"Mary" is less explicit in its teaching than the two great
novels just summarized, but what it misses in didacticism it
more than gains in art. The radiant creature who gives her
name to the book is one of Bjornson's most exquisite figures.
She is the very embodiment of youthful womanhood, filled with
the joy of life, and bringing sunshine wherever she goes. Yet
this temperament leads to her undoing, or what would be the
undoing of any woman less splendid in character. But the
strength that impels her to the misstep that comes so near to
having tragic consequences is also the strength that saves her
when chastened by suffering. In her the author "gives us the
common stuff of life," says an English critic, "gives it us
simple and direct. There is nothing here of Ibsen's pathology.
We are in the sun. Her most hideous blunder cannot undo a
woman's soul. Bjornson knows that the deed is nothing at all.
It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. Not everything
that cometh out of a man defileth a man. At all events, so it
is here: triumph and joy built upon an act that--as the
Philistines would say--has defiled forever." As a triumph of
sheer creation, this figure is hardly overmatched anywhere in
the author's portrait gallery of women.

If Bjornson's essential teaching may be found in a single
page, as has above been suggested, his personality evades all
such summarizing. In the present essay, he has been considered
as a writer merely,--poet, dramatist, novelist,--but the man
is vastly more than that. His other activities have been
hinted at, indeed, but nothing adequate has been said about
them. The director of three theatres, the editor of three