At the grammar school, at the high school, and at the university he showed little interest in the curriculum, and no particular aptitude for study; but before leaving college he had already begun original composition, and at the age of twenty-four he published a masterpiece. This was the pastoral romance, _Synnövé Solbakken_, which for sheer beauty of style and atmosphere he has never surpassed. For some years preceding the date of its appearance there had been a lull in literary activity in Norway. Out of this premonitory hush of stillness came a beautiful voice, which by the newness and freshness of its tones aroused immediate interest. Everybody listened, enchanted by the strange harmony. Men saw that a new prophet had arisen in Israel. The absolute simplicity of the style, the naïveté of the story, the naturalness of the characters, the short, passionate sentences like those of the Sagas, the lyrically poetic atmosphere, appealed at once to the Norwegian heart. Why is it that we are surprised in books and in plays by simple language and natural characters? It must be that we are so accustomed to literary conventions remote from actual life, that when we behold real people and hear natural talk in works of art our first emotion is glad astonishment. For the same reason we praise certain persons for displaying what we call common sense. Be this as it may, no one believed that a pastoral romance could be so vigorous, so fresh, and so true. Of all forms of literature, pastoral tales, whether in verse or in prose, have been commonly the most artificial and the most insipid; but here was the breath of life. I can recommend nothing better for the soul weary of the closeness of modern naturalism than a course of reading in the early work of Björnson.
He followed this initial success with three other beautiful prose lyrics--_Arne_, _A Happy Boy_, and _The Fisher Maiden_. These stories exhibit the same qualities so strikingly displayed in _Synnövé Solbakken_. In all this artistic production Björnson is an impressionist, reproducing with absolute fidelity what he saw, both in the world of matter and of spirit. We may rely faithfully on the correctness of these pictures, whether they portray natural scenery, country customs, or peasant character. We inhale Norway. We can smell the pines. The nipping and eager air, the dark green resinous forests--we feel these as plainly as if we were physically present in the Land of the Midnight Sun. The kindly simplicity of the peasants, the village ceremonies at weddings and funerals, the cheerful loneliness with sheep on mountain pasture, and the subdued but universal note of deep rural piety, make one feel as though the whole community were bound by gold chains about the feet of God. Björnson says, "The church is in the foreground of Norwegian peasant life." And indeed everything seems to centre around God's acre, and the spire of the meeting-house points in the same direction as the stories themselves. Many beautiful passages affect us like noble music; our eyes are filled with happy tears.