ecent, after all.
Bjoernson, at any rate, began very soon to be troubled. Between 1864
and 1874, from his thirty-second to his forty-second year, his
invention seemed, to some extent, paralyzed. _The Fisher Maiden_, the
one story written during that time, starts as beautifully as _Arne_;
but it grows complicated and introspective: the psychological
experiences of the stage-struck heroine are not in the same key as the
opening chapters. Passing over nine years, we find _Magnhild_ much
more vague and involved--

"Here he is visibly affected by French models, and by the methods
of the naturalists, but he is trying to combine them with his own
simpler traditions of rustic realism.... The author felt himself
greatly moved by fermenting ideas and ambitions which he had not
completely mastered.... There is a kind of uncomfortable
discrepancy between the scene and the style, a breath of Paris
and the boulevards blowing through the pine-trees of a
puritanical Norwegian village.... But the book is a most
interesting link between the early peasant-stories and the great
novels of his latest period."

Well, of these same "great novels"--of _Flags are Flying_ and _In
God's Way_--people must speak as they think. They seem to me the
laborious productions of a man forcing himself still further and
further from his right and natural bent. In them, says Mr. Gosse,
"Bjoernson returns, in measure, to the poetical elements of his youth.
He is now capable again, as for instance in the episode of Ragni's
symbolical walk in the woodlands, _In God's Way_, of passages of pure
idealism." Yes, he returns--"in measure." He is "capable of idyllic
passages." In other words, his nature reasserts itself, and he remains
an imperfect convert. "He has striven hard to be a realist, and at
times he has seemed to acquiesce altogether in the naturalistic
formula, but in truth he has never had anything essential in common
with M. Zola." In other words, he has fallen between two stools. He
has tried to expel nature with a pitchfork and still she runs back
upon him. He has put his hand to the plough and has looked back: or
(if you take my view of "the naturalistic formula") he has sinned, but
has not sinned with his whole heart. For to produce a homogeneous
story, either the acquired Zola or the native Bjoernson must have been
cast out utterly.

Value of Early Impressions to a Novelist.

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