thirty-five years have dealt with most of the graver problems
which concern society as a whole,--politics, religion, education,
the status of women, the license of the press, the demand of the
socialist for a reconstruction of the old order. They have also
dealt with many of the delicate questions of individual ethics,
--the relations of husband and wife, of parent and child, the
responsibility of the merchant to his creditors and of the employer
to his dependants, the double standard of morality for men and
women, and the duty devolving upon both to transmit a vigorous
strain to their offspring. These are some of the themes that
have engaged the novelist and dramatist; they have also engaged
the public speaker and lay preacher of enlightenment, as well
as themes of a more strictly political character, such as the
separation of Norway from the Dual Monarchy, the renewal of
the ancient bond between Norway and Iceland, the free development
of parliamentary government, the cause of Pangermanism, and the
furtherance of peace between the nations. An extensive
programme, surely, even in this summary enumeration of its
more salient features, but one to which his capacity has not
proved unequal, and which he has carried out by the force of
his immense energy and superabundant vitality. The burden of
all this tendencious matter has caused his art to suffer at times,
no doubt, but his inspiration has retained throughout much
of the marvellous freshness of the earlier years, and the
genius of the poet still flashes upon us from a prosaic
environment, sometimes in a lovely lyric, more frequently,
however, in the turn of a phrase or the psychological
envisagement of some supreme moment in the action of the story
or the drama.