It was worth it, though, that harassing, exacting journey, for the sake of the two hours of quiet passage in the late evening through the fjords. There is no country that welcomes its guests less ostentatiously than Norway does, that stands more simply on its own attainments. There is no parade of harbours and high buildings and imposing statues. Just the long stretches of receding waterways, motionless, many coloured waterways, green and grey and purple; a purple that shimmers now and then to the rich transparent red of Homer’s sea, Homer’s wine-coloured midland sea; the fading waterways, and about them the long, endless, low-crested circling hills. Hardly a sign of life, only now and then below the promontories of rock, a warning light, and near it on the land some small wooden house.
But then Norway is an empty country. It is as large as England, and it has a population of three million. You will see no towns on the long fourteen-hour journey from Bergen to Christiania. Only here and there a collection of scattered hutments and the long stretches of the fjords. And it is remarkable that so small a nation should have made such a considerable contribution to the literature of Europe. A useless, hopeless task it must sometimes seem, we felt, to the young Norwegian. “I am writing,” one can imagine him to say, “in a language that only three million people are able to understand. It is possible that my work may be some day read and appreciated in the foreign cities of Europe; but it will be read there in translation; and the phrasing, the colour, the rhythm, on which I have expended so much labour, will have gone out of it. If only I had been born in America!”
And then we remembered that the population of England when Shakespeare wrote was little greater than that of Norway is to-day; that it seemed worth while to him to write for three million people; that these, as all other, things are relative; that it would be impossible without detachment, without a sense of the eternal values, to produce a masterpiece; and that such a one as Björnson would know out of the direct simplicity of his nature, that it is enough to plough one’s furrow to the end.
We were bound for Finse and its winter sports, and it was exciting to look for the first signs of ice and snow at the edge of the water, to watch at each halt on the way the fall of the thermometer. We seemed to get little colder, though, for that is the charm of Norway. The sun shines out of a blue sky, and your face tingles with the glare that the snow flings up on it. It is a pity, though, that you have to wear darkened glasses to protect your eyes. It robs the sky of its colour, and if such a phrase may be permitted, it seems to bleach the snow, with the effect of an unreal twilight. Only now and again in glimpses, through windows for the most part, can one see the landscape as it really is.