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.[3] 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 semerais
Aux quatre coins,
J'en donnerais aux amoureux
Qui 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.