Essays on Scandinavian Literature

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

"'Sigurd the Crusader' is meant to be what is called a 'folk-play.' It is my intention to make several dramatic experiments with grand scenes from the sagas, lifting them into a strong but not too heavy frame. By a 'folk-play' I mean a play which should appeal to every eye and every stage of culture, to each in its own way, and at the performance of which all, for the time being, would experience the joy of fellow-feeling. The common history of a people is best available for this purpose—nay, it ought dramatically never to be treated otherwise. The treatment must necessarily be simple and the emotions predominant; it should be accompanied with music, and the development should progress in clear groups....

"The old as well as the new historic folk literature will, with its corresponding comic element, as I think, be a great gain to the stage, and will preserve its connection with the people where this has not already been lost—so that it be no longer a mere institution for amusement, and that only to a single class. Unless we take this view of our stage, it will lose its right to be regarded as a national affair, and the best part of its purpose, to unite while it lifts and makes us free, will be gradually assumed by some other agency. Nor shall we ever get actors fit for anything but trifles, unless we abandon our foreign French tendency as a leading one and substitute the national needs of our own people in its place."

It would be interesting to note how the poet has attempted to solve a problem so important and so difficult as this. In the first place, we find in "Sigurd the Crusader" not a trace of a didactic purpose beyond that of familiarizing the people with its own history, and this, as he himself admits in the preface just quoted, is merely a secondary consideration. He wishes to make all, irrespective of age, culture, and social station, feel strongly the bond of their common nationality; and, with this in view, he proceeds to unroll to them a panorama of simple but striking situations, knit together by a plot or story which, without the faintest tinge of sensationalism, appeals to those broadly human and national sympathies which form the common mental basis of Norse ignorance and Norse culture. He seizes the point in the saga where the long-smouldering hostility between the royal brothers, Sigurd the Crusader and Eystein, has broken into full blaze, and traces, in a series of vigorously sketched scenes, the intrigue and counter-intrigue which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax—a mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Björnson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather a retrogression.

II

A period is apt to come in the life of every man who is spiritually alive, when his scholastic culture begins to appear insufficient and the traditional premises of existence seem in need of readjustment and revision. This period, with the spiritual crisis which it involves, is likely to occur between the thirtieth and the fortieth meridian. Ibsen was thirty-four years old (1862) when in "The Comedy of Love" he broke with the romanticism of his youth, and began to wrestle with the problems of contemporary life. 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. It is distressing to have to pretend that you do not hear the doubt which whispers early and late in your ear, Vanitas, vanitas, vanitas vanitatum. Few are those of us who have the courage to face it, to rise up and fight with it, and rout it or be routed by it.

Björnson had up to this time (1870) built solely upon tradition. He had been orthodox, and had exalted childlike peace and faith above doubt and struggle. Phrases indicative of a certain spiritual immaturity are scattered through his early poems. In "The Child in our Soul," he says, for instance: "The greatest man on earth must cherish the child in his soul and listen, amid the thunder, to what it whispers low;" and again: "Everything great that thought has invented sprouted forth in childlike joy; and everything strong, sprung from what is good, obeyed the child's voice." Though in a certain sense that may be true enough, it belongs to the kind of half-truths which by constant repetition grow pernicious and false. 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. Grundtvig, with whom this note is pervasive, had in his early youth a great influence over him. The glorification of primitive feeling was part of the romantic revolt against the dry rationalism of the so-called period of enlightenment.

To account for the fact that so mighty a spirit as Björnson could have reached his thirty-eighth year before emerging from this state of idyllic naïveté, I am inclined to quote the following passage from Brandes, descriptive of the condition of the Scandinavian countries during the decade preceding 1870:

"While the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined place, the people were self-satisfied—though not with a joyous or noisy self-satisfaction; for there was much sadness in their minds after the great disasters [the Sleswick-Holstein War].... They rested on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism—the ideals of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard—and their strong vigilance, they regenerated the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were the power which could rule the world, but which, for mysterious and incomprehensible reasons, had for a long series of years preferred to eat crumbs from the foreigners' table. They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which led the cause of the peoples to victory—and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant."[5]

[5] Brandes: Det Moderne Gjennembrud's Maend, pp. 44, 45.

Though there is a good deal of malice, there is no exaggeration in this unflattering statement. Scandinavia had by its own choice cut itself off from the cosmopolitan world life; and the great ideas which agitated Europe found scarcely an echo in the three kingdoms. In my own boyhood, which coincides with Björnson's early manhood, I heard on all hands expressions of self-congratulation because the doubt and fermenting restlessness which were undermining the great societies abroad had never ruffled the placid surface of our good, old-fashioned, Scandinavian orthodoxy. How heartily we laughed at the absurdities of Darwin, who, as we had read in the newspapers, believed that he was descended from an ape! How deeply, densely, and solidly ignorant we were; and yet how superior we felt in the midst of our ignorance!