(1851-)
Arne Garborg is one of the most potent forces in the new school of
Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is
more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly
different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the
result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the
foundations of a literature essentially Norse.
The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social
conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates
the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this
social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he
himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental
idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the
paths. Where Bjoernson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life
might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the
outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a
storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material
way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had
held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a
consequence of his books.
Arne Garborg was born at Jaederen, in the southwestern part of Norway,
January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of
his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village
schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom
religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived,
Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with
conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction
led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of
his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he
reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was
extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only
models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong
tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a
school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in
1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student
was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and
indeed sometimes actual want.
He had previously, in Risoer, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a
small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school
affairs; and a year later, in Tvedestrand, he established the
Tvedestrand Post. This experience as county editor and printer had
qualified him for newspaper work, and in 1877 he became connected with
the Aftenbladet of Christiania. The same year he founded the
Fedraheimen, "a weekly paper for the Norse people." This was really
the beginning of his literary career, although besides his early
enterprises in journalism he had as a student contributed occasional
articles to the newspapers, and had already published his first book,
a critical essay on Ibsen's 'Emperor and Galilean.'
The attempt made by Ivar Aasen to establish in Norway a national
language through a normalization of the peasant dialects, found in
Garborg one of its warmest supporters. Discarding Danish as a literary
medium, he advocated the use of the strong Norse, and the Fedraheimen
appeared as the organ of the new movement. Garborg wrote a book upon
the subject in the year after the establishment of his journal, and
ever since, by precept and practice, he has been the chief
propagandist of the new speech.
His first novel, 'En Fritenkjar' (A Freethinker), appeared anonymously
in the Fedraheimen in 1878. The subject of the story was one of the
vital questions of the day, the conflict between iron-bound dogmatism
and rational thought; a theme now threadbare with much handling, but
then startlingly new. The author's early training and his own
environment of intolerant theology supplied material for the story.
The hero of the tale, the man who dared to think for himself, was
looked upon as a criminal, to be ranked with house-breakers and
thieves. The ostracism which he brought upon himself was but the just
punishment for his crimes. The Freethinker, treated as a moral leper,
is driven from his home and goes abroad to expiate his sin of
unorthodoxy. In later years he returns to his native land, to find
most of his acquaintances dead. Of his family only one still lives,
and that is his son, who has become a clergyman!
Garborg's second romance, 'Bondestudentar' (Peasant Students) (1883),
deals with a problem no less real. In Norway, although there is no
rank of nobility, class distinctions are nevertheless strongly marked;
and in this novel his pen is directed against the evils which result
from the inordinate striving of the lower orders for a position to
which they are unfitted both by nature and circumstances. This book,
again, is to a degree autobiographical; for Garborg, as has been said,
is himself peasant, and he has fought the fight and suffered the
anguish of the new culture attained with incalculable sacrifice.
'Peasant Students' is undoubtedly his greatest work. Nowhere else has
he indicated more clearly his seriousness of purpose, or worked out
his theme with more effectiveness. The hero, Daniel Braut, is the
representative of the ideal student, a son of the people who shall
strive for "poetry and the soul" and introduce the elements of culture
among his class. Manual labor is his aversion; and at last, forced by
the weakness of his nature and the necessity of his poverty, he goes
over to the ranks of philistinism, marries a woman of property, and
studies theology. Both books are stories of high ideals and
humiliating compromises. The author's pessimism is in the ascendant,
and in the end the lower nature conquers.
In 'Mannfolk' (1886) he takes up a different theme, the relation of
the sexes, a question which he treats with startling frankness.
Garborg is a realist in so far that he prefers to depict life as it
is, well knowing that fiction cannot approach truth in point of
interest. He bears true testimony of what he sees and knows, but his
realism is very far removed from the naturalism of the French school.
Following 'Peasant Students' appeared in 1884 'Forteljinger og Sogar'
(Narratives and Tales), a volume of stories dealing sometimes with
subjects generally proscribed. Of his other works the most important
are the narrative 'Hjaa ho Mor' (With Mama), 'Kolbotnbrev og andre
Skildringar' (Kolbotn Letters and Other Sketches: 1890), the novels
'Traette Maend' (Weary Souls: 1891), 'Fred' (Peace: 1893), and the drama
'Uforsonlige' (The Irreconcilables: 1888).
After being deprived of his government position upon the publication
of 'Mannfolk,' Arne Garborg retired with his wife and child into the
solitude of the mountains, where for two years he lived and wrote in
his saeter hut; but at last, overcome by the loneliness of this
isolated life, he left Norway and settled in Germany.