Bjornson's--_The King_."

The idea of a "democratic monarchy"--a kind of reformed
constitutional monarchy, that should be a half-way house on the
road to republicanism--was not entirely new; Bjornson's success was
in presenting the problem as seen from the _inside_--that is to
say, from the king's point of view. His opponents, of course,
branded him as a red-hot republican, which he was not. In a preface
he wrote for a later edition of the play, he says that he did not
intend the play mainly as an argument in favour of republicanism,
but "to extend the boundaries of free discussion"; but that, at
the same time, he believed the republic to be the ultimate form of
government, and all European states to be proceeding at varying
rates of speed towards it.

_The King_ is composed of curiously incongruous elements. The
railway meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to
compare with the meeting in Ibsen's _An Enemy of Society_; the last
act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting
social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always
underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the
melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the
third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of
much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone
before: And--strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially
"actual"--there is in the original, between each act, a mysterious
"mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of somewhat
cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs in the clouds,
between an "Old Grey Man" and a "Chorus of Tyrants" in a desolate
scene of snow and ice, between Choruses of Men, Women, and Children