BY WILLIAM M. PAYNE

Of the two great writers who have, more than any others, made it possible for Norway to share in the comity of intellectual intercourse so characteristic of the modern literary movement, it must be granted that Bjoernson is, more distinctly than Ibsen, the representative of their common nationality.  Both are figures sufficiently commanding to belong, in a sense, to the literature of the whole world, and both have had a marked influence upon the ideals of other peoples than that from which they sprung; but the wider intellectual scope of Ibsen has been gained at some sacrifice of the strength that comes from taking firm root in one’s native soil, and speaking first and foremost to the hearts of one’s fellow-countrymen.  What we may call the cosmopolitan standpoint of the greater part of his work has made its author less typically a Norwegian than Bjoernson has always remained.  It is not merely that the one writer has chosen to spend the best years of his life in countries not his own, while the other has never long absented himself from the scarred and storm-beaten shores of the land, rich in historic memories and “dreams of the saga-night,” that gave him birth and nurture.  Tourguenieff lived apart from his fellow-countrymen for as many years as Ibsen has done, yet remained a Russian to the core.  It is rather a difference of native intellectual bent that has left Bjoernson to stand as the typical representative of the Norwegian spirit, while the most famous of his contemporaries has given himself up to the pursuit of abstractions, and has been swept along by a current of thought resulting from the confluence of many streams.  The intensely national character of Bjoernson’s manifold activity is well illustrated by a remark of Georg Brandes, to the effect that mention of Bjoernson’s name in the presence of any gathering of Norwegians is like running up the national flag.  And it seems, on the whole, that the sum total of his literary achievement must be reckoned the greatest to be set down to the credit of any one Norwegian since Norway began to develop a literature of her own.  Far nobler and finer than that of either Wergeland or Welhaven, the two most conspicuous of his predecessors, this achievement is challenged by that of Ibsen alone, and even then in but a single aspect.  It is only as dramatists that suspense of judgment between the two men is for a moment admissible; as a poet the superiority of Bjoernson is unquestionable, while his rank as the greatest of Norwegian novelists is altogether beyond dispute.

[Illustration:  BJOeRNSON]