ntrigue and counter-intrigue
which hurry the action onward toward its logically prepared climax--a
mutual reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious.
Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of
incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no
advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather
a retrogression.

II

A period is apt to come in the life of every man who is spiritually
alive, when his scholastic culture begins to appear insufficient and the
traditional premises of existence seem in need of readjustment and
revision. This period, with the spiritual crisis which it involves, is
likely to occur between the thirtieth and the fortieth meridian. Ibsen
was thirty-four years old (1862) when in "The Comedy of Love" he broke
with the romanticism of his youth, and began to wrestle with the
problems of contemporary life. Goethe was thirty-seven when, in 1786, he
turned his back upon the Storm and Stress, and in Italy sought and
gained a new and saner vision of the world. This renewal of the sources
which water the roots of his spiritual being becomes an imperative
necessity to a man when he has exhausted the sources which tradition
supplies. It is terrible to wake up one morning and see one's past life
in a new and strange illumination, and the dust of ages lying inch-thick
upon one's thoughts. It is distressing to have to pretend that you do
not hear the doubt which whispers early and late in your ear, _Vanitas,
vanitas, vanitas vanitatum_. Few are those of us who have the courage to
face it, to rise up and fight with it, and rout it or be routed by it.

Bjoernson had up to this time (1870) built solely upon tradition. He had
been orthodox, and had exalted childlike peace and faith above doubt and
struggle. Phrases indicative of a certain spiritual immaturity are
scattered through his early poems. In "The Child in our Soul," he says,
for instance: "The greatest man on earth must cherish the child in his
soul and listen, amid the thunder, to what it whispers low;" and again:
"Everything great that thought has invented sprouted forth in childlike
joy; and everything strong, sprung from what is good, obeyed the child's
voice." Though in a certain sense that may be true enough, it belongs to
the kind of half-truths which by constant repetition grow pernicious
and false. The man who at forty assumes the child's attitude of mere
wondering