Björnstjerne Björnson
I saw Björnson for the first time in Paris in the spring of 1886, where he formed the centre of the entire Scandinavian population. He was living with his wife and daughters in a quiet side street not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in which he always took his morning walk. When I went to see him, his wife was the first to receive me; she was a dark-eyed native of Bergen, still pretty, with short-cut grey hair, and at first it seemed as though she meant to spend the customary quarter of an hour in conversation with me, as Björnson was at his work and might not be disturbed. Before long, however, the door into the adjoining room was opened, and a powerful, grey, bushy head was thrust through the aperture—a high forehead and little sharp eyes that sparkled behind a pair of spectacles, a large prominent hooked nose, and a pair of thin lips that quivered with anger and energy—but the next instant this menacing totality softened into a winning smile, and the whole man came in view, it was a bear-like figure, not above medium height, but with shoulders, arms and legs that gave one the impression of immense muscular strength. A man with this body and this temperament would require to lay about him in order to make life endurable, that was the first impression that one received, and the second was that this great muscular man was not created to understand the most subtle and hidden problems of human life. At the same time one understood his popularity. This genius of a bear had something about him that was irresistibly healthy, straightforward and convincing; he represented the primeval type of manhood, the leader whom the mass of the people follow like a flock of sheep, and at whose glance women turn hot and cold. Björnson’s is not a reserved nature—with such muscles there is no need of reserve—and owing to his communicativeness one gets to know him as well in a single day as any one else in a year. He invited me to join him in his morning walk in the Bois, and having first divested himself of a colossal Wagner cap, which seemed intended rather for adornment than for warmth, he stepped along with an elegance that would have done credit to a dandy, but which among German authors and thinkers is wholly unknown. The Scandinavians as a rule set a far greater value on dress than the Germans, and Björnson did not conceal his personal feelings in this respect, as displaying the silk lining of his overcoat, he said: “You see I am fond of fine clothes; when I get a new suit from the tailor, I spend half the day in front of the looking-glass, but for all that I never for a single instant forget the great work of civilisation to which we must devote our whole energy.”
We crossed the Place de l’Etoile, and Björnson began to tell me about this same work. He spoke loud, and in a threatening voice, as though he were addressing a large audience. Omnibuses rattled by, light elegant carriages with india-rubber tyres flew past us, and riders came out of the Bois; it was necessary to concentrate one’s attention, to make room, to be careful, the crowd of foot-passengers was enough to confuse anybody; but Björnson behaved as though he did not observe it, he had grown excited in speaking, his voice quivered, his eyes shone with tears, and the passers-by stood still and stared at the strange bear-like figure with the broad, ruddy face appearing beneath the cylindriform hat and the brand new suit. But Björnson was too much accustomed to be stared at in his own country to allow himself to be disturbed by it. He shouted a few words of hearty greeting to a sad-looking little fellow countryman whom he caught sight of; and presently an English Bible-seller wandered by, who, hearing a foreign tongue, offered him the Word of God, whereupon Björnson recollected that he did not possess a Bible, and commenced a long altercation with the man, which ended by Björnson commissioning him to leave one at his house at the earliest opportunity. At last we reached the Bois. We walked among the fragrant acacias to the waterfall and past the winding lake, we walked and walked, surrounded by the spring magic of the half southern landscape, and imbued with the feeling of peaceful melancholy and comfortable exhaustion which the early spring in Paris brings with it. But Björnson felt neither melancholy nor exhaustion. Excited, and aglow with physical energy as though he contained the whole charge of an electric battery in himself, he spoke of the problem of how the relationship between men and women was to be remodelled. His great novel, Thomas Rendalen, had appeared not very long before, and he had just finished the first chapter of In God’s Way. He confessed that until lately he had not understood the importance of the subject, that he had not in fact possessed sufficient physiological knowledge. In all his former writings he had treated the relations between men and women in the old way, as something that is founded on a physical need. But the moderns will not have it so any longer. “No, they will not have it,” he said, in a voice that quivered with excitement. “They wish to get beyond that. The best men and the best women have other duties now, they recognise that it is their duty to work hand in hand towards the ennobling of the human race. What they want is a higher union. All the best men and women are of one opinion in the matter, and the number of the best increases with increasing knowledge. The time will come when it will be natural to every high-minded man and woman to wish only for a spiritual union.”
I was dumbfounded. This doctrine did not please me, and proceeding from the lips of this robust giant it sounded, to put it mildly, somewhat strange. Björnson was silent for a few moments, we neither of us spoke. When the pause had elapsed—the pause which his listeners are wont to fill with a volley of applause—he began again in a condescending manner:
“I too used to think differently. In my youth I lived as others do; I knew no better. No one told me. But if I had known then what I know now, I should not have done it. I was in America a few years ago, and there they are further advanced than they are here; I spoke with some American lady doctors, and they explained it to me. They proved it to me on paper as clearly and plainly as possible. Strength goes here or there. In the brain or—in propagation. There is never more than a certain amount of strength, it only depends on where it is localised, whether for the highest purpose or the lowest—they explained it all. There is no ‘must’ about it, there is no natural necessity; that is deceptive nonsense. But women must make a beginning, they must oppose their degradation. Women must unite with women to give one another a hand. You must support each other, and then you will be able to dictate to men. The talk about not being able is all nonsense. For instance, you,” he said, turning suddenly on me, “have you ever had any difficulty of the kind?”
Of course I assured him that I never had; and I could do so with a good conscience, as he obviously alluded to a very material form.
Björnson took me back with him and gave me a copy of his Gauntlet in Fräulein Klingenfeld’s German translation, which is a new and more severe edition of his former work. We often saw each other afterwards, but he never made me such a long speech again; I was not the right sounding-board for him. And here I must add, for the enlightenment of my possibly astonished readers, that conversations such as these were quite common at the time when the moral movement was raging in the north.
I happened to be in Copenhagen the following year when Björnson’s great moral tournament was announced. He spoke in one of the largest theatres in Copenhagen. Troops of “enlightened” peasants had come from the country to hear him; they looked strangely out of place with their black neckties and short whiskers as they pushed their way through the front seats, between Copenhagen elegants and worthy ladies of ripe years. The whole place was crowded to overflowing. I had a ticket for the evening reception which was given in honour of Björnson by a committee of the women “progressionists” of Copenhagen who formed the advance-guard of the emancipation movement, and I intended going there when the lecture was over.
Björnson appeared. A desk had been placed on the stage in front of the curtain, which was lowered. He mounted it, and stood looking like a righteous lion with a shaggy, grey mane, his eyes firmly closed, his lips compressed, the very incarnation of fanatical energy, “the man” for the masses. He began to speak. First he thundered, then he lowered his voice; first the words fell like hard stones, then his voice shook with emotion; he commanded, he entreated, he became by turns a man of learning, a pastor, a prophet and a jailor. But the effect produced upon the people of Copenhagen was not great. They applauded him very casually, the Danes—even in the lower stratum of society—are too æsthetic and critical, too conscious of being the possessors of an old and refined culture, to adopt the simple Norwegian modes of thought. Shortly afterwards Björnson visited the provincial towns and sowed his seeds throughout the whole of Scandinavia, where they took root.
I went home after the lecture feeling disappointed and depressed. It had sounded so hollow, and considering the past of this great writer and the future expectations of the three countries respecting him, it seemed to promise little for the hopes which the young generation had fixed on him and on him only. It made me shudder to think of the speeches in which the representatives of a dozen old maids, and about as many discontented wives, would sing his praises in consequence of his words this day. The lecture, which was called Monogamy and Polygamy, was the great divide between his yesterday and his to-morrow; it was then that the words were spoken: “So far and no further.”
He had been too crude and too pathetic for the people of Copenhagen. But the further he travelled into outlying districts, where culture was less advanced, the more this crudeness and pathos gained him influence, and as this tournament resulted in a change in the moral conceptions of Scandinavia which was destined to rule over family life as well as public life—a change which assumed the authority of a whole school of contemporary thought of which Björnson was the speaking trumpet, and as this school continues to gain ground in Germany the more surely, the more it becomes conscious of being the expression of the experience of a class, it deserves a more careful investigation.
What then was the subject of Björnson’s lecture?
It was a repetition of that speech of his in the Bois de Boulogne, only it was a larger and more detailed generalisation of the same, because in it he no longer dealt with noble-minded men and women, but with all men and all women. He had two fundamental doctrines which he used as his starting points: Woman’s complete equality with man respecting marriage, and the unconditional adaptive capacity of mammals.
Whether the latter doctrine is included in the German version of Monogamy and Polygamy, I cannot say, as I have not got it by me. But with the exception of what the American lady doctors had told him, Björnson founded his argument in favour of the reform of the sexual relations on the following anecdote: He met a man who had a large cage in which he kept a dog, a cat, a rat, a mouse and a bird. He fed them well and taught them to overcome their natural instincts of enmity and to live peaceably together. “And they all prospered well, very well, and loved one another much, very much.” It evidently had not occurred to Björnson that the chief characteristic of this story is the parable of the cage and the domestic animals. It is a well-known fact, that in zoological gardens the ravenous animals are kept apart from the peaceful ones, as the latter are ready to die of fear and misery from the mere smell of the others, even without seeing them. But Björnson places the cage first as a matter of course—the great cage of society filled with domestic animals and house parasites which have been tame for generations, and are indolent and blunted in their instincts. Too satiated, too lazy and too degenerate to fight, the dear little creatures vegetate in close proximity to one another, which is exactly what well-fed domestic animals are in the habit of doing, even without a cage. And then with a bold logical venture, he compared this state of things to the most central and most complicated of human relationships. If even the unreasoning animals are able to overcome their natural instincts, he argues, man also, after being sensibly reasoned with and encouraged by example, after many generations of training will be capable of adapting his strongest instinct to moral precepts and finally attain the ideal of pure sexlessness. Is not the daughter of the “educated classes” chaste? Have we not many millions of chaste old maids? Then why should not we have chaste old bachelors, and why cannot we have chaste young bachelors as well? Arise, you women! Strike! Refuse to be made “the laundry for unclean men”! Twice before he gave this lecture, Björnson had dealt with the same subject—in Thomas Rendalen and in The Gauntlet; the last of these two is the best known in Germany. In both works he declares that there should be only one moral standard for men and for women, and that this standard should be that of women.
The supporters of the movement in favour of the emancipation of women in Scandinavia baptised themselves into the name of Björnson, and adopted his confession of faith. The life, temperament, and superfluous energy of man was brought under the horizon of woman, and the eternal active was to allow itself to be remodelled by the eternal passive, because the latter was statistically in the majority.
At the time when Björnson was giving these lectures and writing these books, there was another movement which had just reached its zenith in the north, and which, by its opponents and by the emancipated daughters of the middle class, was known by the designation of “free love.” Its leaders were Arne Garborg and Hans Jaeger, who pleaded for the universal recognition of the socialist ideal as follows: That the conditions of society might be so ordered as to render prostitution unnecessary, by making early unions possible and marriage no longer a sacrament. Both parties were anxious to abolish prostitution, which is an evil that is not mentioned in Germany, although here also the emancipation movement (still in its infancy) is interested in it. It was the aim of Garborg and Jaeger to hasten its destruction by making it economically possible for early unions to be contracted in love, whereas Björnson and the women’s rights party sought another means, i.e. the mortification of the flesh.
No subject that has ever been discussed in the north has met with such an immense and lasting interest as this one. Beneath the pressure of Björnson the movement for the emancipation of women assumed a form of open enmity against man, and introduced a pietistic doctrine of the superiority of women into the literature and public life of Sweden. Should the movement ever force its way into the outposts of declining militarism in Germany, the signs are already to hand that there also the spirit of Björnson will rule.
How was it possible that this manly author with his impetuous and progressive nature should lose his way in the cul-de-sac of Christian asceticism—in the covert places of degeneration—and that having arrived at the time of life when a man’s opinions are matured, he did not find his way out again?
Here we come to the spot where the many conflicting threads of Björnson’s life are knotted together, from whence we arrive at the various stages of his creation, and from them find our way back again to the central point of his being.
A piece of contemporary history and class biography is unfolded in these numerous phases of Björnson’s life, reaches its climax here, runs its course and finds its ending. The political and social type of the ruling middle class is sharply outlined in him, and clearly stamped as though it were in a bronze medal.
But before we come to this chapter, we must examine the course of his development and the appreciation accorded him by his countrymen.
It cannot be said that Björnson meets with an unquestioning recognition in the middle classes. The influence of agitators is always most strongly felt by those who are a little below them in the social scale, that is perhaps the reason why Björnson has succeeded in exerting such a great influence upon the Scandinavian peasantry and upon women.
A few years ago I was travelling on foot through Norway, aided by the national means of locomotion, the “skyds.” It was slow work, but it afforded me numberless opportunities of coming in contact with the sons of the soil. On one occasion I met with a peasant on his way home from the “saeter,” who was content to be my guide for hours together, and he gave me some insight into his admiration for Björnson as a political speaker; another time, while I was waiting for horses in a “skyds station,” I examined a little book-case which was hanging over the writing table in the superintendent’s room, and there I found an almost complete set of Björnson’s works. And once it was the “skyds” boy himself who asked me if I knew Björnson. All the women teachers and book-keepers who, with knapsacks on their backs, wander across the mountains of their native land, carry his name upon their lips and his books in their hearts. High up at the foot of Skineggen in Jötunheimen, in the midst of eternal snow, I asked a haggard-looking old Valdres peasant who kept the tourist’s house there during the six weeks of summer, which was my nearest way to Björnson, and he answered with an approving smile addressing me in the second person singular: “Thou knowest Björnson, thou art an intelligent young lady. Trust me and I will tell thee all that thou wouldest know.” Whereupon he went indoors and fetched a large map of the Norwegian mountains, which he spread out on the short grass between us, and proceeded to point up and down with his finger into Gudbrandsdal and from thence to the south till he came to a spot where he stopped short, and said: “Here is Aulestad, Björnson’s place. Every one who wishes to go there may do so, thou also.” Then he began a long complicated account of the why and the wherefore Björnson is beloved by the peasant, said that he was a “homely man” who went “straight ahead”; and then he told me of the difficulties that he and his neighbours had encountered in order to hear him speak, and how they had gone long journeys to attend meetings in distant places.
Far from there, in comfortable Denmark, where the peasants are short and round but none the less zealous readers of newspapers and earnest politicians, I met a certain self-confident Sören Sörensen in a third-class railway coupé who bestowed on me the honouring epithet of “intelligent young lady,” because I let him know of my acquaintance with Björnson. Björnson’s name was a sure letter of recommendation among the peasantry of the three Scandinavian countries. It is not very long since he spoke in Jutland in favour of arbitration, universal disarm-ment and public peace, and with his usual cunning, called upon his old antagonists, the pastors, to help him in the name of their religion in the great work of peace. His name had been sufficient to collect around him no less than thirty thousand listeners, even in those years of the apathy and despondency of the Danish people. What is the cause of this immense influence?
I can explain it in two sentences. It is that in him the peasantry recognise their own flesh and blood, and that he stimulates the middle class.
The class distinctions of central Europe have simplified themselves in the north. There is scarcely any social democracy and no great industrial class, their place is occupied by the peasantry as a political power and by the provincial middle class as the rulers in business. Björnson himself was born a peasant, but became a bourgeois in his early youth. In the next generation the sons of peasants who became authors were careful to avoid the middle class. But on the other hand there is annually a by no means inconsiderable percentage of the peasantry who go over into the middle class because it is more highly educated. Among these are pastors, gymnasium teachers, doctors, lawyers, merchants—yes, and rich peasant proprietors as well. The provincial bourgeoisie of the north represents what is perhaps the purest type of that decadence of the middle classes which has declared itself throughout the whole of Europe; it is totally unlike the Scandinavian peasantry, which possesses a healthy strength, the reverse of social democracy, and embodies the power of a rising class. The great European upheaval of 1848 barely touched this Scandinavian bourgeoisie with its narrow horizon, its commercial self-satisfaction, its snivelling morality, its mania for conventionalities, its love of stagnation, its small-minded, starved nature and hypocrisy against which Ibsen, the revolutionary bourgeois, has raised the scorpion whip, and Björnson, the peasant’s son, has preached in his reform writings, preached against it and its middle class views of life, though at the same time he always looked upon it as the highest normal condition.
Ibsen took Hedda Gabler, the daughter of an officer whom he describes with considerable humour, for the profession of commanding officer in Norway is the favourite resource of the superfluous sons of tradesmen, and it has of late been proved by the autumn manœuvres that the Norwegian peasant soldier can do everything, whereas his commanding officer can accomplish very little. Therefore Ibsen took this daughter of the upper commercial class with her superior morals, analysed her and proved her to be what she was—a sexless nonentity who stupidly sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring, and who retains nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire. He takes her and throws her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on her lips—takes her and permeates her entire being with that exhausted vitality which leads to suicidal mania. Björnson takes as his heroine Svava, the daughter of a rich but very dissipated merchant, who falls in love with a young man while conversing with him on old-maidish and philanthropic topics, but throws her glove into his face in consequence of some backstair gossip through which she discovers that instead of living like herself, he has acted the part of Don Juan after the example of her father. Björnson contrasts the vulgar frivolity of the male bourgeois with the vulgar sexlessness of the superior girl, and he extols the latter as being the only salutary system of morals.
Of course Björnson’s Gauntlet was received on the bourgeois stage with great pomp, but not so Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. And while the middle class was unanimous in regarding Ibsen with curiosity mingled with horror, as the angel of death whose sign is on his door, it greeted Björnson as a renowned and fashionable physician who is always able to effect a cure so long as the illness is not positively fatal.
The Scandinavian peasant does not let his hair grow grey over these discussions, and in general he is well disposed towards the emancipation of women. He has long been accustomed to see women work and earn wages like himself, for it is not at all unusual for his sisters and aunts to provide for themselves by becoming maid-servants. That the wife should have the right of disposal over her own dowry, should keep a sharp eye on all gains and expenses and should put in a word on all affairs of house and home—to that also he is well accustomed, and the compliant son of the soil knows how to sing a song in praise of the matriarchy of the peasant mother. Matrimonial infidelity is to him an abomination, he does not envy the townsman that for which he personally has little opportunity, and he despises the attractions of the youthful life of the idle sons of the middle class, since he seldom transgresses with any save his future wife. And since he looks at everything from the utilitarian standpoint, it is natural that he should give his full approval when daughters not only cease to cost money, but are able to earn it and to lay by a store of fine dollars. As for their remaining unmarried—well, you can’t have your cake and eat it—they have got the money, what more do they want? The peasant does not look upon married life in the æsthetic manner that is common to the higher classes for whom it possesses a certain artistic value, to him it is as much of a business as milking, ploughing, manuring; and if the one is no longer necessary, the other can be dispensed with too. He has none of the prudery of the townsman who finds something offensive in a bold glance at nature, yet he too has his pruderies, and if the townsman evinces moral and æsthetic scruples against an open discussion or an undiluted song of love, so likewise the peasant will not read it in print because to him it represents the commonplace. This is how Björnson, with his doctrine of perfection, proved to be the right man both for the middle class and the peasantry; his lectures were acceptable chiefly because they partook of the nature of a religious discourse or a Sunday sermon, to which a man listens when he is wearing his best clothes, but which he has no time to think about during the six remaining days of the week when he is busy and has to do his work.
No sooner had I reached Gudbrandsdal than I seemed to be standing on Björnson’s own territory. Everybody knew exactly how far it was to his place, and the last two hours of the way I was driven by a little girl who took me past wealthy two-storeyed farm-houses rising from the rich pasture land, drove me round a beautiful winding road, jumped down, opened the gate, sprang on to her seat again, and without consulting me, drove through the entrance and up the drive, stopping at the door of a large, low building which was Björnson’s country seat.
Outside, under the wide-spreading roof, sat his wife and daughters, surrounded by guests who were staying in the house. The author was writing, but he received me. He was sitting at his writing table in a large low room—a regular peasant’s room. His feet were resting on a polar bearskin which had been presented to him by a society of advanced women, and a gigantic vase filled with cut roses was placed on a pedestal beside him. He informed me that the house had been an old farm which he had bought and fitted with all the requirements of modern life. We partook of the midday meal in the old room that had formerly been the servants’ hall, and where now, instead of servant and maid, were assembled a large gathering of Danish, Swedish and Finnish “women’s rights women.” Having dined, we drank coffee in the drawing-room, which had been the ball-room, but was now furnished according to Parisian taste with flowers, chaises longues, cream-coloured curtains with red gauze linings, bibelots and oil paintings. Presently an old lady entered; she had an aquiline profile and yellow waving curls over her ears, she was thick-set and broad-shouldered with a fresh red complexion and small sparkling eyes, one could see at once that she was a feminine Björnson. “My mother,” said he, “she is ninety years old.” And this giant’s mother, herself a giant, spoke and greeted us in as lively and hearty a manner as a person of sixty. When we had finished our coffee, Björnson led me out on to the new balcony which encircled the house. He glanced over the rising land with its luxuriant pasture. “Our people are being corrupted,” he said. “Our press and our life are full of lies. I am writing an article against lies, the lies with which we are being poisoned.” He made a gesture with his arm across the distant country, and exclaimed, “Lying must be abolished!”
I was obliged to go, as my little coachman was waiting. We retraced our steps through the old room with its low ceiling and exquisite Parisian furniture, and its glass cupboard filled with plate. I drove away meditating on the strange contrast between this farm house and its artificial fittings worthy of a town mansion, and I heard Björnson’s pathetic voice calling to his country, “Lying must be abolished!”
Björnson was the son of a peasant; it was only in later life that his father became a pastor, and from him Björnson has inherited a theological tendency. He is essentially a preacher and religious teacher, he is never happy unless he has something to proclaim. But as he is not one of those who enjoy self-denial, he prefers that those very contradictory truths, which he has preached during the course of years, should take the form of a manifestation of the joy of life.
This is Björnson’s chief characteristic. During his whole life and in all his writings, he has sought to unite theology with materialism. All his writings, no matter how extreme, had their origin in a compromise between the two.
Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales, followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with his earlier ones.
In 1869, Ibsen wrote The League of Youth, which was the first of his social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called A Bankrupt, and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s satire, i.e. the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons, and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany.
The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and finally—but, as I think, chiefly—the example of Ibsen. Björnson, as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him, until one came who showed him the way.
Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in The Editor. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama entitled The New System; while in Leonarda, the snivelling morality of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced views of the grandmother.
Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and amendment might ensue.
Björnson rose swiftly to the summit of his fame. He became a kind of head prophet in Norway. There was no political, social, religious or economical question on which he had not a weighty—often an ominously weighty—word to say; sometimes it was a suggestion, less frequently an opinion, or word of advice. Gradually, however, social criticism in the general sense of the term became stale, while on the other hand a new, brand new problem appeared above the horizon.
This was the problem of Nora, the woman who wishes to be first a human being and then a woman, it had been handled by Ibsen many years before, and had provided a subject for Kielland’s widely known literary works. Nora’s generation was already grown up and her children were numerous. Kielland described the virtuous woman and the good-for-nothing man, the sensible, earnest, thoughtful girl and the scum of society. In Sweden a multitude of unhappy wives took refuge in authorship, and called down a fearful judgment on the husbands of all classes of society. Life had influenced literature and now literature retaliated upon life with practical results. The petticoated population of the three Scandinavian kingdoms began to cogitate upon its own importance. The air was filled with an incredible number of women’s “works,” and an incredible amount of feminine talent was discovered. Just as a young girl in Germany is taught the art of capturing a protector with Gretchen wiles, in Scandinavia she was taught to think about herself and her own importance with the earnestness of a Nora in the third act. And just as a young girl in Germany grows squint-eyed from being always on the look-out for a husband, so the Scandinavian girl of fifteen and sixteen had already lost her youthful simplicity, her natural and unconstrained manner. Her walk, deportment, and tone of voice seemed to demand attention, and everything concerning woman was discussed and debated. The Liberal press of the three countries, mindful of woman’s indirect influence on votes, bowed the knee and worshipped her intelligence and magnanimity, and man’s delight knew no bounds if, at a meeting of Conservatives, a young lady hooted like a street-boy. Every number of the progressive journals contained at least one notice on the results of the struggle for the emancipation of women. Young women were expected to be as strong as men, and young women were anxious to be strong in order that they might inspire men with respect. All young girls were taught swimming, gymnastics, bicycling and skating. Rowing clubs were started for women, debating clubs and preparatory schools for university examinations, schools for artistic handicraft and women’s rights unions, yet in each of these there was always a man as manager. Marriage was despised, but the right to propose was claimed should they suddenly be seized with the desire to make a man happy. They entertained a great confidence in themselves and in the mutual fellowship of women’s interests, while they vowed eternal unity, sisterhood and friendship. The universities were open and all the colleges were accessible to women; they became students and studied law, philosophy and medicine. Sometimes they tried to speak during the hour for practice in philosophy, but without any great result. Indeed, there was very little result at all beyond the production of a couple of lady doctors, a deluge of village school teachers, and a remarkable increase of ill-health. But at any rate they had succeeded in proving their intellectual gifts, although in order to do so they had plunged up to the ears in the stupefying machinery of learned study against which an ever-increasing number of the best men were raising their voices in protest. They became telephone clerks, telegraph clerks, railway commissioners, statisticians, superintendents, and in all these newly gained functions they generally took pains to be more consequential and more disagreeable than their male colleagues. But what the rising generation of women loved best were the fine arts. They painted and wrote, reviewed and edited, they petitioned the government for scholarships and the suffrage, for the right of property and other rights, some of which were granted, others promised. The average men joined hand in hand to assist their efforts, and at first the whole movement promised success. It was an undoubted success in fact, but only among the middle class. At that time no one had as yet realised that the movement was purely the result of the unimaginative, poverty-stricken spirit of the poorer middle class parent, who thanks Heaven when he has “disposed of” his children, and weeps tears of joy when his daughters are “able to provide for themselves” and are therefore no longer in need of being “provided for,” which last is always connected in his mind with household worry and expense.
Of course Björnson did not realise it either, and it was not until much later that he took an active part in the movement, for he had never been the pioneer of any cause. It was only when the movement was well started, and the majority were interested in it, that he gave it his support, and Björnson’s support was the “open sesame.” Björnson was the right man and the right author to popularise it with success, with only too great a success.
The northern woman had developed out of wife-hood and domesticity into different stages of individualism. All varieties of sex were evolved, and the creative talent proffered a selection of degenerate breeds: freshly developed and deadened natures, erotomaniacs and sexlessness, the woman who theorises, the woman who demands her rights, the woman whose instincts are asleep, the woman whose head is hot and whose senses are cold, the woman whose chastity is aggressive, every kind of artificial product in fact, with here and there the rare exception of the free, proud nature of one who is a law unto herself.
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.