Chapter III

Then followed dramas and poems. The strong personality of Björnson gradually worked its way out of the swaddling-clothes of the national mind. In "Between the Battles," "Sigurd Slembe" (Sigurd the Bad), and "Amljot Gelline," will be found the same grand type, the hero born to be a chieftain, created to be the benefactor of his people, a being alike powerful and noble, but whose rights are withheld from him, and who is compelled, owing to the injustice under which he suffers, to cause a large amount of evil on his way to the goal, although he desires only good. Whole towns are left in flames behind Sverre, wherever he may fare. He tells of this with the bitterest anguish in "Between the Battles." "I know a chieftain," he exclaims, "who longed to be a blessing to his country, but who became its curse. He shudders with horror at his own wretched fate, and would have fled from all the hideous corpses that stare him in the face from border to border of the land; would have fled as an exile from his own hereditary kingdom, had there not been those who clung to his mantle. So he is led, as by an inexorable fate, from one bloody deed of violence to another, from conflagration to conflagration, over reeking corpses and heaps of ruins, while shrieks and wails of lamentation pursue him, and all hell is let loose about him, and people say the devil walks at his side; in truth, some say he is the devil! I know--ah! I know that while those about him are slaughtering one another like so many cattle, he has not the heart to lay his hand on a single man, lest he should intensify his own misery. And masses are sung before the battle, and masses after the battle; he strives to make atonement and to heal; he brings relief to the suffering and assuages ills; to those who ask it of him he gives peace; but there is one to whom it will be long ere he can bring peace, and that is himself." Sigurd, the hero of the trilogy "Sigurd Slembe," is despised and persecuted because he who desired only justice for himself and happiness for Norway, betrayed into the hands of his enemies by his half-brother, the feeble-minded Harold Gille, becomes the murderer of the latter. He had gone to his brother, after long renunciation and bitter inward struggles, with the best intention in the world, and the most ardent desire to come to a peaceful understanding with him, and he leaves him, having escaped from the guard to whom the murder was entrusted, "a king in the armor of revenge, with the eye of despair and a flaming sword." Amljot, who in the innermost depths of his soul is so good, so humble, becomes an incendiary and a pillager until the day when, as the knight of Olaf, he meets his death at Stiklestad. These characters are deeply rooted in the poet's soul. He had early encountered passionate opposition, had felt himself misunderstood and hated by his opponents. With his indomitable ambition, with the vehemence that was inherent in his nature, and the tenderness that belonged to his temperament, he felt himself wondrously akin to those saga forms, and whenever he was conscious of being misunderstood and unjustly scorned by his people, he laid the burden of his longing to elevate this people, and to harmonize them with himself, and his consciousness that with all his good designs he had estranged his people from him at times, upon the characters of these old chieftains; this Sigurd, for instance, who when excited becomes a changed being, "hard as a steel-spring, bounding without a footfall o'er the floor, with flashing, evil eyes, and voice that seemed to come from a long, dark passage," but who, nevertheless, conceals within his soul a veritable horn of plenty, overflowing with magnificent plans for the public weal. Profoundly, indeed, must Björnson have suffered in his youth to be able to write Sigurd's soliloquy in the winter night, or the one toward the end of the drama, beginning with the words, "The Danes have forsaken me? Lost the battle? Thus far--and never farther?" in which mighty plans,--to assemble an army, to sail far away, to become a merchant, a crusader,--arise with giddy swiftness and are rejected, until the impression of approaching dissolution again obtrudes itself. Then the words "Thus far--and never farther," return no longer as a question, but refrain-like as an answer. Even in the midst of despair love of fatherland, which in this case is love of the enemy, thus finds utterance: "Ah, this beautiful land was not by me to be governed. Great is the wrong I have done it! How, ah! how was this possible? When absent I saw in ev'ry cloud thy mountains; I yearned for home like a child for Christmas; and yet I sought not my home,--and I gave thee wound on wound."

Great personality with Björnson is not encased in Michael-Angelo-like pride; it works its way out of the national spirit only to strive, yearningly, to return to it again. Its most ardent desire is to become united with this spirit, and profound, indeed, is the tragedy where this union is prevented.

In this point Björnson forms the sharpest contrast to the man who is his peer among contemporary Norwegian poets, Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen is solitary by nature. "In distant lands I rest lonely," he cries. These lines, which are the refrain of the well-known poem, "Langt borte" (In Distant Lands), written on the occasion of the trip of the Scandinavian students to Upsala in 1875, form the motto of his life. He penetrates the depths of the earth, like his miner.

"Make way for me, thou heavy hammer,
To the heart's most secret chamber."

Ibsen seeks the solitary silence of night. In his poem "Lysræd" (Afraid of Light), he declares that as a child he was afraid of being in the dark; but that everything has become changed, the glare of daylight now bewilders him, the noise of life makes him weak and ready to swoon away. Only hid beneath the shelter of night's veil of terror, his will is armed for deeds of daring. Without the cover of night he is helpless, and he well knows that if ever he accomplishes a great work, it will be a deed of darkness.

In the spirited and beautiful words of the poem the author has depicted his own temperament. The nature of Björnson, on the contrary, does not strive downward; its aspirations rise upward and outward. His genius has open arms.

Another contrast between the two poets may be felt in the Northern dramas penned by both during their first period. As a born dramatist, Ibsen has no bent, no inclination, for descriptions of nature. His principal dramatic characters, in his youth, were personifications of an idea, not modelled directly from nature, and in his almost exceptionally dramatic poems, exterior nature necessarily plays but an evanescent rôle. Even where nature is introduced by him, with most thrilling effect, as in the "ice-church" in "Brand," it is rather as a symbol than as a reality; the ice-church is the church in which he who forsakes the established churches runs great danger of meeting his end. The freer, more expansive spirit of Björnson dwells lingeringly on the natural surroundings of Norway and imparts the impressions received from them to his dramas. Let us give as an example of this the scene between Sigurd and the Finnish maiden, one of the most beautiful scenes that Björnson has written. When the maiden, announced by her long quavering shout of exultation, steps upon the stage, she brings with her the entire nature of the Northland, as her realm. The daughter of the Finnish chieftain reveals herself as a glimpse of the radiance of the Northern Lights; her words have the brilliant charm of the midnight sun; her glad love of life, of the sunshine of summer, her unreciprocated love for Sigurd, the delicate and transitory nature of her sorrow,--all this is a fragment of the living poetry of nature. Masterly, indeed, is the description of her appearance given by Sigurd.

"_The Finnish Maiden._--Can you feel how beautiful it is here?"

"_Sigurd._--Oh, yes! at times I can. When I stand before my cavern and gaze upon the eternal snow;--o'er it the tree-tops by twilight resemble weird spectres, each other approaching. Then you, on your snowshoes, come stormily down the mountains; all your dogs are around you, your troop follows after, and the size of all seems to grow three times larger. O'er your wild and blustering train, and this world of enchanting romance around it, the Northern Lights, with their brilliant colors and forms, now congregating, now spreading wide their splendor...."

This keen sense of nature is common to all Björnson's Norse characters of the olden time. He has imparted to them his own modern feelings. The little epic poem, "Amljot Gelline" (consisting of fifteen brief cantos), in particular, is unsurpassed for the beauty of its descriptions of nature. The song, "During the Springtime Inundation," describing the plunge which the mountain streams, swollen by the water from the melting snow, make into the valleys below, and the anxious huddling together in the mountain caves of the terrified wild beasts, paints in indelible colors an annual episode of Norwegian nature, transplanted some eight hundred years into the past, and which is consequently rendered wilder and more forcible than at the present day. The canto "Amljot's Yearning for the Ocean," in whose rhythm we feel the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea, is one of the most beautiful of all the poems that have ever portrayed the poetry of the sea. Byron had depicted the unruliness, the inexorableness, the fury of the ocean; Björnson paints the deep melancholy, the phlegmatic coldness, the ransoming freshness of the surging billows. Listen to the opening stanzas of the poem:--

"The sea I long for, the mighty ocean,
That onward rolls in its calm majestic;
With banks of billowy vapor freighted,
To meet itself it doth ever wander.
The sky may lower, the shore may signal,
The sea recedes not, nor pauses ever;
In summer nights, 'mid the storms of winter,
Its billows murmur the self-same yearning.

"The sea I pine for, ah, yes! the ocean,
With brow so cold tow'rd the heaven lifted.
Behold how earth in the sea casts shadows,
And whispering mirrors there all her sorrows!
The sun tho' strokes it with warm, bright touches,
Of life's delights utters words intrepid;
Yet ever ice-cold, mournfully peaceful
It buries sorrow and consolation.

"The full moon draws it, the tempest rouses,
Yet vain all effort to stay its current;
Laid waste tho' the lowland, tho' mountains crumble,
It grandly sweeps tow'rd eternity.
Yet all it draws must its waves close over;
What once is sunk in the sea never rises.
No shrieks are heard, and reveal'd no message,
The ocean's language there's none can interpret.

"Then seek the sea, go out on the ocean,
All ye who never can know atonement!
To all who sorrow it brings deliv'rance,
Yet onward carries its own enigma.
That singular bond with Death but consider,
It gives him all but itself--the ocean.

"Thy melancholy allures me, O ocean!
My feeble plans how they fade and dwindle;
I swiftly banish my anxious yearnings;
Thy cold, cold breath brings peace to my bosom."

The music of the waves here produces the effect of a magnificent cradle song. It is one to the dreaming hero whose great hope is that he may be able to see the nails give way in the planks of his ship, as death opens the portals to the stream of ransoming waters, and himself, covered by eternal silence, rest in the depths below, while in sublime moonlight nights, when the silver sheen of the moonbeams plays on the mighty surface, "the waves his name tow'rd the strand are rolling."