as a poet.
A few trips into the neighboring countries,--first of all his
participation in the expedition of the students to Upsala, in 1856,
immediately thereupon a prolonged residence in Copenhagen,--brought
his poetic talents to maturity. He had already begun his little drama
"De Nygifte" (The Newly Married Couple), but had laid it aside with a
keen sense of the inadequacy of his powers, not to resume work on it
until ten years later. In brief lyric poems of the genuine folk-song
character, he had calmed his creative impulse without satisfying it.
He now wrote the firstling of his dramatic muse, "Mellem Slagene"
(Between the Battles), an earnest little play in one act, that treats
of an episode from the Norwegian civil war of the early Middle Ages,
and whose terse, ragged prose style, which formed the sharpest
contrast to the sonorous, verbose iambics of the Danish dramas of the
Oehlenschläger school, inaugurated a new form of the Northern style.
The play was rejected by Heiberg, at that time director of the royal
theatre at Copenhagen, was first produced on the stage in Christiania,
and was not printed until some time afterward. How far Björnson and the
entire later poetic literature have progressed on the path thus broken,
can be best observed by witnessing to-day a theatrical performance of
this little drama, which on its first appearance repelled, because
of the supposed wildness of its materials and the harshness of their
treatment, and which now actually seems to us quite idyllic and by far
too sentimental.
Meanwhile, his mission to write novels of peasant life became even
clearer to Björnson, and after publishing anonymously a few shorter
stories, by way of experiment, he gave the public, in 1857, his
"Synnöve Solbakken." This literary _débût_ was a victory, and the
reception of the little volume in Denmark, whose verdict is usually
the decisive one for the poetic creations of Norway, especially tended
to make it a decided triumph. The fresh originality, the novelty of
the materials, and the manner in which they were handled, does not
sufficiently explain this success. It was the result of the remarkable
harmony of the book, with all that was desired and demanded of a poetic
work by a portion of the reading world of the day. The national liberal
party of that time (the party name was first adopted in Germany at a
later period) absolutely determined the literary taste; it demanded
something of a primeval Northern, vigorously national, ancient
Scandinavian character, and at the same time,--an element which seemed
curiously at variance with this,--Christian ethics, combined with an
innocent idyllic tone, a poetry which banished Titanic defiance and
modern passion with equal severity from its sphere. In the eyes of
the national liberal party, passion was unpoetic and melancholy was
affectation; the party of intelligence, as it is modestly called and
still calls itself, deemed everything European suspicious, and believed
that the far North alone had preserved that moral purity and freshness
which was to regenerate the decaying civilization of Europe, and as
for modern ideas, in the strictest sense of the words, they simply
had no existence for the blissful ignorance of this party. Björnson's
stories of peasant life, without considering their great and true
merits, almost seemed like the fulfilment of the party programme. The
circumstances of the poet's youth, and his early reading had led him
to regard peasant life in the light of the old Norse sagas; while he
had gained through his familiarity with the life and thought of the
peasants, on the other hand, a comprehension of the ancient sagas.
His first long story, as well as many of his very short ones (as "The
Father," "The Eagle's Nest," etc.), produced a revival of the old
saga style, while the materials, in conformity with the wishes of the
people, were popular, without being characterized by sharply pronounced
realism. In Germany Teutonists alone are familiar with the Icelandic
sagas; in the Scandinavian countries, these in many respects admirable
and almost always interesting narratives, have not only been popular
since the revival of the national sentiment, but have been surrounded
by a certain halo of glory, as venerable monuments of a great past.
Beyond all else their style has been held in high esteem. And this
style, calm, epic in nature, always presenting a clear picture that in
the antique time sprang into existence as the form suitable for the
narration of discord, murder, revenge for bloodshed, arson, adventurous
voyages and deeds of valor, was preserved by Björnson, or rather it
was revived by him, and through its grandeur ennobled and exalted
the subject-matter, the love life of young Norwegian peasant lads and
lasses. The temperament of the poet was so thoroughly akin to that of
the ancient story-teller, and the human race depicted by him was so
completely in accord with that represented in ancient saga lore, that
in spite of everything a harmonious whole was produced.
Björnson belongs to those fortunate beings who are not compelled to
seek a form, because they possess one of their own. His earliest novel
is a thoroughly ripe fruit. In his first venture he is classic. He
is not one of those poets who throughout a long life are continually
increasing the perfection of the artistic form of their works, and are
unable to invest the latter with inner equilibrium until after hard
struggles with refractory materials have been undergone. His career has
not been like that of so many others, a mountain ascent amid clouds of
mist, crowned only with a few sunny hours at the top; it has rather
been an upward climbing, during which beautiful prospects have been
disclosed to the eye at every stage. Indeed, his development has been
of such a nature that even at the outset, with his original comparative
narrowness or poverty of ideas, he grasped the highest artistic
perfection of form, and eventually imparted to his works an ever richer
ideal life and an ever increasing knowledge of the human heart. In thus
enlarging their scope, however, he has never marred their poetic worth,
but he has frequently somewhat sacrificed their plastic and classic
equilibrium.
Nevertheless, it must not be thought that Björnson's first works were
hailed with the unanimous applause which people now often profess to
believe they received. There are many individuals to be found to-day in
the Scandinavian countries, to whom it is satisfactory to point out
some work of Björnson which they have always praised, in order that
they may, with all the greater appearance of impartiality, censure
his later creations. His first novels and dramas formed too strong a
contrast with all that the public had been accustomed to admire to be
received without opposition, and many people of literary culture who
had been in hearty sympathy with the previously prevailing poesy, could
not but feel their æsthetic creed to be violated by them. In Denmark,
indeed, a great and rich school of poetry, whose influence had extended
far into Norway, was on the eve of its decline. The sonorous pathos of
Oehlenschläger still rang with its musical accents in every ear, his
representations of the antiquity and early middle ages of the North
seemed to men of the old school, even if outwardly less true, at least
inwardly more true than the writings of Björnson; the unsurpassed
elegance and grace of Henrik Hertz had enfeebled their taste for
primitive simplicity, and finally people missed in the new Norwegian
poetry the lofty philosophic culture which Heiberg had accustomed the
public to require of the poet and to find in his works. I recollect
distinctly how strange and novel "Synnöve Solbakken" and "Arne" seemed
to me on their first appearance.
The opposing voices were hushed by the healthy taste for all that
was genuine which has almost everywhere been preserved by the great
reading-world, but the rapidity of the success was dependent on the
circumstance that the ruling Scandinavian party took the new poetry
under its protection and proclaimed the poet's fame abroad with a
flourish of trumpets. In those days the adherents of the national
liberal party of the three Scandinavian countries were favorably
inclined to the peasant in literature. People loved the peasant in the
abstract; the real, concrete peasant was yet unknown to them. They had
granted him the right of suffrage, they had felt convinced that he
would continue throughout all time to permit himself to be guided by
those "who had conferred on him the gift of freedom," and they lived in
hopes that he would never use this "freedom" for any other purpose than
to elect and honor his city benefactors. For this reason the peasant
at that time was still called by the organs of the great cities the
healthy pith of the people; in him was seen the scion of the knights of
antiquity; he was celebrated in song and addressed in flattering terms.
Works of fiction which glorified his life with extreme delicacy, and at
the same time in a new and elevated style, were sure of an enthusiastic
reception in Denmark, especially when they originated in one of the
sister-countries, which stood almost nearer to the heart of every true
Scandinavian than his own fatherland.
The blasé citizen of Copenhagen had, moreover, the same predilection
for the peasant novels of Björnson that in the past century had been
cherished for pastoral romances and pastoral plays. The world had now
become too critical to desire shepherdesses with red crooks, and lambs
with red silk ribbons about their necks; but a substitute was found in
the Norwegian lads and lasses, whose emotional life was as thoroughly
refined and deep as that of a student or a young lady of the higher
circles.
The peasant novel was in itself no new variety. The Jutland village
and heath pictures of Steen Steensen Blicher began the series; they
appeared about twenty years earlier than the first village tales of
Berthold Auerbach, who, however, had been unacquainted with them, as
no German translation of them had been published until toward the
middle of the fourth decade of the century. It was Auerbach, who, after
the way had been pointed out by Immermann in his "Oberhof," first in
Germany treated the story of peasant life as an independent variety
of the novel; for the first time a German poet became absorbed in
the events and characters of the quiet villages. But several years
before Auerbach's first attempt the great French novelist, George
Sand, had achieved success in this field. She who had been born in
the country, and who had passed beyond the stormy period of her life,
felt an impulse to venture on pastoral poems, and she gave to France
in "La mare au diable," "François le champi," etc., a little series of
refined, ideally executed rural scenes.
Neither the "Village Tales of the Black Forest," nor the country
stories of George Sand were known to Björnson when he made his début.
He had learned nothing from Auerbach, nor had he anything in common
with him. Two marked peculiarities distinguish the Norwegian peasant
novels from the German. Auerbach is an epic poet; he depicts rural
life in its entire breadth, he shows us the peasant in his daily
occupations in the field and in the stable, enables us to observe his
half-lazy, half-dignified sluggishness, his state of bondage in manners
and customs, his daily routine. Björnson is neither decidedly an epic
poet nor a dramatist proper; his strength lies in producing dramatic
effects within epic limits; and this is the reason why everything
with him is so brief and so concise. The fact is, exterior matters
are related by him solely for the sake of the heart history for which
they form a setting. Another distinction is the following: the rural
tales of Auerbach are written from a view of life which the poet does
not share with the peasant, which he does not hold in common with his
hero and heroine. Auerbach did not write from the standpoint of a
childlike mind and a childlike faith. He was a man of learning, and a
thinker; he possessed the rich and many-sided culture of the German
mind of his young days. He had been a pupil of Schelling; he had made
his début with a novel about Spinoza, whose works he had translated,
and whose views of life he had made his own, to proclaim them abroad
as long as he lived. To be sure, he had remodelled Spinozaism to
suit his own needs and sympathies,--for it is, indeed, more than
doubtful whether Spinoza would have especially warmed to the idea of
making a hero of that finite being, that circumscribed intelligence,
called the villager,--but he accepted the doctrines of Spinoza as
the gospel of nature, the philosopher himself as the apostle of the
religion of nature, the worship of nature. Auerbach was partial to the
representation of the peasant, because the latter was to him a bit
of nature, and it delighted him to seek in the unsophisticated soul
the germ of that life philosophy which to him seemed the only true
philosophy, the one which was destined to gain a speedy triumph over
all others. Let the reader observe in his classic novel "Barfüssele"
(Little Barefoot) how the bold young peasant maiden, far from heeding
the command to offer her left cheek to any one who might smite her
on the right, passes through life with clenched fists, and neither
deems herself in the slightest degree to blame, nor suffers on that
account the least humiliation. The spirit pervading these books is the
political passion of Germany before the March revolution, to elevate
the common man to a comprehension of the political and religious
ideal of the educated classes. Quite different is the relation of
the narrator to his materials in Björnson's peasant tales. In all
essentials the poet was grounded in the same views of life as his
heroes; his writings are no effusions of a philosophic mind. A poetic
and artistic genius, no superior intellect addresses the reader from
these pages. Hence the remarkable unity of sentiment and tone.
The excellencies were specifically poetic; the tenderest sentiment was
cast in the hardest form; the most refined, versatile observation was
united with a lyric ardor which permeated the whole and burst into a
freer course in numerous fugitive child, folk, and love songs. A vein
of fundamental romance hovered over the narrative. The new order of
novel admitted of being preluded without any disharmony by a nursery
story, as in "Arne," in which plants conversed and vied with one
another in their efforts. Notwithstanding the dry realism of certain
of the characters, it was so idyllic that little detached stories, in
which woodland sprites played a rôle, became wedded to the universally
prevailing tone without causing any breach with the spirit of the
general action. Björnson was a good observer and had amassed a store
of little traits from which he constructed his tales. When his Arne is
asked, "How do you manage when you make songs?" he replies, "I hoard
up the thoughts that others are in the habit of letting go." Björnson
might have given the same answer himself. And yet sagas, folk-songs,
and folk-tales were the currents through whose intermingling his
art-form became crystallized. He did not give it isolated grandeur, but
kept himself through it in rapport with the popular mind.
"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 take
Over 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!"[2]
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.