Jonas Lie.[12] The _Figaro_ has occupied itself with him of late; and
before long, I venture to predict, London and New York will also have
discovered him. English versions of a few of his earlier novels
appeared, to be sure, twenty years ago--in very bad translations--and
accordingly attracted no great attention. "The Visionary," which has
recently been published in London, has had better luck, having been
accorded a flattering reception. Of its popular success it is yet too
early to speak. But even if Jonas Lie were not about to knock at our
gates, I venture to say that I shall earn the gratitude of many a reader
by making him acquainted with this rare, complex, and exceedingly modern
spirit. For Jonas Lie is not (like so many of his brethren of the quill)
a mere inoffensive gentleman who spins yarns for a living, but he is a
forceful personality of bright perceptions and keen sensations, which
has chosen to express itself through the medium of the novel. He dwells
in a many-windowed house, with a large outlook upon the world and its
manifold concerns. In a score of novels of varying degrees of excellence
he has given us vividly realized bits of the views which his windows
command. But what lends their chief charm to these uncompromising
specimens of modern realism is a certain richness of temperament on the
author's part, which suffuses even the harshest narrative with a rosy
glow of hope. Though, generally speaking, there is no very close kinship
between him and the French realists, I am tempted to apply to him Zola's
beautiful characterization of Daudet: "Benevolent Nature placed him at
that exquisite point where reality ends and poetry begins." Before he
had yet written a single book, except a volume of flamboyant verse,
Björnson said of him in a public speech: "His friends know that he only
has to plunge his landing-net down into himself in order to bring it up
full."
[12] Pronounced _Lee_.
The man who, in anticipation of his achievements, impressed Björnson so
deeply with his genius, was, however, by others, who felt themselves to
be no less entitled to an opinion, regarded as an "original," not to say
a fool. That he was decidedly queer, his biography by Arne Garborg amply
testifies.
"Two souls, alas, abide within my breast,
The one forever strives against the other,"
says Faust; and Jonas Lie's life and literary activity are apparently,
in a very real sense, the result of a similar warfare. There was,
indeed, a good ancestral reason for the duality of his nature. His
father, a judge of sterling ability and uprightness, was descended, but
a few generations back, from sturdy, blond, Norwegian peasants; while
his mother was of Finnish, or possibly Gypsy, descent. I remember well
this black-eyed, eccentric little lady, with her queer ways,
extraordinary costumes, and still more extraordinary conversation. It is
from her Jonas Lie has inherited the fantastic strain in his blood, the
strange, superstitious terrors, and the luxuriant wealth of color which
he lavished upon his poems and his first novel, "The Visionary." From
his paternal ancestors, who were for three generations judges and
judicial functionaries, he has derived his good sense, his intense
appreciation of detail, and his strong grip on reality. His career
represents at its two poles a progression from the adventurous
romanticism of his maternal heritage to the severe, wide-awake realism
of the paternal--the emancipation of the Norseman from the Finn.
"Jonas Lie has a good memory," writes his biographer. "Thus he
remembers--even though it be as through a haze--that he was once in the
world as the son of a laborer, a carpenter, or something in that line,
and that he went with food in a tin-pail to his father, when he was at
work. During this incarnation he must have behaved rather shabbily; for
in the next he found himself degraded to a fox--a silver fox--and in
this capacity he was shot one moonlight night on the snow. After that
he emerged, according to his recollection, as Jonas Lauritz Idemil, son
of the lawyer Mons Lie, at Hougsund, in Eker. This took place November
6, 1833."
When he was but a few years old his father removed, in various official
capacities, to Mandal, Söndhordland, and, finally, to the city of
Tromsoe, in Nordland. It was here, in the extreme north, that Jonas
spent the years of his boyhood, and it was this wild, enchanted region
which put the deepest impress upon his spirit.
"In Nordland," he says in "The Visionary," the hero of which is
essentially the Finnish half of himself, "all natural phenomena are
intense, and appear in colossal contrasts. There is an endless,
stony-gray desert as in primeval times, before men dwelt there; but in
the midst of this are also endless natural riches. There is sun and
glory of summer, the day of which is not only twelve hours, but lasts
continuously, day and night, for three months--a warm, bright,
fragrance-laden summer, with an infinite wealth of color and changing
beauty. Distances of seventy to eighty miles across the mirror of the
sea approach, as it were, within earshot. The mountains clothe
themselves up to the very top with greenish-brown grass, and in the
glens and ravines the little birches join hands for play, like white,
sixteen-year-old girls; while the fragrance of the strawberry and
raspberry fills the air as nowhere else; and the day is so hot that you
feel a need to bathe yourself in the sun-steeped, plashing sea, so
wondrously clear to the very bottom.... Myriads of birds are surging
through the air, like white breakers about the cliffs, and like a
screaming snow-storm about their brooding-places...."
But "as a contrast there is a night of darkness and terror which lasts
nine months."
In this arctic gloom, during which the yellow candle-light struggled all
day long through the frost-covered window-panes, the Finn grew big in
Jonas Lie, and the Norseman shrank and was almost dwarfed. The air was
teeming with superstitions which he could not help imbibing. His fancy
fed eagerly on stories of Draugen, the terrible sea-bogie who yells
heartrendingly in the storm, and the sight of whom means death; on
blood-curdling tales of Finnish sorcery and all sorts of uncanny
mysteries; on folk-legends of trolds, nixies, and foul-weather sprites.
He had his full share of that craving for horrors which is common to
boyhood; and he had also the most exceptional facilities for satisfying
it. Truth to tell, if it had not been for the Norse Jekyll in his nature
the Finnish Hyde might have run away with him altogether. They were
mighty queer things which often invaded his brain, taking possession of
his thought, paralyzing his will, and refusing to budge, no matter how
earnestly he pleaded. There were times when he grew afraid of himself;
when his imagination got the upper hand, blowing him hither and thither
like a weather-cock. Then the Norse Jekyll came to his rescue and routed
his uncomfortable yoke-fellow. Hence that very curious phenomenon that
the same man who has given us sternly and soberly realistic novels like
"The Family at Gilje" and "The Commodore's Daughters," is also the
author of the collection of tales called "Trold," in which his fancy
runs riot in a phantasmagoria of the grotesquest imaginings. The same
Jonas Lie who comports himself so properly in the parlor is quite
capable, it appears, of joining nocturnally the witches' dance at the
Brocken and cutting up the wildest antics under the pale glimpses of the
moon.
Throughout his boyhood he struggled rather ineffectually against his
Hyde, who made him kill roosters, buy cakes on credit, go on forbidden
expeditions by land and sea, and shamefully neglect his lessons.
Accordingly, he made an early acquaintance with the rod, and was
regarded as well-nigh incorrigible. He accepted with boyish stoicism the
castigations which fell pretty regularly to his lot, bore no one any
grudge for them, but rarely thought of mending his ways, in order to
avoid them. They were somehow part of the established order of things
which it was useless to criticise. In his reminiscences from his early
years, which he published some years ago, he is so delightfully boy,
that no one who has any recollection of that barbaric period in his own
life can withhold his sympathy. The following, for instance, seems to me
charming:
"I can still feel how she (Kvaen Marja, the maid) pulled us, cowering
and reluctant, out of our warm beds, where we lay snug like birds in
their nests, between the reindeer skin and the sheepskin covering. I
remember how I stood asleep and tottering on the floor, until I got a
shower of cold water from the bathing-sponge over my back and became
wide awake. Then to jump into our clothes! And now for the lessons! It
was a problem how to get a peep at them during the scant quarter hour,
while the breakfast was being devoured down in the dining-room with
mother, who sat and poured out tea before the big astral lamp, while
darkness and snow-drift lay black upon the window-panes. Then up and
away!...
"There (in the school) I sat and perspired in the sultry heat of the
stove, and with a studiously unconcerned face watched with strained
anxiety every expression and gesture of the teacher. Was he in
good-humor to-day? Would that I might escape reciting! He began at the
top.... That was a perfect millstone lifted from my breast, though, as
yet, nothing could be sure. Now for a surreptitious peep at the end of
the lesson."
It was Jonas Lie's ambition at that time to become a gunsmith. He had a
profound respect for the ingenuity and skill required for such a curious
bit of mechanism. But his father, who could not afford to have a member
of his family descend into the rank of artisans, promptly strangled
that ambition. Then the sea, which has been "the Norseman's path to
praise and power," no less than the Dane's, lured the adventurous lad;
and his parent, who had no exalted expectations regarding him, gave his
consent to his entering the Naval Academy at Fredericksvaern. But here
he was rejected on account of near-sightedness. Nothing remained, then,
but to resume the odious books and prepare to enter the University. But
to a boy whose heroes were the two master-thieves, Ola Höiland and Gjest
Baardsen, that must have been a terribly arduous necessity. However, he
submitted with bad grace, and was enrolled as a pupil at the gymnasium
in Bergen. Here his Finnish Hyde promptly got him into trouble. Having
by sheer ill luck been cheated of his chances of a heroic career, he
began to imagine in detail the potentialities of greatness for the loss
of which Fate owed him reparation. And so absorbed did he become in this
game of fancy, and so enamored was he of his own imaginary deeds, that
he lost sight of the fact that they were of the stuff that dreams are
made of. With frank and innocent trustfulness he told them to his
friends, both young and old, and soon earned a reputation as a most
unblushing liar. But if any one dared call him that to his face, he had
to reckon with an awe-inspiring pair of fists which were wielded with
equal precision and force. The youth, being at variance with the world,
lived in a state of intermittent warfare, and he gave and received
valiant blows, upon which he yet looks back with satisfaction.
In spite of his distaste for books Jonas Lie managed, when he was
eighteen years old, to pass the entrance examination to the University.
Among his schoolmates during his last year of preparation at Heltberg's
Gymnasium, in Christiania, were Björnstjerne Björnson and Henrik Ibsen.
The former took a great interest in the odd, _naïve_, near-sighted
Nordlander who walked his own ways, thought his own thoughts, and
accepted ridicule with crushing indifference.
"I was going about there in Christiania," he says in a published letter
to Björnson, "as a young student, undeveloped, dim, and unclear--a kind
of poetic visionary, a Nordland twilight nature--which after a fashion
espied what was abroad in the age, but indistinctly in the dusk, as
through a water telescope--when I met a young, clear, full-born force,
pregnant with the nation's new day, the blue steel-flash of
determination in his eyes and the happily found national
form--pugnacious to the very point of his pen. I gazed and stared,
fascinated, and took this new thing aboard along the whole gunwale.
Here, I felt, were definite forms, no mere dusk and fantastic
haze--something to fashion into poetry.... From the first hour you knew
how to look straight into this strange twilight of mine, and you espied
flashes of the aurora there when no one else did, like the true and
faithful friend you are. You helped and guided and found grains of
gold, where others saw mostly nonsense, and perhaps half a screw loose.
While I was straying in search of the spiritual tinsel, with which the
_esprits forts_ of the age were glittering, you taught me, and impressed
upon me, again and again, that I had to seek in myself for whatever I
might possess of sentiment and simplicity--and that it was out of this I
would have to build my fiction."
This bit of confession is extremely significant. The Finnish Hyde was
evidently yet uppermost. Björnson taught Lie to distrust the tinsel
glitter of mere rhetoric, and the fantastic exuberance of invention in
which the young Nordlander believed that he had his _forte_. But the
matter had even a more serious phase than this. It was about this time
that Lie disappeared for a period of three months from his friends, and
even his parents, and when again he emerged into the daylight, he could
give no account of himself. He had simply sauntered about, moping and
dreaming. He had been Hyde. The cold shudders which lurked in his blood
from the long, legend-haunted arctic night could break into open terror
on unforeseen occasions. Grown man though he was, he was afraid of being
alone in the dark--a peculiarity which once got him into a comical
predicament.
It was his habit when travelling to place his big top-boots at night
within easy reach, so that he might use them as weapons against any
ghost or suspicious-looking object that might be stirring in the gloom.
One evening when he had gone to bed at a country inn, he was aroused
from his sleep and saw indistinctly a white phenomenon fluttering to and
fro along the opposite wall. Instantly he grabs a boot and hurls it with
ferocious force at the goblin. A roar was heard followed by a salvo of
blue profanity. It was a fellow-traveller--a lumber-dealer--who was to
occupy the other bed in the room. He had undressed and was disporting
himself in nocturnal attire before reposing, when Jonas Lie's well-aimed
missile hit him in the stomach and doubled him up with pain.
A skeleton in the den of a medical friend caused Lie many a shiver, for
he could never quite rid himself of the idea that it moved. All that lay
beyond the range of the senses drew him with an irresistible,
half-shuddering attraction; and he resented all attempts to explain it
by ordinary mundane laws. As his first novel abundantly proves, he
possesses in a marked degree the "sixth sense" that gropes eagerly and
with a half-terrified fascination in the dusk that lies beyond the
daylight of the other five.
The verses which Jonas Lie began about this time to produce are mostly
written for patriotic and other festive occasions, and therefore arouse
no creepy sensations. But they are so overladen with confusing imagery
that they have to be read twice to be understood. In the poem "Solveig"
(1855) he makes the heart "in its prison envy the free-born thoughts
which fly to the beloved one's breast." His versification is gnarled
and twisted, and a perpetual strain upon the ear. As Mr. Nordahl Rolfsen
has remarked, one need not be a princess in order to be troubled by the
peas in his verse.[13] Browning himself could scarcely have perpetrated
more unmelodious lines than Jonas Lie is capable of. Nevertheless there
is often in his patriotic songs a most inspiriting bugle-note, which is
found nowhere in Browning, unless it be in the "Cavalier Tunes." The
curiosities of his prosody are (according to his biographer)
attributable to the Nordland accent in his speech. They would sound all
right, he says, to a Nordland ear.
[13] Nordahl Rolfsen: Norske Digtere, p. 527.
At the risk of violating chronology I may as well speak here of his two
collections of "Poems" (1867 and 1889) (the latter being an expurgated
but enlarged edition of the earlier), to which the present criticisms
particularly apply. Both editions contain notable things amid occasional
bits of what scarcely rises above doggerel. The sailor songs, though
rough, are true in tone and have a catching nautical swing; but of far
deeper ring and more intensely felt are the poems which deal with the
nocturnal sides of nature. These have at times a strange, shivering
resonance, like an old violin whose notes ripple down your spine. I
refer especially to such untranslatable poems as "Draugen," "Finn-Shot,"
"The Mermaid," and "Nightmare." The mood of these is heavy and uncanny,
like that of the "Ancient Mariner." But they are indubitably poetry. It
is by no means sure that the world has not lost a poet in Jonas Lie; but
probably a lesser one than the novelist that it gained.
As Jonas had been voted by his kin the family dullard, it was decided to
make a clergyman of him. But to this the young man objected, chiefly,
according to his own story, because the clerical gown looks too much
like a petticoat. At all events, after having equipped himself with a
set of theological tomes, and peeped cursorily into them, he grew so
discouraged that he went to the bookseller and exchanged them for a set
of law-books. Not that the law had any peculiar attraction for him; he
rather accepted it as a _pis aller_; for, of course, he had to study
something. In due time he was graduated, but with such poor standing
that he concluded to put in another year and try again. And this time he
managed to acquit himself creditably. He then began (1859) the practice
of the law in the little town of Kongsvinger, the centre of the richest
lumber districts in Norway. But in the meanwhile he had had an
experience of another kind which is worth recounting.
From his boyhood he had been a worshipper of the fair sex. Marriages (of
other people) had been among the most tragic events in his life; and he
rarely failed to shed tears at the thought that now this lovely charmer,
too, was removed from the number of his possible selections. If things
went on in this way he would have no choice but to be a bachelor.
However, one fine day a most attractive-looking craft, bearing the name
Thomasine Lie, appeared upon his horizon, sailed within speaking
distance, and presently a great deal nearer. In fact, though they were
cousins, it took a remarkably short time for the two young people to
discover that they loved each other; and when that discovery was made,
they acted upon it with laudable promptitude. They became engaged; and
were subsequently married. And from that day the Finnish Hyde in Jonas
was downed and reduced to permanent subjection. He never raised his head
again. The more sober-minded, industrious, and sensible Norse Jekyll
took command and steered with a steady hand, in fair weather and foul,
and often through dangerous waters, the barque Jonas Lie, which came to
carry more and more passengers the longer it proceeded on its voyage.
Truth to tell, I know among contemporary men of letters no more
complete, happy, and altogether beautiful marriage than that of Jonas
and Thomasine Lie. The nearest parallel to it that I can think of is
that of John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Taylor, who later became Mrs. Mill.
Lie's friends accuse him of carrying his admiration of his wife to the
verge of idolatry. He will leave himself but little merit, but with an
air of candid conviction he attributes even his authorship to his
Thomasine. "Her name ought to stand next to mine on the title-pages of
my books," he has repeatedly declared. And again, "If I have written
anything that is good, then my wife deserves as much credit for it as
myself ... Without her nothing would have come of it except nonsense."
Even though that may be an exaggeration, pure delusion it is not. For
Mrs. Lie is, in a certain way, the complement to her husband. She
possesses what he has not; and he possesses what she, in her modest
self-extinction, would never dream of laying claim to. The spirit of
order, adjustment, and lucidity is strong in her; while he, in his
fanciful exuberance, is often overwhelmed by his material, and is unable
to get it into shape. Then she quietly steps in and separates the dry
land from the water in his seething and struggling chaos. She is one of
those rare women who, while apparently only listening, can give you back
your own thoughts clarified. Mr. Garborg relates most charmingly how she
straightens out the tangles in her husband's plots, and unobtrusively
draws him back, when, as frequently happens, he has switched himself off
on a side-line and is unable to recover his bearings. And this occurs as
often in his conversation as in his manuscripts, which he never
despatches to the publisher without her revision. She helps him
condense. She knows just what to omit. Yet she does not pretend to be in
the least literary. Her proper department, in which she is also a
shining success, is the care of her children and the superintendence of
her household. She understands to perfection the art of economy and has
a keen practical sense, which makes her admirably competent in all the
more difficult situations in life. And he, feeling her competence and
his own deficiency, frankly leans on her. Hence a certain motherliness
on her part (most beautiful to behold) has tinged their relation; and on
his an admiring and affectionate dependence. Each prizes in the other
what he himself lacks; and the husband's genius loses none of its
brightness to the wife, because it is herself who trims the wick and
adjusts the reflectors which send its light abroad.
I have again anticipated, because the subsequent career of Jonas Lie
could not be properly understood without a full appreciation of the new
factor which from this time enters into it. He developed signal ability
as a lawyer during the years of his practice at Kongsvinger; became
prosperous and influential, bought a considerable estate (called
Sigridnaes) and began to dabble in politics. He still wrote occasional
poems, and was the soul of all conviviality in the town. He entertained
celebrities, wrote political leaders in the papers, earned a great deal
of money, lived high, and unfolded a restless and widely ramified
activity. Then came the great financial crisis of 1867-68, which swept
away so many great fortunes in Norway. Lie became involved (chiefly by
endorsement of commercial paper) to the extent of several hundred
thousand dollars. He gave up everything he had, and moved to
Christiania, resolved to pay the enormous debt, for which he had
incurred legal responsibility, to the last farthing. Quixotic as it may
seem, it was his intention to accomplish this by novel-writing. And to
his honor be it said that for a long series of years he kept sending
every penny he could spare, above the barest necessities, to his
creditors, refusing to avail himself of the bankruptcy law and accept a
compromise. But it was a bottomless pit into which he was throwing his
hard-earned pennies, and in the end he had to yield to the persuasions
of his family and abandon the hopeless enterprise.
In Christiania he spent some hard and penurious years, trying to make a
livelihood as a journalist and man of letters. Some of his friends
suspected that the Lie family were subsisting on very short rations; but
they were proud, and there was no way to help them. The ex-lawyer
developed ultra-democratic sympathies, and time and again his Thomasine
led the dance at the balls of the Laborers' Union with Mr. Eilert
Sundt.[14] A position as teacher of Norwegian in Heltberg's Gymnasium he
lost because he only made orations to his pupils, but taught them no
rhetoric. His volume of "Poems" (1867) had attracted no particular
attention; but his political articles were much read and discussed.
However, it was not in politics that he was to win his laurels.
[14] A well-known Norwegian philanthropist, whose work on the
Gypsies is highly regarded.