the years that have passed since the publication of "Dust," Björnson has produced four volumes of fiction,—his two great novels, a third novel of less didactic mission, and a second collection of short stories. The first of the novels, "Flags Are Flying in City and Harbor," saw the light during the year following the publication of "A Glove," and the teaching of that play is again enforced with uncompromising logic in the development of the story. The work has two other main themes, and these are heredity and education. So much didactic matter as this is a heavy burden for any novel to carry, and a lesser man than Björnson would have found the task a hopeless one. That he should have succeeded even in making a fairly readable book out of this material would have been remarkable, and it is a pronounced artistic triumph that the book should prove of such absorbing interest. For absorbingly interesting it is, to any reader who is willing that a novel should provide something more than entertainment; and who is not afraid of a work of fiction that compels him to think as he reads. The principal character is a man descended from a line of ancestors whose lives have been wild and lawless, and who have wallowed in almost every form of brutality and vice. The four preceding generations of the race are depicted for us in a series of brief but masterly characterizations, in which every stroke tells, and we witness the gradual weakening of the family stock. But with the generation just preceding the main action of the novel, there has been introduced a vigorous strain of peasant blood, and the process of regeneration has begun. It is this process that goes on before our eyes. It does not become a completed process, but the prospect is bright 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 only in the cases of certain among the individual participants in the action, but also in the case of the whole community to which they belong. So much for the book as a study in heredity. As an educational tract, it has the conspicuous virtue of remaining in close touch with life while embodying the spirit of modern scientific pedagogy. The hero of the book,—the last descendant of a race struggling for moral and physical rehabilitation,—throws himself into the work of education with an energy equal to that which his forbears had turned into various perverse channels. He organizes a school, more than half of the book, in fact, is about this school and its work,—and seeks to introduce a system of training which shall shape the whole character of the child, a school in which truth and clean living shall be inculcated with thoroughness and absolute sincerity, a school which shall be the microcosm of the world outside, or rather of what that world ought to be. Björnson's interest in education has been life-long; for many years it had gone astray in a sort of Grundtvigian fog, but at the time when this book came to be written, it had worked its way out into the clear light of reason. If the future should cease to care for this work as a piece of literature, it will still look back to it as to a sort of nineteenth century "Emile," and take renewed heart from its inspiring message.

"In God's Ways," the second of the two great novels, is a work of which it is difficult to speak in terms of measured praise. With its delicate and vital delineations of character, its rich sympathy and depth of tragic pathos, its plea for the sacredness of human life, and its protest against the religious and social prejudice by which life is so often misshapen, this book is an epitome of all the ideas and feelings that have gone to the making of the author's personality, and have received such manifold expression in his works. It is a simple story, concerned mainly with four people, in no way outwardly conspicuous, yet here united by the poet's art into a relationship from which issue some of the deepest of social questions, and which enforces in the most appealing terms the fundamental teaching of all the work of his mature years. First of all, we have the boyhood of the two friends who are afterwards to grow apart in their sympathies; the one alert of mind, imaginative, open to every intellectual influence, also impetuous and hot-blooded; the other shy and intellectually stolid, but good to the very core, and moved by the strongest of altruistic impulses. In accordance with their respective characters, the first of these youths becomes a physician, and the other a clergyman. Then we have the sister of the physician, who becomes the wife of the clergyman, a noble, proud, self-centred nature, finely strung to the inmost fibre of her being. Then we have a woman of the other sort, clinging, abnormally sensitive, a child when the years of childhood are over, and made the victim of a shocking child-marriage to a crippled old man. She it is whom the physician loves, and persuades to a legal dissolution of her immoral union. After some years, he makes her his wife, and their happiness would be complete were it not for the social and religious prejudice aroused. The clergyman, whom years of service in the state church have hardened into bigotry, is officially, as it were, compelled to condemn the friend of his boyhood, and even the sister, for a time grown untrue to her own generous nature, shares in the estrangement. In vain does the physician seek to shelter his wife from the chill of her environment. She droops, pines away, and finally dies, gracious, lovable, and even forgiving to the last. Then the death angel comes close to the clergyman and his wife, hovering over their only child, and at last the barrier of formalism and prejudice and religious bigotry is swept away from their minds. Their natural sympathies, long repressed, resume full sway, and they realize how deeply they, have sinned toward the dead woman. The sister seeks a reconciliation with her brother, but he repulses her, and gives her his wife's private diary to read. In this journal intime she finds the full revelation of the gentle spirit that has been done to death, and she feels that the very salvation of her life and soul depend upon winning her brother's forgiveness. The closing chapter, in which the final reconciliation occurs, is one of the most wonderful in all fiction; its pathos is of the deepest and the most moving, and he must be callous of soul, indeed, who can read it with dry eyes.

If we were to search the whole of Björnson's writings for the single passage which should most completely typify his message to his fellowmen,—not Norwegians alone, but all mankind,—the choice would have to rest upon the words spoken from the pulpit by the clergyman of this novel, on the Sunday following the certainty of his child's recovery.

"To-day a man spoke from the pulpit of the church about what he had learned.

"Namely, about what first concerns us all.

"One forgets it in his strenuous endeavor, a second in his zeal for conflict, a third in his backward vision, a fourth in the conceit of his own wisdom, a fifth in his daily routine, and we have all learned it more or less ill. For should I ask you who hear me now, you would all reply thoughtlessly, and just because I ask you from this place, 'Faith is first.'

"No, in very truth, it is not. Watch over your child, as it struggles for breath on the outermost verge of life, or see your wife follow the child to that outermost verge, beside herself for anxiety and sleeplessness,—then love will teach you that life comes first. And never from this day on will I seek God or God's will in any form of words, in any sacrament, or in any book or any place, as if He were first and foremost to be found there; no, life is first and foremost—life as we win it from the depths of despair, in the victory of the light, in the grace of self-devotion, in our intercourse with living human kind. God's supreme word to us is life, our highest worship of Him is love for the living. This lesson, self-evident as it