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.