Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt:... A STUDY OF THE WRITINGS OF BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON On a photograph of himself which Bjornson lately sent to an English friend--a remarkably pacific person--he wrote in his bold and flowing hand, fra hans Kjcempefcelle, "from his fellowwarrior." These words give an exact superficial impression of the temperament of the most breezy and turbulent, the most agitated and agitating of modern European men of letters. Georg Brandes has aptly said that whenever Bjornson speaks, the flag of Norway seems to be unfurled. Yet a false idea would be formed, if it were not at once added that the primary attraction of this flag to Bjernson is not the idea that its enemies are to be destroyed, but that its friends are to be gathered around it and to be marched somewhere. The direction and object 01 the march are secondary in the poet's mind. The great thing is to be moving on, with songs and shoutings and cries of defiance, tramping along the mountain-tops of the world, in the eye of the sun, keeping a sharp look-out for adventures and for moral princesses held in durance vile. This magnificent combative optimism of Bjornson's is what distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It makes his personality very attractive, and adds to it a touch of naivete," of the happy, strutting child agog for pirates, which is quite unusual in our sated age. Norway supplies the oldest and the youngest-hearted of the authors of our time, the weary Ibsen huddled above the sinking embers of existence, and the schoolboy Bjornson, climbing trees for mares'nests, and flinging up his bonnet in the sunshine. With these characteristics, and with a temper which is to a strange degree dogged and yet ductile at the same time, Bjornson has been curiously modified by the tendencies of...