Bjornstjerne Bjornson | Page 2

his manner of inculcating them upon his readers, who
has just rounded out his scriptural tale of three score years and ten, and,
in commemoration of the anniversary, is now made the recipient of
such a tribute of grateful and whole-souled admiration as few men have
ever won, and none have better deserved. It would be certainly
invidious, and probably futile, to attempt a nice, comparative estimate
of the services of these three men to the common cause of humanity; let
us be content with the admission that Björnstjerne Björnson is _primus
inter pares_, and make no attempt to exalt him at the expense of his
great contemporaries. Writing now eight years later, at the time when
Björnson's death has plunged his country and the world in mourning, it
is impressive to note that of the five men constituting the group above
designated, Tolstoy alone survives to carry on the great literary
tradition of the nineteenth century.
It will be well, however, to make certain distinctions between the life
work of Björnson and that of the two men whom a common age and
common aims bring into inevitable association with him. These
distinctions are chiefly two,--one of them is that while Tolstoy and
Ibsen grew to be largely cosmopolitan in their outlook, Björnson has
much more closely maintained throughout his career the national, or, at
any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen
presently became, the one indifferent to artistic expression, and the
other baldly prosaic where he was once deeply poetical, Björnson
preserved the poetic impulse of his youth, and continued to give it play
even in his envisagement of the most practical modern problems. Let us
enlarge a little upon these two themes. Ernest Renan, speaking at the
funeral of Tourguénieff, described the deceased novelist as "the
incarnation of a whole people." Even more fittingly might the phrase be
applied to Björnson, for it would be difficult to find anywhere else in
modern literature a figure so completely and profoundly representative
of his race. In the frequently quoted words of Dr. Brandes, to speak the
name of Björnson in any assembly of his countrymen is like "hoisting
the Norwegian flag." It has been maliciously added that mention of his
name is also like flaunting a red flag in the sight of a considerable

proportion of the assembly, for Björnson has always been a fighter as
well as an artist, and it has been his self-imposed mission to arouse his
fellow countrymen from their mental sluggishness no less than to give
creative embodiment to their types of character and their ideal
aspirations. But whatever the opposition aroused by his political and
social radicalism, even his opponents have been constrained to feel that
he was the mouthpiece of their race as no other Norwegian before him
had been, and that he has voiced whatever is deepest and most enduring
in the Norwegian temper. Powerful as has been his appeal to the
intellect and conscience of the modern world at large, it has always had
a special note of admonition or of cheer for his own people. With
reference to the second of our two themes, it is sufficient to say that,
although the form of verse was almost wholly abandoned by him
during the latter half of his life, the breath of poetry never ceased to
exhale from his work, and the lyric exuberance of his later prose still
recalls to us the singer of the sixties.
Few productions of modern literature have proved as epoch- making as
the modest little volume called "Synnöve Solbakken," which appeared
in the book shops of Christiania and Copenhagen in 1857. It was a
simple tale of peasant life, an idyl of the love of a boy and a girl, but it
was absolutely new in its style, and in its intimate revelation of the
Norwegian character. It must be remembered that until the year 1814,
Norway had for centuries been politically united with Denmark, and
that Copenhagen had been the common literary centre of the two
countries. To that city Norwegian writers had gravitated as naturally as
French writers gravitate to Paris. There had resulted from this condition
of things a literature which, although it owed much to men of
Norwegian birth, was essentially a Danish literature, and must properly
be so styled. That literature could boast, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, an interesting history comparable in its antiquity
with the greater literatures of Europe, and a brilliant history for at least
a hundred years past. But old literatures are sure to become more or
less sophisticated and trammelled by traditon, and to this rule Danish
literature was no exception. When the constitution of Eidsvold, in 1814,
separated Norway from Denmark, and made it into an independent