We are now writing in the year of our Lord 1955, and thus it has been fifty years since 1905 and Norwegian national independence. We must be prepared for some kind of jubilee in the course of the next twelve months.

The very two parties which have usurped the word "radicalism" have tied themselves especially to the date 1905: a state of affairs which can in many ways shed light on the curious nationalist and separatist traits which have come to mark Norwegian intellectual life. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of people in this country: there are those who remember 1905, and those who do not remember 1905. For the first group Norway's dissolving of the union with Sweden stands as the century's most important political event; the only thing which has really happened in the world since the turn of the century. For the other group, or more precisely for the rest of us, it plays a bigger role that there have been two so-called world wars. Only from afar, endlessly far away, from a boring history class's most boring sessions, does there glimmer a faint, faint memory; didn't it have to do with some consuls or something like that, something about 1814 and maybe the seventeenth of May? Every time older people mention 1905 with matter-of-fact solemnity, I find myself on the verge of replying: "1905, what's that?" Oh, well. Time goes so damned fast. For me the Reichstag fire, the Moscow trials and Ossietzky's Nobel prize have meant so much more; in a way they were my youth's 1905. But no optimism, no faith in the electrification of Norwegian waterfalls, followed the dissolution of these unions .... I hardly think that two generations have ever faced each other with more incomprehension than we and our elders do today....

I fear that we shall come to punish it with oblivion. But behind all that, behind Freud and Huitfeldt bindings and the Bergen Railway and Nansen and 1905, one can glimpse something else: our elder brother, the anarchist and prophet of suicide, Norway's first, great, sloppy metaphysician: Hans Jæger.

I often think of a cartoon from a Swedish newspaper: an infinitely wretched couple are standing and staring at each other. The caption reads:

"Listen, Maja, we might as well get married; we can't be more miserable than we are now."

It's something in that direction we think when we stop and look at Jæger; he knew that.

The eighteen-eighties and nineties had more in common with our time than with the intervening decades; above all a certain metaphysical climate, a familiar sensation of having come to the wrong world; for this one couldn't possibly be intentional! In times of crisis a certain literary phenomenon which regularly pops up like a falling barometer needle: in the nineties the pointer stood at "neoromanticism", and in the forties and fifties it has moved into an ill-defined field on the dial, popularly called "modernism"—both of them indications that atmospheric disturbances have occurred and that a metaphysical low-pressure area is in the vicinity. The pointer is approaching "storm," and the air swirls with wars and rumors of wars and bad years in every sense.

There are two kinds of people who react to the low pressure: on the one hand those who have gone by the name "neoromantics" or "modernists," and on the other the "radicals." They are two different ways of reacting, but both are set apart from the bourgeoisie by a striking capacity for unhappiness; they feel at odds with society in every sense, they're not at home in the world and more or less react according to their constitutional bent. The "neoromantics" and "modernists" opt out of a wholly impossible society, they break the thread and more or less retire to the countryside and write about how terrible they feel. "... Satan lodges with me," says Vilhelm Krag, and there is no doubt that he meant it. Fine poetry has been created both by neoromantics and by modernists.

The radical acts out of the same basic experience, but through an entirely different temperament; he chooses to cure his unhappiness by fixing the world, by changing it so that it will be able to make room for his and others' humanity. Basically one can then speak of a melancholic and a choleric reaction.

The radical maintains his volitional relation to reality, and he has the potential to gain the whole world, but with considerable risk of injury to his soul. He loses the umbilical cord to the metaphysical realm which in fact once set him in motion, and all his deeds end up in meaningless fights and empty busyness. The melancholic keeps the umbilical link to the stars and the cosmos, but at the risk of his withdrawal from humanity's leading to another amputation which isn't much better; he has lost the blood supply from earthly reality and its problems, he has lost the world as a field for moral experimentation. He misses out on the adventure with matter, which is a shame; for it, regarded as adventure, is itself a piece of metaphysics, and lies completely on a plane with metaphysical testing.

Practically speaking we are confronted with two versions of the spiritually motivated segment of humanity: The Knight of the Grail, and the Monk.

Legend tells that Parsifal was the son of Cain. The others, the monks, descend from his mild and pale dead brother. The sons of Abel have another mission to pursue, with its own tasks and its own dangers, and hereby make their exit from this saga.

With all Knights of the Grail it is the case that when they lose sight of the Grail, they kill each other—just as it happened in the last, sorry phase of the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. All of Arthur's knights must fight for the right cause, or they will end up facing each other with conflicting interests; and when you bear a sword, when you are born to bear a sword, you naturally have your own way of settling things.

I know hardly any figure who more movingly realized the fate of the failed Knight of the Grail in his own life than Hans Jæger himself. His starting point was so very clear; the goal for his whole struggle was identical with his own phrase about the goal of history: Humanity's great meeting with itself. He started out under the motto: "Metaphysics or suicide," and he lost the metaphysics, but kept the suicide. Nor do I know anyone who has better fulfilled the requirement of descending from Cain. He was literally born with a Cain complex—a concept which psychology probably doesn't use, but which it could certainly turn to good account.

It is as if everything around me stiffens in dread at my coming, and dies where I advance; the birds raise terrified cries of alarm: here he comes! here he comes! and flap their wings to get away, but freeze and cannot . . . Before me walks a cold and toxic breath of imprecation . . . .

Is it possible to express the descent from Cain more concisely?

It is only out of pure decency that we refrain from talking about it; so as not to offend our elders, if you will. But an incredible number of this generation did not make it past twenty-five, and that gives us a certain feeling of having somebody behind us once we mention it.

What it comes down to is: We are now seeking an answer to this question, and we are in a hurry. We are writing in 1955, we are around thirty-five years old now, and we have kept our mouths shut long enough.

Between Jæger and us there lies a radical era of cultural-political chatter and political mass murder. The legacy of the intervening generation has essentially consisted of the right to die on one side or another of the big, antagonistic mass movements which these our predecessors set in motion. We have witnessed the Knights of the Grail killing each other, the way the last of them are busy doing under the great purges in Russia. That is the Arthurian Knights' G”tterd„mmerung in its most decadent and degenerate phase.

Could it have been otherwise?

Sigurd Hoel created a marvelous, prophetic book title, and thereby described a whole epoch with the words "A fortnight before the nights of frost." It really was a fortnight before. And now we're right in the middle of them, in the very night of frost incarnate.

The process began in Jæger, and was then sidetracked by 1905 and a national kingdom and the internal combustion engine's making possible the first airplanes. The concept Norway rose up in people's souls, and sucked to itself all the forces which radicalism had set free. That was the knights' first great temptation; to fight for the national instead of for the human. . . .

Jæger didn't fall for the national.

When he forgot the Grail, it was at least due to a more serious question than Norway's political independence. In a way it was Ibsen he tripped over. Ibsen's radicalism was much deeper than Jæger's, and Jæger didn't understand that; but he remained loyal to what he did understand—namely that he wasn't happy on earth. And he had no need to keep himself warm in a Norwegian sweater.

Seen from the nationalist left, Ibsen had grown conservative with the years; he was certainly no patriot, and he didn't understand that 1905 was the turning point of world history. But from Jæger's point of view Ibsen was a fallen-away Bohemian, a celebrated writer of bourgeois plays, a man who had become world-famous by betraying the cause. He hated him with the younger brother's great, loyal hate: precise because in his eyes Ibsen could have amounted to something.

That Jæger himself was getting hopelessly lost in sexual questions and nonessentials, he naturally couldn't know. While Ibsen was interested in planting a real bomb under the age, Jæger settled for saying a few coarse words and breaking some windows. The fall from Knight of the Grail to street urchin was as abrupt as a shooting star. In the face of everyday problems metaphysics became too thin and insubstantial; only a few small distant stars remained as a dream of something he had once wanted. So Jæger became a pragmatist; he changed to a course which he hated, but which he felt morally obligated to accept. Only toward the end did the dream return, but this time as a longing for death, for the great, still sea. In general Jæger's relationship to death is one of the most peculiar things in his whole development. In the beginning death is so to speak a metaphysical propaganda number, it had great effect as an eye-catcher. As is well known, the following belonged to the famous ten commandments of the Christiania-boheme:

Thou shalt sever thy family roots.
Thou shalt write thine own life.
Thou shalt commit suicide.

To awaken the conscience of the bourgeoisie, young men should first expose how the old had organized things on earth, then they should show by their actions that they took it seriously. But the big shock- numbers merely aroused the fathers' indignation instead of their feeling of shame. And then followed many gray years. The reality didn't bear out the ideas. And when death pops up again, it is no longer in the capacity of that which will blow society to smithereens, but as the figure of the great liberator, the good, faithful friend, the only one who has waited for him. "The thought of death has become a dear friend, a quiet consolation, who follows me everywhere, and never forsakes me. In the morning when I open my eyes, it is right there and wishes me good morning, and gives me strength and courage to go the rest of the way. In the evening when I go to bed it is with me, and with its help I go peacefully to sleep ...." Jæger did not in fact take his own life; he knew that it had lost all effectiveness for purposes of agitation. He died a miserable, a gray death, with a bottle of brandy under the bed.

All the same it was Munch who ended up writing the history of the Russian period. It is committed to paper in two pictures. In two portraits of Hans Jæger.

The first is the great painting of him, the way he looked—unkempt, lonely and hopeless, in the sofa corner with his glass of whisky-and-soda, the fallen warrior. The other is the lithograph of him, just the head, and in exactly the same position as in the painting.

The painting was done in the 1880s, the other sixty years later. The very last thing Munch did was to draw Hans Jæger again. The last night on which he was able to work he spent drawing the face directly on the stone, and the next morning he went to the lithography workshop. But when the sixty prints were finished, Munch had become so weak that he wasn't able to sign more than two of the copies. The main thing was that now the work was done. Munch knew that it was as it should be, and he hardly glanced at the prints.

Seen from outside the two pictures are very like; the same hat is pulled down on the forehead, the same collar turned up under the beard. And yet there are two completely different people who look at you through them. One is the Bohemian, the determinist, consecrated to death. The other is the Knight of the Grail, also consecrated to death but in the flower of youth, who will die only after having found the Grail. It is not the race's ebbing vitality which kills him, but his own overflowing youthfulness which has made him ripe for death, ripe for a death which merely means more life.

Both pictures have the same oblique slope of the shoulders. But in the first picture it is the line across a pair of tired shoulders leaning against the upholstery of the sofa. In the other picture one sees the shoulders as if on a man holding a lance under his right arm.

For a moment Jæger's face lives on the paper as it really was, pure, devout and serious—without a single shadow of the frivolity and cynicism with which he masked his defeat. He has exchanged the Grand Café for the Castle of the Grail.

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