ose second. But if we take literature in its
larger sense, as including all the manifestations of creative activity
in language, and if we insist, furthermore, that the man singled out
for this preeminence shall stand in some vital relation to the
intellectual life of his time, and exert a forceful influence upon the
thought of the present day, the choice must rather be made among the
three giants of the north of Europe, falling, as it may be, upon the
great-hearted Russian emotionalist who has given us such deeply moving
portrayals of the life of the modern world; or upon the passionate
Norwegian idealist whose finger has so unerringly pointed out the
diseased spots in the social organism, earning by his moral surgery the
name of pessimist, despite his declared faith in the redemption of
mankind through truth and freedom and love; or, perchance, upon that
other great Norwegian, equally fervent in his devotion to the same
ideals, and far more sympathetic in his manner of inculcating them upon
his readers, who has just rounded out his scriptural tale of three
score years and ten, and, in commemoration of the anniversary, is now
made the recipient of such a tribute of grateful and whole-souled
admiration as few men have ever won, and none have better deserved. It
would be certainly invidious, and probably futile, to attempt a nice,
comparative estimate of the services of these three men to the common
cause of humanity; let us be content with the admission that
Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson is _primus inter pares_, and make no attempt to
exalt him at the expense of his great contemporaries. Writing now
eight years later, at the time when Bjoernson's death has plunged his
country and the world in mourning, it is impressive to note that of the
five men constituting the group above designated, Tolstoy alone
survives to carry on the great literary tradition of the nineteenth
century.

It will be well, however, to make certain distinctions between the life
work of Bjoernson and that of the two men whom a common age and common
aims bring into inevitable association with him. These distinctions are
chiefly two,--one of them is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen grew to be
largely cosmopolitan in their outlook, Bjoernson has much more closely
maintained throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the
racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently
became, the one indifferent to artistic expression, and the o