the highest ecstasy of joy I would feel the deepest apprehension
and distress--here in the parsonage of Naesset were awakened my
earliest sensations."

The passage is obviously important. And Bjoernson shows how much
importance he attaches to the experience by introducing it, or
something like it, time after time into his stories. Readers of _In
God's Way_--the latest of the novels under discussion--will remember
its opening chapter well.

It was good fortune indeed that a boy of such gifts should pass his
early boyhood in such surroundings. Nor did the luck end here. While
the young Bjoernson accumulated these impressions, the peasant-romance,
or idyll of country life, was taking its place and growing into favor
as one of the most beautiful forms of modern prose-fiction. Immermann
wrote _Der Oberhof_ in 1839. Weill and Auerbach took up the running in
1841 and 1843. George Sand followed, and Fritz Reuter. Bjoernson began
to write in 1856. _Synnoeve Solbakken_ and _Arne_ came in on the high
flood of this movement. "These two stories," writes Mr. Gosse, "seem
to me to be almost perfect; they have an enchanting lyrical quality,
without bitterness or passion, which I look for elsewhere in vain in
the prose literature of the second half of the century." To my mind,
without any doubt, they and _A Happy Boy_ are the best work Bjoernson
has ever done in fiction, or is ever likely to do. For they are
simple, direct, congruous; all of one piece as a flower is of a piece
with its root. And never since has Bjoernson written a tale altogether
of one piece.

His later Manner.

For here the luck ended. All over Europe there began to spread
influences that may have been good for some artists, but were (we may
say) peculiarly injurious to so _naif_ and, at the same time, so
personal a writer as Bjoernson. I think another age will find much the
same cause to mourn over Daudet when it compares his later novels with
the promise of _Lettres de Mon Moulin_ and _Le Petit Chose_.
Naturalism demands nothing more severely than an impersonal treatment
of its themes. Of three very personal and romantic writers, our own
Stevenson escaped the pit into which both Bjoernson and Daudet
stumbled. You may say the temptation came later to him. But the
temptation to follow an European fashion does, as a rule, befall a
Briton last of all men, for reasons of which we need not feel proud:
and the date of Mr. Hardy's stumbling is fairly r