Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

“ His whole great, rich, marvellous life has always seemed to me like an epic with its battles and its final victory. Such a spirit must of necessity make room for itself, and decisively assert itself in history, in whatever direction its activity may be turned, under whatever circumstances and at whatever time it enters upon its career. The time when Luther came was one of those great historical epochs when the world-serpent sheds its skin and reappears in rejuvenated shape.... A great man, even the very greatest, is always the son of his age—only he is the eldest son ”

“ In Tegnér, on the other hand, it is primarily the man who is impressive; and the author is interesting as the revelation of the man. He has no literary airs and graces, but speaks with a splendid authority, e plena pectore, from the fulness of his manly [Pg 221] conviction. He seems a very personification of the national genius—fair, vigorous, and beautiful—with the glow of health in his cheeks and the light of courage in his eye. His vision of the world is bright and vivid, and he swims with a joyous ease in the high-tide of the moment, like a beautiful fish in the luminous summer sea. ”

“ But by submission and self-extinction, so alien to her character, she arouses his suspicion that she has something on her conscience; and, in his feeling of outrage, he begins to neglect and abuse her. When, at last, his maltreatment reaches a climax, she arises in all the dignity of her womanhood, and asserts her true self. Then comes reconciliation, followed by a united life of true equality and loving comradeship.
Such a mere skeleton of a plot can, of course, give no conception of the wealth of vivid details with which the book abounds. ”

“ Royalty is therefore a curse, because it robs its possessor of the wholesome discipline of life which is the right of every man that is born into the world.
Furthermore, there is an obvious intention to show that the monarchy, being founded upon a lie, is incapable of any real adaptation to the age, and reconciliation with modern progress. The king in the play is a young, talented, liberal-minded man, who is fully conscious of the anomaly of his position, and determined to save his throne by stripping it of all mediæval and mythological garniture. ”

“ To have breathed the breath of such warm and living life into a character of fiction is no small achievement. It is the loveliness of love, the sweetness of womanhood, the glorious ferment of the blood in the human springtide which are celebrated in "The Visionary." The thing is beautifully done. I do not know where young love has been more touchingly portrayed, unless it be in some of the Russian tales of Tourguéneff. [15] The second-sight with which the hero, David Holst, is afflicted, introduces an undertone of sadness—a pensive minor key—and seems to necessitate the tragic dénouement. ”

“ It is a greater achievement in a critic to gain an international fame than in a poet or a writer of fiction. The world is always more ready to be amused than to be instructed, and the literary purveyor of amusement has opportunities for fame ten times greater than those which fall to the lot of the literary instructor. The epic delight—the delight in fable and story—to which the former appeals, is a fundamental trait in human nature ”

“ Tegnér (and to his honor be it said) was one of the few who did not despair of liberty because a people born and bred in despotism failed to exercise the wisdom and self-restraint which only liberty can foster. For the only road to the attainment of liberty is its practice and its abuse, and the slow education which can be acquired by no theoretical teaching, but only in the hard and expensive school of experience. For the terrible birth-pangs of liberty no despotically governed people can escape, unless it chooses to remain in thraldom. ”

“ The same persistent tendency to present the wrong side as well as the right side—and not, as literary good manners are supposed to prescribe, ignore the former—is obvious in the charming tale, "At the Fair," where a little spice of wholesome truth spoils the thoughtlessly festive mood; and the squalor, the want, the envy, hate, and greed which prudence and a regard for business compel the performers to disguise to the public, become the more cruelly visible to the visitors of the little alley-way at the rear of the tents. ”

“ Goethe was thirty-seven when, in 1786, he turned his back upon the Storm and Stress, and in Italy sought and gained a new and saner vision of the world. This renewal of the sources which water the roots of his spiritual being becomes an imperative necessity to a man when he has exhausted the sources which tradition supplies. It is terrible to wake up one morning and see one's past life in a new and strange illumination, and the dust of ages lying inch-thick upon one's thoughts. ”

“ The terror with which Thomasine contemplates her approaching maternity is one of the finest points in the book. Has she the right to perpetuate such a race, which will be a curse to itself and to future generations? Would she not confer a boon upon mankind if, by destroying herself, she sweetened the life-blood of humanity? ”

“ The man who at forty assumes the child's attitude of mere wondering acceptance toward the world and its problems, may, indeed, be a very estimable character; but he will never amount to much. It is the honest doubters, the importunate questioners, the indefatigable fighters who have broken humanity's shackles, and made the world a more comfortable abiding-place to the present generation than it was to the past. There is unquestionably a strain of Danish romanticism in Björnson's persistent harping upon childlike faith and simplicity and a childlike vision of the world. ”

“ It is difficult to understand how a man of well-balanced brain and a logical equipment second to none, can take au sérieux a mere philosophical savage who dances a war-dance amid what he conceives to be the ruins of civilization, swings a reckless tomahawk and knocks down everybody and everything that comes in his way. There must lie a long history of disappointment and bitterness behind that endorsement of anarchy pure and simple. ”

“ There is no doubt that Norway is the most democratic country in Europe, if not in the world. There is a far sturdier sense of personal worth, a far more fearless assertion of equality, and a far more democratic feeling permeating society than, for instance, in the United States. Sweden, on the other hand, is essentially an aristocratic country, with a landed nobility and many other remnants of feudalism in her political and social institutions. ”

“ For the tremendous popularity which greeted "Frithjof's Saga" was due in no small measure to this half-juvenile robustness of its author's genius. As I cannot help regretting in myself the loss of my boyish appetite for swashbuckling marauders, and mysterious treasure-diggers, I am, indeed, far from deploring Tegnér's delight in the insane prowess of Charles XII., or the gay and chivalrous gallantry of Gustavus III. There is a sort of fine salubriousness in it which makes one, on the whole, like him the more. ”

“ Sometimes, for a change, he cried at the wickedness of the latter, and marvelled, with the naïveté of a spoiled child, that there should be such dreadful people in the world, who should persist in misunderstanding and misrepresenting him. Those who were good to him he exalted and lauded to the skies, no matter how they conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity. Some of the most mediocre princes, who had paid him compliments, he embalmed in prose and verse. ”

“ Mathilde, Laura's friend, accompanies them, though it is difficult to conjecture in what capacity; and publishes an anonymous novel, in which she enlightens the young wife regarding the probable results of her conduct. She thrusts a lamp into the dusk of her soul and frightens her by the things she shows her. She also, by arousing her jealousy, leads her out of childhood, with its veiled vision and happy ignorance, into womanhood, with its unflinching recognition of the realities that were hidden from the child. ”

“ Björnson is the son of a clergyman; he has never himself personally experienced the peasant's daily toil and narrow parochial vision. He has felt the power of the mountains over his mind, and been filled with longing, as a grand emotion, but the contractedness of the spiritual horizon has not tormented him. ”

“ Through the dim and lofty passage-ways resounds the laughter of children; on the scenes of so many hoary crimes the prattle of innocent girls is heard; a multitude of scientific instruments labor to demonstrate the laws of nature, and to simplify the problem of existence which the crimes of the Kurts had tended to complicate. Thomas Rendalen, profoundly impressed as he is with his responsibility as the last descendant of such a race, takes up this educational mission with a lofty humanitarian enthusiasm. ”

“ The objections to "Frithjof's Saga" which have been urged by numerous critics may all be admitted as more or less valid; yet something remains which will account for its astounding popularity. Tegnér at the time when he was singing of Frithjof's and Ingeborg's love was himself suffering from a consuming but unrequited passion. The strong, warm pulse of life which throbs in Frithjof's wrath, defiance, and scorn, and in his deep and manly tenderness is the poet's own. ”

“ A strong spiritual kinship drew him to Schiller, whose splendor of imagery and impassioned rhetoric were the very gifts which he himself in a superlative degree possessed. The breath of political and religious liberalism which pervades the writings of the German poet was also highly congenial to Tegnér, and last, but not least, they were both light-loving, beauty-worshipping Hellenists, and, though externally conformists, hid joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies. ”

“ Having the man, we are able to trace the germs of his being in the past of his race and his country; but, with all our science we have not yet acquired the ingenuity to predict the man—to deduce him a priori from the tangle of determining causes which enveloped his birth. It seems beautifully appropriate in the Elder Edda that the god-descended hero Helge the Völsung should be born amid gloom and terror in a storm which shakes the house, while the Norns—the goddesses of fate—proclaim in the tempest his tempestuous career. ”

“ I have learned at my own expense what a human heart can endure without breaking, and what power God has deposited in a man under his left nipple. As I say, I am under obligation to this year, for it has enriched me with what is the real sinking fund of human wisdom and human independence—a mighty, deeply rooted contempt for man.... ”

“ The moral exaltation which manifests itself in this struggle is most vividly portrayed. She clings to life desperately; she is young and strong, unsentimental, and averse to ascetic enthusiasm. It finally occurs to her that her own race, too, will assert itself in this child; that the pure and vigorous strain which her own blood will infuse may redeem it from the dark destiny of the Kurts. She finally resolves upon a compromise; if the child is dark, like the Kurts, both it and its mother shall die. ”

“ The voluptuous warmth and wealth of color, the exquisite levity, the débonnaire grace of the Swinburnian drama we seek in vain. Björnson is vigorous, but he is not subtile. Mere feline amorousness, such as Swinburne so inimitably portrays, he would disdain to deal with if even he could. Such a bit of intricate self-characterization as the English poet puts into the Queen's mouth in the first scene with Chastelard, in the third act, lies utterly beyond the range of the sturdier Norseman. ”

“ The most modern literature, which is interpenetrated with the spirit of the age, has a way of asking dangerous questions—questions before which the reader, when he perceives their full scope, stands aghast. Our old idyllic faith in the goodness and wisdom of all mundane arrangements has undoubtedly received a shock. Our attitude toward the universe is changing with the change of its attitude toward us. What the thinking part of [Pg 117] humanity is now largely engaged in doing is readjusting itself toward the world and the world toward it. ”

“ Never has Björnson written anything more convincing, penetrating, subtly satirical. He cuts deep; every incision draws blood. A Norwegian who reads the play cannot well rid himself of a startled sense of exposure that is at first wounding to his patriotism. It is mortifying to have to admit that things are thus in Norway. And the worst of it is that there appears to be no remedy. The condition is, according to Björnson, inherent in all small states which cripple the souls of men, stunt their growth, and contract their horizon. ”

“ In all the great men of Norway we recognize something of the rampant individualism of their Viking forefathers. Ibsen is the modern apostle par excellence of philosophic anarchism; and Björnson, too, has his full share of the national aggressiveness and pugnacity. For all that there is a radical difference between the two. The sense of social obligation which Ibsen lacks, Björnson possesses in a high degree. He fights, not as a daring guerilla, but as the spokesman and leader of thousands. He is the chieftain who looms a head above all the people. ”

“ The bitterest opponent of the poet (for like every strong personality he has many enemies) is thus no less his debtor than his warmest admirer. His speech has stamped itself upon the very language and given it a new ring, a deeper resonance. His [Pg 4] thought fills the air, and has become the unconscious property of all who have grown to manhood and womanhood since the day when his titanic form first loomed up on the horizon of the North. It is not only as their first and greatest poet that the Norsemen love and hate him, but also as a civilizer in the widest sense. ”

“ If society did not, with the fierce instinct of self-preservation, guard its traditional morality against such assailants as Byron and Shelley, civilization would suffer. The conservative bias of the Philistine (though not so outwardly attractive) is no less valuable as a factor in civilization than the iconoclastic zeal of the reformer. If the centrifugal force had full sway in human society, without being counteracted by a centripetal tendency, anarchy would soon prevail. ”