As the strife became fiercer and Christiania would not lend itself to be a field of battle, the conflict was transferred to hospitable Sweden. The Norwegian wine was well adapted for exportation; pamphlets grew in size as they travelled and in Sweden became literature. Thoughts came to the top and personalities settled at the bottom of the vessel. Ibsen and Björnson broke into Sweden; Tidemand and Gude took prizes in the art exhibition of 1866; Kierulf and Nordraak were authorities in singing and music. Then came Ibsen's Brand. This had appeared in 1866, but John did not see it till 1869. It made a deep impression on the primitive Christian side of him, but it was gloomy and severe. The final utterance in it regarding "Deus caritatis" was not satisfying, and the poet seemed to have had too much sympathy with his hero to have described his overthrow with cold irony.
Brand gave John a good deal of trouble. He (Brand) had dropped Christianity but kept its stern ascetic morality; he demanded obedience for his old doctrines though they were no more practicable; he despised the tendency of the time towards humanity and compromise, but ended by recommending the God of compromise. Brand was a fanatic, a pietist, who dared to believe himself right against the whole world, and John felt himself related to this terrible egoist who was wrong besides. No half-measures! go straight on; break down everything that stands in the way, for you only are right! John's tender conscience, which suffered at every step he took lest it should vex his father or friends, was stupefied by Brand. All ties of consideration and of love should be torn asunder for the sake of "the cause." That John was no longer a pietist was a piece of good fortune, otherwise he too would have been overwhelmed by the avalanche.[2] But Brand gave him a belief in a conscience which was purer than that which education had given him, and a law which was higher than conventional law. And he needed this iron backbone in his weak back, for he had long periods during which by fits and starts and out of mildness he thought himself wrong, and the first who came, right; therefore, he was also very easily misled. Brand was the last Christian who followed an old ideal, therefore he could be 110 pattern for one who felt a vague inclination to revolt against all old ideals.
Brand after all was a fine plant, but without any roots in its own period; and, therefore, it belonged to the herbarium. Then came Peer Gynt. This was rather obscure than deep and had its value as an antidote against the national self-love. The fact that Ibsen was neither banished nor persecuted after having said such bitter things against the proud Norwegians, shows that in Norway they were more honourable fighters than the Swedes afterwards showed themselves to be.
Ibsen was at that time regarded as a misanthrope and as an enemy and envier of Björnson. People were divided into two camps, and the dispute as to which of the two was the greater was endless, for it concerned an artistic problem—"contents or form."
The influence of Norwegian on Swedish poetry has been great and partly beneficent, but there was a peculiarly Norwegian element in it, which was not adaptable to Sweden, a land with quite another development. In the sequestered valleys of Norway there lived a people who, under the pressure of need and poverty, found ready to their hand in the Christian doctrine of renunciation an ascetic philosophy which promised heaven as a compensation for earth's hardships. Nature in her most gloomy and parsimonious aspect, a damp climate, long winters, great distances between the villages,—all co-operated to preserve an austere mediæval type of Christianity. There is something which may be said to resemble insanity in the Norwegian character, of the same kind as the English "spleen;" and possibly the intimate relations of Norway with the hypochondriacal islanders may have impressed traces on its civilisation. In Jonas Lie's Clair-voyant this melancholy is depleted, and in it one finds the same weird atmosphere as in the Icelandic sagas, and the theme also is similar,—the struggle of the spirit against physical darkness and cold. There we have depicted the tragic lot of the Norseman banished from sunny lands to gloomy wildernesses, and seeking relief by emigration, the ethnographical significance of which has been overlooked in view of its economical aspect. The Norwegian character is the result of many hundred years of tyranny, of injustice, of hard struggling for a livelihood, of want of gladness.
Swedish literature should have avoided absorbing these national peculiarities, but they have made it half-Norwegian. Brand still haunts Swedish literature with his ideal demands, with which the romanticised and cheerful Swede cannot sincerely sympathise. Therefore this foreign garb suits him so badly; therefore modern Swedish music sounds so unharmonious, like an echo of the violins of Hardanger, tuned over again by Grieg; therefore the talk of greater moral purity sounds discordant in the mouth of the vivacious Swede. He has not suffered from long oppression and does not need to seek himself in the past; melancholy has not so beset him in his open flat land of lakes and rivers, and therefore a sour mien becomes him ill.
When the Swedes received great and novel ideas by way of Norway or direct from the Continent through Ibsen and Björnson, they should have kept the kernel and thrown away the Norwegian husk. Even the Doll's House is Norwegian. Nora is related to the Icelandic women who wished to set up a matriarchate; she belongs to the weird imperious women in Härmännen who again are pure Norse. In them the emotions have become frozen or distorted by centuries of cognate marriages.
The whole Swedish literature of feminism is ultra-Norwegian; it contains the same immodest demands on the man and petting of the spoilt woman. Several young authors have introduced the Norwegian style into Swedish; one authoress has placed the scene of her book in Norway, and made her hero talk Norwegian! Further one could not go!
Let us welcome foreign influence which is cosmopolitan; but not Norwegian, for that is provincial, and we have plenty of the same kind ourselves.