his ideas were of too challenging a nature for the ruling, conservative, and highly orthodox circles of the land; even at the present time he is pursued by the press of the Norwegian government and by the leading official society with a fury which is as little choice in its selection of means as the bitterness which pursues the champions of thrones and altars in other countries.  In spite of all this, Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson has his people behind him and about him as perhaps no other poet has, unless it be Victor Hugo.  When his name is mentioned it is equivalent to hoisting the flag of Norway.  In his noble qualities and in his faults, in his genius and in his weak points, he as thoroughly bears the stamp of Norway as Voltaire bore that of France.  His boldness and his naivete, his open-heartedness as a man and the terseness of his style as an artist, the highly wrought and sensitive Norwegian popular sentiment, and the lively consciousness of the one-sidedness and the intellectual needs of his fellow-countrymen that has driven him to Scandinavianism, Pan-Teutonism, and cosmopolitanism—­all this in its peculiar combination in him is so markedly national that his personality may be said to offer a resume of the entire people.

None of his contemporaries so fully represent this people’s love of home and of freedom, its self-consciousness, rectitude, and fresh energy.  Indeed, just now he also exemplifies on a large scale the people’s tendency to self-criticism; not that scourging criticism which chastises with scorpions, and whose representative in Norway is Ibsen, in Russia Turgenieff, but the sharp bold expression of opinion begotten of love.  He never calls attention to an evil in whose improvement and cure he does not believe, or to a vice which he despairs of seeing out-rooted.  For he has implicit faith in the good in humanity, and possesses entire the invincible optimism of a large, genial, sanguine nature.

As to his character, he is half chieftain, half poet.  He unites in his own person the two forms most prominent in ancient Norway—­those of the warrior and of the scald.  In his intellectual constitution he is partly a tribune of the people, partly a lay preacher; in other words, he combines in his public demeanor the political and religious pathos of his Norwegian contemporaries, and this became far more apparent after he broke loose from orthodoxy than it was before.  Since his so-called apostasy he has in fact been a missionary and a reformer to a greater degree than ever.

He could have been the product of no other land than Norway, and far less than other authors could he thrive in any but his native soil.  In the year 1880, when the rumor spread through the German press that Bjoernson, weary of continual wrangling at home, was about to settle in Germany, he wrote to me:—­“In Norway will I live, in Norway will I lash and be lashed, in Norway will I sing and die.”