Bjornstjerne Bjornson | Page 4

must be better there, Broader the view and freer the air; Com'st thou
these longings to bring me; These only, and nothing to wing me? "Oh,
shall I never, never go Over the lofty mountains! Must all my thoughts
and wishes so Held in these walls of ice and snow Here be imprisoned
forever? Till death shall I flee them never? "Hence! I will hence! Oh, so
far from here, Over the lofty mountains! Here 't is so dull, so
unspeakably drear; Young is my heart and free from fear-- Better the

walls to be scaling Than here in my prison lie wailing. "One day, I
know, shall my soul free roam Over the lofty mountains. Oh, my God,
fair is thy home, Ajar is the door for all who come; Guard it for me yet
longer, Till my soul through striving grows stronger."
At the age of eleven Björnson's school days began at Molde, and were
continued at Christiania in a famous preparatory school, where he had
Ibsen for a comrade. He entered the university in his twentieth year, but
his career was not brilliant from a scholastic point of view, and he was
too much occupied with his own intellectual concerns to be a model
student. From his matriculation in 1852, to the appearance of his first
book in 1857, he was occupied with many sorts of literary experiments,
and became actively engaged in journalism. The theatre, in particular,
attracted him, for the theatre was one of the chief foci of the intellectual
life of his country (as it should be in every country), and he plunged
into dramatic criticism as the avowed partisan of Norwegian ideals,
holding himself, in some sort, the successor of Wergeland, Who had
died about ten years earlier. Before becoming a dramatic critic, he had
essayed dramatic authorship, and the acceptance by the theatre of his
juvenile play, "Valborg," had led to a somewhat unusual result. He was
given a free ticket of admission, and a few weeks of theatre-going
opened his eyes to the defects of his own accepted work, which he
withdrew before it had been inflicted upon the public. The full
consciousness of his poetical calling came to him upon his return from
a student gathering at the university town of Upsala, whither he had
gone as a special correspondent. "When I came home from the
journey," 'he says, "I slept three whole days with a few brief intervals
for eating and conversation. Then I wrote down my impressions of the
journey, but just because I had first lived and then written, the account
got style and color; it attracted attention, and made me all the more
certain that the hour had come. I packed up, went home, thought it all
over, wrote and rewrote `Between the Battles' in a fortnight, and
travelled to Copenhagen with the completed piece in my trunk; I would
be a poet." He then set to writing "Synnöve Solbakken," published it in
part as a newspaper serial, and then in book form, in the autumn of
1857. He had "commenced author" in good earnest.
The next fifteen years of Björnson's life were richly productive. Within
a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his peasant idyls

and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had also published
two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned as the
achievement of fourteen feverish days. The remaining product of the
fifteen years includes two more prose idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The
Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable number of small pieces similar in
character); three more plays drawn from the treasury of old Norse
history, "King Sverre," "Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigurd Jorsalfar"; a
dramatic setting of the story of "Mary Stuart in Scotland"; a little social
comedy, "The Newly Married Couple," which offers a foretaste of his
later exclusive preoccupation with modern life; "Arnljot Gelline," his
only long poem, a wild narrative of the clash between heathendom and
the Christian faith in the days of Olaf the Holy; and, last but by no
means least, the collection of his "Poems and Songs." Thus at the age
of forty, Björnson found himself with a dozen books to his credit books
which had stirred his fellow countrymen as no other books had ever
stirred them, arousing them to the full consciousness of their own
nature and of its roots in their own heroic past. He had become the
voice of his people as no one had been before him, the singer of all that
was noble in Norwegian aspiration, the sympathetic delineator of all
that was essential in Norwegian Character. He had, in short, created a
national literature where none had before existed, and he was still in his
early prime.
The collected edition of Björnson's "Tales," published