their mixture of timidity and self-interest; the manly,
straightforward young politician, resolute to carry on the work
that has sapped his brother's life; the warped, de-humanised nature
of the journalist; the sturdy common-sense of the yeoman farmer;
and the doctor, the "family friend," as a sort of mocking chorus.
Besides its plea for a higher regard for truth, the play also
attacks the precept, preached by worldly wisdom, that we ought to
harden our natures to make ourselves invulnerable; a proposition
which was hateful to one of Bjornson's persistently impressionable
and ingenuous nature. The fact remains, as Brandes grimly admits,
that "nowadays we have only a very qualified sympathy with public
characters who succumb to the persecution of the press." Brandes
sees in the play, besides its obvious motive, an allegory. Halvdan
Rejn, the weary and dying politician, is (he says) meant for Henrik
Wergeland, a Norwegian poet-politician who had similar struggles,
sank under the weight of similar at tacks, died after a long
illness, and was far higher reputed after his death than during his
life. In Harald Rejn, with his honest enthusiasm and misjudged
political endeavours Brandes sees Bjornson himself; while the
yeoman brother, Haakon, seems to him to typify the Norwegian
people.

_The Bankrupt_ (_En Fallit_: literally _A Bankruptcy_) was partly
written in Rome, partly in Tyrol, and published at Copenhagen in
1875. It was a thing entirely new to the Scandinavian stage for a
dramatist to deal seriously with the tragi-comedy of money, and,
while making a forcible plea for honesty, to contrive to produce a
stirring and entertaining play on what might seem so prosaic a
foundation as business finance. Some of the play's earliest critics
dismissed it as "dry," "prosaic," "trivial," because of the nature