The Flying Mail/Old Olaf/the Railroad and the Churchyard
By . By . Translated by CARL LARSEN. Boston and Cambridge : Sever, Francis, & Co.
WE tried to tell the reader some months ago what kind of writer Björnson is, and we do not know that his story in this collection affords cause for fresh dissertation upon him. It is of his realistic rather than his idyllic mood ; but as his delicacy never fails him, the portraits of the simple, kind-hearted, sensitive Canute Aakre, and the shrewd, hard, unscrupulously ambitious Lars Hogstad are as exquisitely painted as any ideal figure that the poet has done. The story is only the narrative of these two country politicians, in their early friendship and their later rivalry, the success of Lars in having the railroad run through the old village churchyard, which Canute had striven to protect from the sacrilege, and the final triumph of the latter in the good offices which he renders Lars when a spark from one of the first - passing locomotives has burned that successful man out of house and home. It is all very interesting, because it make us so intimately acquainted with the working of the local political machinery in Norway, and, better still, with the character of the people and their feeling when confronted with such modern thoughts as shake mankind through the railway and the steamship. The author has availed himself of the right of every one who tells a good story, to omit the application.
Björnson is further represented in this book by two little tales which are not named in the title, “ The Eagle’s Nest and “ The Father,” and which are wonderful in showing how much can be achieved in small space with simplest material and the quietest manner. One merely tells how the young man that climbed to the eagle’s nest slipped and fell dead at the feet of his betrothed ; the other, how the ever-prospered father was not truly blest in his only son till he had lost him ; but in the limits of these narrow plots the author contrives to touch the strongest chords in his reader with thrilling and irresistible force. Only himself can do justice to the idea of his most sincere and unaffected art.
In “ The Flying Mail ” we are charm - ingly made acquainted with a Danish writer hitherto strange to us, who shows himself master of a very neat and accurate knowledge of the human heart as affected by love and society. The pretty conceit of the young man intrusting to the winds a declaration of love for that unseen and unknown fair, one syllable of whose conjectured name they have blown into his attic window, is sufficiently daring, but it is managed with the utmost skill and grace ; and in the slightly sketched personages, Ingeborg and Miss Brandt, we realize two very lifelike and natural people. It is in them, and in the surpassing daintiness and the fine humor with which their characters are indicated, that the new author secures his hold upon the reader, and that will make him welcome with whatever romance he appears hereafter.
Mrs. Thoresen, who writes “ Old Olaf,” is also a Dane, but Norway is her home, and the poetical feeling of her story is rather like that of Björnson than of Goldschmidt. She reminds us here and there of the former, as if she had made a study of his method ; and her story is the least forcibly original of all in the book. This is not saying that it is not very touching in matter and good in form, we hope ; for it is all this, and something better : studied from nature, we should think, as well as from Björnson, and characterized by a pure womanly feeling. We must add also that the sex of the author is shown in her disregard of human life among her characters, for she apparently thinks nothing of destroying one generation of lovers, that another may profit by their sad fate.