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Updated: May 2, 2025
This has always been a favorite theme with Bjoernson, and he has no clearer title to our gratitude than that which he has earned by his unfailing insistence upon the sanctity of family life, its mutual confidences, and its common joys.
The work which was thus destined to mark the opening of a new era in Norwegian letters was written in the twenty-fifth year of its author's life. The son of a country pastor, Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson was born at Kvikne, December 8, 1832. At the age of six, his father was transferred to a new parish in the Romsdal, one of the most picturesque regions in Norway.
Protestantism carried it against Roman Catholicism, the young Oehlenschlaeger against Baggesen, Romanticism against Rationalism; Oehlenschlaeger as the Northern poet of human nature against a certain Bjoernson, who, it was said, claimed to be more truly Norse than he. In Mr. Driebein's presentment, no recognised great name was ever attacked.
His King Sverre of 1861 had been a disappointment, but Sigurd Slembe of the following year was new and great poetry, and fascinated young people's minds. Bjoernson, socially, as in literature, was a strong figure, self- confident, loud-voiced, outspoken, unique in all that he said, and in the weight which he knew how to impart to all his utterances.
Bjoernson has written nothing more profoundly moving than these plays, with their twofold treatment of essentially the same theme, nor has he written anything which offers a clearer revelation of his own rich personality, with its unfailing poetic vision, its deep tenderness, and its boundless love for all humankind.
These distinctions are chiefly two, one of them is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen grew to be largely cosmopolitan in their outlook, Bjoernson has much more closely maintained throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint.
In the clean-cut phrases and moral earnestness of this apologia pro vita sua, which deserves to be reproduced at greater length, we have the modern Bjoernson, no longer poet alone, but poet and prophet at once, the champion of sincere thinking and worthy living, the Sigurd Slembe of our own day, happier than his prototype in the consciousness that the ambition to serve his people has not been; altogether thwarted, and that his beneficent activity is not made sterile even by the bitterest opposition.
He is a young man; let him rub off his corners!" Heiberg is credited with having replied: "Very true! Let him! but not in my drawing-room! That is not a place where people may rub anything off." Heiberg's wife, on the other hand, admired him exceedingly, and was undoubtedly very much fascinated by him. In a circle of younger people, Bjoernson was a better talker than conversationalist.
The fact that the conclusion of the letter contained much that was conciliatory and beautiful consequently did not help matters. Bjoernson wrote: When you write about the Jews, although I am not in agreement with you, altogether in agreement, you yet seem to me to touch upon a domain where you might have much to offer us, many beautiful prospects to open to us.
His manner jarred a little on the more subdued Copenhagen style; the impression he produced was that of a great, broad-shouldered, and very much spoilt child. In the press, all that he wrote and did was blazoned abroad by the leading critics of the day, who had a peculiar, challenging way of praising Bjoernson, although his ability was not seriously disputed by anyone.
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