The
achievement represented by this list is all the more
extraordinary when we consider the fact that for the greater
part of the thirty-five years which these plays and novels
cover, their author has been, both as a public speaker and
as a writer for the periodical press, an active participant
in the political and social life of his country.
Most of these books must be dismissed with a few words in
order that our remaining space may be given to the four or
five that are of the greatest power and significance. "The
Editor," the first of the modern plays, offers a fierce
satire upon modern journalism, its dishonesty, its corrupt
and malicious power, its personal and partisan prejudice.
The character of the editor in this play was unmistakeably
drawn, in its leading characteristics, from the figure of a
well known conservative journalist in Christiania, although
Bjornson vigorously maintained that the protraiture was typical
rather than personal.
"In various other countries than my own, I have observed
the type of journalist who is here depicted. It is characterized
by acting upon a basis of sheer egotism, passionate and
boundless, and by terrorism in such fashion that it frightens
honest people away from every liberal movement, and visits
upon the individual an unscrupulous persecution.
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