Part 4 (2/2)
The harsh and unsentimental logic of reality is emphasized with a ruthless disregard of rose-colored traditions.
From the pedagogic point of view, I have no doubt that ”Jacob” would be cla.s.sed as an immoral book. But the question of its morality is of less consequence than the question of its truth. The most modern literature, which is interpenetrated with the spirit of the age, has a way of asking dangerous questions--questions before which the reader, when he perceives their full scope, stands aghast. Our old idyllic faith in the goodness and wisdom of all mundane arrangements has undoubtedly received a shock. Our att.i.tude toward the universe is changing with the change of its att.i.tude toward us. What the thinking part of humanity is now largely engaged in doing is readjusting itself toward the world and the world toward it. Success is but adaptation to environment, and success is the supreme aim of the modern man. The authors who, by their fearless thinking and speaking, help us toward this readjustment should, in my opinion, whether we choose to accept their conclusions or not, be hailed as benefactors. It is in the ranks of these that Alexander Kielland has taken his place, and occupies a conspicuous position.
JONAS LIE
The last Norwegian novelist who is in the Parisian sense _arrive_ is Jonas Lie.[12] The _Figaro_ has occupied itself with him of late; and before long, I venture to predict, London and New York will also have discovered him. English versions of a few of his earlier novels appeared, to be sure, twenty years ago--in very bad translations--and accordingly attracted no great attention. ”The Visionary,” which has recently been published in London, has had better luck, having been accorded a flattering reception. Of its popular success it is yet too early to speak. But even if Jonas Lie were not about to knock at our gates, I venture to say that I shall earn the grat.i.tude of many a reader by making him acquainted with this rare, complex, and exceedingly modern spirit. For Jonas Lie is not (like so many of his brethren of the quill) a mere inoffensive gentleman who spins yarns for a living, but he is a forceful personality of bright perceptions and keen sensations, which has chosen to express itself through the medium of the novel. He dwells in a many-windowed house, with a large outlook upon the world and its manifold concerns. In a score of novels of varying degrees of excellence he has given us vividly realized bits of the views which his windows command. But what lends their chief charm to these uncompromising specimens of modern realism is a certain richness of temperament on the author's part, which suffuses even the harshest narrative with a rosy glow of hope. Though, generally speaking, there is no very close kins.h.i.+p between him and the French realists, I am tempted to apply to him Zola's beautiful characterization of Daudet: ”Benevolent Nature placed him at that exquisite point where reality ends and poetry begins.” Before he had yet written a single book, except a volume of flamboyant verse, BjOrnson said of him in a public speech: ”His friends know that he only has to plunge his landing-net down into himself in order to bring it up full.”
[12] p.r.o.nounced _Lee_.
The man who, in antic.i.p.ation of his achievements, impressed BjOrnson so deeply with his genius, was, however, by others, who felt themselves to be no less ent.i.tled to an opinion, regarded as an ”original,” not to say a fool. That he was decidedly queer, his biography by Arne Garborg amply testifies.
”Two souls, alas, abide within my breast, The one forever strives against the other,”
says Faust; and Jonas Lie's life and literary activity are apparently, in a very real sense, the result of a similar warfare. There was, indeed, a good ancestral reason for the duality of his nature. His father, a judge of sterling ability and uprightness, was descended, but a few generations back, from st.u.r.dy, blond, Norwegian peasants; while his mother was of Finnish, or possibly Gypsy, descent. I remember well this black-eyed, eccentric little lady, with her queer ways, extraordinary costumes, and still more extraordinary conversation. It is from her Jonas Lie has inherited the fantastic strain in his blood, the strange, superst.i.tious terrors, and the luxuriant wealth of color which he lavished upon his poems and his first novel, ”The Visionary.” From his paternal ancestors, who were for three generations judges and judicial functionaries, he has derived his good sense, his intense appreciation of detail, and his strong grip on reality. His career represents at its two poles a progression from the adventurous romanticism of his maternal heritage to the severe, wide-awake realism of the paternal--the emanc.i.p.ation of the Norseman from the Finn.
”Jonas Lie has a good memory,” writes his biographer. ”Thus he remembers--even though it be as through a haze--that he was once in the world as the son of a laborer, a carpenter, or something in that line, and that he went with food in a tin-pail to his father, when he was at work. During this incarnation he must have behaved rather shabbily; for in the next he found himself degraded to a fox--a silver fox--and in this capacity he was shot one moonlight night on the snow. After that he emerged, according to his recollection, as Jonas Lauritz Idemil, son of the lawyer Mons Lie, at Hougsund, in Eker. This took place November 6, 1833.”
When he was but a few years old his father removed, in various official capacities, to Mandal, SOndhordland, and, finally, to the city of Tromsoe, in Nordland. It was here, in the extreme north, that Jonas spent the years of his boyhood, and it was this wild, enchanted region which put the deepest impress upon his spirit.
”In Nordland,” he says in ”The Visionary,” the hero of which is essentially the Finnish half of himself, ”all natural phenomena are intense, and appear in colossal contrasts. There is an endless, stony-gray desert as in primeval times, before men dwelt there; but in the midst of this are also endless natural riches. There is sun and glory of summer, the day of which is not only twelve hours, but lasts continuously, day and night, for three months--a warm, bright, fragrance-laden summer, with an infinite wealth of color and changing beauty. Distances of seventy to eighty miles across the mirror of the sea approach, as it were, within earshot. The mountains clothe themselves up to the very top with greenish-brown gra.s.s, and in the glens and ravines the little birches join hands for play, like white, sixteen-year-old girls; while the fragrance of the strawberry and raspberry fills the air as nowhere else; and the day is so hot that you feel a need to bathe yourself in the sun-steeped, plas.h.i.+ng sea, so wondrously clear to the very bottom.... Myriads of birds are surging through the air, like white breakers about the cliffs, and like a screaming snow-storm about their brooding-places....”
But ”as a contrast there is a night of darkness and terror which lasts nine months.”
In this arctic gloom, during which the yellow candle-light struggled all day long through the frost-covered window-panes, the Finn grew big in Jonas Lie, and the Norseman shrank and was almost dwarfed. The air was teeming with superst.i.tions which he could not help imbibing. His fancy fed eagerly on stories of Draugen, the terrible sea-bogie who yells heartrendingly in the storm, and the sight of whom means death; on blood-curdling tales of Finnish sorcery and all sorts of uncanny mysteries; on folk-legends of trolds, nixies, and foul-weather sprites.
He had his full share of that craving for horrors which is common to boyhood; and he had also the most exceptional facilities for satisfying it. Truth to tell, if it had not been for the Norse Jekyll in his nature the Finnish Hyde might have run away with him altogether. They were mighty queer things which often invaded his brain, taking possession of his thought, paralyzing his will, and refusing to budge, no matter how earnestly he pleaded. There were times when he grew afraid of himself; when his imagination got the upper hand, blowing him hither and thither like a weather-c.o.c.k. Then the Norse Jekyll came to his rescue and routed his uncomfortable yoke-fellow. Hence that very curious phenomenon that the same man who has given us sternly and soberly realistic novels like ”The Family at Gilje” and ”The Commodore's Daughters,” is also the author of the collection of tales called ”Trold,” in which his fancy runs riot in a phantasmagoria of the grotesquest imaginings. The same Jonas Lie who comports himself so properly in the parlor is quite capable, it appears, of joining nocturnally the witches' dance at the Brocken and cutting up the wildest antics under the pale glimpses of the moon.
Throughout his boyhood he struggled rather ineffectually against his Hyde, who made him kill roosters, buy cakes on credit, go on forbidden expeditions by land and sea, and shamefully neglect his lessons.
Accordingly, he made an early acquaintance with the rod, and was regarded as well-nigh incorrigible. He accepted with boyish stoicism the castigations which fell pretty regularly to his lot, bore no one any grudge for them, but rarely thought of mending his ways, in order to avoid them. They were somehow part of the established order of things which it was useless to criticise. In his reminiscences from his early years, which he published some years ago, he is so delightfully boy, that no one who has any recollection of that barbaric period in his own life can withhold his sympathy. The following, for instance, seems to me charming:
”I can still feel how she (Kvaen Marja, the maid) pulled us, cowering and reluctant, out of our warm beds, where we lay snug like birds in their nests, between the reindeer skin and the sheepskin covering. I remember how I stood asleep and tottering on the floor, until I got a shower of cold water from the bathing-sponge over my back and became wide awake. Then to jump into our clothes! And now for the lessons! It was a problem how to get a peep at them during the scant quarter hour, while the breakfast was being devoured down in 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 surrept.i.tious 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 HOiland 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 unblus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s the entrance examination to the University.
Among his schoolmates during his last year of preparation at Heltberg's Gymnasium, in Christiania, were BjOrnstjerne BjOrnson and Henrik Ibsen.
The former took a great interest in the odd, _nave_, near-sighted Nordlander who walked his own ways, thought his own thoughts, and accepted ridicule with crus.h.i.+ng indifference.
”I was going about there in Christiania,” he says in a published letter to BjOrnson, ”as a young student, undeveloped, dim, and unclear--a kind of poetic visionary, a Nordland twilight nature--which after a fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+on 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. BjOrnson 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.
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