Bjornstjerne Bjornson, 1832-1910 Part 2

The Merchant. I have not been able to go to church very much of late because of my cough. And in the foul air. ...

The King. You go to sleep. But are you a Christian?

The. Merchant. That goes without saying.

The King. (_to the Priest._) And you are naturally one?

The Priest. By the grace of Jesus I hope that I am.

The King. That is the formula, boys, that is the accepted thing to say. Therefore, you are a Christian community, and it is no fault of mine if such a community will not deal seriously with what concerns Christianity. Greet it from me, and say that it must have an eye to the inst.i.tution of monarchy.

The Priest. Christianity has nothing to do with such matters. It searches _the inner man_.

The King. That tone! I know it--it does not search the air in which the patient lives, but the lungs. There you have it! Nevertheless, Christianity must have an eye to the monarchy--must pluck the lie from it--must not follow it to its coronation in the church, as an ape follows a peac.o.c.k. I know what I felt in that situation. I had gone through with a rehearsal the day before--ho, ho! Ask the Christianity in this land, if it be not time to concern itself with the monarchy.

It should hardly any longer, it seems to me, let the monarchy play the part of the seductive wanton who turns the thoughts of all citizens to war--which is much against the message of Christianity--and to cla.s.s distinctions, to luxury, to show and vanity. The monarchy is now so great a lie that it compels the most upright man to share in its falsehood."

The conversation that follows is in a vein of bitterness on the one side, and of obtuse smugness on the other; the tragic irony of the action grows deeper and deeper, until in the end the king, completely disheartened and despairing, goes into an adjoining room, and dies by his own hand, to the consternation of the men from whom he has just parted. They give utterance to a few polite phrases, charitably accounting for the deed by the easy attribution of insanity to the king, and the curtain falls.

It may well be imagined that "The King" made a stir in literary and social circles, and quite noticeably fluttered the dovecotes of conventionality and conservatism. Such plain speaking and such deadly earnestness of conviction were indeed far removed from the idyllic simplicity of the peasant tales and from the poetical reconstructions of the legendary past. Eight years later, Bjornson prefaced a new edition of this work with a series of reflections upon "Intellectual Freedom" that const.i.tute one of the most vigorous and remarkable examples of his serious prose. The central ideas of his political faith are embodied in the following sentences from this preface:--

"Intellectual Freedom. Why is not attention called over and over again to the fact that for the great peoples, who have so many compensating interests, the free commerce of ideas is one condition of life among many others; while for us, the small peoples, it is absolutely indispensable. A people numerically large may attain to ways of thought and enterprise that no political censure can reduce to a minimum; but under narrower conditions it may easily come about that the whole people will fall asleep. A powerful propaganda of enlightenment under the conditions of free speech is for us of the first and the last importance. When I wrote this piece it was my chief aim to enlarge the bounds of free thought. I have later made the same attempt in matters of religion and morals. When my opponents seek to sum up my character in a few words, they are apt to say: 'He attacks the throne and the altar.' It seems to me that I have served the freedom of the spirit, and in the interests of that cause I now beg leave to reply. (1) _Concerning the attack on Christianity._ It may be worth while in a country with a state church to recall now and then the meaning of Christianity. It is not an inst.i.tution, still less a book, and least of all it is a house or a seminary. It is the G.o.dly life according to the precepts and example of Jesus. There may be men who think they are attacking Christianity when they investigate the historical origin or the morality of some dogma; I do not think so.

Honest investigation can result only in growth. Christianity, with or without its whole apparatus of dogma, will endure in its essence for thousands of years after us; there will always be spiritually-minded people who will be enn.o.bled by it, and some made great. I honor all the n.o.ble. I have friends among the Christians, whom I love, and never for a moment have I thought of attacking their Christianity. I have no higher wish than to see them by its help transform certain aspects of our society into seriousness. (2) _Concerning the attack on monarchy._ Monarchy is, on the other hand, an inst.i.tution, here the circ.u.mstances are naturally different. I have attacked monarchy, and I will attack it. But--and to this 'but' I call the closest attention.

Shortly before the July Revolution, when its first signs were declared, Chateaubriand was talking with the King, who asked what it all meant.

'It is monarchy that is done with,' replied the royalist, for he was also a seer. Certainly there have been in France both kingdom and empire since that day. If there should be no more hereafter, they still exist in other lands, and will endure for generations after us.

But 'done with' are they none the less; notice was given them by the French Revolution. It does not concern them all simultaneously; it fixes terms, different for the different kingdoms, and far removed for the kingdoms based upon conquest. But the face of civilization is now turned toward the republic, and every people has reached the first, second, or third stage of the way. "If a work of the mind is born of Norse conditions and stands before the ethical judgment seat--let it have its full action; otherwise it will not produce its full reaction.

If the faith that gave shape to the piece is not the strongest force in the society that gave it birth, it will evoke an opposing force of greater strength. Thereby all will gain. But to ignore it, or seek to crush it--that in a large society may not greatly matter, so rich are the possibilities of other work taking its place; but in a small society it may be equivalent to destroying the sight of its only eye."

In the clean-cut phrases and moral earnestness of this _apologia pro vita sua_, which deserves to be reproduced at greater length, we have the modern Bjornson, no longer poet alone, but poet and prophet at once, the champion of sincere thinking and worthy living, the Sigurd Slembe of our own day, happier than his prototype in the consciousness that the ambition to serve his people has not been; altogether thwarted, and that his beneficent activity is not made sterile even by the bitterest opposition.

Only a rapid glance may be taken at the books of the five years following upon the publication of "The King." The story of "Magnhild,"

planned several years earlier, represents Bjornson's return to fiction after a long dramatic interlude. There are still peasants in this story, but they are different from the figures of the early tales, and the atmosphere of the work is modern. It turns upon the question of the mutual duties of husband and wife, when love no longer unites them.

The solution seems to lie in separation when union has thus become essentially immoral. "Captain Mansana" is a story of Italian life, based, so the author a.s.sures us, on actual characters and happenings that had come within the range of his observation during his stay abroad. Its interest does not lie in any particular problem, but rather in the delineation of the t.i.tular figure, a strong and impetuous person whose character suggests that of Ferdinand La.s.salle, as the author himself points out to us in a prefatory note. "Dust" is a pathetic little story having for its central idea what seems like a pale reflection of the idea of Ibsen's "Ghosts," which had appeared a few months before. It is the dust of the past that settles upon our souls, and clogs their free action. The special application of this thought is to the religious training of children:--

"When you teach children that the life here below is nothing to the life above, that to be visible is nothing in comparison with being invisible, that to be a human being is nothing in comparison with being dead, that is not the way to teach them to view life properly, or to love life, to gain courage, strength for work, and love of country."

In the play, "Leonarda," and again in the play, "A Glove," the author recurs to the woman question; in the one case, his theme is the att.i.tude of society toward the woman of blemished reputation; in the other, its att.i.tude toward the man who in his relation with women has violated the moral law. "Leonarda" is a somewhat inconclusive work, because the issue is not clearly defined, but in "A Glove" (at least in the acting version of the play, which differs from the book in its ending) there is no lack of definiteness. This play inexorably demands the enforcement of the same standard of morality for both s.e.xes, and declares the unchaste man to be as unfit for honorable marriage as the unchaste woman. Upon the theme thus presented a long and violent discussion raged; but if there be such a thing as an immutable moral law in this matter, it must be that upon which Bjornson has so squarely and uncompromisingly planted his feet. The other remaining work of this five-year period is the play called "The New System." The new system in question is a system of railway management, and it is a wasteful one. But the young engineer who demonstrates this fact has a hard time in opening the eyes of the public. He succeeds eventually, but not until he has encountered every sort of contemptible opposition and hypocritical evasion of the plain truth. The social satire of the piece is subtle and sharp; what the author really aims at is to ill.u.s.trate, by a specific example, the repressive forces that dominate the life of a small people, and make it almost impossible for any sort of truth to triumph over prejudice.

Since the production of "A Glove," twenty years ago, eight more plays have come from Bjornson's prolific pen. Of these by far the most important are the two that are linked by the common t.i.tle, "Beyond the Strength." The translation of this t.i.tle is hopelessly inadequate, because the original word means much more than strength; it means talent, faculty, capability, the sum total of a man's endowment for some particular purpose. The two pieces bearing this name are quite different in theme, but certain characters appear in both, and both express the same thought,--the thought that it is vain for men to strive after the unattainable, for in so doing they lose sight of the actual possibilities of human life; the thought that much of the best human energy goes to waste because it is devoted to the pursuit of ideals that are indeed beyond the strength of man to realize. In the first of the two plays, this superhuman ideal is religious, it is that of the enthusiast who accepts literally the teaching that to faith all things are possible; in the second, the ideal is social, it is that of the reformer who is deluded to believe that one resounding deed of terror and self-immolation for the cause of the people will suffice to overthrow the selfish existing order, and create for the toiling ma.s.ses a new heaven upon earth. No deeper tragedies have been conceived by Bjornson than these two, the tragedy of the saintlike Pastor Sang, who believes that the miracle of his wife's restoration to health has at last in very truth been wrought by his fervent prayer, and finds only that the ardor of his faith and hers has brought death instead of life to them both,--the tragedy of his son Elias, who dies like Samson with his foes for an equally impossible faith, and by the very violence of his fanaticism removes the goal of socialist endeavor farther than ever into the dim future. Bjornson has written nothing more profoundly moving than these plays, with their twofold treatment of essentially the same theme, nor has he written anything which offers a clearer revelation of his own rich personality, with its unfailing poetic vision, its deep tenderness, and its boundless love for all humankind.

The play, "Geography and Love," which came between the two just described, is an amusing piece, in the vein of light and graceful comedy, which satirizes the man with a hobby, showing how he unconsciously comes to neglect his wife and family through absorption in his work. The author was, in a way, taking genial aim at himself in this piece, a fact which his son Bjorn, who played the princ.i.p.al part, did not hesitate to emphasize. "Paul Lange and Tora Parsberg," the next play, deals with the pa.s.sions engendered by political controversy, and made much unpleasant stir in Norwegian society because certain of the characters and situations were unmistakeably taken from real life.

After these plays came "Laboremus" and "At Storhove," both concerned with substantially the same theme, which is that of the malign influence exerted by an evil-minded and reckless woman upon the lives of others. From a different point of view, we may say that the subject of these plays is the consecration of the home. This has always been a favorite theme with Bjornson, and he has no clearer t.i.tle to our grat.i.tude than that which he has earned by his unfailing insistence upon the sanct.i.ty of family life, its mutual confidences, and its common joys. Completing the list, we have "Daglannet," another domestic drama of simple structure, and "When the New Wine Blooms," a study of modernity as exemplified in the young woman of to-day, of the estrangement that too often creeps into married life, and of the stirrings that prompt men of middle age to seek to renew the joys of youth.

During the years that have pa.s.sed since the publication of "Dust,"

Bjornson has produced four volumes of fiction,--his two great novels, a third novel of less didactic mission, and a second collection of short stories. The first of the novels, "Flags Are Flying in City and Harbor," saw the light during the year following the publication of "A Glove," and the teaching of that play is again enforced with uncompromising logic in the development of the story. The work has two other main themes, and these are heredity and education. So much didactic matter as this is a heavy burden for any novel to carry, and a lesser man than Bjornson would have found the task a hopeless one.

That he should have succeeded even in making a fairly readable book out of this material would have been remarkable, and it is a p.r.o.nounced artistic triumph that the book should prove of such absorbing interest.

For absorbingly interesting it is, to any reader who is willing that a novel should provide something more than entertainment; and who is not afraid of a work of fiction that compels him to think as he reads. The princ.i.p.al character is a man descended from a line of ancestors whose lives have been wild and lawless, and who have wallowed in almost every form of brutality and vice. The four preceding generations of the race are depicted for us in a series of brief but masterly characterizations, in which every stroke tells, and we witness the gradual weakening of the family stock. But with the generation just preceding the main action of the novel, there has been introduced a vigorous strain of peasant blood, and the process of regeneration has begun. It is this process that goes on before our eyes. It does not become a completed process, but the prospect is bright for the future, and the flags that fly over town and harbor in the closing chapter have a symbolical significance, for they announce a victory of spirit over sense, not only in the cases of certain among the individual partic.i.p.ants in the action, but also in the case of the whole community to which they belong. So much for the book as a study in heredity. As an educational tract, it has the conspicuous virtue of remaining in close touch with life while embodying the spirit of modern scientific pedagogy. The hero of the book,--the last descendant of a race struggling for moral and physical rehabilitation,--throws himself into the work of education with an energy equal to that which his forbears had turned into various perverse channels. He organizes a school, more than half of the book, in fact, is about this school and its work,--and seeks to introduce a system of training which shall shape the whole character of the child, a school in which truth and clean living shall be inculcated with thoroughness and absolute sincerity, a school which shall be the microcosm of the world outside, or rather of what that world ought to be. Bjornson's interest in education has been life-long; for many years it had gone astray in a sort of Grundtvigian fog, but at the time when this book came to be written, it had worked its way out into the clear light of reason. If the future should cease to care for this work as a piece of literature, it will still look back to it as to a sort of nineteenth century "Emile," and take renewed heart from its inspiring message.

"In G.o.d's Ways," the second of the two great novels, is a work of which it is difficult to speak in terms of measured praise. With its delicate and vital delineations of character, its rich sympathy and depth of tragic pathos, its plea for the sacredness of human life, and its protest against the religious and social prejudice by which life is so often misshapen, this book is an epitome of all the ideas and feelings that have gone to the making of the author's personality, and have received such manifold expression in his works. It is a simple story, concerned mainly with four people, in no way outwardly conspicuous, yet here united by the poet's art into a relations.h.i.+p from which issue some of the deepest of social questions, and which enforces in the most appealing terms the fundamental teaching of all the work of his mature years. First of all, we have the boyhood of the two friends who are afterwards to grow apart in their sympathies; the one alert of mind, imaginative, open to every intellectual influence, also impetuous and hot-blooded; the other shy and intellectually stolid, but good to the very core, and moved by the strongest of altruistic impulses. In accordance with their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a n.o.ble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of her being. Then we have a woman of the other sort, clinging, abnormally sensitive, a child when the years of childhood are over, and made the victim of a shocking child-marriage to a crippled old man. She it is whom the physician loves, and persuades to a legal dissolution of her immoral union. After some years, he makes her his wife, and their happiness would be complete were it not for the social and religious prejudice aroused. The clergyman, whom years of service in the state church have hardened into bigotry, is officially, as it were, compelled to condemn the friend of his boyhood, and even the sister, for a time grown untrue to her own generous nature, shares in the estrangement.

In vain does the physician seek to shelter his wife from the chill of her environment. She droops, pines away, and finally dies, gracious, lovable, and even forgiving to the last. Then the death angel comes close to the clergyman and his wife, hovering over their only child, and at last the barrier of formalism and prejudice and religious bigotry is swept away from their minds. Their natural sympathies, long repressed, resume full sway, and they realize how deeply they, have sinned toward the dead woman. The sister seeks a reconciliation with her brother, but he repulses her, and gives her his wife's private diary to read. In this _journal intime_ she finds the full revelation of the gentle spirit that has been done to death, and she feels that the very salvation of her life and soul depend upon winning her brother's forgiveness. The closing chapter, in which the final reconciliation occurs, is one of the most wonderful in all fiction; its pathos is of the deepest and the most moving, and he must be callous of soul, indeed, who can read it with dry eyes.

If we were to search the whole of Bjornson's writings for the single pa.s.sage which should most completely typify his message to his fellowmen,--not Norwegians alone, but all mankind,--the choice would have to rest upon the words spoken from the pulpit by the clergyman of this novel, on the Sunday following the certainty of his child's recovery.

"To-day a man spoke from the pulpit of the church about what he had learned.

"Namely, about what first concerns us all.

"One forgets it in his strenuous endeavor, a second in his zeal for conflict, a third in his backward vision, a fourth in the conceit of his own wisdom, a fifth in his daily routine, and we have all learned it more or less ill. For should I ask you who hear me now, you would all reply thoughtlessly, and just because I ask you from this place, 'Faith is first.'

"No, in very truth, it is not. Watch over your child, as it struggles for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and sleeplessness,--then love will teach you that _life comes first_. And never from this day on will I seek G.o.d or G.o.d's will in any form of words, in any sacrament, or in any book or any place, as if He were first and foremost to be found there; no, life is first and foremost--life as we win it from the depths of despair, in the victory of the light, in the grace of self-devotion, in our intercourse with living human kind. G.o.d's supreme word to us is life, our highest wors.h.i.+p of Him is love for the living. This lesson, self-evident as it is, was needed by me more than by most others. This it is that in various ways and upon many grounds I have hitherto rejected,--and of late most of all. But never more shall words be the highest for me, nor symbols, but the eternal revelation of life. Never more will I freeze fast in doctrine, but let the warmth of life melt my will.

Never will I condemn men by the dogmas of old time justice, unless they fit with our own time's gospel of love. Never, for G.o.d's sake! And this because I believe in Him, the G.o.d of Life, and His never ending revelation in life itself."

Here is a gospel, indeed, one that needs no church for its promulgation, and no ceremonial for the enhancement of its impressiveness. It is a gospel, moreover, that is based upon no foundation of precarious logic, but finds its premises in the healthy instincts of the natural man. It is no small thing to have thus found the way, and to have helped others likewise to find the way, out of the mists of superst.i.tion, through the valleys of doubt and despondency, athwart the thickets of prejudice and bigotry with all their furtive foemen, up to these sunlit heights of serenity.

"Mary" is less explicit in its teaching than the two great novels just summarized, but what it misses in didacticism it more than gains in art. The radiant creature who gives her name to the book is one of Bjornson's most exquisite figures. She is the very embodiment of youthful womanhood, filled with the joy of life, and bringing suns.h.i.+ne wherever she goes. Yet this temperament leads to her undoing, or what would be the undoing of any woman less splendid in character. But the strength that impels her to the misstep that comes so near to having tragic consequences is also the strength that saves her when chastened by suffering. In her the author "gives us the common stuff of life,"

says an English critic, "gives it us simple and direct. There is nothing here of Ibsen's pathology. We are in the sun. Her most hideous blunder cannot undo a woman's soul. Bjornson knows that the deed is nothing at all. It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. Not everything that cometh out of a man defileth a man. At all events, so it is here: triumph and joy built upon an act that--as the Philistines would say--has defiled forever." As a triumph of sheer creation, this figure is hardly overmatched anywhere in the author's portrait gallery of women.

If Bjornson's essential teaching may be found in a single page, as has above been suggested, his personality evades all such summarizing. In the present essay, he has been considered as a writer merely,--poet, dramatist, novelist,--but the man is vastly more than that. His other activities have been hinted at, indeed, but nothing adequate has been said about them. The director of three theatres, the editor of three newspapers and the contributor to many others, the promoter of schools and patriotic organizations, the partic.i.p.ant in many political campaigns, the lay preacher of private and public morals, the chosen orator of his nation for all great occasions,--these are some of the characters in which we must view him to form anything like a complete conception of his many-sided individuality. Take the matter of oratory alone, and it is perhaps true that he has influenced as many people by the living word as he has by the printed page. He has addressed hundreds of audiences in the three Scandinavian countries and in Finland, he has spoken to more than twenty thousand at a time, and his winged speech has gone straight home to his hearers. All who ever heard him will agree that his oratory was of the most persuasive and vital impressiveness. Jaeger attempts to describe it in the following words:--

"It is eloquence of a very distinctive type; its most characteristic quality is its wealth of color; it finds expression for every mood, from the lightest to the most serious, from the most vigorous to the most delicate and tender. Now his words ring like the voice of doom, filled with thunder and lightning, now they become soft and persuasive with smiling mien. With a single cadence, or a play of the facial muscles, or a slight gesture, he can portray a person, a situation, or an object, so that it appears living in the sight of his hearers. And what the word alone cannot do, is accomplished in the most brilliant manner by the virtuosity of his delivery. He does not speak his words, he presents them; they take bodily form and seem alive."

In his more intimate relations.h.i.+ps, on the other hand, in face to face conversation or in the home circle, the man takes on a quite different aspect; the prophet has become the friend, the impa.s.sioned preacher has become the genial story teller, and shares the gladsome or mirthful mood of the hour. Such a personality as this may be a.n.a.lyzed; it defies any concise synthesis. One resorts to figures of speech, and they were abundantly resorted to by those who paid him the tribute of their admiration and love upon the occasion of his seventieth anniversary. Let us take an instance at random from one of these tributes.

"The cataract that roars down to the free foaming sea. The mountain with its snowclad peaks towering up into the immensity of the starry heavens. The rustling of the woodland above the blossom-spangled and smiling meadows, the steep uptowering, the widely growing, and the joyously smiling. At once the soft melody that stirs the heart and the strong wind that sweeps over the Northern lands."

This concourse of metaphors gives some slight idea of the way in which Bjornson's personality affected those who came into contact with it.

The description may be supplemented by a few bits of anecdote and reminiscence. The composer Grieg contributes the following incident of the old days in Norway:--

"It was Christmas eve of 1868 at the Bjornsons in Christiania. They lived then in the Rosenkrantzgade. My wife and I were, as far as I can remember, the only guests. The children were very boisterous in their glee. In the middle of the floor an immense Christmas tree was enthroned and brightly lighted. All the servant-folk came in, and Bjornson spoke, beautifully and warmly, as he well knows how to do.

'Now you shall play a hymn, Grieg,' he said, and although I did not quite like the notion of doing organist's work, I naturally complied without a murmur. It was one of Grundtvig's hymns in 32--thirty-two verses. I resigned myself to my fate with stoicism. At the beginning I kept myself awake, but the endless repet.i.tions had a soporific effect. Little by little I became as stupid as a medium. When we had at last got through with all the verses, Bjornson said: 'Isn't that fine. Now I will read it for you!' And so we got all thirty-two verses once more. I was completely overawed."

When the poet purchased his country estate which was his home from the late seventies to the end of his life, his coming was looked forward to with mingled feelings by the good country folk of the neighborhood.

Kristofer Janson thus tells the story of his arrival:

"His coming was antic.i.p.ated with a certain anxiety and apprehension, for was he not a 'horrid radical'? The dean in particular thought that he might be a menace to the safe spiritual slumber of the village. As the dean one day was driving through the village in his carriole, just where the road turns sharply by the bridge below Aulestad, he met another carriole which was rapidly driving that way and in it a man who, without respect for the clerical vehicle, shouted with all the strength of his lungs: 'Half the road!' The dean turned aside, saying with a sigh: 'Has Bjornson come to the Gausdal at last?' "It was indeed so, and he showed his colors at the start. The same dean and Bjornson became the best of friends afterwards, and found much sport in interchanging genial jests whenever they met."

Frits Thaulow, the painter, thus wrote to Bjornson reminding him of a festive gathering of students:

"The manager came in and announced with a loud voice that it was past twelve. Then you sprang up.

"'Bring champagne! Now I will speak of what comes after twelve o'clock! of all that lies beyond the respectable hour for retiring!

For the hour when fancy awakens and fills us with longings for the world of wonderland; then the painter sees only the dim outline in the moonlight, then the musician hears the silence, then the poet after his thoughtful day feels sprouting the first shoots of the next. After twelve freedom begins. The day's tumult is stilled, and the voice within becomes audible.'

"Thus you spoke, and 'after twelve' became a watchword with us.

"Many a spark has been kindled in your soul by the quiet evening time.

But later in life, when you become a chieftain in the battle, broad daylight also made its demands upon you. Like the sun you shone upon us and made the best that was in us to grow, but I shall always keep a deep artistic affection for what comes 'after twelve.'"

Henrik Cavling tells the following story of the poet in Paris:

"It was one of Bjornson's peculiarities to go out as a rule without any money in his pocket. He neither owned a purse nor knew the French coins. His personal expenditures were restricted to the books he bought, and now and then a theatre ticket. One day he carne excitedly into the sitting-room, and asked: