He succeeds
eventually, but not until he has encountered every sort of
contemptible opposition and hypocritical evasion of the plain truth.
The social satire of the piece is subtle and sharp; what the author
really aims at is to illustrate, by a specific example, the
repressive forces that dominate the life of a small people, and
make it almost impossible for any sort of truth to triumph
over prejudice.
Since the production of "A Glove," twenty years ago, eight more
plays have come from Bjornson's prolific pen. Of these by far
the most important are the two that are linked by the common
title, "Beyond the Strength." The translation of this title is
hopelessly inadequate, because the original word means much more
than strength; it means talent, faculty, capability, the sum total
of a man's endowment for some particular purpose. The two pieces
bearing this name are quite different in theme, but certain
characters appear in both, and both express the same thought,
--the thought that it is vain for men to strive after the
unattainable, for in so doing they lose sight of the actual
possibilities of human life; the thought that much of the best
human energy goes to waste because it is devoted to the pursuit
of ideals that are indeed beyond the strength of man to realize.
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