acceptance toward the world and its problems, may, indeed, be
a very estimable character; but he will never amount to much. It is the
honest doubters, the importunate questioners, the indefatigable fighters
who have broken humanity's shackles, and made the world a more
comfortable abiding-place to the present generation than it was to the
past. There is unquestionably a strain of Danish romanticism in
Bjoernson's persistent harping upon childlike faith and simplicity and a
childlike vision of the world. Grundtvig, with whom this note is
pervasive, had in his early youth a great influence over him. The
glorification of primitive feeling was part of the romantic revolt
against the dry rationalism of the so-called period of enlightenment.

To account for the fact that so mighty a spirit as Bjoernson could have
reached his thirty-eighth year before emerging from this state of
idyllic _naivete_, I am inclined to quote the following passage from
Brandes, descriptive of the condition of the Scandinavian countries
during the decade preceding 1870:

"While the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close,
confined place, the people were self-satisfied--though not with a joyous
or noisy self-satisfaction; for there was much sadness in their minds
after the great disasters [the Sleswick-Holstein War].... They rested
on their laurels and fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had
dreams. The cultivated, and especially the half-cultivated, public in
Denmark and Norway dreamed that they were the salt of Europe. They
dreamed that by their idealism--the ideals of Grundtvig and
Kierkegaard--and their strong vigilance, they regenerated the foreign
nations. They dreamed that they were the power which could rule the
world, but which, for mysterious and incomprehensible reasons, had for a
long series of years preferred to eat crumbs from the foreigners' table.
They dreamed that they were the free, mighty North, which led the cause
of the peoples to victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent,
ignorant."[5]

[5] Brandes: Det Moderne Gjennembrud's Maend, pp. 44, 45.

Though there is a good deal of malice, there is no exaggeration in this
unflattering statement. Scandinavia had by its own choice cut itself off
from the cosmopolitan world life; and the great ideas which agitated
Europe found scarcely an echo in the three kingdoms. In my own boyhood,
which coincides with Bjoernson's early manhood, I heard on all hands
e