The Nobel Prize in Literature 1903
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Banquet Speech |
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Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's speech at
the Nobel Banquet at Grand Hôtel, Stockholm, December 10,
1903
(Translation)
I believe that the Prize I have received
today will be regarded by the public as a gift from one nation to
another. After the long struggle in which I have taken part to
gain for Norway an equal place within the Union, a struggle which
was often bitterly resented in Sweden, may I say that the
decision is a credit to her name.
I am glad of this opportunity to express very briefly my views on
the role of literature.
Let me, in the interest of brevity, evoke a picture I have had in
my mind since my early youth, whenever I think of human progress.
I see it as an endless procession in which men and women move
steadily along. The line they follow is not invariably straight
but it does take them forward. They are urged on by an
irresistible force, purely instinctive at first but eventually
more and more conscious. Not that human progress is ever entirely
a matter of conscious effort, and no man has ever been able to
make it so. It is in this no man's land between conscious
progress and subconscious forging ahead that imagination is at
work. In some of us, the gift of prescience is so great that it
enables us to see far ahead to the new paths along which human
progress will travel.
Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our
knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Therefore, our sense
of good and evil is so much a part of our conscience that, to
this day, no one can disregard it and feel at ease with himself.
That is why I have always been so puzzled by the idea that we
writers should lay down our sense of good and evil before we take
up our pens. The effect of this reasoning would be to turn our
minds into cameras indifferent to good and evil, to beauty and
ugliness alike!
I do not want to dwell here on the extent to which modern man –
always assuming he is a sane individual – can shake off a
conscience that is the heritage of millions of years, and by
which all the generations of mankind have been guided to the
present day. I shall merely ask why those who subscribe to this
theory choose certain images instead of others? Is their choice a
purely mechanical one? Why are the pictures that present
themselves to their imagination almost invariably shocking? Are
they sure that it is not they, in fact, who have chosen
them?
I do not think we need to wait for the answer. They can no more
shake off the ideas that have come down to them through centuries
of inherited morality than we can. The only difference between
them and ourselves is that, whereas we serve these ideas, they
try to rebel against them. I should quickly add here that not all
is immoral that appears to be so. Many of today's guiding ideas
were revolutionary ones in the past. What I do say is that the
writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are
the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could
draw countless examples from the history of literature to show
that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more
tendentious his work is liable to be. The great poets of Greece
were equally at home with mortals and immortals. Shakespeare's
plays were a great Teutonic Valhalla with brilliant sunshine at
times and violent tempests at others. The world to him was a
battlefield, but his sense of poetic justice, his sublime faith
in life and its infinite resources guided the battles.
We may invoke from their graves, as often as we wish, the
characters of Molière and Holberg, to see nothing but a
procession of figures in frilly costumes and wigs who, with
affected and grotesque gestures, fulfill their mission. They are
as tendentious as they are verbose.
I spoke just now of our Teutonic Valhalla. Did not Goethe and
Schiller bring something of the Elysian fields into it? The sky
was loftier and warmer with them, life and art happier and more
beautiful. We may perhaps say that those who have basked in this
warmth, in this sunshine – young Tegnér, young
Oehlenschläger, and young Wergeland, not forgetting Byron
and Shelley – have all had something of the Greek gods in
them.
This time and this trend are gone now, but I should like to
mention two great men who belong to it. First, I think of my old
friend in Norway who is now ill. He has lit many a beacon along
our Norwegian coast to guide the mariner, to warn him of the
danger that lies ahead. I think, too, of a grand old man in a
neighbouring country to the east, whose light shines forth and
gives happiness to many. Their spirit, their many years of work,
were lit by a purpose that was ever brighter, like a flame in the
evening wind.
I have said nothing here of the effect of tendentiousness on art,
which it can make or mar. «Ich rieche die Absicht und werde
verstimmt.»
If tendentiousness and art appear in the same proportion, all is
well. Of the two great writers I have mentioned, it may well be
that the former's warnings are so severe as to be frightening.
And the latter may lure us with the charms of an ideal that
passes human understanding and therefore frightens, too. But what
is necessary is that our courage to live is strengthened, not
weakened. Fear should not turn us back from the paths which open
before us. The procession must go on. We must be confident that
life is fundamentally good, that even after frightening disasters
and the most tragic events, the earth is bathed in a flood of
strength whose sources are eternal. Our belief in it is its
proof.
In more recent times, Victor Hugo has been my hero. At the bottom
of his brilliant imagination lies the conviction that life is
good and it is that which makes his work so colourful. There are
those who talk of his shortcomings, of his theatrical mannerisms.
Let them. For me, all his deficiencies are compensated by his
joie de vivre. Our instinct of self-preservation insists
on this, for if life did not have more good than evil to offer
us, it would have come to an end long ago. Any picture of life
that does not allow for this fact is a distorted picture. It is
wrong to imagine, as some do, that it is the dark aspects of life
which are bad for us. That is not true.
Weaklings and egotists cannot abide harsh facts but the rest of
us can. If those who choose to make us tremble or blush were also
able to hold out a promise that, for all that may befall us, life
has happiness to offer us, we might say to ourselves: all right,
we are faced in this plot and in these words with a mystery that
is part of life, and we should be roused to fear or amusement
according to the author's will. The trouble is that writers
seldom achieve more than a sensation, and often not even that! We
feel doubly dissatisfied, because the author's attitude to life
is so negative and because he is not capable of leading us.
Incompetence is always galling.
The greater the burden a man takes upon his shoulders, the
stronger he must be to carry it. No words are unmentionable, no
action or horror beyond powers of description, if one is equal to
them.
A meaningful life – this is what we look for in art, in its
smallest dewdrops as in its unleashing of the tempest. We are at
peace when we have found it and uneasy when we have not.
The old ideas of right and wrong, so firmly established in our
consciousness, have played their part in every field of our life;
they are part of our search for knowledge and our thirst for life
itself. It is the purpose of all art to disseminate these ideas
and, for that, millions of copies would not be one too
many.
This is the ideal I have tried to defend, as a respectful servant
and enthusiast. I am not one of those who believe that an artist,
a writer, is exempt from responsibility. On the contrary, his
responsibility is greater than that of other men because he who
is at the head of the procession must lead the way for those who
follow.
I am deeply grateful to the Swedish
Academy for recognizing my efforts in this direction and I
now wish to raise my glass to the success of its work in
promoting all that is sound and noble in literature.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
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