mong
Bjoernson's predecessors there are but two lyrists of the first order,
viz., Wergeland and Welhaven. The former was magnificently profuse and
chaotic, abounding in verve and daring imagery, but withal
high-sounding, declamatory, and, at his worst, bombastic. There is a
reminiscence in him of Klopstock's inflated rhetoric; and a certain
dithyrambic ecstasy--a strained, high-keyed aria-style which sometimes
breaks into falsetto. His great rival, Welhaven, was soberer, clearer,
more gravely melodious. He sang in beautiful, tempered strains, along
the middle octaves, never ranging high into the treble or deep into the
base. There is a certain Tennysonian sweetness, artistic self-restraint,
and plastic simplicity in his lyrics; just as there is in Wergeland's
reformatory ardor, his noble rage, and his piling up of worlds, aeons,
and eternities a striking kinship to Shelley. But both these poets,
though their patriotism was strong, were intellectually Europeans,
rather than Norwegians. The roots of their culture were in the general
soil of the century, whose ideas they had absorbed. Their personalities
were not sufficiently tinged with the color of nationality to give a
distinctly Norse cadence to their voices. Wergeland seems to me like a
man who was desperately anxious to acquire a national accent; but
somehow never could catch the trick of it. As regards Welhaven, he was
less aware of his deficiency (if deficiency it was); but was content to
sing of Norse themes in a key of grave, universal beauty. Of the new
note that came into the Norwegian lyric with Bjoernson, I can discover no
hint in his predecessors. Such a poem as, for instance, "Nils Finn,"
with its inimitably droll refrain--how utterly inconceivable it would be
in the mouth of Wergeland or Welhaven! The new quality in it is as
unexplainable as the poem itself is untranslatable. It has that
inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel
(if you have the conditions for recognizing it) in the first word a
Norseman addresses to you. It has that wonderful twang of the Hardanger
fiddle, and the color and sentiment of the ballads sung and the
legendary tales recited around the hearth in a Norwegian homestead
during the long winter nights. With Bjoernson it was in the blood. It was
his soul's accent, the dialect of his thought, the cadence of his
emotion. And so, also, is the touching minor undertone in the poem, the
tragic strain in the hal