but uncertain of utterance, and
relatively unimportant. These books are 'Magnhild' (1877), 'Kaptejn
Mansana' (1879), and 'Stoev' (Dust: 1882). They were, however,
significant of a new development of the author's genius, for they were
the precursors of two great novels soon thereafter to follow. 'Det
Flager i Byen og paa Havnen' (Flags are Flying in Town and Harbor)
appeared in 1884. (Paa Guds Veje) (In God's Way) was published in 1889.
These books are experiments upon a larger scale than their author had
previously attempted in fiction, and neither of them exhibits the
perfect mastery that went to the simpler making of the early peasant
tales. They are somewhat confused and turbulent in style, and it is
evident that their author is groping for adequate means of handling the
unwieldy material brought to his workshop by so many currents of modern
thought. The central theme of 'Det Flager' (in its English translation
called, by the way, 'The Heritage of the Kurts') is the influence of
heredity upon the life of a family group. The process of rehabilitation,
resulting from the introduction of a healthy and vigorous strain into a
stock weakened by the vices and passions of several generations, and
aided by a scientific system of education, is carried on before our
eyes, and the story of this process is the substance of the book.
Regeneration is not wholly achieved, but the end leaves us hopeful for
the future; and the flags that fly over town and harbor in the closing
chapter have a symbolical significance, for they announce a victory of
spirit over sense, not alone in the case of certain individuals, but
also in the case of the whole community with which they are identified.
If this book comes to be forgotten as a novel (which is not likely), it
will have a fair chance of being remembered, along with 'Levana' and
'Emile,' as a sort of educational classic. 'Paa Gud's Veje,' the last
great work of Bjoernson, is also strongly didactic in tone, yet it
attains at its highest to a tranquillity of which the author seemed for
many years to have lost the secret. The struggle it depicts is that
between religious bigotry and liberalism as they contend for the mastery
in a Norwegian town; and the moral is that "God's way" is the way of
people who order their lives aright and keep their souls sweet and pure,
rather than the way of the Pharisee who pins his faith to observances
and allows the letter of his religion to overshadow the spirit