two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned as the achievement of fourteen feverish days. The remaining product of the fifteen years includes two more prose idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable number of small pieces similar in character); three more plays drawn from the treasury of old Norse history, "King Sverre," "Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigurd Jorsalfar"; a dramatic setting of the story of "Mary Stuart in Scotland"; a little social comedy, "The Newly Married Couple," which offers a foretaste of his later exclusive preoccupation with modern life; "Arnljot Gelline," his only long poem, a wild narrative of the clash between heathendom and the Christian faith in the days of Olaf the Holy; and, last but by no means least, the collection of his "Poems and Songs." Thus at the age of forty, Björnson found himself with a dozen books to his credit books which had stirred his fellow countrymen as no other books had ever stirred them, arousing them to the full consciousness of their own nature and of its roots in their own heroic past. He had become the voice of his people as no one had been before him, the singer of all that was noble in Norwegian aspiration, the sympathetic delineator of all that was essential in Norwegian Character. He had, in short, created a national literature where none had before existed, and he was still in his early prime.

The collected edition of Björnson's "Tales," published in 1872, together with "The Bridal March," separately published in the following year, gives us a complete representation of that phase of his genius which is best known to the world at large. Here are five stories of considerable length, and a number of slighter sketches, in which the Norwegian peasant is portrayed with intimate and loving knowledge. The peasant tale was no new thing in European literature, for the names of Auerbach and George Sand, to say nothing of many others, at once come to the mind. In Scandinavian literature, its chief representative had been the Danish novelist, Blicher, who had written with insight and charm of the peasantry of Jutland. But in the treatment of peasant life by most of Björnson's predecessors there had been too much of the de haut en bas attitude; the peasant had been drawn from the outside, viewed philosophically, and invested with artificial sentiment. Björnson was too near to his own country folk to commit such faults as these; he was himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty living from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct, he was not afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving the brutal aspects of peasant life a place upon his canvas. In emphasizing the characteristics of reticence and naïveté he really discovered the Norwegian peasant for literary purposes. Beneath the words spoken by his characters we are constantly made to realize that there are depths of feeling that remain unexpressed; whether from native pride or from a sense of the inadequacy of mere words to set forth a critical moment of life, his men and women are distinguished by the most laconic utterance, yet their speech always has dramatic fitness and bears the stamp of sincerity. Jaeger speaks of the manifold possibilities of this laconic method in the following words:—

"It is as if the author purposely set in motion the reader's fancy and feeling that they might do their own work. The greatest poet is he who understands how to awaken fancy and feeling to their highest degree of self-activity. And this is Björnson's greatness in his peasant novels, that he has poured from his horn of plenty a wealth of situations and motives that hold the reader's mind and burn themselves into it, that become his personal possession just because the author has known how to suggest so much in so few words."

In some respects, the little sketch called "The Father" is the supreme example of Björnson's artistry in this kind. There are only a few pages in all, but they embody the tragedy of a lifetime. The little work is a literary gem of the purest water, and it reveals the whole secret of the author's genius, as displayed in his early tales. It is by these tales of peasant life that Björnson is best known outside of his own country; one may almost say that it is by them alone that he is really familiar to English readers. A free translation of "Synnöve Solbakken" was made as early as 1858, by Mary Howitt, and published under the title of "Trust and Trial." Translations of the other tales were made soon after their original appearance, and in some instances have been multiplied. It is thus a noteworthy fact that Björnson, although four years the junior of Ibsen, enjoyed a vogue among English readers for a score of years during which the name of Ibsen was absolutely unknown to them. The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges of late years, and the long neglected older author has had more than the proportional share of our attention than is fairly his due.

In his delineation of the Norwegian peasant character, Björnson was greatly aided by the study of the sagas, which he had read with enthusiasm from his earliest boyhood. Upon them his style was largely formed, and their vivid dramatic representation of the life of the early Norsemen impressed him profoundly, shaping both his ideals and the form of their expression. The modern Scandinavian may well be envied for his literary inheritance from the heroic past. No other European has anything to compare with it for clean-cut vigor and wealth of romantic material. The literature which blossomed in Iceland and flourished for two or three centuries wherever Norsemen made homes for themselves offers a unique intellectual phenomenon, for nothing like their record remains to us from any other primitive people. This

     "Tale of the Northland of old
And the undying glory of dreams,"

proved a lasting stimulus to Björnson's genius, and, during the early period of his career, which is now under review, it made its influence felt alike in his tales, his dramas, and his songs. "To see the peasant in the light of the sagas and the sagas in the light of the peasant" he declared to be the fundamental principle of his literary method.

It has been seen that during the fifteen years which made Björnson in so peculiar a sense the spokesman of his race, he wrote no less than five saga dramas. The first two of these works, "Between the Battles" and "Halte-Hulda," are rather slight performances, and the third, "King Sverre," although a more extended work, is not particularly noteworthy. The grimness of the Viking life is softened by romantic coloring, and the poet has not freed himself from the influence of Oehlenschlaeger. But in "Sigurd Slembe" he found a subject entirely worthy of his genius, and produced one of the noblest masterpieces of all modern literature. This largely planned and magnificently executed dramatic trilogy was written in Munich, and published in 1862. The material is found in the "Heimskringla," but the author has used the prerogative of the artist to simplify the historical outline thus offered into a superb imaginative creation, rich in human interest, and powerful in dramatic presentation. The story is concerned with the efforts of Sigurd, nicknamed "Slembe," to obtain the succession to the throne of Norway during the first half of the twelfth century. He was a son of King Magnus Barfod, and, although of illegitimate birth, might legally make this claim. The secret of his birth has been kept from him until he has come to manhood, and the revelation of this secret by his mother is made in the first section of the trilogy, which is a single act, written in blank verse. Recognizing the futility of urging his birthright at this time, he starts off to win fame as a crusader, the sort of fame that haloed Sigurd Jorsalfar, then king of Norway. The remainder of the work is in prose, and was, in fact, written before this poetical prologue. The second