stage; but, before that, it had been seen in German dress at Munich
and Hamburg. As an inevitable result of his recent activities as a
political speaker and pamphleteer, Bjornson had come in for a good
deal of vituperation in the press, a fact which no doubt added some
gall to the ink with which he drew the portrait of the journalist
in this play. The Stockholm critics, indeed, had condemned _The
Editor_ as merely a pamphleteering attack on the editor of a
well-known journal. In answer to this criticism Bjornson wrote from
Rome in March, 1875: "It is said that my play is a pamphleteering
attack on a certain individual. That is a deliberate lie. I have
studied the journalist type, which is here represented, in many
other countries besides my own. The chief characteristic of this
type is to be actuated by an inordinate egotism that is perpetually
being inflamed by passion; that makes use of bogeys to frighten
people, and does this in such a way that, while it makes all its
honest contemporaries afraid of any freedom of thought, it also
produces the same result on every single individual by means
of reckless persecution. As I wished to portray that type, I
naturally took a good deal of the portrait from the representative
of the type that I knew best; but, like every artist who wishes to
produce a complete creation, I had to build it up from separate
revelations of itself. There can, therefore, be no question of any
individual being represented in my play except in so far as he may
partially agree with the type."

However much Bjornson may have written _The Editor_ with a
"purpose," his vivid dramatic sense kept him from becoming merely
didactic. The little tragedy that takes place amongst this homely
group of people makes quite a moving play, thanks to the skill with
which the types are depicted--the bourgeois father and mother, with