William Morton Payne

“ She is the very embodiment of youthful womanhood, filled with the joy of life, and bringing sunshine 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. ”

“ All the forces of selfishness and prejudice and ignorance combine against him; even the people whom he seeks to benefit are so wedded to their idols that their attitude is one of suspicion rather than of sympathy. He loves a young woman of strong and noble character, and wins her love in return, but she dies on the very eve of their union. His oldest and most confidential friend, the wealthiest man in the kingdom, but a republican, is murdered by a radical associate of the intransigeant type, and the king is left utterly bereaved by his twofold loss. ”

“ Beneath the words spoken by his characters we are constantly made to realize that there are depths of feeling that remain unexpressed; whether from native pride or from a sense of the inadequacy of mere words to set forth a critical moment of life, his men and women are distinguished by the most laconic utterance, yet their speech always has dramatic fitness and bears the stamp of sincerity. ”

“ The greatest poet is he who understands how to awaken fancy and feeling to their highest degree of self-activity. And this is Björnson's greatness in his peasant novels, that he has poured from his horn of plenty a wealth of situations and motives that hold the reader's mind and burn themselves into it, that become his personal possession just because the author has known how to suggest so much in so few words. ”

“ The king, is young, physically delicate, and of highly sensitive organization. When he comes to the throne he realizes the hollowness and the hypocrisy of the existence that prescription has marked out for him; he realizes also that the very ideal of monarchy, under the conditions of modern European civilization, is a gigantic falsehood. For a time after his accession, he leads a life of pleasure seeking and revelry, hoping that he may dull his sense of the sharp contrast that exists between his station and his ideals. ”

“ Few productions of modern literature have proved as epoch-making as the modest little volume called "Synnöve Solbakken," which appeared in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it was absolutely new in its style, and in its intimate revelation of the Norwegian character. It must be remembered that until the year 1814, Norway had for centuries been politically united with Denmark, and that Copenhagen had been the common literary centre of the two countries. ”

“ With the mutual love of Sigurd and Audhild comes the one hour of sunshine in both their lives, but the love is destined to end in a noble renunciation and to leave only a hallowed memory in token of its brief existence.
Ten more years as a crusader and a wanderer over the face of the earth pass by before we meet with Sigurd again in the third section of the trilogy. But his resolution is taken. He has returned to his native land, and will claim his own. ”

“ But whatever the opposition aroused by his political and social radicalism, even his opponents have been constrained to feel that he was the mouthpiece of their race as no other Norwegian before him had been, and that he has voiced whatever is deepest and most enduring in the Norwegian temper. Powerful as has been his appeal to the intellect and conscience of the modern world at large, it has always had a special note of admonition or of cheer for his own people. ”

“ There are only a few pages in all, but they embody the tragedy of a lifetime. The little work is a literary gem of the purest water, and it reveals the whole secret of the author's genius, as displayed in his early tales. It is by these tales of peasant life that Björnson is best known outside of his own country; one may almost say that it is by them alone that he is really familiar to English readers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is nothing here of Ibsen's pathology. We are in the sun. Her most hideous blunder cannot undo a woman's soul. Björnson knows that the deed is nothing at all. It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. ”

“ 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 Björnson, 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 ”

“ Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a noble, 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. ”

“ 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 ennobled by it, and some made great. I honor all the noble. 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. ”

“ He has become a hard man, but, however wild his schemes of revenge, and however desperate his measures, he retains our sympathy to the end because we feel that circumstances have made him the ravager of his country, and that his underlying motive all along has not been a merely personal ambition, but an immense longing to serve his people, and to rule them with justice and wisdom. ”

“ In his delineation of the Norwegian peasant character, Björnson was greatly aided by the study of the sagas, which he had read with enthusiasm from his earliest boyhood. Upon them his style was largely formed, and their vivid dramatic representation of the life of the early Norsemen impressed him profoundly, shaping both his ideals and the form of their expression. The modern Scandinavian may well be envied for his literary inheritance from the heroic past. No other European has anything to compare with it for clean-cut vigor and wealth of romantic material. ”

“ 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 masses a new heaven upon earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if we take literature in its larger sense, as including all the manifestations of creative activity in language, and if we insist, furthermore, that the man singled out for this preëminence shall stand in some vital relation to the intellectual life of his time, and exert a forceful influence upon the thought of the present day, the choice must rather be made among the three giants of the north of Europe, falling, as it may be, upon the great-hearted Russian emotionalist who has given us such deeply moving portrayals of the life of the modern world ”

“ Björnson was too near to his own country folk to commit such faults as these; he was himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty living from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct, he was not afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving the brutal aspects of peasant life a place upon his canvas. In emphasizing the characteristics of reticence and naïveté he really discovered the Norwegian peasant for literary purposes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 peasant tale was no new thing in European literature, for the names of Auerbach and George Sand, to say nothing of many others, at once come to the mind. In Scandinavian literature, its chief representative had been the Danish novelist, Blicher, who had written with insight and charm of the peasantry of Jutland. But in the treatment of peasant life by most of Björnson's predecessors there had been too much of the de haut en bas attitude; the peasant had been drawn from the outside, viewed philosophically, and invested with artificial sentiment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The best folk-singer is he who stands in the whirling round of life, says the poet, and he reveals the very secret of his power when he tells us that life was ever more to him than song, and that existence, where it was worth while, in the thick of the human fray, always had for him a deeper meaning than anything he had written. The longest poem in Björnson's collection is called "Bergliot," and is a dramatic monologue in which the foul slaying of her husband Ejnar Tambarskelve and their son Ejndride is mourned by the bereaved wife and mother. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eight years later, Björnson prefaced a new edition of this work with a series of reflections upon "Intellectual Freedom" that constitute 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So much didactic matter as this is a heavy burden for any novel to carry, and a lesser man than Björnson 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 pronounced 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. ”

“ Each of these parties found a vigorous leader, the cause of ultra-Norwegianism being championed by Wergeland, an erratic person in whom the spark of genius burned, but who never found himself, artistically speaking. The champion of the conservatives was Welhaven, a polished writer of singular charm and much force, philosophical in temper, whose graceful verse and acute criticism upheld by both precept and practice the traditional standards of culture. ”