Bjornstjerne Bjornson | Page 2

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 Bj?rnstjerne Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson'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 Bj?rnson 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, Bj?rnson 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, Bj?rnson 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 Tourgu��nieff, described the deceased novelist as "the incarnation of a whole people." Even more fittingly might the phrase be applied to Bj?rnson, 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 Bj?rnson 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 Bj?rnson 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 "Synn?ve 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 kingdom (save for the forced Swedish partnership), the country had practically no literary tradition save that which centred about the Danish capital. She might claim to have