The excellencies were specifically poetic; the tenderest sentiment was cast in the hardest form; the most refined, versatile observation was united with a lyric ardor which permeated the whole and burst into a freer course in numerous fugitive child, folk, and love songs. A vein of fundamental romance hovered over the narrative. The new order of novel admitted of being preluded without any disharmony by a nursery story, as in "Arne," in which plants conversed and vied with one another in their efforts. Notwithstanding the dry realism of certain of the characters, it was so idyllic that little detached stories, in which woodland sprites played a rôle, became wedded to the universally prevailing tone without causing any breach with the spirit of the general action. Björnson was a good observer and had amassed a store of little traits from which he constructed his tales. When his Arne is asked, "How do you manage when you make songs?" he replies, "I hoard up the thoughts that others are in the habit of letting go." Björnson might have given the same answer himself. And yet sagas, folk-songs, and folk-tales were the currents through whose intermingling his art-form became crystallized. He did not give it isolated grandeur, but kept himself through it in rapport with the popular mind.
"Synnöve Solbakken" was the plastic harmony within the limitation of Norwegian life, and the hero Thorbjörn was the type of the vigorous, stubborn youth, whose nature could only ripen to maturity through calming, soothing influences. "Arne," on the other hand, represented the lyric, yearning tendency of the people, that impulse of the viking blood which has been transformed into desire for travel, and the hero the type of the tender-hearted, dreamy youth who needed to be steeled in order to become a man. Much of the deepest, most elementary propensity of the Norwegian people, much of the peculiar youthful yearning of the poet himself, was committed to Arne's principal song which has become so celebrated. A sigh from the heart of the people may be heard in the following lines:—
"Shall I the journey never take
Over the lofty mountains?
Must my poor thoughts on this rock-wall break?
Must it a dread, ice-bound prison make,
Shutting at last in around me,
Till for my tomb it surround me?
"Forth will I! forth! Oh, far, far, away,
Over the lofty mountains!
I will be crushed and consumed if I stay;
Courage tow'rs up and seeks the way;
Let it its flight now be taking,
Not on this rock-wall be breaking!"[2]
The yearning expressed in this poem is that which drove the sea-kings of old to the West and to the South, that which led Holberg, the great founder of the Norwegian-Danish literature, to roam over half of Europe on foot, and which at the present day is manifested in the emigration of so many Norwegian artists of all kinds.
If the two larger stories "Synnöve" and "Arne" formed such perfect complements of each other, the third story "En glad Gut" (A Happy Boy) was like a refreshing breeze bringing deliverance from the brooding melancholy that oppresses the Norwegian mind, and sweeping it away in the name of a healthy temperament. This production contained the joyous message of unsophisticated vital powers and love of life; it was like a fresh song, bubbling over with laughter and purifying the atmosphere.
III.
Then followed dramas and poems. The strong personality of Björnson gradually worked its way out of the swaddling-clothes of the national mind. In "Between the Battles," "Sigurd Slembe" (Sigurd the Bad), and "Amljot Gelline," will be found the same grand type, the hero born to be a chieftain, created to be the benefactor of his people, a being alike powerful and noble, but whose rights are withheld from him, and who is compelled, owing to the injustice under which he suffers, to cause a large amount of evil on his way to the goal, although he desires only good. Whole towns are left in flames behind Sverre, wherever he may fare. He tells of this with the bitterest anguish in "Between the Battles." "I know a chieftain," he exclaims, "who longed to be a blessing to his country, but who became its curse. He shudders with horror at his own wretched fate, and would have fled from all the hideous corpses that stare him in the face from border to border of the land; would have fled as an exile from his own hereditary kingdom, had there not been those who clung to his mantle. So he is led, as by an inexorable fate, from one bloody deed of violence to another, from conflagration to conflagration, over reeking corpses and heaps of ruins, while shrieks and wails of lamentation pursue him, and all hell is let loose about him, and people say the devil walks at his side; in truth, some say he is the devil! I know—ah! I know that while those about him are slaughtering one another like so many cattle, he has not the heart to lay his hand on a single man, lest he should intensify his own misery. And masses are sung before the battle, and masses after the battle; he strives to make atonement and to heal; he brings relief to the suffering and assuages ills; to those who ask it of him he gives peace; but there is one to whom it will be long ere he can bring peace, and that is himself." Sigurd, the hero of the trilogy "Sigurd Slembe," is despised and persecuted because he who desired only justice for himself and happiness for Norway, betrayed into the hands of his enemies by his half-brother, the feeble-minded Harold Gille, becomes the murderer of the latter. He had gone to his brother, after long renunciation and bitter inward struggles, with the best intention in the world, and the most ardent desire to come to a peaceful understanding with him, and he leaves him, having escaped from the guard to whom the murder was entrusted, "a king in the armor of revenge, with the eye of despair and a flaming sword." Amljot, who in the innermost depths of his soul is so good, so humble, becomes an incendiary and a pillager until the day when, as the knight of Olaf, he meets his death at Stiklestad. These characters are deeply rooted in the poet's soul. He had early encountered passionate opposition, had felt himself misunderstood and hated by his opponents. With his indomitable ambition, with the vehemence that was inherent in his nature, and the tenderness that belonged to his temperament, he felt himself wondrously akin to those saga forms, and whenever he was conscious of being misunderstood and unjustly scorned by his people, he laid the burden of his longing to elevate this people, and to harmonize them with himself, and his consciousness that with all his good designs he had estranged his people from him at times, upon the characters of these old chieftains; this Sigurd, for instance, who when excited becomes a changed being, "hard as a steel-spring, bounding without a footfall o'er the floor, with flashing, evil eyes, and voice that seemed to come from a long, dark passage," but who, nevertheless, conceals within his soul a veritable horn of plenty, overflowing with magnificent plans for the public weal. Profoundly, indeed, must Björnson have suffered in his youth to be able to write Sigurd's soliloquy in the winter night, or the one toward the end of the drama, beginning with the words, "The Danes have forsaken me? Lost the battle? Thus far—and never farther?" in which mighty plans,—to assemble an army, to sail far away, to become a merchant, a crusader,—arise with giddy swiftness and are rejected, until the impression of approaching dissolution again obtrudes itself. Then the words "Thus far—and never farther," return no longer as a question, but refrain-like as an answer. Even in the midst of despair love of fatherland, which in this case is love of the enemy, thus finds utterance: "Ah, this beautiful land was not by me to be governed. Great is the wrong I have done it! How, ah! how was this possible? When absent I saw in ev'ry cloud thy mountains; I yearned for home like a child for Christmas; and yet I sought not my home,—and I gave thee wound on wound."
Great personality with Björnson is not encased in Michael-Angelo-like pride; it works its way out of the national spirit only to strive, yearningly, to return to it again. Its most ardent desire is to become united with this spirit, and profound, indeed, is the tragedy where this union is prevented.
In this point Björnson forms the sharpest contrast to the man who is his peer among contemporary Norwegian poets, Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen is solitary by nature. "In distant lands I rest lonely," he cries. These lines, which are the refrain of the well-known poem, "Langt borte" (In Distant Lands), written on the occasion of the trip of the Scandinavian students to Upsala in 1875, form the motto of his life. He penetrates the depths of the earth, like his miner.