Yet
this temperament leads to her undoing, or what would be the
undoing of any woman less splendid in character. But the
strength that impels her to the misstep that comes so near to
having tragic consequences is also the strength that saves her
when chastened by suffering. In her the author "gives us the
common stuff of life," says an English critic, "gives it us
simple and direct. There is nothing here of Ibsen's pathology.
We are in the sun. Her most hideous blunder cannot undo a
woman's soul. Bjornson knows that the deed is nothing at all.
It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. Not everything
that cometh out of a man defileth a man. At all events, so it
is here: triumph and joy built upon an act that--as the
Philistines would say--has defiled forever." As a triumph of
sheer creation, this figure is hardly overmatched anywhere in
the author's portrait gallery of women.
If Bjornson's essential teaching may be found in a single
page, as has above been suggested, his personality evades all
such summarizing. In the present essay, he has been considered
as a writer merely,--poet, dramatist, novelist,--but the man
is vastly more than that.
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