of fiction.

"_Paa Guds Veje_" ("In the Ways of God"), (1889), in which Thomas
Rendalen again figures, though not as hero, is another indictment of
conventional morality. It is a very powerful but scarcely an agreeable
book. The abrupt, laconic style has no flux, no continuity, and gives
the reader the sensation of being pulled up sharply with a curb bit,
whenever he fancies that he has a free rein. Though every page is
crowded with trenchant and often admirable observations, they have not
the coherence of an organic structure, but rather that of a mosaic. The
design is obvious, striking, and impressive. It is neither distorted nor
overdrawn. It is unquestionably thus we treat moral non-conformists,
even though it be in pure self-preservation that they broke the bond
which we are agreed to enforce. The question resolves itself into this:
Has society, in its effort to uphold its moral standards, the right to
exact the sacrifice of life itself and every hope of happiness from the
victims of its own ignorance and injustice? When the young physician,
Edward Kallem, rescues the eighteen-year old Ragni Kule from the
degradation of her marriage to a husband afflicted with a most loathsome
disease, and afterward marries her--does he deserve censure or praise?
Bjoernson's answer is unmistakable. It is exactly the situation, depicted
five years later, by Madame Sarah Grand in the relation of Edith to the
young rake, Sir Moseley Menteith. Only, Bjoernson rescues the victim,
while the author of "The Heavenly Twins" makes her perish. In both
instances it is the pious ignorance of clerical parents which
precipitates the tragedy. Ragni's deliverance is, however, only an
apparent one. Society, which without indignation had witnessed her sale
to the corrupt old libertine, is frightfully shocked by her marriage to
Dr. Kallem, and manifests its disapproval with an emphasis which takes
no account of ameliorating circumstances. The sanguinary ingenuity in
the constant slights and stabs to which she is exposed makes her life a
martyrdom and finally kills her. "Contempt will pierce the armor of a
tortoise," says an oriental proverb; and poor Ragni had no chelonian
armor. When her most harmless remarks are misinterpreted and her most
generous acts become weapons wherewith to slay her, she loses all heart
for resistance, and merely lies down to die. Very subtile and beautiful
is the manner in which Bjoernson indicates the interaction of psychic