He had, in short, created
a national literature where none had before existed, and he was
still in his early prime.
The collected edition of Bjornson's "Tales," published in 1872,
together with "The Bridal March," separately published in the
following year, gives us a complete representation of that phase
of his genius which is best known to the world at large. Here
are five stories of considerable length, and a number of
slighter sketches, in which the Norwegian peasant is portrayed
with intimate and loving knowledge. The peasant tale was no
new thing in European literature, for the names of Auerbach
and George Sand, to say nothing of many others, at once come
to the mind. In Scandinavian literature, its chief representative
had been the Danish novelist, Blicher, who had written with
insight and charm of the peasantry of Jutland. But in the
treatment of peasant life by most of Bjornson's predecessors
there had been too much of the _de haut en bas_ attitude; the
peasant had been drawn from the outside, viewed philosophically,
and invested with artificial sentiment. Bjornson was too near
to his own country folk to commit such faults as these; he was
himself of peasant stock, and all his boyhood life had been
spent in close association with men who wrested a scanty
living from an ungrateful soil.
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