Essays on Scandinavian Literature - Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (best books to read non fiction txt) 📗

the dining-room with mother, who sat and poured out tea before the big astral lamp, while darkness and snow-drift lay black upon the window-panes. Then up and away!...

"There (in the school) I sat and perspired in the sultry heat of the stove, and with a studiously unconcerned face watched with strained anxiety every expression and gesture of the teacher. Was he in good-humor to-day? Would that I might escape reciting! He began at the top.... That was a perfect millstone lifted from my breast, though, as yet, nothing could be sure. Now for a surreptitious peep at the end of the lesson."

It was Jonas Lie's ambition at that time to become a gunsmith. He had a profound respect for the ingenuity and skill required for such a curious bit of mechanism. But his father, who could not afford to have a member of his family descend into the rank of artisans, promptly strangled that ambition. Then the sea, which has been "the Norseman's path to praise and power," no less than the Dane's, lured the adventurous lad; and his parent, who had no exalted expectations regarding him, gave his consent to his entering the Naval Academy at Fredericksvaern. But here he was rejected on account of near-sightedness. Nothing remained, then, but to resume the odious books and prepare to enter the University. But to a boy whose heroes were the two master-thieves, Ola Höiland and Gjest Baardsen, that must have been a terribly arduous necessity. However, he submitted with bad grace, and was enrolled as a pupil at the gymnasium in Bergen. Here his Finnish Hyde promptly got him into trouble. Having by sheer ill luck been cheated of his chances of a heroic career, he began to imagine in detail the potentialities of greatness for the loss of which Fate owed him reparation. And so absorbed did he become in this game of fancy, and so enamored was he of his own imaginary deeds, that he lost sight of the fact that they were of the stuff that dreams are made of. With frank and innocent trustfulness he told them to his friends, both young and old, and soon earned a reputation as a most unblushing liar. But if any one dared call him that to his face, he had to reckon with an awe-inspiring pair of fists which were wielded with equal precision and force. The youth, being at variance with the world, lived in a state of intermittent warfare, and he gave and received valiant blows, upon which he yet looks back with satisfaction.

In spite of his distaste for books Jonas Lie managed, when he was eighteen years old, to pass the entrance examination to the University. Among his schoolmates during his last year of preparation at Heltberg's Gymnasium, in Christiania, were Björnstjerne Björnson and Henrik Ibsen. The former took a great interest in the odd, _naïve_, near-sighted Nordlander who walked his own ways, thought his own thoughts, and accepted ridicule with crushing indifference.

"I was going about there in Christiania," he says in a published letter to Björnson, "as a young student, undeveloped, dim, and unclear--a kind of poetic visionary, a Nordland twilight nature--which after a fashion espied what was abroad in the age, but indistinctly in the dusk, as through a water telescope--when I met a young, clear, full-born force, pregnant with the nation's new day, the blue steel-flash of determination in his eyes and the happily found national form--pugnacious to the very point of his pen. I gazed and stared, fascinated, and took this new thing aboard along the whole gunwale. Here, I felt, were definite forms, no mere dusk and fantastic haze--something to fashion into poetry.... From the first hour you knew how to look straight into this strange twilight of mine, and you espied flashes of the aurora there when no one else did, like the true and faithful friend you are. You helped and guided and found grains of gold, where others saw mostly nonsense, and perhaps half a screw loose. While I was straying in search of the spiritual tinsel, with which the _esprits forts_ of the age were glittering, you taught me, and impressed upon me, again and again, that I had to seek in myself for whatever I might possess of sentiment and simplicity--and that it was out of this I would have to build my fiction."

This bit of confession is extremely significant. The Finnish Hyde was evidently yet uppermost. Björnson taught Lie to distrust the tinsel glitter of mere rhetoric, and the fantastic exuberance of invention in which the young Nordlander believed that he had his _forte_. But the matter had even a more serious phase than this. It was about this time that Lie disappeared for a period of three months from his friends, and even his parents, and when again he emerged into the daylight, he could give no account of himself. He had simply sauntered about, moping and dreaming. He had been Hyde. The cold shudders which lurked in his blood from the long, legend-haunted arctic night could break into open terror on unforeseen occasions. Grown man though he was, he was afraid of being alone in the dark--a peculiarity which once got him into a comical predicament.

It was his habit when travelling to place his big top-boots at night within easy reach, so that he might use them as weapons against any ghost or suspicious-looking object that might be stirring in the gloom. One evening when he had gone to bed at a country inn, he was aroused from his sleep and saw indistinctly a white phenomenon fluttering to and fro along the opposite wall. Instantly he grabs a boot and hurls it with ferocious force at the goblin. A roar was heard followed by a salvo of blue profanity. It was a fellow-traveller--a lumber-dealer--who was to occupy the other bed in the room. He had undressed and was disporting himself in nocturnal attire before reposing, when Jonas Lie's well-aimed missile hit him in the stomach and doubled him up with pain.

A skeleton in the den of a medical friend caused Lie many a shiver, for he could never quite rid himself of the idea that it moved. All that lay beyond the range of the senses drew him with an irresistible, half-shuddering attraction; and he resented all attempts to explain it by ordinary mundane laws. As his first novel abundantly proves, he possesses in a marked degree the "sixth sense" that gropes eagerly and with a half-terrified fascination in the dusk that lies beyond the daylight of the other five.

The verses which Jonas Lie began about this time to produce are mostly written for patriotic and other festive occasions, and therefore arouse no creepy sensations. But they are so overladen with confusing imagery that they have to be read twice to be understood. In the poem "Solveig" (1855) he makes the heart "in its prison envy the free-born thoughts which fly to the beloved one's breast." His versification is gnarled and twisted, and a perpetual strain upon the ear. As Mr. Nordahl Rolfsen has remarked, one need not be a princess in order to be troubled by the peas in his verse.[13] Browning himself could scarcely have perpetrated more unmelodious lines than Jonas Lie is capable of. Nevertheless there is often in his patriotic songs a most inspiriting bugle-note, which is found nowhere in Browning, unless it be in the "Cavalier Tunes." The curiosities of his prosody are (according to his biographer) attributable to the Nordland accent in his speech. They would sound all right, he says, to a Nordland ear.


[13] Nordahl Rolfsen: Norske Digtere, p. 527.


At the risk of violating chronology I may as well speak here of his two collections of "Poems" (1867 and 1889) (the latter being an expurgated but enlarged edition of the earlier), to which the present criticisms particularly apply. Both editions contain notable things amid occasional bits of what scarcely rises above doggerel. The sailor songs, though rough, are true in tone and have a catching nautical swing; but of far deeper ring and more intensely felt are the poems which deal with the nocturnal sides of nature. These have at times a strange, shivering resonance, like an old violin whose notes ripple down your spine. I refer especially to such untranslatable poems as "Draugen," "Finn-Shot," "The Mermaid," and "Nightmare." The mood of these is heavy and uncanny, like that of the "Ancient Mariner." But they are indubitably poetry. It is by no means sure that the world has not lost a poet in Jonas Lie; but probably a lesser one than the novelist that it gained.

As Jonas had been voted by his kin the family dullard, it was decided to make a clergyman of him. But to this the young man objected, chiefly, according to his own story, because the clerical gown looks too much like a petticoat. At all events, after having equipped himself with a set of theological tomes, and peeped cursorily into them, he grew so discouraged that he went to the bookseller and exchanged them for a set of law-books. Not that the law had any peculiar attraction for him; he rather accepted it as a _pis aller_; for, of course, he had to study something. In due time he was graduated, but with such poor standing that he concluded to put in another year and try again. And this time he managed to acquit himself creditably. He then began (1859) the practice of the law in the little town of Kongsvinger, the centre of the richest lumber districts in Norway. But in the meanwhile he had had an experience of another kind which is worth recounting.

From his boyhood he had been a worshipper of the fair sex. Marriages (of other people) had been among the most tragic events in his life; and he rarely failed to shed tears at the thought that now this lovely charmer, too, was removed from the number of his possible selections. If things went on in this way he would have no choice but to be a bachelor. However, one fine day a most attractive-looking craft, bearing the name Thomasine Lie, appeared upon his horizon, sailed within speaking distance, and presently a great deal nearer. In fact, though they were cousins, it took a remarkably short time for the two young people to discover that they loved each other; and when that discovery was made, they acted upon it with laudable promptitude. They became engaged; and were subsequently married. And from that day the Finnish Hyde in Jonas was downed and reduced to permanent subjection. He never raised his head again. The more sober-minded, industrious, and sensible Norse Jekyll took command and steered with a steady hand, in fair weather and foul, and often through dangerous waters, the barque Jonas Lie, which came to carry more and more passengers the longer it proceeded on its voyage.

Truth to tell, I know among contemporary men of letters no more complete, happy, and altogether beautiful marriage than that of Jonas and Thomasine Lie. The nearest parallel to it that I can think of is that of John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Taylor, who later became Mrs. Mill.

Lie's friends accuse him of carrying his admiration of his wife to the verge of idolatry. He will leave himself but little merit, but with an air of candid conviction he attributes even his authorship to his Thomasine. "Her name ought to stand next to mine on the title-pages of my books," he has repeatedly declared. And again, "If I have written anything that is good, then my wife deserves as much credit for it as myself ... Without her nothing would have come of it except nonsense."

Even though that may be an exaggeration, pure delusion it is not. For Mrs.