enabled to become a teacher, first at a provincial school, and later
in Copenhagen.

"Pelle" consists of four parts, each, except perhaps the last, a
complete story in itself. First we have the open-air life of the boy
in country surroundings in Bornholm; then the lad's apprenticeship
in a small provincial town not yet invaded by modern industrialism
and still innocent of socialism; next the youth's struggles in
Copenhagen against employers and authorities; and last the man's
final victory in laying the foundation of a garden-city for the
benefit of his fellow-workers. The background everywhere is the
rapid growth of the labor movement; but social problems are never
obtruded, except, again, in the last part, and the purely human
interest is always kept well before the reader's eye through variety
of situation and vividness of characterization. The great charm of
the book seems to me to lie in the fact that the writer knows the
poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but
has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and
a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his
imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next,
sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be
content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His
sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the
little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the
seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves. "Pelle"
has conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark; there is
that in the book which should conquer also the hearts of a wider
public than that of the little country in which its author was born.

OTTO JESPERSEN,