ife, and bringing sunshine
wherever she goes. Yet this temperament leads to her undoing, or what
would be the undoing of any woman less splendid in character. But the
strength that impels her to the misstep that comes so near to having
tragic consequences is also the strength that saves her when chastened
by suffering. In her the author "gives us the common stuff of life,"
says an English critic, "gives it us simple and direct. There is
nothing here of Ibsen's pathology. We are in the sun. Her most hideous
blunder cannot undo a woman's soul. Bjoernson knows that the deed is
nothing at all. It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. Not
everything that cometh out of a man defileth a man. At all events, so
it is here: triumph and joy built upon an act that--as the Philistines
would say--has defiled forever." As a triumph of sheer creation, this
figure is hardly overmatched anywhere in the author's portrait gallery
of women.

If Bjoernson's essential teaching may be found in a single page, as has
above been suggested, his personality evades all such summarizing. In
the present essay, he has been considered as a writer merely,--poet,
dramatist, novelist,--but the man is vastly more than that. His other
activities have been hinted at, indeed, but nothing adequate has been
said about them. The director of three theatres, the editor of three
newspapers and the contributor to many others, the promoter of schools
and patriotic organizations, the participant in many political
campaigns, the lay preacher of private and public morals, the chosen
orator of his nation for all great occasions,--these are some of the
characters in which we must view him to form anything like a complete
conception of his many-sided individuality. Take the matter of oratory
alone, and it is perhaps true that he has influenced as many people by
the living word as he has by the printed page. He has addressed
hundreds of audiences in the three Scandinavian countries and in
Finland, he has spoken to more than twenty thousand at a time, and his
winged speech has gone straight home to his hearers. All who ever
heard him will agree that his oratory was of the most persuasive and
vital impressiveness. Jaeger attempts to describe it in the following
words:--

"It is eloquence of a very distinctive type; its most characteristic
quality is its wealth of color; it finds expression for every mood,
from the lightest to the most serious, from the mos