himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been
spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty
living from an ungrateful soil. Although a poet by instinct,
he was not afraid of realism, and did not shrink from giving
the brutal aspects of peasant life a place upon his canvas. In
emphasizing the characteristics of reticence and _naivete_ he
really discovered the Norwegian peasant for literary purposes.
Beneath the words spoken by his characters we are constantly
made to realize that there are depths of feeling that remain
unexpressed; whether from native pride or from a sense of the
inadequacy of mere words to set forth a critical moment of
life, his men and women are distinguished by the most laconic
utterance, yet their speech always has dramatic fitness and
bears the stamp of sincerity. Jaeger speaks of the manifold
possibilities of this laconic method in the following words:--

"It is as if the author purposely set in motion the reader's
fancy and feeling that they might do their own work. The
greatest poet is he who understands how to awaken fancy and
feeling to their highest degree of self-activity. And this
is Bjornson's greatness in his peasant novels, that he has
poured from his horn of plenty a wealth of situations and
motives that hold the reader's mind and burn themselves into
it, that become his personal possession just because the author
has known how to suggest so much in so few words."

In some respects, the little sketch called "The Father" is
the supreme example of Bjornson's artistry in this kind. There
are only a few pages in all, but they embody the tragedy of a
lifetime. The little work is a literary gem of the purest water,