rces in the new school of
Norwegian literature. The contemporary of Alexander Kielland, who is
more widely known abroad, he is however the representative of a vastly
different phase. Kielland's works, except for their setting, are the
result of general European culture; whereas Garborg has laid the
foundations of a literature essentially Norse.

The new literature of young Norway is a true exponent of its social
conditions. The ferment of its strivings and its discontent permeates
the whole people. Much of Garborg's work is the chronicle of this
social unrest, particularly among the peasant classes, where he
himself by birth belongs. In the reaction against the sentimental
idealism of the older school, he is the pioneer who has blazed the
paths. Where Bjoernson gives rose-colored pictures of what peasant life
might be, Garborg with heavy strokes of terrible meaning draws the
outline of what it is. His daring and directness of speech aroused a
storm of opposition, and he has also been made to suffer in a material
way for the courage of his opinions, in that the position which he had
held in the government service since 1879 was taken from him as a
consequence of his books.

Arne Garborg was born at Jaederen, in the southwestern part of Norway,
January 1851. The circumstances of his life were humble, and all of
his surroundings were meagre in the extreme. His father, a village
schoolmaster, was a man of nervous, fanatical temperament, with whom
religion was a mania. In the obscure little village where he lived,
Garborg's boyhood was outwardly uneventful but inwardly filled with
conflict. Brought up in an atmosphere of pietism, the natural reaction
led him into a kind of romantic atheistic unbelief. In the turmoil of
his mind, the battles were fought again and again, until at length he
reached the middle ground of modern thought. His education was
extremely desultory; but from the age of nine, when from the only
models within his reach he wrote hymns and sermons, he showed a strong
tendency for literature. He passed the required examinations for a
school-teacher in 1870, and alternately taught and studied, until in
1875 he entered the University of Christiania. His life as a student
was by no means smooth, but he persisted, in spite of poverty and
indeed sometimes actual want.

He had previously, in Risoer, published a Teacher's Journal (1871), a
small paper dealing principally though not exclusively with school
affair