III
Björnson was the son of a peasant; it was only in later life that his father became a pastor, and from him Björnson has inherited a theological tendency. He is essentially a preacher and religious teacher, he is never happy unless he has something to proclaim. But as he is not one of those who enjoy self-denial, he prefers that those very contradictory truths, which he has preached during the course of years, should take the form of a manifestation of the joy of life.
This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise between the two.
Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales, followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with his earlier ones.
In 1869, Ibsen wrote The League of Youth, which was the first of his social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called A Bankrupt, and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s satire, i.e. the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons, and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.
The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and finally—but, as I think, chiefly—the example of Ibsen. Björnson, as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him, until one came who showed him the way.
Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in The Editor. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama entitled The New System; while in Leonarda, the snivelling morality of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced views of the grandmother.
Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and amendment might ensue.
Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or economical question on which he had not a weighty—often an ominously weighty—word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new, brand new problem appeared above the horizon.
This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a human being and then a woman, it had been handled by Ibsen many years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s “works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered. Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity, her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries, mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and worshipped her intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics, bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they had succeeded in proving their intellectual gifts, although in order to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians, superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts, and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children, and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry and expense.
Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never been the pioneer of any cause. It was only when the movement was well started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only too great a success.
The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved, and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds: freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness, the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.
It was in the year 1884 that the novel appeared which was intended to reform public morals, it was called Thomas Rendalen. The introduction is a kind of ancestral history of the hero’s family, and it may be counted as one of the greatest things that Björnson has ever written; its historical spirit and word-colouring are such that one might fancy it to be a genuine production of the latter half of the seventeenth century. The continuation of the story describes a model educational establishment founded on a new moral principle, and is the first of Björnson’s works which is written from an English and American standpoint. A victorious warfare is waged against the stupid prejudices of society and the distorted and harmful system by which girls are educated. A dissolute man of the world who, with his hypnotic glances, has seduced a young girl of respectable family, afterwards forsakes both her and her child in order to marry a rich young lady who offers no objection in spite of possessing an accurate knowledge of the facts. The “fallen” girl with her child is honourably received into the model establishment. But the real hero is Thomas Rendalen, a youth of German extraction, who was begotten through violence and violation, but is rescued from this evil inheritance by a wise training, and later on by an equally wise system of self-training. His mother looks after him, she has been trained in England as a teacher of gymnastics and is superintendent of the model establishment, and on one occasion during her short married life she had a fearful tussle with her brutal husband in which she sufficiently proved her physical superiority. It is a novel on the training of the sexual impulse. The idea of the book, which is repeatedly illustrated by new examples, is to show that the union between man and woman is not a condition of the highest physical and spiritual welfare; that philanthropical works, and other more or less external diversions, are also very fine remedies. In the improved version of The Gauntlet, Björnson maintains that impurity is far worse than celibacy. A woman beginning life is considered pure, unless she has been seduced; but a man is considered impure. Education is held to be the highest means and aim of life, and the union between man and woman, from being an eternal source of strength for both, is degraded into a temporary arrangement for the procreation of the race. Thomas Rendalen became the gospel of the school mistresses, teachers, telegraph clerks and other women who, on account of their position in life or their personal idiosyncracies, are debarred from marriage. It surrounded the compulsory spinsterhood of the feminine portion of our higher stratum of society with a halo of glory, and the hearts of the discontented women of the north—married and unmarried—were laid in thousands at the feet of Björnson.
This was all that he staked in the movement. While new wishes and new needs were being aroused in a multitude of women, among whom were the most refined, the most advanced, the most developed of their sex; while a new type of womanhood was being evolved which sought for emancipation and groped after it only to find it in an unsatisfying, stupid, and distorted form; he remained glued to the superficial, put boarding-school education in the place of domestic discipline, morality in the place of Christianity, and made woman a generous offer of independence and personal freedom in return for the renunciation of her sex. And as to men he had once uttered the celebrated cry, “Passion must be abolished:” so to women he says: “Sex is nothing, it is entirely a matter of secondary importance, the fruit of a poet’s debauched imagination. There are many joys, a teacher’s joys, a pastor’s joys, a student’s joys, which are far more natural to a woman’s nature than the artificial and overrated fiction of love.” And with regard to their intercourse with men, he carried his snivelling morality and unseemly enquiries as far as the bridal bed.
In his next and, so far, his last novel, Björnson wandered In God’s Ways.
The subject of it is the marriage between a young girl who is childlike in her ignorance and a man who has become blind and lame in consequence of his excesses. Their separation, combined with the subsequent re-marriage of the young woman, is regarded both by society and by her relatives as an act of adultery. She is unable to endure the accusation, and dies from the cruelty of her fellow creatures. The person of next importance in the book is a young man who cures himself of a secret vice by means of diligent duet-playing with this same young woman, and by a still more diligent practice of running on all fours and other gymnastic exercises.
Such is the nature of Björnson’s contribution to the psychology of sex.
With regard to the moral conclusions of his latter period, he takes his stand beside Tolstoy as an ascetic; and like Tolstoy, who has wasted a grand psychology, Björnson has squandered a rich lyrical faculty on a mutilated ideal. Asceticism stands and falls with religious enthusiasm, and consists, in most cases, of nothing but religious enthusiasm; this is why, with Tolstoy, it went hand in hand with a return to positive Christianity; but Björnson, who became a religious freethinker at the same time that he became an ascetic, planted the moral that he preached on a far more slippery soil—on the soil of Degeneration.
* * * * *
In Ibsen’s first social drama, The League of Youth, he has drawn a satirical portrait of Björnson in the person of the central figure of the piece—Stensgaard, the adventurer and popular speaker. Hjalmar Christensen points out the likeness in his newly published work, called Northern Writers.
When we, at the end of Björnson’s career, examine the collected works of this celebrated author, we are impressed with the superficiality, the clap-trap precipitation and inward wavering which he displays whenever he takes part in the problems and social questions of the day. Every new book of his clearly proves to us that what he pathetically offers as gold is in reality nothing but dross, and in his last collection of Tales the tone of persuasion, which in old time so often won him the victory, sounds distressingly false. It was always his ambition to advance with the age, and he has met with the fate that must ever be the experience of those who aim no higher. The age does not allow any one to keep pace with it for long, and he who is not in advance of it will soon find himself in the rear.