The Susanne

“What we want in the future is a literature which will make men better.”

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson quoted in William Henry Schofield, ‘Personal impressions of Björnson and Ibsen’, Atlantic Monthly, Boston:1898

“Magnhild is a victim of that morbid egotism to which the women of Norwegian novels are usually a prey. She has the customary inability to accept the hard facts of lige and make the best of them.

She lives among the usual throng of monsters, mental or physical, who are sketched with Björnson’s painful and perhaps inartistic minuteness. The actions of the various characters in the story are generally preposterous if not maniacal, and altogether the effect which it produces is one of unrelieved gloom and depression.

The sombre dead-level of squalor and horror with which it deals would be apt to get on one’s nerves, and the feckless, shiftless, slatternly Magnhild is, we hope, a character more likely to excite impatience than sympathy in the breast of the healthy British maiden. Probably it would be better is she did not read about her at all.”

Book review: ‘Magnhild’ and ‘Dust’, The Academy, London:1897

“Space is wanting to do justice here to the little novel of Kaptejn Mansana, a story of passion and adventure from the last phase of Italian history. It has all the delicacy and beauty of those early stories by which Björnson attracted to himself European attention, but it surpasses these, it seems to me, in truth and vigour of delineation, in power over the more subtle and reflex emotions of the mind, and in a more perfect command over the fervent parts of style.”

Edmund Gosse, ‘Two new works by Björnson’, The Academy, London:1879

“…its cheerful optimism becomes the winning personality of the hero and his fair lady-love. The book gains genius and charm, too, from its skilful presentation of peasant reserve and innate shyness. The correspondence of Eyvind[sic] during his sojourn at the agricultural college is at once extremely amusing and strangely pathetic. His letters awaken within us a profound astonishment that people so incapable of expressing themselves can ever achieve their ambitions. And yet the boy has an eloquence of his own, that to Marit at least proved irresistible:

‘To the Highly Honoured Marit-Knut’s Daughter, –I have just received your letter, but you seem to want me to be just as wise as I was before. I dare not write anything of what I want to write about, for I do not know you. But perhaps you don’t know me either. You must not believe that I am any longer the soft cheese out of which you pressed water when I sat and watched you dance. I have lain upon many a shelf to dry since that time. Nor yet am I like those long-haired dogs that for the slightest thing let their ears droop, and slip away from people, as I used to do. I take my chance now. Your letter was playful enough, but it was playful just where it ought not to have been, for you understand me well, and you could guess that I did not ask for fun, but because of late I can think of nothing but what I asked about. I waited in deep anxiety, and then came nothing but trifling and laughter. Good-bye, Marit Nordistauer, I shall not look too much at you, as I did at that dance. I hope you may both eat and sleep well, and finish your new web of cloth, and especially that you may shovel away the snow that lies before the church door.’”

Book review: ‘A Happy Boy’, The Academy, London: 1896

“The first part has an unintermittent imaginative intensity, a Rembrandt-like breadth of literary chiaroscuro, and a vigorous realism of that relentless kid which of late has exercised such a fascinations over both writers and readers; and it leaves the impression of immense activity.

In the remainder of the book this creative energy is put into harness and made to drag a heavy chariot, or rather a prosaic cart, filled with theories – theories of education, of heredity, and sexual morals, the result being that its paces are subdued to a spiritless amble which is unspeakably depressing.

In the Kurts of Tomas’s ancestry there is a rich warmth of baleful vitality; we feel the palpitation of their wild hearts; and their story may be fitly described as a Norse Wuthering Heights.

Had the writer continued to work the imaginative vein struck in the opening chapter, The Heritage of the Kurts would have been a romance of sombre power; as it stands, it is ineffective, with that kind of ineffectiveness which must be found wherever creation is dominated by polemics.”

James Ashcroft Noble, ‘The Heritage of the Kurts: book review’, The Academy, London:1892

“With Björnson, however, begins the true Gothic school, about which Tegner (the Matthew Arnold of the North) blundered so beautifully. He is content with the simplest elements, yet takes care to assimilate them exquisitely. He is not a Milton, capable of producing a Christian epic; nor a Dante, capable of contructing and all-embracing allegory of personal suffering; nor a Goethe, capable of founding a science of culture. He is merely an idyllic thinker, exhibiting some creative fortitude, and wealthy in delicate suggestion.” 

Anonymous, ‘BJORNSON’, Spectator, London:1866

“With all due admiration for Dostoievsky and the ablest of his confrères among the pessimists, I cannot but think it would be a better sign if Björnstjerne Björnson were to become the vogue. It is not so much a question of optimism versus pessimism as of perfect sanity of mind and body against baffling weariness, disease and despair. We have much to learn from a writer such as Dostoievsky: perhaps we have a really deeper and worthier lesson to learn from men like Björnson”

William Sharp, ‘Björnson’s In God’s Way: book review’, The Academy, London:1890

“While German literature darkens under the malignant star of Deutschthum, while French Art sickening of its long diesase crawls like a Leper through the light and wholesome world, while all over the European continent one wan influence or another asserts its despair-engendering sway over books and men, whither shall a bewildered student fly for one deep breath of pure air and wholesome ozone?”

Robert Buchanan, ‘Björnstjerne Björnson’, Contemporary Review, London:1872

“There he lay, the greatest the North has ever known, the King of Life on the journey of death, resting on the improvised couch as if on a bed of state. We were grouped around him – only a few intimate Danish friends, together with Norway’s Ambassador, who had come to wait on him in order to pay his country’s respects. The Ambassador, a highly gifted and distinguished lawyer, bent respectfully down over the invalid and kissed him on the forehead.

It was so entirely spontaneous that it impressed ur all by its solemnity, with the religious reverence of public worship. The old poet’s eyes were dim with tears. He grasped both the Ambassador’s hands – grasped them both – and drew them to his lips and kissed them over and over again, whilst with breaking voice he whispered: ‘Thank you! thank you!’

I thought, and involuntarily formed the words in my mind, 
‘Now Björnson and Norway bid farewell to each other.’”

Peter Nansen, ‘The last meeting with Björnson’, The Fortnightly Review, London: 1910

“And out of this young and sturdy nation two writers have arisen who wear laurels on their brows and are smiled on by Apollo. Björnson is well known, by this time, to many Englishmen; he represents the happy buoyant side of the life of his fatherland; he is what one would naturally expect a Norwegian author to be – rough, manly, unpolished, a young Titan rejoicing in his animal spirits. Ibsen, on the other hand, is a quite unexpected product of the mountain-lands, a typical modern European, a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire, piercing downward into the dark, profound, Promethean, a dramatic satirist.”

Edmund Gosse, ‘Ibsen, the Norwegian Satirist’, The Fortnightly Review, London: 1873