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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
will carry us toward those higher regions where the earth is our fatherland, all mankind our countrymen.
Cosmopolitanism is the feeling with which the wayward soul regards the different nations, they are all of equal value to him, for the reason that he has home nowhere. Internationalism is a feeling growing out of the deepest love to the spot where we are born—through loving that, we slowly reach farther toward loving the whole earth.
In correspondence with that tendency to internationalism, which Björnson does not—or at least did not some years ago—acknowledge himself, Björnson is an ardent friend of the Pease-cause, in favor of which a great deal of his talent as orator has been used.
In their view of that omnipotent power, love between man and woman, Björnson and Ibsen are true representatives of the present generation. This age, which has understood the identity of soul and body, does not loose itself in contemplation of outward forms, as forms alone, but seeks at every place the contents of those forms. The objective element has ceased to be the ruling one in the analysis of love. In Björnson’s and Ibsen’s works true love is measured by the degree of strength it gives to the self. Reasoning thus, Norah came to the conclusion that her marriage with Helmer had on both sides been without true love.
Ibsen’s bitter satire on love between man and woman, as practiced in publicly sanctified engagements and later on in marriage, awoke such hissing wrath in his father- land that he for ten years lived abroad.
Norwegian society was not yet ready to understand that it was not love between man and Woman which Ibsen denied and attacked, it was the social ideal of this love.
Björnson, believing, full of hope, optimist in the most beautiful sense of that word, as he is, attacked this established ideal by painting one completely different. His “ Plags are hoisted in city and at port,” teaches the new social moral, that ignorance is not identical with innocence. He wants mothers to teach their boys and girls about the laws of life, that they may no more need to go to playmates or servants to get questions answered in a way which may injure them for lifetime. We must have mothers who bend their knees in reverence to the laws of nature, the beautiful and sacred; mothers who realize that nature is good and pure and true in all her ways; first then will the houses of prostitution be things unknown among us, buried with mistakes of the past. Some six or seven years ago Björnson traveled in Denmark, lecturing about his favorite subject, true love between man and woman. He only recognizes •that union between man and woman which rests upon a unity of soul and body; no decree of society, neither clerical nor civil, can establish such a union, nor can it destroy it. They who look forward to those reforms of society, needed so sorely, yet so little acknowledged, will especially appreciate one feature common to both Ibsen and Björnson. We may pile up before us every book written by them, not on one page, not in a single expression, will we find charity lauded. Those two men never bent their proud heads to money, never changed their opinion for the sake of wealth or rank; to them the charity of society is only a simple duty as long as it is a deplorable necessity. They both believe in a ruling justice in life, the justice involved in the fact that certain causes have certain effects as sure as a splash follows the stone thrown into the water. By the power of this justice Ibsen was at last acknowledged by his countrymen; by the same justice the heart of the Norwegian nation went out to Björnson from the time when his first, idyls from Norwegian peasant life appeared.
Around these two representatives of the best in our own age, those prophets of a still better future, gather all who believe in the old prophecy: “ Your sons and your daughters shall see sights, and the spirit shall descend to all mankind.” The structure of future society shall have the word “ justice ” written over its portals with flaming letters; charity shall be buried deep in the ground, and the two Norwegian poets, nay, poets of the world, shall be counted among those who wrote its funeral march.
When Ibsen’s teachings about “ God in one,” and Björnson s about “God in all,” have reached their aim, then the poet, be it woman or man, shall arise among us, who shall sing about “All in God.”