United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Brandes, to speak the name of Bjoernson in any assembly of his countrymen is like "hoisting the Norwegian flag."
For it seemed quite unthinkable to her that the master should have any money to take out with him. "This complete indifference of Bjoernson to small matters sometimes proved annoying. In this connection I may tell of a little trip he once took with Jonas Lie.
His departure was thus a very hard blow for Bjoernson, but for that matter, was also felt as a painful loss by those he opposed. Not long after this departure, and immediately after the publication of my long article on Goldschmidt, I received one day, to my surprise, a letter of eight closely written pages from Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson, dated April 15th, 1869.
No deeper tragedies have been conceived by Bjoernson than these two, the tragedy of the saintlike Pastor Sang, who believes that the miracle of his wife's restoration to health has at last in very truth been wrought by his fervent prayer, and finds only that the ardor of his faith and hers has brought death instead of life to them both, the tragedy of his son Elias, who dies like Samson with his foes for an equally impossible faith, and by the very violence of his fanaticism removes the goal of socialist endeavor farther than ever into the dim future.
His personal expenditures were restricted to the books he bought, and now and then a theatre ticket. One day he carne excitedly into the sitting-room, and asked: "'Who took my five franc piece? It was a five franc piece that he had got somewhere or other and had stuck in his pocket to buy a theatre ticket with. It turned out that the maid had found it and given it to Fru Bjoernson.
Eight years later, Bjoernson prefaced a new edition of this work with a series of reflections upon "Intellectual Freedom" that constitute one of the most vigorous and remarkable examples of his serious prose. The central ideas of his political faith are embodied in the following sentences from this preface: "Intellectual Freedom.
Thus at the age of forty, Bjoernson found himself with a dozen books to his credit books which had stirred his fellow countrymen as no other books had ever stirred them, arousing them to the full consciousness of their own nature and of its roots in their own heroic past.
What had called it forth was my remark, in that article, that Bjoernson, like Goldschmidt, sometimes, when talent failed, pretended to have attained the highest, pretended that obscurity was the equivalent of profundity.
So much didactic matter as this is a heavy burden for any novel to carry, and a lesser man than Bjoernson would have found the task a hopeless one. That he should have succeeded even in making a fairly readable book out of this material would have been remarkable, and it is a pronounced artistic triumph that the book should prove of such absorbing interest.
Two other celebrated personages whom I met for the first time a little later were Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson and Magdalene Thoresen. I became acquainted with Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson at the Nutzhorns, their son, Ditlev, being a passionate admirer of his.
Word Of The Day