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The next fifteen years of Bjoernson's life were richly productive. Within a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his peasant idyls and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had also published two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned as the achievement of fourteen feverish days.
The collected edition of Bjoernson'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.
But even had I been capable of rising to a more correct and a fuller estimate of Bjoernson's character, there was too much dividing us at this time for any real friendship to have been established.
The English had made the whole country subservient to them, and at the hotels one Englishman in this French country was paid more attention to than a dozen Frenchmen. Here I understood two widely different poems: Hauch's Swiss Peasant, and Bjoernson's Over the Hills and Far Away.
"Mary" is less explicit in its teaching than the two great novels just summarized, but what it misses in didacticism it more than gains in art. The radiant creature who gives her name to the book is one of Bjoernson's most exquisite figures. She is the very embodiment of youthful womanhood, filled with the joy of life, and bringing sunshine wherever she goes.
If we were to search the whole of Bjoernson'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.
I did not believe in Bjoernson, saw in the letter nothing but an attempt to use me as a critic, now that he had lost his former advocate in the Press. The prospect of the journey to the North did not tempt me; in Bjoernson's eyes it would have been Thor's journey with Loki, and I neither was Loki nor wished to be.
"It was with 'A Bankruptcy' that the home made its first appearance upon the stage, the home with its joys and sorrows, with its conflicts and its tenderness." Two years later appeared "The King, which is in many respects Bjoernson's greatest modern masterpiece in dramatic form.
Oh, my God, fair is thy home, Ajar is the door for all who come; Guard it for me yet longer, Till my soul through striving grows stronger." At the age of eleven Bjoernson's school days began at Molde, and were continued at Christiania in a famous preparatory school, where he had Ibsen for a comrade.
The social satire of the piece is subtle and sharp; what the author really aims at is to illustrate, by a specific example, the repressive forces that dominate the life of a small people, and make it almost impossible for any sort of truth to triumph over prejudice. Since the production of "A Glove," twenty years ago, eight more plays have come from Bjoernson's prolific pen.
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