w.

_The King_ (_Kongen_) was written at Aulestad, the Norwegian home in
which Bjornson settled after his return from abroad, and was published
at Copenhagen in 1877. It is perhaps not surprising that the play, with
its curious blend of poetry and social philosophy, and its somewhat
exuberant (though always interesting) wordiness, was not at first
a conspicuous success on the stage; but the interest aroused by
the published book was enormous. It was widely read and vigorously
discussed, both in Scandinavia and abroad; and while, on the one hand,
it brought upon Bjornson the most scurrilous abuse and the harshest
criticism from his political opponents, on the other hand a prominent
compatriot of his (whose opinion was worth having) gave it as his
verdict, at a political meeting held soon after the play's publication,
that "the most notable thing that has happened in Norway of late--or at
any rate, one of the most notable--in my opinion is this last book of
Bjornson's--_The King_."

The idea of a "democratic monarchy"--a kind of reformed constitutional
monarchy, that should be a half-way house on the road to
republicanism--was not entirely new; Bjornson's success was in
presenting the problem as seen from the _inside_--that is to say, from
the king's point of view. His opponents, of course, branded him as a
red-hot republican, which he was not. In a preface he wrote for a later
edition of the play, he says that he did not intend the play mainly as
an argument in favour of republicanism, but "to extend the boundaries of
free discussion"; but that, at the same time, he believed the republic
to be the ultimate form of government, and all European states to be
proceeding at varying rates of speed towards it.

_The King_ is composed of curiously incongruous elements. The railway
meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to compare with the
meeting in Ibsen's _An Enemy of Society_; the last act is melodrama
with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the
intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist
in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the
wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the
mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm
of what has gone before: And--strangest incongruity of all in a play
so essentially "actual"--there is in the original, between each act,
a mysterious "mellemspil,"