Itis a well-known peculiarity of Norwegian authors that they all want something. It is either some of the “new devilries” with which Father Ibsen amuses himself in his old age, or else it is the Universal Disarm-ment Act and the peace of Europe, which Björnson, with his increasing years and increasing folly, assures us will come to pass as a result of “universal morality;” or else it is the rights of the flesh, which have been discovered by Hans Jaeger; but whatever they want, it is always something that has no connection with their art as authors. All their writings assume the form of a polemical or critical discussion on social subjects; yet in spite of their boasted psychology, they care little for the great mystery which humanity offers to them in the unexplored regions lying between the two poles: man and woman; and as for physiology, they are as little concerned about it as Paul Bourget in hisPhysiologie de l’Amour Moderne, where there is no more physiology than there is in the novels of Dumaspère.
“When the green tree,” etc. That is the style of the Norwegian authors; and as for the authoressesof the three Scandinavian countries,—they are all ladies who have been educated in the high schools. They cast down their eyes, not out of shyness,—for the modern woman is too well aware of her own importance to be shy,—but in order to read. They read about life, as it is and as it should be, and then they set themselves down to write about life as it is and as it should be; but they really know nothing of it beyond the little that they see during their afternoon walks through the best streets in the town, and at the evening parties given by the bestbourgeoissociety.
This is the case with all Scandinavian authoresses, with one exception. This one exception can see, and she looks at life with good large eyes, opened wide like a child’s, and sees with the impartiality that belongs to a healthy nature; she can grasp what she sees, and describe it too, with a freshness and expressiveness which betray a lack of “cultured” reading.
A ladyof remarkable and brilliant beauty may sometimes be seen in the theatre at Copenhagen, or walking in the streets by the side of a tall, stout, fair gentleman, whose features resemble those of Gustavus Adolphus. Any one can see that the lady is a native of Bergen. To usstrangers, the natives of Bergen have a certain something whereby we always recognize them, no matter whether we meet them in Paris or in Copenhagen. Björnson’s wife has it as decidedly as the humblest clerk whom we see on Sundays at the table of his employer at Reval or Riga. Their short, straight noses lack earnestness, their hair is shiny and untidy, their eyes are black as pitch, and they have the free and easy movements that are peculiar to a well-proportioned body; it is as though the essence of the vitality of Europe had collected in the old Hanseatic town of the North. I do not think that the inhabitants of Bergen are remarkable for their superior intelligence; if they were it might hinder them from grasping things as resolutely, and despatching them as promptly as they are in the habit of doing. But among Norwegians, who are known to have heavy, meditative natures, the people of Bergen are the most cheerful and light-hearted,—in as far as it is possible to be cheerful and light-hearted in this world.
The lady who is walking by the side of the man with the Gustavus-Adolphus head is a striking phenomenon in Copenhagen. She is different from every one else, which a lady ought never to be. Compared with the flat-breasted, lively, and flirtatious women of Copenhagen, she, with her well-developed figure and large hips, is like a great sailing-ship among small coquettish pleasure boats. She is always doing something whichno lady would do; she wears bright colors, which are not the fashion; and I saw her one evening at an entertainment, where there were not enough chairs, sitting on a table and dangling her feet,—although she is the mother of two grown-up sons!
Whenthe woman’s rights movement made its appearance in Norway, authoresses sprang up as numerous as mushrooms after the rain. Women claimed the right to study, to plead, and to legislate in the local body and the state; they claimed the suffrage, the right of property, and the right to earn their own living; but there was one very simple right to which they laid no claim, and that was the woman’s right to love. To a great extent this right had been thrust aside by the modern social order, yet there were plenty of Scandinavian authors who claimed it; it was only amongst the lady writers that it was ignored. They did not want to risk anything in the company of man; they did not want any love on the fourth story with self-cooked meals; they preferred to criticise man and all connected with him; and they wrote books about the hard-working woman and the more or less contemptible man. The two sexes were a vanquished standpoint. These were completed by the addition ofbeings who were neither men nor women, and, in consequence of the law of adaptability, they continued to improve with time, and woman became a thinking, working, neutral organism.
Good heavens! When women think!
Among the group of celebrated women-thinkers,—Leffler, Ahlgren, Agrell, etc.,—who criticised love as though it were a product of the intelligence, followed by a crowd of maidenly amazons, there suddenly appeared an author named Amalie Skram, whom one really could not accuse of being too thoughtful. It is true that in her first book there was the intellectual woman and the sensual man, and a seduced servant girl, grouped upon the chessboard of moral discussion with a measured proportion of light and shade,—that was the usual method of treating the deepest and most complicated moments of human life. But this book contained something else, which no Scandinavian authoress had ever produced before: her characters came and went, each in his own way; every one spoke his own language and had his own thoughts; there was no need for inky fingers to point the way; life lived itself, and the horizon was wide with plenty of fresh air and blue sky,—there was nothing cramped about it, like the wretched little extract of life to which the other ladies confined themselves. There was a wealth of minute observation about this book, brought to life by careful painting and critical descriptions, a trustworthy memory and an untroubled honesty;one recognized true naturalism below the hard surface of a problem novel, and one felt that if her talent grew upon the sunny side, the North would gain its first woman naturalist who did not write about life in a critical, moralizing, and polemical manner, but in whom life would reveal itself as bad and as stupid, as full of unnecessary anxiety and unconscious cruelty, as easy-going, as much frittered away and led by the senses as it actually is.
Two years passed by and “Constance Ring,” the story of a woman who was misunderstood, was followed by “Sjur Gabriel,” the story of a starving west coast fisherman. There is not a single false note in the book, and not one awkward description or superfluous word. It resembles one of those sharp-cut bronze medallions of the Renaissance, wherein the intention of the artist is executed with a perfected technical power in the use of the material. This perfection was the result of an intimate knowledge of the material, and that was Fru Skram’s secret. Her soul was sufficiently uncultured, and her sense of harmony spontaneous enough to enable her to reproduce the simplest cause in the heart’s fibre. She describes human beings as they are to be found alone with nature,—with a raw, niggardly, unreliable, Northern nature; she tells of their never-ending, unfruitful toil, whether field labor or child-bearing, the stimulating effect of brandy, the enervating influence of their fear of a harshGod,—the God of a severe climate,—the shy, unspoken love of the father, and the overworked woman who grows to resemble an animal more and more. Such are the contents of this simplest of all books, which is so intense in its absolute straightforwardness. The story is told in the severest style, in few words without reflections, but with a real honesty which looks facts straight in the face with unterrified gaze, and is filled with a knowledge of life and of people combined with a breadth of experience which is generally the property of men, and not many men. We are forced to ask ourselves where a woman can have obtained such knowledge, and we wonder how this unconventional mode of thinking can have found its way into the tight-laced body and soul of a woman.
A second book appeared the same year, called “Two Friends.” It is the story of a sailing vessel of the same name, which travels backwards and forwards between Bergen and Jamaica, and Sjur Gabriel’s grandson is the cabin boy on board. This book offers such a truthful representation of the life, tone of conversation, and work on board a Norwegian sailing vessel, that it would do credit to an old sea captain. The tone is true, the characters are life-like, and the humor which pervades the whole is thoroughly seamanlike. The description of how the entire crew, including the captain, land at Kingston one hot summer night to sacrifice to the BlackVenus, and the description of the storm, and the shipwreck of the “Two Friends” on the Atlantic Ocean, the gradual destruction of the ship, the state of mind of the crew, and the captain’s suddenly awakened piety;—it is all so perfectly life-like, so characteristically true of the sailor class, and so full of local Norwegian coloring, that we ask ourselves how a woman ever came to write it,—not only to experience it, but to describe it at all, describe as she does with such masterly confidence and such plain expressions, without any affectation, prudery, or conceit, and without any trace of that dilettantism of style and subject which has hitherto been regarded as inseparable from the writings of Scandinavian women.
Whencecomes this sudden change from the dilettante book, “Constance Ring,” with its Björnson-like reflections, to the matured style of “Sjur Gabriel” and “Two Friends”?
I could not understand it all at first, but the day came when I understood. Amalie Skram as a woman and an author had come on to the sunny side.
I have often wondered why it is that so few people come on to the sunny side. I have studied life until I became the avowed enemy of all superficial pessimism and superficial naturalism.I have discovered a secret attraction between happiness and individualism,—an attraction deeper than Zola is able to apprehend; it is the complete human beings who, with wide-opened tentacles, are able to appropriate to their own use everything that their inmost being has need of; but whether a person is or is not a complete human being, that fate decides for them before they are born.
Fru Amalie Skram was, in her way, one of these complete women. She passed unscathed through a girl’s education, was perhaps scarcely influenced by it, and with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks she gazed upon the world and society with the look of a barbaric Northern woman, who retains the full use of her instinct. When quite young she married the captain of a ship, by whom she had two sons. She went with him on a long sea voyage round the world; she saw the Black Sea, the Sea of Azof, and the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. She saw life on board ship, and life on land,—man’s life. Her mind was like a photographic plate that preserves the impressions received until they are needed; and when she reproduced them, they were as fresh and complete as at the moment when they were first taken. These impressions were not the smallware of a lady’s drawing-room; they represented the wide horizon, the rough ocean of life with its many dangers. It was the kind of life that brings with it freedom from allprejudice, the kind of life which is no longer found on board a modern steamer going to and fro between certain places at certain intervals.
But it was not to be expected that the monotony of the life could satisfy her. She separated herself from her husband, and remained on shore, where she became interested in various social problems, and wrote “Constance Ring.”
It was then that she made the acquaintance of Erik Skram.
The man with the head of Gustavus Adolphus is Denmark’s most Danish critic. His name is little known elsewhere, and he cannot be said to have a very great reputation; but this may be partly accounted for by the fact that he has no ambition, and partly because he has one of those profound natures that are rendered passive by the depth of their intellect. He is a man of one book, a novel called “Gertrude Colbjörnson,” and he is never likely to write another. But he contributes to newspapers and periodicals, where his spontaneous talent is accompanied by that quiet, delicate, easy-going style which is one of the forms of expression peculiar to the Danish sceptics.
Fru Amalie Müller became Fru Amalie Skram, and the bold Bergen woman, who was likewise the dissatisfied lady reformer of Christiania, became the wife of a born critic, and went to live at Copenhagen. She was an excitable littlebrunette, he a fair, phlegmatic man, and togetherthey entered upon the struggle for the mastery, which marriage always is.
In this struggle Fru Amalie Skram was beaten; every year she became more of an artist, more natural, more simple, more herself, and more of all that a woman never can become when she is left to herself. Her husband’s superior culture liberated her fresh, wild, primitive nature from the parasites of social problems; the experienced critic saw that her strength lay in her keen observation, her happy incapacity for reasoning and moralizing, her infallible memory for the impressions of the senses and emotions, and her good spirits, which are nothing more than the result of physical health. He cautiously pushed her into the direction to which she is best suited, to the naturalism which is natural to her. Her books were no longer drawn out, neither were they as poor in substance as books by women generally are, even the best of them; they grew to be more laconic than the majority of men’s books, but clear and vivid; there was nothing in them to betray the woman. And after he had done this much for her, the experienced man did yet one thing more,—he gave her the courage of her recollections.
AmalieSkram’s talent culminated in “Lucie.” In this book we see her going about in an untidy, dirty, ill-fitting morning gown, and she is perfectly at home. It would scandalize any lady. Authoresses who struggle fearlessly after honest realism—like Frau von Ebner-Eschenbach and George Eliot—might perhaps have touched upon it, but with very little real knowledge of the subject. Amalie Skram, on the other hand, is perfectly at home in this dangerous borderland. She is much better informed than Heinz Tovote, for instance, and he is a poet who sings of women who are not to be met with in drawing-rooms. She describes the pretty ballet girl with genuine enjoyment and true sympathy; but the book falls into two halves, one of which has succeeded and the other failed. Everything that concerns Lucie is a success, including the part about the fine, rather weak-kneed gentleman who supports her, and ends by marrying her, although his love is not of the kind that can be called “ennobling.” All that does not concern Lucie and her natural surroundings is a failure, especially the fine gentleman’s social circle, into which Lucie enters after her marriage, and where she seems to be as little at home as Amalie Skram herself. Many an author and epicurean would have hesitated before writing such a bookas “Lucie.” But Amalie Skram’s naturalism is of such an honest and happy nature that any secondary considerations would not be likely to enter her mind, and in the last chapter the brutal naturalism of the story reaches its highest pitch. In the whole of Europe there are only two genuine and honest naturalists, and they are Emile Zola and Amalie Skram.
Her later books—take, for instance, her great Bergen novel, “S. G. Myre,” “Love in North and South,” “Betrayed,” etc.—are not to be compared with the three that we have mentioned. They are naturalistic, of course; their naturalism is of the best kind; they are stillunco in de la nature, but they are no longer entirelyvu à travers un tempérament. They are no longer quite Amalie Skram.
Norwegian naturalism—we might almost say Teutonic naturalism—culminated in Amalie Skram, this off-shoot of the Gallic race. Compared with her, Fru Leffler and Fru Ahlgren are good little girls, in their best Sunday pinafores; Frau von Ebner is a maiden aunt, and George Eliot a moralizing old maid. All these women came of what is called “good family,” and had been trained from their earliest infancy to live as became their position. All the other women whom I have sketched in this book belonged to the upper classes, and like all women of their class, they only saw one little side of life, and therefore their contribution to literature is worthlessas long as it tries to be objective. Naturalism is the form of artistic expression best suited to the lower classes, and to persons of primitive culture, who do not feel strong enough to eliminate the outside world, but reflect it as water reflects an image. They feel themselves in sympathy with their surroundings, but they have not the refined instincts and awakened antipathies which belong to isolation. Where the character differs from the individual consciousness, they do not think of sacrificing their soul as a highway for the multitude, any more than their body—à laLucie—to thecommune bonum.