haraoh"
(which in the original is entitled "A Ball Mood") without detecting the
revolutionary note that trembles quite audibly through the calm and
unimpassioned language? There is, by the way, a little touch of
melodrama in this tale which is very unusual with Kielland. "Romance and
Reality," too, is glaringly at variance with conventional romanticism in
its satirical contrasting of the prematrimonial and the postmatrimonial
view of love and marriage. The same persistent tendency to present the
wrong side as well as the right side--and not, as literary good manners
are supposed to prescribe, ignore the former--is obvious in the charming
tale, "At the Fair," where a little spice of wholesome truth spoils the
thoughtlessly festive mood; and the squalor, the want, the envy, hate,
and greed which prudence and a regard for business compel the performers
to disguise to the public, become the more cruelly visible to the
visitors of the little alley-way at the rear of the tents. In "A Good
Conscience" the satirical note has a still more serious ring; but the
same admirable self-restraint which, next to the power of thought and
expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow
upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much--from enforcing his lesson
by marginal comments, _a la_ George Eliot. But he must be obtuse indeed
to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page of
philosophical moralizing.

"Hope's Clad in April Green" and "The Battle of Waterloo" (the first
and the last tale in the Norwegian edition) are more untinged with a
moral tendency than any of the foregoing. The former is a mere _jeu
d'esprit_, full of good-natured satire on the calf-love of very young
people, and the amusing over-estimate of our importance to which we are
all, at that age, peculiarly liable.

As an organist with vaguely melodious hints foreshadows in his prelude
the musical _motifs_ which he means to vary and elaborate in his fugue,
so Kielland lightly touched in these "Novelettes" the themes which in
his later works he has struck with a fuller volume and power. What he
gave in this little book was a light sketch of his mental physiognomy,
from which, perhaps, his horoscope might be cast and his literary future
predicted.

Though a patrician by birth and training, he revealed a strong sympathy
with the toiling masses. But it was a democracy of the brain, I should
fancy, rather than of the heart. As I