Part 35

He came of well-to-do people, and received a liberal education at the gymnasium of Christiania, the University of Leipsic, and the University of Norway. His father, professor of mathematics at the Naval Academy, had made several trips to the United States and had been impressed by the opportunities offered there to energetic young men. Upon his urgent advice, Hjalmar when about twenty-one came to America, and soon obtained a position upon a Norwegian newspaper, the Fremad of Chicago.

From childhood he had longed to write, but had been discouraged by his father, who expatiated upon the limitations of their native tongue, and assured him that to succeed in literature he must be able to write in another language as readily as in his own. Even in his school days he had shown a remarkable aptitude for languages; not only for understanding and speaking them, but for a sympathetic comprehension of foreign literatures, and that sensitiveness to shades of expression which so rarely comes to any but a native. He now worked with all his energy to acquire English, not only as a necessary tool, but as the best medium for conveying his own thought.

This whole-souled devotion to an adopted tongue was soon rewarded by a more spontaneous ease of expression than he possessed even in his native Norwegian. No one could guess from his poems that he was foreign to the speech in which he wrote them; few even among those born and bred to its use have had such mastery of its capacities.

He soon left the Fremad and began teaching Greek and Latin at the small Urbana University, in Ohio. Thence he was called to Cornell University in 1874 as professor of German, and in 1880 to Columbia College, where later he became professor of German languages and literatures. He was a teacher of rare stimulus and charm. He had an attractive vigor of personality; his treatment of subjects was at once keenly analytic and very sympathetic, while his individual point of view was impressed in an easy and vivid style.

The same qualities won for Boyesen a distinguished place in the lecture-field, where he gave his audiences an exceptional combination of solid learning and graceful and lucid expression. A series on the Norse sagas, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, are still valued as 'Scandinavian Studies.'

In critical work, of which these studies form a part, Professor Boyesen made his chief mark, as was natural, on the literature and legends of his native land. The best commentary on Ibsen yet published in English is his introduction to Ibsen's works; he manages to compress within the space of a very few pages the pith of the great anarch's social ideas and the character of his dramatic work. His 'Goethe and Schiller' is also excellent.

In pure letters, his earliest poems collected into 'Idyls of Norway,' and his early stories of Norse life, of which 'Gunnar' was first and best, were never surpassed by him in later life, if indeed they were equaled. The best powers of his mind were gradually drawn into fields which solidified and broadened his intellect, but checked the free inspiration and romantic feeling of youth. In gauging his merit as a creative artist, we must set aside all but the work of these few enthusiastic years. An important part of this change must be credited to the influence of the Russian novelists and their American disciples. Whatever may be the final verdict on Turgénieff and Tolstoy, their tremendous effect on American literature is one of the most striking facts in our recent literary history; its value is a more dubious matter, according to the point of view. Boyesen met Turgénieff in Paris, and was deeply impressed by him; he also became intimate with W.D. Howells, and through the influence of the latter became an ardent disciple of Tolstoy. The result was to transform the romanticist of 'Gunnar'--steeped in the legends of old Norway, creating a fairy-land atmosphere about him and delighting to live in the ideal,--into a so-called realist, setting himself to the task of brushing away all illusions and painting life as sterile and unpicturesque as it is in its meanest, most commonplace conditions. To do this, he claimed, was the stern function of the author. To help his readers to self-knowledge, although it might lessen their happiness, was the greatest service he could render them.

He succeeded. The best comment on the theory and the practice alike is that 'Gunnar' lives and its realistic successors do not, and indeed never did; and that much the same may be said of the corresponding epochs of other American novelists' work, with a few exceptions where native genius was too strong to be spoiled even by a vicious artistic principle. 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' and 'The Golden Calf' belong to the second half of Boyesen's work.

A high place must be given, however, to his stories for boys in the children's magazines, principally on Norwegian themes. These are among the best of their kind,--spirited, wholesome, strong in plot and workmanship, and containing some examples of his most perfect style. Even the more slender juvenile tales have passages of the finest poetic spirit, and a charm scarcely equaled in his more ambitious work. He won some laurels as a dramatist: 'Alpine Roses' was successfully acted in New York in 1883, and 'Ilka on the Hilltop' (taken from his story of that name) in 1884.

Although he was in complete sympathy with the American life and character and wished to make them his own, Professor Boyesen was never quite an American. His descriptions of life in the United States are therefore always the result of a foreigner's observation. His generous humanity appeals to all races, however, and his books have been successfully translated into German, Russian, and Norwegian. For years he had been collecting matter for an extensive history of Scandinavian literature,--a task for which his nationality, his scholarship, and his mastery of the English language especially fitted him. His sudden death at forty-seven prevented its accomplishment, and perhaps deprived him of a still wider and solider fame.

A NORWEGIAN DANCE

From 'Gunnar'

They all hurried back to the hall. Gudrun might well wish to ask questions, but she dared not; for she felt the truth, but was afraid of it. They could not help seeing, when they entered the hall, that many curious glances were directed toward them. But this rather roused in both a spirit of defiance. Therefore, when Gunnar was requested to begin the stev he chose Ragnhild for his partner, and she accepted. True, he was a houseman's son, but he was not afraid. There was a giggling and a whispering all round, as hand in hand they stepped out on the floor. Young and old, lads and maidens, thronged eagerly about them. Had she not been so happy, perhaps she would not have been so fair. But as she stood there in the warm flush of the torchlight, with her rich blond hair waving down over her shoulders, and with that veiled brightness in her eyes, her beauty sprang upon you like a sudden wonder, and her presence was inspiration. And Gunnar saw her; she loved him: what cared he for all the world beside? Proudly he raised his head and sang:--

_Gunnar_--There standeth a birch in the lightsome lea,

_Ragnhild_--In the lightsome lea;

_Gunnar_--So fair she stands in the sunlight free,

_Ragnhild_--In the sunlight free;

_Both_--So fair she stands in the sunlight free.

_Ragnhild_--High up on the mountain there standeth a pine,

_Gunnar_--There standeth a pine;

_Ragnhild_--So stanchly grown and so tall and fine,

_Gunnar_--So tall and fine;

_Both_--So stanchly grown and so tall and fine.

_Gunnar_--A maiden I know as fair as the day,

_Ragnhild_--As fair as the day;

_Gunnar_--She shines like the birch in the sunlight's play,

_Ragnhild_--In the sunlight's play;

_Both_--She shines like the birch in the sunlight's play.

_Ragnhild_--I know a lad in the spring's glad light,

_Gunnar_--In the spring's glad light;

_Ragnhild_--Far-seen as the pine on the mountain-height,

_Gunnar_-- On the mountain-height;

_Both_-- Far-seen as the pine on the mountain-height.

_Gunnar_--So bright and blue are the starry skies,

_Ragnhild_-- The starry skies;

_Gunnar_--But brighter and bluer that maiden's eyes,

_Ragnhild_-- That maiden's eyes;

_Both_--But brighter and bluer that maiden's eyes.

_Ragnhild_--And his have a depth like the fjord, I know,

_Gunnar_-- The fjord, I know;

_Ragnhild_--Wherein the heavens their beauty show,

_Gunnar_-- Their beauty show;

_Both_--Wherein the heavens their beauty show.

_Gunnar_--The birds each morn seek the forest glade,

_Ragnhild_-- The forest glade;

_Gunnar_--So flock my thoughts to that lily maid,

_Ragnhild_-- That lily maid;

_Both_-- So flock my thoughts to that lily maid.

_Ragnhild_--The moss it clingeth so fast to the stone, _Gunnar_-- So fast to the stone;

_Ragnhild_--So clingeth my Soul to him alone, _Gunnar_-- To him alone;

_Both_--So clingeth my soul to him alone.

_Gunnar_--Each brook sings its song, but forever the same,

_Ragnhild_-- Forever the same;

_Gunnar_--Forever my heart beats that maiden's name,

_Ragnhild_-- That maiden's name;

_Both_--Forever my heart beats that maiden's name.

_Ragnhild_--The plover hath but an only tone,

_Gunnar_-- An only tone;

_Ragnhild_--My life hath its love, and its love alone,

_Gunnar_-- Its love alone;

_Both_--My life hath its love, and its love alone.

_Gunnar_--The rivers all to the fjord they go, _Ragnhild_-- To the fjord they go;

_Gunnar_-- So may our lives then together flow, _Ragnhild_-- Together flow;

_Both_--Oh, may our lives then together flow!

Here Gunnar stopped, made a leap toward Ragnhild, caught her round the waist, and again danced off with her, while a storm of voices joined in the last refrain, and loud shouts of admiration followed them. For this was a stev that was good for something; long time it was since so fine a stev had been heard on this side of the mountains. Soon the dance became general, and lasted till after midnight. Then the sleigh-bells and the stamping of hoofs from without reminded the merry guests that night was waning. There stood the well-known swan-shaped sleigh from Henjum, and the man on the box was Atle himself. Ragnhild and Gudrun were hurried into it, the whip cracked, and the sleigh shot down over the star-illumined fields of snow.

The splendor of the night was almost dazzling as Gunnar came out from the crowded hall and again stood under the open sky. A host of struggling thoughts and sensations thronged upon him. He was happy, oh, so happy!--at least he tried to persuade himself that he was; but strange to say, he did not fully succeed. Was it not toward this day his yearnings had pointed, and about which his hopes had been clustering from year to year, ever since he had been old enough to know what yearning was? Was it not this day which had been beckoning him from afar, and had shed light upon his way like a star, and had he not followed its guidance as faithfully and as trustingly as those wise men of old? "Folly and nonsense," muttered he; "the night breeds nightly thoughts!" With an effort he again brought Ragnhild's image before his mind, jumped upon his skees, and darted down over the glittering snow. It bore him toward the fjord. A sharp, chill wind swept up the hillside, and rushed against him. "Houseman's son!" cried the wind. Onward he hastened. "Houseman's son!" howled the wind after him. Soon he reached the fjord, hurried on up toward the river-mouth, and coming to the Henjum boat-house, stopped, and walked out to the end of the pier, which stretched from the headland some twenty to thirty feet out into the water. The fjord lay sombre and restless before him. There was evidently a storm raging in the ocean, for the tide was unusually high, and the sky was darkening from the west eastward. The mountain-peaks stood there, stern and lofty as ever, with their heads wrapped in hoods of cloud. Gunnar sat down at the outer edge of the pier, with his feet hanging listlessly over the water, which, in slow and monotonous plashing, beat against the timbers. Far out in the distance he could hear the breakers roar among the rocky reefs; first the long, booming roll, then the slowly waning moan, and the great hush, in which the billows pause to listen to themselves. It is the heavy deep-drawn breath of the ocean. It was cold, but Gunnar hardly felt it.

He again stepped into his skees and followed the narrow road, as it wound its way from the fjord up along the river. Down near the mouth, between Henjum and Rimul, the river was frozen, and could be crossed on the ice. Up at Henjumhei it was too swift to freeze. It was near daylight when he reached the cottage. How small and poor it looked! Never had he seen it so before;--very different from Rimul. And how dark and narrow it was all around it! At Rimul they had always sunshine. Truly, the track is steep from Henjumhei to Rimul; the river runs deep between.

MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON

(1837-)

Whatever objections may be made to the sensational character of many of Miss Braddon's earlier novels, her place is certainly in the ranks of the "born" story-tellers. Although still in the prime of life, she has been before the public for thirty-seven years. Her books have been produced in amazingly rapid and continuous succession. She was born in London in 1837, wrote little stories in her early teens, and was fond of entertaining her companions with startling original tales.

When a young girl she conceived a passion for the stage, and a dramatic--or melodramatic--element is conspicuous in most of her novels. She was barely twenty-one when she had completed a comedietta, 'The Lover of Arcadia,' which, after many alterations and revisions, was put on the stage of the Strand Theatre in 1860, with--naturally--but moderate success. Her disappointment was extreme. She gave up the hope of becoming a successful dramatist. Her next venture, like that of most young authors, was a small volume of poems, of which Garibaldi was the chief theme. About this time she also wrote a number of highly colored, much strained tales in the Temple Bar and St. James' magazines. These tales drew attention, and awoke an echo which neither the comedietta nor the poems had done, making it clear to her that in narrative fiction lay her strength. She was ambitious, she wanted money even more than reputation, and she has followed narrative fiction most diligently ever since, with widening and indisputable success.

In 1862 appeared her first full-fledged novel, 'Lady Audley's Secret.' It achieved instantaneous distinction and an enormous sale, six editions being disposed of in as many weeks. She had finally hit the mark, though not by accident. She had carefully thought out a new scheme, and had corrected literary mistakes by her late experience. She knew that the first desire of novel readers is for novelty, a characteristic usually preferred to originality, which is often much more slowly recognized. Mrs. Gore's fashionable novels, correct in portraiture and upholstery, clever but monotonous, had had their day; Mrs. Trollope's coarse and caustic delineations; G.P.R. James's combats, adventures, skirmishes, disguises, trials, and escapes, and Bulwer's sentimental and grandiloquent romances, had begun to pall upon the public taste. Miss Braddon perceived that the time had come for something new, so 'Lady Audley's Secret' was a striking innovation.

Hitherto, wickedness had been ugly. She endued it with grace and beauty. She invented a mystery of crime surrounded by everyday circumstances, yet avoiding the "detective novel" mechanism. A new story, 'Aurora Floyd,' repeated the immense success of 'Lady Audley.' Novel after novel followed, full of momentous incidents, of surprises leading to new surprises. All the time Miss Braddon was observing much, correcting much in her methods and ideas. She studied manners closely; drew ingenious inferences; suggested dramatic and startling conclusions. She has, too, introduced into modern fiction the beguiling female fiend, who, like the Italian duchess of the Middle Ages, betrays with a smile, and with one arm about her lover beckons to the hired bravo to do his bloody work. Her plots, though sometimes forced, are ingenious and exciting. The movement of her stories is swift, and the scenes and personages contribute to the appointed end. As the author has grown in literary stature, a finer and often admirable effort is made to analyze or to develop character, as an element subservient to the exigencies of the stirring catastrophe.

Her style and treatment have matured with practice and with years, and her later novels display artistic form and finish. Her 'Mohawks' is in many respects a superb study of fashionable life, with several historical portraits introduced, of London in the time of Pope, St. John, Walpole, and Chesterfield--a tableau of great movement and accuracy of composition. In thirty-five years she has written more than sixty stories, the best of them being perhaps this fine semi-historical melodrama. Several of her earlier fictions have been successfully dramatized. An exquisite little tale for Christmas-tide, 'The Christmas Hirelings,' is an evidence of her lightness of touch and refinement of conception in a trifle. In 1874 Miss Braddon married John Maxwell, a well-known London publisher.

THE ADVENT OF THE 'HIRELINGS'

From 'The Christmas Hirelings': copyrighted by Harper and Brothers

Everything had been made ready for the little strangers. There were fires blazing in two large bedrooms overhead--rooms with a door of communication. In one there were still the two little white beds in which Lilian and Sibyl had slept when they were children; poor Lilian, whose bed was in the English cemetery at Florence, under a white marble monument erected by her sorrowing husband, and whose sorrowing husband had taken to himself a second wife five years ago. Every one knew where Lilian was lying, but no one at Penlyon Castle knew where Sibyl's head had found rest. All that people knew about the disobedient daughter was that her husband had died within three or four years of her marriage, worn to death in some foreign mission. Of his luckless widow no one at Penlyon had heard anything, but it was surmised that her father made her an allowance. He could hardly let his only daughter starve, people said, however badly she might have treated him. Lady Lurgrave's early death had been a crushing blow to his love and to his pride. She had died childless.

* * * * *

Sir John had heard the carriage stop, and the opening of the hall door; and although he pretended to go on reading his paper by the lamp placed close at his elbow, the pretense was a poor one, and anybody might have seen that he was listening with all his might.

The footman had opened the hall door as the wheels drew near; it was wide open when the carriage stopped. The red light from the hall fire streamed out upon the evening gray, and three little silvery voices were heard exclaiming:--

"Oh, what a pretty house!"

"Oh, what a big house!"

And then the smallest voice of the three with amazing distinctness:--

"What an exceedingly red fire."

The carriage door flew open, and two little girls all in red from top to toe, and one little boy in gray, rolled out in a heap, or seemed to roll out, like puppies out of a basket, scrambled on to their feet and ran up the steps,--Mr. Danby, slim and jaunty as usual, following them.

"Good gracious, how tiny they are!" cried Adela, stooping down to kiss the smaller girl, a round red bundle, with a round little face, and large dark gray eyes shining in the firelight.

The tiny thing accepted the kiss somewhat shrinkingly, and looked about her, awed by the grandeur of the hall, the large fireplace and blazing logs, the men in armor, or the suits of armor standing up and pretending to be men.

"I don't like them," said the tiny girl, clinging to Danby and pointing at one of these mailed warriors with a muffled red hand: "they're not alive, are they, Uncle Tom?"

"No, no, no, Moppet, they're as dead as door-nails."

"Are they? I don't like dead people."

"Come, come, Moppet, suppose they're not people at all--no more than a rocking-horse is a real live horse. We'll pull one of them down to-morrow and look inside him, and then you'll be satisfied."

The larger scarlet mite, larger by about an inch, older by a year, was standing before the fire, gravely warming her hands, spreading them out before the blaze as much as hands so tiny could spread themselves. The boy was skipping about the hall, looking at everything, the armed warriors especially, and not at all afraid.

"They're soldiers, aren't they?" he asked.

"Yes, Laddie."

"I should like to be dressed like that, and go into a battle and kill lots of people. I couldn't be killed myself, could I, if I had that stuff all over me?"

"Perhaps not, Laddie; but I don't think it would answer. You'd be an anachronism."

"I wouldn't mind being a nackerism if it saved me from being killed," said Laddie.

"Come, little ones, come and be presented to your host," said Mr. Danby, as the footman opened the library door; and they all poured in--Danby, Adela, and the children--the smallest running in first, her sister and the boy following, considerably in advance of the grown-ups.

Moppet ran right into the middle of the room as fast as her little red legs could carry her; then seeing Sir John sitting where the bright lamplight shown full upon his pale elderly face, with its strongly marked features, black eyebrows, and silvery-gray hair, she stopped suddenly as if she had beheld a Gorgon, and began to back slowly till she brought herself up against the silken skirt of Adela Hawberk's gown; and in that soft drapery she in a manner absorbed herself, till there was nothing to be seen of the little neatly rounded figure except the tip of a bright red cap and the toes of two bright red gaiters.

The elder mite had advanced less boldly, and had not to beat so ignominious a retreat. She was near enough to Mr. Danby to clutch his hand, and holding by that she was hardly at all frightened.

The boy, older, bolder, and less sensitive than either of the girls, went skipping around the library as he had skipped about the hall, looking at things and apparently unconscious of Sir John Penlyon's existence.

"How d'ye do, Danby?" said Sir John, holding out his hand as his old friend advanced to the fire, the little red girl hanging on to his left hand, while he gave his right to his host. "Upon my word, I began to think you were never coming back. You've been an unconscionable time. One would suppose you had to fetch the children from the world's end."

"I had to bring them to the world's end, you might say. Boscastle is something more than a day's journey from London in the depth of winter."

"And are these the children? Good heavens, Danby! what could you be thinking about to bring us such morsels of humanity?"

"We wanted children," said Danby, "not hobbledehoys"

"Hobbledehoys! no, but there is reason in everything. You couldn't suppose I wanted infants like these--look at that little scrap hidden in Adela's frock. It's positively dreadful to contemplate! They will be getting under my feet. I shall be treading upon them, and hurting them seriously."

"No you won't, Jack; I'll answer for that."

"Why not, pray?"

"Because of their individuality. They are small, but they are people. When Moppet comes into a room everybody knows she is there. She is a little scared now; but she will be as bold as brass in a quarter of an hour."