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

Lie is, in a certain way, the complement to her husband. She possesses what he has not; and he possesses what she, in her modest self-extinction, would never dream of laying claim to. The spirit of order, adjustment, and lucidity is strong in her; while he, in his fanciful exuberance, is often overwhelmed by his material, and is unable to get it into shape. Then she quietly steps in and separates the dry land from the water in his seething and struggling chaos. She is one of those rare women who, while apparently only listening, can give you back your own thoughts clarified. Mr. Garborg relates most charmingly how she straightens out the tangles in her husband's plots, and unobtrusively draws him back, when, as frequently happens, he has switched himself off on a side-line and is unable to recover his bearings. And this occurs as often in his conversation as in his manuscripts, which he never despatches to the publisher without her revision. She helps him condense. She knows just what to omit. Yet she does not pretend to be in the least literary. Her proper department, in which she is also a shining success, is the care of her children and the superintendence of her household. She understands to perfection the art of economy and has a keen practical sense, which makes her admirably competent in all the more difficult situations in life. And he, feeling her competence and his own deficiency, frankly leans on her. Hence a certain motherliness on her part (most beautiful to behold) has tinged their relation; and on his an admiring and affectionate dependence. Each prizes in the other what he himself lacks; and the husband's genius loses none of its brightness to the wife, because it is herself who trims the wick and adjusts the reflectors which send its light abroad.

I have again anticipated, because the subsequent career of Jonas Lie could not be properly understood without a full appreciation of the new factor which from this time enters into it. He developed signal ability as a lawyer during the years of his practice at Kongsvinger; became prosperous and influential, bought a considerable estate (called Sigridnaes) and began to dabble in politics. He still wrote occasional poems, and was the soul of all conviviality in the town. He entertained celebrities, wrote political leaders in the papers, earned a great deal of money, lived high, and unfolded a restless and widely ramified activity. Then came the great financial crisis of 1867-68, which swept away so many great fortunes in Norway. Lie became involved (chiefly by endorsement of commercial paper) to the extent of several hundred thousand dollars. He gave up everything he had, and moved to Christiania, resolved to pay the enormous debt, for which he had incurred legal responsibility, to the last farthing. Quixotic as it may seem, it was his intention to accomplish this by novel-writing. And to his honor be it said that for a long series of years he kept sending every penny he could spare, above the barest necessities, to his creditors, refusing to avail himself of the bankruptcy law and accept a compromise. But it was a bottomless pit into which he was throwing his hard-earned pennies, and in the end he had to yield to the persuasions of his family and abandon the hopeless enterprise.

In Christiania he spent some hard and penurious years, trying to make a livelihood as a journalist and man of letters. Some of his friends suspected that the Lie family were subsisting on very short rations; but they were proud, and there was no way to help them. The ex-lawyer developed ultra-democratic sympathies, and time and again his Thomasine led the dance at the balls of the Laborers' Union with Mr. Eilert Sundt.[14] A position as teacher of Norwegian in Heltberg's Gymnasium he lost because he only made orations to his pupils, but taught them no rhetoric. His volume of "Poems" (1867) had attracted no particular attention; but his political articles were much read and discussed. However, it was not in politics that he was to win his laurels.


[14] A well-known Norwegian philanthropist, whose work on the Gypsies is highly regarded.


A little before Christmas, 1870, there appeared from Gyldendal's publishing-house in Copenhagen a novel, entitled "The Visionary" (_Den Fremsynte_), by Jonas Lie. To analyze the impression which this strange book makes at the first reading is difficult. I thought, as I sat rejoicing in its vivid light and color, twenty-four years ago: "This Jonas Lie is a sort of century-plant, and 'The Visionary' is his one blossom. It is the one good novel which almost every life is said to contain. Only this is so strikingly good that it is a pity it will have no successors."

It was evidently himself, or rather the Finnish part of himself, the author was exploring; it was in the mine of his own experience he was delving; it was his own heart he was coining. That may, in a sense, be true of every book of any consequence; but it was most emphatically true of "The Visionary." It is not to the use of the first person that this autobiographical note is primarily due; but to a certain beautiful intimacy in the narrative, and a _naïve_ confidence which charms the reader and takes him captive. With a lavish hand Lie has drawn upon the memories of his boyhood in the arctic North; and it was the newness of the nature which he revealed, no less than the picturesque force of his language, which contributed in no small degree to the success of his book. But, above all, it was the sweetness and pathos of the exquisite love story. Susanna, though as to talents not much above the commonplace, is ravishing. To have breathed the breath of such warm and living life into a character of fiction is no small achievement. It is the loveliness of love, the sweetness of womanhood, the glorious ferment of the blood in the human springtide which are celebrated in "The Visionary." The thing is beautifully done. I do not know where young love has been more touchingly portrayed, unless it be in some of the Russian tales of Tourguéneff.[15] The second-sight with which the hero, David Holst, is afflicted, introduces an undertone of sadness--a pensive minor key--and seems to necessitate the tragic _dénouement_.


[15] Spring Floods, Liza, Faust.


The immediate success of "The Visionary" changed Jonas Lie's situation and prospects. He was first sent with a public stipend to Nordland for the purpose of studying the character, manners, and economic condition of the dwellers within the polar zone; and, like the conscientious man he is, he made an exhaustive report to the proper department, detailing with touching minuteness the results of his observations. The Norwegian government has always taken a strong (and usually very intelligent) interest in rising artists, musicians, and men of letters, and has endeavored by stipends and salaries to compensate them for the smallness of the public which the country affords. Jonas Lie was now a sufficiently conspicuous man to come into consideration in the distribution of the official _panem et circenses_. The state awarded him a largess of $400 for one year (twice renewed), in order to enable him to go to Italy and "educate himself for a poet;" and he was also made a beneficiary of the well-known Schafer legacy for the training of artists. In the autumn of 1871 he started with his wife and four children for Rome. It was in a solemnly festal frame of mind that he now resolved to devote the rest of his life to his real vocation, which at last he had found. This was what they had all meant--his gropings, trials, and failures. They had all fitted him for the life-work which was now to be his. The world lay before him as in the shining calm after storm.

He took his artistic training, as everything else, with extreme seriousness. With the utmost conscientiousness he started out with his Thomasine, morning after morning, to study the Vatican and the Capitoline collections. "Happy is the man," says Goethe, "who learns early in life what art means." But Jonas Lie was thirty-eight years old; and, as far as I can judge from his writings, I should venture to say that the secret of classical art has never been unlocked to him. It lies probably rather remote from the sphere of his sensations. His genius is so profoundly Germanic that only an ill-wisher would covet for him that expansion of vision which would enable him to perceive with any degree of artistic realization and intimacy the glorious serenity of the Juno Ludovisi and the divine distinction of the Apollo Belvedere.

The two books which were the first-fruits of the Roman sojourn were a disappointment to his friends, though in the case of the unpretentious collection called "Tales and Sketches from Nordland" (1872) there is no reason why it should have been. The public found that it was not on a level with "The Visionary," and by "The Visionary" Jonas Lie was bound to be judged, whether he liked it or not. That is the penalty of having produced a masterpiece, that one is never permitted to follow the example of _bonus Homerus_, who, as every one knows, sometimes nods. Jonas Lie was far from nodding in "The Barque Future" (1872). There was an abundance of interest in the material, and a delightful picturesque vigor in the descriptions of nature. But of romantic interest of the kind which the ordinary novel-reader craves, there was very little. _À propos_ of "The Barque Future" let me quote a bit of general characterization which applies to nearly all the subsequent works of Jonas Lie.

"It is in this particular that Jonas Lie most distinctly diverges from all romanticism and romance-writing: His interest in practical affairs, his ability to see poetry in that which is contemporary. The sawdust in the rivers has never offended him, nor the Briton's black cloud of coal-smoke. The busy toil of office and shop is not prose to him. He penetrates to the bottom of its meaning--its significance to civilization."[16]


[16] Arne Garborg: Jonas Lie, p. 172.


"The Barque Future" is, as regards its problem, Gustav Freytag's _Soll und Haben_ ("Debit and Credit") transferred to Nordland. Instead of the noble house of Rothsattel we have the ancient and highly esteemed commercial firm of Heggelund, whose chief falls into the toils of the scoundrel, Stuwitz, very much as Baron Rothsattel was dragged to ruin by the Jew Veitel Itzig. But no more than Freytag can find it in his heart to award the victory to the Hebrew usurer, can Lie violate the proprieties of fiction by permitting Stuwitz to fatten on his spoil. He could not, like the German novelist, conjure up a noble gentleman of democratic sympathies and practical ability (like von Finck) and make him emerge in the nick of time as the heir of the ancient gentry, justifying the dignities which he enjoys in the state by the uses which he fulfils. In Norway there is no nobility; and Lie, therefore, had to make his able and industrious plebeian, Morten Jonsen (the equivalent of Anton Wohlfahrt in _Soll und Haben_) the inheritor of the future. He accordingly awards to him the hand of Miss Edele Heggelund; but not until he has put Jacob to shame by the amount and character of the work by which he earns his Rachel.

The reception of "The Barque Future" was far from satisfactory to its author. He grew apprehensive about himself. He could not afford another failure; nay, not even a _succès d'estime_. Accordingly he waited two years, and published in 1874 "The Pilot and his Wife," which made its mark. It is an every-day story in the best