[1] See Ibsen’s Poems.
_The High Priest of Purity_
_Björnstjerne Björnson_
I
I saw Björnson for the first time in Paris in the spring of 1886,
where he formed the centre of the entire Scandinavian population. He
was living with his wife and daughters in a quiet side street not far
from the Bois de Boulogne, in which he always took his morning walk.
When I went to see him, his wife was the first to receive me; she was
a dark-eyed native of Bergen, still pretty, with short-cut grey hair,
and at first it seemed as though she meant to spend the customary
quarter of an hour in conversation with me, as Björnson was at his
work and might not be disturbed. Before long, however, the door into
the adjoining room was opened, and a powerful, grey, bushy head was
thrust through the aperture--a high forehead and little sharp eyes that
sparkled behind a pair of spectacles, a large prominent hooked nose,
and a pair of thin lips that quivered with anger and energy--but the
next instant this menacing totality softened into a winning smile,
and the whole man came in view, it was a bear-like figure, not above
medium height, but with shoulders, arms and legs that gave one the
impression of immense muscular strength. A man with this body and
this temperament would require to lay about him in order to make life
endurable, that was the first impression that one received, and the
second was that this great muscular man was not created to understand
the most subtle and hidden problems of human life. At the same time one
understood his popularity. This genius of a bear had something about
him that was irresistibly healthy, straightforward and convincing; he
represented the primeval type of manhood, the leader whom the mass of
the people follow like a flock of sheep, and at whose glance women turn
hot and cold. Björnson’s is not a reserved nature--with such muscles
there is no need of reserve--and owing to his communicativeness one
gets to know him as well in a single day as any one else in a year.
He invited me to join him in his morning walk in the Bois, and having
first divested himself of a colossal Wagner cap, which seemed intended
rather for adornment than for warmth, he stepped along with an elegance
that would have done credit to a dandy, but which among German authors
and thinkers is wholly unknown. The Scandinavians as a rule set a far
greater value on dress than the Germans, and Björnson did not conceal
his personal feelings in this respect, as displaying the silk lining
of his overcoat, he said: “You see I am fond of fine clothes; when I
get a new suit from the tailor, I spend half the day in front of the
looking-glass, but for all that I never for a single instant forget the
great work of civilisation to which we must devote our whole energy.”
We crossed the Place de l’Etoile, and Björnson began to tell me about
this same work. He spoke loud, and in a threatening voice, as though
he were addressing a large audience. Omnibuses rattled by, light
elegant carriages with india-rubber tyres flew past us, and riders
came out of the Bois; it was necessary to concentrate one’s attention,
to make room, to be careful, the crowd of foot-passengers was enough
to confuse anybody; but Björnson behaved as though he did not observe
it, he had grown excited in speaking, his voice quivered, his eyes
shone with tears, and the passers-by stood still and stared at the
strange bear-like figure with the broad, ruddy face appearing beneath
the cylindriform hat and the brand new suit. But Björnson was too
much accustomed to be stared at in his own country to allow himself
to be disturbed by it. He shouted a few words of hearty greeting to
a sad-looking little fellow countryman whom he caught sight of; and
presently an English Bible-seller wandered by, who, hearing a foreign
tongue, offered him the Word of God, whereupon Björnson recollected
that he did not possess a Bible, and commenced a long altercation with
the man, which ended by Björnson commissioning him to leave one at
his house at the earliest opportunity. At last we reached the Bois. We
walked among the fragrant acacias to the waterfall and past the winding
lake, we walked and walked, surrounded by the spring magic of the half
southern landscape, and imbued with the feeling of peaceful melancholy
and comfortable exhaustion which the early spring in Paris brings with
it. But Björnson felt neither melancholy nor exhaustion. Excited, and
aglow with physical energy as though he contained the whole charge of
an electric battery in himself, he spoke of the problem of how the
relationship between men and women was to be remodelled. His great
novel, _Thomas Rendalen_, had appeared not very long before, and he had
just finished the first chapter of _In God’s Way_. He confessed that
until lately he had not understood the importance of the subject, that
he had not in fact possessed sufficient physiological knowledge. In all
his former writings he had treated the relations between men and women
in the old way, as something that is founded on a physical need. But
the moderns will not have it so any longer. “No, they will not have
it,” he said, in a voice that quivered with excitement. “They wish to
get beyond that. The best men and the best women have other duties now,
they recognise that it is their duty to work hand in hand towards the
ennobling of the human race. What they want is a higher union. All the
best men and women are of one opinion in the matter, and the number of
the best increases with increasing knowledge. The time will come when
it will be natural to every high-minded man and woman to wish only for
a spiritual union.”
I was dumbfounded. This doctrine did not please me, and proceeding from
the lips of this robust giant it sounded, to put it mildly, somewhat
strange. Björnson was silent for a few moments, we neither of us spoke.
When the pause had elapsed--the pause which his listeners are wont
to fill with a volley of applause--he began again in a condescending
manner:
“I too used to think differently. In my youth I lived as others do; I
knew no better. No one told me. But if I had known then what I know
now, I should not have done it. I was in America a few years ago, and
there they are further advanced than they are here; I spoke with some
American lady doctors, and they explained it to me. They proved it to
me on paper as clearly and plainly as possible. Strength goes here or
there. In the brain or--in propagation. There is never more than a
certain amount of strength, it only depends on where it is localised,
whether for the highest purpose or the lowest--they explained it all.
There is no ‘must’ about it, there is no natural necessity; that is
deceptive nonsense. But women must make a beginning, they must oppose
their degradation. Women must unite with women to give one another
a hand. You must support each other, and then you will be able to
dictate to men. The talk about not being able is all nonsense. For
instance, you,” he said, turning suddenly on me, “have you ever had any
difficulty of the kind?”
Of course I assured him that I never had; and I could do so with a good
conscience, as he obviously alluded to a very material form.
Björnson took me back with him and gave me a copy of his _Gauntlet_
in Fräulein Klingenfeld’s German translation, which is a new and more
severe edition of his former work. We often saw each other afterwards,
but he never made me such a long speech again; I was not the right
sounding-board for him. And here I must add, for the enlightenment of
my possibly astonished readers, that conversations such as these were
quite common at the time when the moral movement was raging in the
north.
I happened to be in Copenhagen the following year when Björnson’s
great moral tournament was announced. He spoke in one of the largest
theatres in Copenhagen. Troops of “enlightened” peasants had come from
the country to hear him; they looked strangely out of place with their
black neckties and short whiskers as they pushed their way through the
front seats, between Copenhagen elegants and worthy ladies of ripe
years. The whole place was crowded to overflowing. I had a ticket
for the evening reception which was given in honour of Björnson by a
committee of the women “progressionists” of Copenhagen who formed the
advance-guard of the emancipation movement, and I intended going there
when the lecture was over.
Björnson appeared. A desk had been placed on the stage in front of the
curtain, which was lowered. He mounted it, and stood looking like a
righteous lion with a shaggy, grey mane, his eyes firmly closed, his
lips compressed, the very incarnation of fanatical energy, “the man”
for the masses. He began to speak. First he thundered, then he lowered
his voice; first the words fell like hard stones, then his voice shook
with emotion; he commanded, he entreated, he became by turns a man of
learning, a pastor, a prophet and a jailor. But the effect produced
upon the people of Copenhagen was not great. They applauded him very
casually, the Danes--even in the lower stratum of society--are too
æsthetic and critical, too conscious of being the possessors of an old
and refined culture, to adopt the simple Norwegian modes of thought.
Shortly afterwards Björnson visited the provincial towns and sowed his
seeds throughout the whole of Scandinavia, where they took root.
I went home after the lecture feeling disappointed and depressed. It
had sounded so hollow, and considering the past of this great writer
and the future expectations of the three countries respecting him, it
seemed to promise little for the hopes which the young generation
had fixed on him and on him only. It made me shudder to think of the
speeches in which the representatives of a dozen old maids, and about
as many discontented wives, would sing his praises in consequence
of his words this day. The lecture, which was called _Monogamy
and Polygamy_, was the great divide between his yesterday and his
to-morrow; it was then that the words were spoken: “So far and no
further.”
He had been too crude and too pathetic for the people of Copenhagen.
But the further he travelled into outlying districts, where culture was
less advanced, the more this crudeness and pathos gained him influence,
and as this tournament resulted in a change in the moral conceptions
of Scandinavia which was destined to rule over family life as well as
public life--a change which assumed the authority of a whole school of
contemporary thought of which Björnson was the speaking trumpet, and as
this school continues to gain ground in Germany the more surely, the
more it becomes conscious of being the expression of the experience of
a class, it deserves a more careful investigation.
What then was the subject of Björnson’s lecture?
It was a repetition of that speech of his in the Bois de Boulogne, only
it was a larger and more detailed generalisation of the same, because
in it he no longer dealt with noble-minded men and women, but with all
men and all women. He had two fundamental doctrines which he used as
his starting points: Woman’s complete equality with man respecting
marriage, and the unconditional adaptive capacity of mammals.
Whether the latter doctrine is included in the German version of
_Monogamy and Polygamy_, I cannot say, as I have not got it by me. But
with the exception of what the American lady doctors had told him,
Björnson founded his argument in favour of the reform of the sexual
relations on the following anecdote: He met a man who had a large cage
in which he kept a dog, a cat, a rat, a mouse and a bird. He fed them
well and taught them to overcome their natural instincts of enmity and
to live peaceably together. “And they all prospered well, very well,
and loved one another much, very much.” It evidently had not occurred
to Björnson that the chief characteristic of this story is the parable
of the cage and the domestic animals. It is a well-known fact, that
in zoological gardens the ravenous animals are kept apart from the
peaceful ones, as the latter are ready to die of fear and misery from
the mere smell of the others, even without seeing them. But Björnson
places the cage first as a matter of course--the great cage of society
filled with domestic animals and house parasites which have been tame
for generations, and are indolent and blunted in their instincts.
Too satiated, too lazy and too degenerate to fight, the dear little
creatures vegetate in close proximity to one another, which is exactly
what well-fed domestic animals are in the habit of doing, even without
a cage. And then with a bold logical venture, he compared this state of
things to the most central and most complicated of human relationships.
If even the unreasoning animals are able to overcome their natural
instincts, he argues, man also, after being sensibly reasoned with
and encouraged by example, after many generations of training will
be capable of adapting his strongest instinct to moral precepts and
finally attain the ideal of pure sexlessness. Is not the daughter of
the “educated classes” chaste? Have we not many millions of chaste old
maids? Then why should not we have chaste old bachelors, and why cannot
we have chaste young bachelors as well? Arise, you women! Strike!
Refuse to be made “the laundry for unclean men”! Twice before he gave
this lecture, Björnson had dealt with the same subject--in _Thomas
Rendalen_ and in _The Gauntlet_; the last of these two is the best
known in Germany. In both works he declares that there should be only
one moral standard for men and for women, and that this standard should
be that of women.
The supporters of the movement in favour of the emancipation of women
in Scandinavia baptised themselves into the name of Björnson, and
adopted his confession of faith. The life, temperament, and superfluous
energy of man was brought under the horizon of woman, and the eternal
active was to allow itself to be remodelled by the eternal passive,
because the latter was statistically in the majority.
At the time when Björnson was giving these lectures and writing these
books, there was another movement which had just reached its zenith
in the north, and which, by its opponents and by the emancipated
daughters of the middle class, was known by the designation of “free
love.” Its leaders were Arne Garborg and Hans Jaeger, who pleaded for
the universal recognition of the socialist ideal as follows: That the
conditions of society might be so ordered as to render prostitution
unnecessary, by making early unions possible and marriage no longer a
sacrament. Both parties were anxious to abolish prostitution, which
is an evil that is not mentioned in Germany, although here also the
emancipation movement (still in its infancy) is interested in it. It
was the aim of Garborg and Jaeger to hasten its destruction by making
it economically possible for early unions to be contracted in love,
whereas Björnson and the women’s rights party sought another means,
_i.e._ the mortification of the flesh.
No subject that has ever been discussed in the north has met with such
an immense and lasting interest as this one. Beneath the pressure of
Björnson the movement for the emancipation of women assumed a form of
open enmity against man, and introduced a pietistic doctrine of the
superiority of women into the literature and public life of Sweden.
Should the movement ever force its way into the outposts of declining
militarism in Germany, the signs are already to hand that there also
the spirit of Björnson will rule.
How was it possible that this manly author with his impetuous and
progressive nature should lose his way in the cul-de-sac of Christian
asceticism--in the covert places of degeneration--and that having
arrived at the time of life when a man’s opinions are matured, he did
not find his way out again?
Here we come to the spot where the many conflicting threads of
Björnson’s life are knotted together, from whence we arrive at the
various stages of his creation, and from them find our way back again
to the central point of his being.
A piece of contemporary history and class biography is unfolded in
these numerous phases of Björnson’s life, reaches its climax here, runs
its course and finds its ending. The political and social type of the
ruling middle class is sharply outlined in him, and clearly stamped as
though it were in a bronze medal.
But before we come to this chapter, we must examine the course of his
development and the appreciation accorded him by his countrymen.