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.
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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.