the intellectual developments of the day had been communicated
to Norway as well as Denmark. French influence was dreaded
as immoral, and there was but little understanding of either
the English language or spirit." But an intellectual renaissance
was at hand, an intellectual reawakening with a cosmopolitan
outlook, and, Bjornson was destined to become its leader, much
as he had been the leader of the national movement of an earlier
decade. During these years of seeming inactivity, comparatively
speaking, he had read and thought much, and the new thought of
the age had fecundated his mind. Historical and religious criticism,
educational and social problems, had taken possession of his
thought, and the philosophy of evolution had transformed the
whole tenor of his ideas, shaping them to, deeper issues and
more practical purposes than had hitherto engaged them. He had
read widely and variously in Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Muller, and
Taine; he had, in short, scaled the "lofty mountains" that had so
hemmed in his early view, and made his way into the intellectual
kingdoms of the modern world that lay beyond. The _Weltgeist_
had appealed to him with its irresistible behest, just as it
appealed at about the same time to Ibsen and Tolstoy and Ruskin,
and had made him a man of new interests and ideals.

One might have found foreshadowings of this transformation in
certain of his earlier works,--in "The Newly Married Couple,"
for example, with its delicate analysis, of a common domestic
relation, or in "The Fisher Maiden," with its touch of modernity,
--but from these suggestions one could hardly have prophesied
the enthusiasm and the genial force with which Bjornson was to
project his personality into the controversial arena of modern life.
The series of works which have come from his pen during the past