This is the case with all Scandinavian authoresses, with one exception. This one exception can see, and she looks at life with good large eyes, opened wide like a child’s, and sees with the impartiality that belongs to a healthy nature; she can grasp what she sees, and describe it too, with a freshness and expressiveness which betray a lack of “cultured” reading.
II
A lady of remarkable and brilliant beauty may sometimes be seen in the theatre at Copenhagen, or walking in the streets by the side of a tall, stout, fair gentleman, whose features resemble those of Gustavus Adolphus. Any one can see that the lady is a native of Bergen. To us strangers, the natives of Bergen have a certain something whereby we always recognize them, no matter whether we meet them in Paris or in Copenhagen. Björnson’s wife has it as decidedly as the humblest clerk whom we see on Sundays at the table of his employer at Reval or Riga. Their short, straight noses lack earnestness, their hair is shiny and untidy, their eyes are black as pitch, and they have the free and easy movements that are peculiar to a well-proportioned body; it is as though the essence of the vitality of Europe had collected in the old Hanseatic town of the North. I do not think that the inhabitants of Bergen are remarkable for their superior intelligence; if they were it might hinder them from grasping things as resolutely, and despatching them as promptly as they are in the habit of doing. But among Norwegians, who are known to have heavy, meditative natures, the people of Bergen are the most cheerful and light-hearted,—in as far as it is possible to be cheerful and light-hearted in this world.
The lady who is walking by the side of the man with the Gustavus-Adolphus head is a striking phenomenon in Copenhagen. She is different from every one else, which a lady ought never to be. Compared with the flat-breasted, lively, and flirtatious women of Copenhagen, she, with her well-developed figure and large hips, is like a great sailing-ship among small coquettish pleasure boats. She is always doing something which no lady would do; she wears bright colors, which are not the fashion; and I saw her one evening at an entertainment, where there were not enough chairs, sitting on a table and dangling her feet,—although she is the mother of two grown-up sons!
III
When the woman’s rights movement made its appearance in Norway, authoresses sprang up as numerous as mushrooms after the rain. Women claimed the right to study, to plead, and to legislate in the local body and the state; they claimed the suffrage, the right of property, and the right to earn their own living; but there was one very simple right to which they laid no claim, and that was the woman’s right to love. To a great extent this right had been thrust aside by the modern social order, yet there were plenty of Scandinavian authors who claimed it; it was only amongst the lady writers that it was ignored. They did not want to risk anything in the company of man; they did not want any love on the fourth story with self-cooked meals; they preferred to criticise man and all connected with him; and they wrote books about the hard-working woman and the more or less contemptible man. The two sexes were a vanquished standpoint. These were completed by the addition of beings who were neither men nor women, and, in consequence of the law of adaptability, they continued to improve with time, and woman became a thinking, working, neutral organism.
Good heavens! When women think!
Among the group of celebrated women-thinkers,—Leffler, Ahlgren, Agrell, etc.,—who criticised love as though it were a product of the intelligence, followed by a crowd of maidenly amazons, there suddenly appeared an author named Amalie Skram, whom one really could not accuse of being too thoughtful. It is true that in her first book there was the intellectual woman and the sensual man, and a seduced servant girl, grouped upon the chessboard of moral discussion with a measured proportion of light and shade,—that was the usual method of treating the deepest and most complicated moments of human life. But this book contained something else, which no Scandinavian authoress had ever produced before: her characters came and went, each in his own way; every one spoke his own language and had his own thoughts; there was no need for inky fingers to point the way; life lived itself, and the horizon was wide with plenty of fresh air and blue sky,—there was nothing cramped about it, like the wretched little extract of life to which the other ladies confined themselves. There was a wealth of minute observation about this book, brought to life by careful painting and critical descriptions, a trustworthy memory and an untroubled honesty; one recognized true naturalism below the hard surface of a problem novel, and one felt that if her talent grew upon the sunny side, the North would gain its first woman naturalist who did not write about life in a critical, moralizing, and polemical manner, but in whom life would reveal itself as bad and as stupid, as full of unnecessary anxiety and unconscious cruelty, as easy-going, as much frittered away and led by the senses as it actually is.
Two years passed by and “Constance Ring,” the story of a woman who was misunderstood, was followed by “Sjur Gabriel,” the story of a starving west coast fisherman. There is not a single false note in the book, and not one awkward description or superfluous word. It resembles one of those sharp-cut bronze medallions of the Renaissance, wherein the intention of the artist is executed with a perfected technical power in the use of the material. This perfection was the result of an intimate knowledge of the material, and that was Fru Skram’s secret. Her soul was sufficiently uncultured, and her sense of harmony spontaneous enough to enable her to reproduce the simplest cause in the heart’s fibre. She describes human beings as they are to be found alone with nature,—with a raw, niggardly, unreliable, Northern nature; she tells of their never-ending, unfruitful toil, whether field labor or child-bearing, the stimulating effect of brandy, the enervating influence of their fear of a harsh God,—the God of a severe climate,—the shy, unspoken love of the father, and the overworked woman who grows to resemble an animal more and more. Such are the contents of this simplest of all books, which is so intense in its absolute straightforwardness. The story is told in the severest style, in few words without reflections, but with a real honesty which looks facts straight in the face with unterrified gaze, and is filled with a knowledge of life and of people combined with a breadth of experience which is generally the property of men, and not many men. We are forced to ask ourselves where a woman can have obtained such knowledge, and we wonder how this unconventional mode of thinking can have found its way into the tight-laced body and soul of a woman.
A second book appeared the same year, called “Two Friends.” It is the story of a sailing vessel of the same name, which travels backwards and forwards between Bergen and Jamaica, and Sjur Gabriel’s grandson is the cabin boy on board. This book offers such a truthful representation of the life, tone of conversation, and work on board a Norwegian sailing vessel, that it would do credit to an old sea captain. The tone is true, the characters are life-like, and the humor which pervades the whole is thoroughly seamanlike. The description of how the entire crew, including the captain, land at Kingston one hot summer night to sacrifice to the Black Venus, and the description of the storm, and the shipwreck of the “Two Friends” on the Atlantic Ocean, the gradual destruction of the ship, the state of mind of the crew, and the captain’s suddenly awakened piety;—it is all so perfectly life-like, so characteristically true of the sailor class, and so full of local Norwegian coloring, that we ask ourselves how a woman ever came to write it,—not only to experience it, but to describe it at all, describe as she does with such masterly confidence and such plain expressions, without any affectation, prudery, or conceit, and without any trace of that dilettantism of style and subject which has hitherto been regarded as inseparable from the writings of Scandinavian women.