Part 2

The critics apparently had not felt the sea-breezes in his first books; but in the last there blew such a lusty gale that all, both critics and public, sniffed its fresh and salty breath with keenest relish. The book was a success, which his previous novel had not quite been, and it marks the beginning of Lie's sane and natural realism as consciously applied, in its main problem, to a modern social question, making the story, in its essence, a novel of character, a psychological study of the relation of man and wife, and not primarily a novel of adventure, which assumption gave Lie the designation "novelist of the sea." The success of the book brought the author, in 1874, by vote of the Storting, a life stipend known as a "poet's salary," which recognition put him in a class with Ibsen and Björnson. The great honor seems to have had a depressing effect, for Lie now scored four failures in succession. He was back in Norway, trying to portray social phenomena of the capital city. The reviewers were most irritating and offensive, and he felt obliged temporarily to desert the field. With the novel _Rutland_ (1881), he returned to the sea. This story surpasses _The Pilot_ in every respect. The sea is described with the fondness of a lover. Like _The Pilot_, it also deals with a problem of the home, but what chiefly impressed the public in reading the book was that the seamen, that important element of the Norwegian people, had found an adequate interpreter.

His next book, _Forward (Gaa Paa)_ (1882), was likewise a maritime novel, with panoramas in the life of the fisher folk on the western coast. At the same time it forecast the new age of industrial development, and revealed growing sympathy and increased understanding in matters of national import. The author seems to have become convinced that a novelist, too, might be able to lend a hand in paving the way for progress. In this book he had by his vivid portrayal attacked stagnation, superstition, sluggishness, and had proclaimed the new gospel of work, activity, enterprise. It had been begun during the latter part of a three years' sojourn in Germany. It was completed in Norway during the autumn of 1882, after which Lie took up his abode in Paris, where he made his home for many years.

For his next work, _A Life Prisoner_ (1883), Lie found his theme in the slums of Christiania. The treatment was not naturalistic enough to satisfy the critics. Lie was of course not unmindful of the new literary movement, but he possessed then, as always, sufficient individual momentum to carry him through the ephemeral phases of literary fads. His novels are not barometers of the prevailing literary atmosphere. He believed in a realism of true naturalism, which has stood the test of time. In this last work he brings a waif of modern society close to the hearts of his readers, and needs no explosions of pent-up indignation, no spirit of class hatred, to make his readers understand this unfortunate product of a bad environment. In his reply to the critics, Lie spoke forcibly on the new literary method, summing up his views in these words: "The main thing is to picture life so that the reader sees, hears, feels, comprehends it; by what esthetic means this is accomplished must be the author's own affair in each individual case. But experience has shown that of all methods direct ones are often the least effective. A single deft touch may save a dozen pages of detailed description." Lie was not a student of the base; he did not even have an artistic liking for evil. There are few bad characters in his works.

It was immediately after his controversy with the critics, in 1883, that _The Family at Gilje_ appeared--a superb illustration of Lie's realism of naturalness. An American critic has said of good realistic writing that it does not so much arouse the pleasure of surprise as that of recognition. To intelligent Norwegian readers of the day that was strikingly true of _The Family at Gilje_. To many readers it seemed like living their lives over again. This may not be a very severe test of the greatness of a novel. Greatness will depend upon other things--the breadth and depth of its humanity. Another point: "The right understanding of men and women leads to the right relations of men and women, and in this way a novel may do good" (F. Marion Crawford). Most of Lie's novels seem to have been written with this object in view. It is evident that in an attempt to portray life for this purpose, social and other questions are sure to appear--not thrust into the reader's face as a problem demanding that he take sides, but brought to his attention naturally, as such things ordinarily come in life. Discreetly done, as Lie surely could do it, this may be a most effective way of revolutionizing conscience. In this artistic manner Lie was, and no doubt consciously, a reformer. To be sure, this is not art for art's sake; it is something more human: art engaged in the pursuit of stimulating noble and healthful thought for the purpose of raising the average of human happiness.

It was this calm and restrained realistic method that Lie now applied in a series of novels which succeeded _The Family at Gilje_. As in this work, the scenes are usually laid in a preceding generation, preferably among the official class in the country. In these homes, which Lie knew so well, we feel that we are with real and natural people among whom problems are not discussed, but experienced. Yet these novels were not so conservative as they seemed. They had persuasive power in behalf of modern ideas with respect to such fundamental things as marriage, home, and children. There was even something of the essence of social dynamite in some of them. _The Family at Gilje_ gave the champions of women new arguments, but they could not approve of the author's advanced sympathies in _The Commodore's Daughters_, one of the realistic novels which now flowed from Lie's pen and which included: _A Maelstrom_ (1884), _The Commodore's Daughters_ (1885), _A Wedded Life_ (1887), _Maisa Jons_ (1888), and _Evil Powers_ (1890). Suddenly there came a change in his literary method, seemingly induced by some unpleasant experience with good friends. He had learned that the conduct of the best of men is often swayed by primal instinct rather than by disciplined reason. In this mood he reverted to the trusty Finn of his bosom who so long had lain dormant, and let him discourse on life and human nature. He proved voluble, resourceful, and original. The result was published in two volumes (1891 and 1892), entitled _Trold_. They are, in part, phantasmagorias charged with the symbolism of Norse legendary lore, where trolls are the personified manifestation of evil forces in nature. The opening sentence of the illuminating introduction says: "That there are trolls in human beings every one knows who has an eye for that sort of thing."

In the most characteristic of these stories, of which there are a dozen in each volume, Lie has personified primal instincts,--allegorized some of the strange facts and mystic forces of nature, man, and society. Others are in lighter vein and have a more human cast, being mere playful satires on social phenomena. They form a marvellous medley. At first it seems quite impossible to believe that the author of _The Family at Gilje_ can be the begetter of things so fantastic and grotesque. But when the reader thinks of the early Nordland stories, he understands, and then feels inclined to regret, that the Finn had so long lain dormant. One is tempted to believe that a little of the troll element could easily have been used to give a tinge of terror to his calm realism; and this is in fact what he has done most effectively in the novel _Dyre Rein_ (1896), which in other respects much resembles _The Family at Gilje_.

After the publication of _Trold_, Lie, even where he does not introduce troll effects, is not hesitant about using more tragic methods and more dramatic scenes than during the period of the strictly realistic novels. There is, moreover, a decided trend toward a wider scope and more cosmopolitan aims, as in _When the Iron Curtain Falls_ (1901), a bolder symbolism, as in _Niobe_ (1893) and in his last work, _East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and Beyond the Towers of Babylon_ (1905), in which, however, as the title indicates, the story is top-heavy with symbolism. It runs parallel with the main narrative as an introduction to each chapter. The whole is the tale of a genius, hampered and harassed by malicious trolls in human guise--evidently an adumbration of the author's own personal experience. But he is, as always, charitable: "Human nature is so complex!"

In other words: the last fifteen years of Lie's authorship reveal him in full possession of the realistic powers of the preceding period, illuminated by a profound comprehension of the mystic forces of life that so often determine human fates.

Like Ibsen, Lie lived abroad for many years, mainly in Paris, but usually spending his summers in the Bavarian Alps, where most of his writing was done. There were too many distractions in Paris, where his home was a centre of the colony of Scandinavian artists and literary workers. In the summer of 1893, after an absence of ten years, he felt the need of visiting Norway again. An intense feeling of homesickness had seized him, as the following incident will indicate. He had called on a Norwegian family in Paris who had just received a plant from Norway in Norwegian earth. "Thinking himself unobserved," one of his daughters tells, "I saw him turn from the company, take a pinch of that earth and put it to his mouth. Whether he kissed it or ate it I do not know. But he looked very solemn."

In Norway he was received most cordially. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Brandes proclaimed him "the most amiable of geniuses." He was interviewed, banqueted, and serenaded almost to distraction, and was glad to get back to Paris, happy, however, in having experienced the touching devotion of his countrymen. A decade of arduous toil followed, after which he began to make plans for returning to Norway to spend the last years of his life. A cozy home was built at Fredriksværn, on the southern coast, and in 1906 the family took possession of it. The next year, however, his faithful wife, the guardian of his genius, passed away. Dependent upon her companionship and solicitous care, he did not long survive her. He died July 5, 1908.

The Norwegian Storting took fitting cognizance of his death, and, as had been done at Ibsen's demise, decreed that interment should be made at the expense of the State.

"Blessed are the merciful," said the pastor at his bier.

"Be merciful!" is the sentiment that echoes and reëchoes throughout Jonas Lie's pages.

JULIUS E. OLSON

_The University of Wisconsin February, 1920_

[Footnote 1: Pronounced as Lee in English.]

[Footnote 2: Arne Garborg is one of Norway's greatest novelists. He is also a gifted lyric poet, and an exceedingly clever controversialist. Most of his works are written in _Landsmaal_, a composite of the peasant dialects. His biography of Lie is a classic.]

[Footnote 3: A peasant poet, kindred in spirit to both Burns and Heine.]

[Footnote 4: The composer of, among other notable things, the melody to Björnson's well-known national song. Before his death, at the age of twenty-four, he had given Edvard Grieg an electric spark from the dynamo of his Norse enthusiasm, which fired Grieg's imagination, and made him _par excellence_ the representative of Norse melody.]

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

THE FAMILY AT GILJE

_Chapter I_

It was a clear, cold afternoon in the mountain region. The air lay blue with the frost, with light rose tints over all the sharp crests, ravines, and peaks, which, like a series of gigantic drifts, tower above tower, floated up towards the horizon. Below, hills and wooded mountain slopes shut the region in with white walls, constantly narrower and narrower, nearer and nearer, always more contracting.

The snow was late this year, but in return, now that the Christmas season had come, lay so heavy on fir and spruce that it bent down both needles and twigs. The groves of birches stood up to their waists in snow; the small clusters of tile-roofed houses of the district were half buried, with snow-drifts pressing down over the roofs. The entrances to the farmyards were deeply dug paths, from which the gate and fence posts stuck up here and there like the masts of sunken boats.

The snow-plough had recently gone through the highway, and on the steep red-tiled roof of the captain's house men were busy shovelling down the great frozen snow-drifts, which hung threatening over the ends of the roof.

The captain's house was specially prominent in the district. It was unpainted and built of square logs, like the greater part of that kind of houses a generation ago.

Over the garden fence and almost up under the window-frames lay the snow-drifts with tracks of sleds and skis in their icy crust, which smoked a little in the frosty north wind under the sun.

It was the same cold, disagreeable north wind which, every time the outer door was opened, blew against the kitchen door until that opened too, and, if it was not closed again, soon after, one or another door on the next floor,--and that made the captain come down from his office, flushed and passionate, to make inquiries and fret and fume over the whole house as to who had gone there first and who had gone last. He could never understand why they did not keep the door shut, though the matter was most easily to be understood,--for the latch was old and loose, and the captain would never spend any money on the smith for a new one.

In the common room below, between the sofa and the stove, the captain's wife, in an old brown linsey-woolsey dress, sat sewing. She had a tall, stiff figure, and a strong, but gaunt, dried-up face, and had the appearance of being anxiously occupied at present by an intricate problem--the possibility of again being able to put a new durable patch on the seat of Jörgen's trousers; they were always bottomless--almost to desperation.

She had just seized the opportunity for this, while Jäger was up in his office, and the children were gone to the post-office; for she went about all day long like a horse grinding clay in a brickyard.

The mahogany sewing-table inlaid with mother-of-pearl and several different kinds of wood, which stood open before her, must have been a family heirloom; in its condition of faded antiquity, it reminded one not a little of her, and in any event did not at all correspond either with the high-backed, rickety, leather armchair, studded with brass nails, in which she sat, nor with the long birchen sofa covered with green linsey-woolsey, which stood like a solitary deserted land against the wall, and seemed to look longingly over to the brown, narrow folding-table, which, with its leaves let down, stood equally solitary and abandoned between the two windows.

The brown case with the four straight legs against the farther wall, with a heap of papers, books, hats, and the spy-glass upon it, was an old clavichord, which, with great trouble, she had had transported up into the mountain region, out of the effects of her home, and on which she had faithfully practised with her children the same pieces which she herself had learned.

The immense every-day room, with the bare timber walls, the unpainted sanded floor, and the small panes with short curtains fastened up in the middle, was in its whole extent extremely scantily furnished; it was half a mile from chair to chair, and everything had a rural meagreness such as one could often see in the homes of officials in the mountain districts in the forties. In the middle of the inner wall, before the great white fire-wall, the antique stove with the Naes iron-works stamp and the knotty wooden logs under it jutted out into the room like a mighty giant. Indeed, nothing less than such a mass of iron was needed to succeed in warming up the room; and in the woods of the captain's farm there was plenty of fuel.

Finally abandoning all more delicate expedients for the trousers, she had laid on a great patch covering everything, and was now sewing zealously. The afternoon sun was still shedding a pale yellow light in the window-frames; it was so still in the room that her movements in sewing were almost audible, and a spool of thread which fell down caused a kind of echo.

All at once she raised herself like a soldier at an order and gave attention. She heard her husband's quick, heavy step creaking on the stairs.

Was it the outside door again?

Captain Jäger, a red, round, and stout man in a threadbare uniform coat, came hastily in, puffing, with the still wet quill-pen in his mouth; he went straight to the window.

His wife merely sewed more rapidly; she wished to use the time, and also prudently to assume the defensive against what might come.

He breathed on the frosty pane in order to enlarge the part that could be seen through. "You will see there is something by the mail. The children are running a race down there in the road,--they are running away from Jörgen with the sled."

The needle only flew still faster.

"Ah, how they run!--Thinka and Thea. But Inger-Johanna! Come here, Ma, and see how she puts down her feet--isn't it as if she was dancing? Now she means to be the first in, and so she will be the first, that I promise you. It is no story when I tell you that the lass is handsome, Ma; that they all see. Ah, come and look how she gets ahead of Thinka! Just come now, Ma!"

But "Ma" did not stir. The needle moved with forced nervous haste. The captain's wife was sewing a race with what was coming; it was even possible that she might get the last of the patch finished before they entered, and just now the sun disappeared behind the mountain crest; they were short days it gave them up there.

The steps outside were taken in two or three leaps, and the door flew open.

Quite right--Inger-Johanna.

She rushed in with her cloak unfastened and covered with snow. She had untied the strings of her hood on the way up the steps, so that her black hair fell down in confusion over her hot face. Breathless, she threw her flowered Valders mittens on a chair. She stood a moment to get her breath, brushed her hair under her hood, and shouted out:

"An order for post-horses at the station, for Captain Rönnow and Lieutenant Mein. The horses are to be here at Gilje at six o'clock to-morrow morning. They are coming here."

"Rönnow, Ma!" roared the captain, surprised; it was one of the comrades of his youth.

Now the others also came storming in with the details.

The mother's pale face, with its marked features and smooth black hair in loops down over her cheeks in front of her cap, assumed a somewhat thoughtful, anxious expression. Should the veal roast be sacrificed which she had reserved for the dean, or the pig? The latter had been bought from the north district, and was fearfully poor.

"Well, well, I bet he is going to Stockholm," continued the captain, meditatively drumming on the window-frame. "Adjutant, perhaps; they would not let that fellow stay out there in the West. Do you know, Ma, I have thought of something of this sort ever since the prince had so much to do with him at the drill-ground. I often said to him, 'Your stories, Rönnow, will make your fortune,--but look out for the general, he knows a thing or two.' 'Pooh! that goes down like hot cakes,' said he. And it looks like it--the youngest captain!"

"The prince--" The captain's wife was just through with the trousers, and rose hastily. Her meagre, yellowish face, with its Roman nose, assumed a resolute expression: she decided on the fatted calf.

"Inger-Johanna, see to it that your father has his Sunday wig on," she exclaimed hurriedly, and hastened out into the kitchen.

The stove in the best room was soon packed full, and glowing. It had not been used since it had been rubbed up and polished with blacking last spring, and smoked now so that they were obliged to open door and windows to the cold, though it was below zero.

Great-Ola, the farm-hand, had been busy carrying large armfuls of long wood into the kitchen, and afterwards with brushing the captain's old uniform coat with snow out on the porch; it must not look as if he had dressed up.

The guest-chamber was made ready, with the beds turned down, and the fire started, so that the thin stove snapped, and the flies suddenly woke up and buzzed under the ceiling, while the wainscot was browned outside of the fire-wall and smelled of paint. Jörgen's hair was wet and combed; the girls changed their aprons to be ready to go down and greet the guests, and were set to work rolling up pipe-lighters for the card-table.

They kept looking out as long as the twilight lasted, both from the first and second story windows, while Great-Ola, with his red peaked cap, made a path in the snow to the carriage-road and the steps.

And now, when it was dark, the children listened with beating hearts for the slightest sound from the road. All their thoughts and longings went out towards the strange, distant world which so rarely visited them, but of which they heard so much that sounded grand and marvellous.

There are the bells!

But, no; Thinka was entirely wrong.

They had all agreed to that fact, when Inger-Johanna, who stood in the dark by a window which she held a little open, exclaimed, "But there they are!"

Quite right. They could hear the sleigh-bells, as the horse, moving by fits and starts, laboriously made his way up the Gilje hills.

The outside door was opened, and Great-Ola stood at the stairs, holding the stable lantern with a tallow candle in it, ready to receive them.

A little waiting, and the bells suddenly sounded plainly in the road behind the wood-shed. Now you could hear the snow creaking under the runners.

The captain placed the candlestick on the table in the hall, the floor of which had been freshly scoured, washed, and strewn with juniper. He went out on the stairs, while the children, head to head, peeped out of the kitchen door, and kept Pasop, who growled and fretted behind them, from rushing out and barking.

"Good-evening, Rönnow! Good-evening, Lieutenant! Welcome to Gilje!" said the captain with his strong, cheerful voice, while the vehicle, which at the last post-house was honored with the name of double sleigh, swung into the yard and up to the steps. "You are elegantly equipped, I see."