reading, and it certainly takes more than the endorsements of other novelists to keep the public going in any one direction. Who is there that has not praised and recommended Henry James? And outside a very limited circle who is there that reads him? But we have kept on reading Bojer, and that in spite of a shock. For his books undoubtedly do shock the average American. I use the word shock, not in the sense of the sort of dismay which Cabell in playful mood produces in our too-maidenly breasts, but in the sense of that effect which a cold shower bath produces.

We read the first chapter of any book by Bojer and we see immediately that here is a novelist who deals with what we call ethical themes, with problems of conduct. The Great Hanger—we read. Ah! We draw a deep breath. With the perspicacity of spiritually minded people we can tell that this great hunger is a spiritual hunger, and we revel in anticipation of one more justification of the ways of God to man. Perhaps we have already read The Inside of the Cup, and that later novel in which Mr. Churchill justifies not so much the ways of God as the ways of the I. W. W. to man. Certainly we feel, after the first chapter, that here is a novel serious in intent and clean cut in workmanship, quite free from that horrid Russian introspective sex-pathology which we dislike so much.

As we read on we note that our aesthetic sensibilities—if we have them—are charmed and satisfied. Bojer can tell a better story with more real character, with more vividly presented backgrounds, all in 300 pages than our own realists can tell in five or seven hundred. His stories have unity and form where our own writers are often not only content to give us a "slice of life," as they say, but never even to trim the edges.

Our human sensibilities, however, do receive a shock. Bojer is utterly sincere, and he will not justify the ways of God to us—or the ways of nature if there are any readers to whom the word God is still a cause of intellectual offense—either by misrepresenting God or by assuming that he must be justified to the orthodox man or woman. Bojer strips us of all our social disguises. He knows that the way to peace, to spiritual adjustment, is through fire and travail. How many people who start to read The Great Hunger in optimism will willingly go all the way with its author and its hero—will, without inner protest, agree that Peer Holm did well when he found God and exchanged for him all that his youth had brought of health and strength, all the money that he had made, all his power over men, the life of his child, his assurance of daily bread. A healthy-minded, fairly well-off American, with the right amount of life insurance, would certainly be aghast at the road Peer Holm took Godward. "Found God?" he would exclaim, "why, the man is down and out!" And if one asked him if the first fact might not be worth while, even if it involved the truth of the latter, he would, if he were well enough informed, come back with "But what is pragmatism for? Doesn't pragmatism get you to God by a better way than that?" Or else he might suggest that Peer Holm should have studied "New Thought."

My surprise at the bravery with which the American public as a whole has taken to Bojer and his bracing philosophy is partly due to the fact that I have spoken to some members of the reading public to whom his lack of sentimentality was a stumbling block. They thought him cruel and unyielding. His Norwegian snows chilled them, and they did not see that it is that very snow, pure and cold, that really makes us appreciate the light of the sun that shines upon it.

Somewhere in Treacherous Ground Bojer has used the phrase about the fresh warmth of the oncoming summer in the northern fjords of Norway that it is like "inhaling a mixture of sunshine and snow." And that figure is an almost perfect one for the enjoyment of all art. Take away the snow, and the sunshine is too warm; let the sunshine melt the snow, and we have muddy sentimentality. Bojer hates that sentimentality in life as well as in art, and his Trechberous Ground is a closely observed exposition of it in life. For, on the treacherous ground of sentimentality, does Erik Evje build a foundation for his own happiness as well as for the happiness and security of others, and of course the ground gives way.

Would that our American novelists would treat us with such kindly roughness as does Bojer! Perhaps, emboldened by his success, they will try to work in the same manner. I am convinced that, to many of his readers, some of the charm of his work is that they cannot predict the course of his novels by a priori considerations. To illustrate, let us glance for a moment at Mr. Winston Churchill's The Dwelling Place of Light, in which a girl in humble circumstances gets a job in a New England woolen mill, has a love affair with the manager, joins the I. W. W., takes part in a strike, and then dies. Throughout the book the reader is always two jumps ahead of the author because he knows exactly what a serious-minded author like Mr. Churchill must and must not do. He knows that the manager's love advances to the girl will be of the sort known as "dishonorable" because American sentiment is on the whole against the obvious misalliance. He knows that the I. W. W. will be treated in such and such a way because Mr. Churchill is a liberal who will not damn it utterly, but who, wishing to retain the good will of those to whom he appeals, will not exactly take its side (of course it is the pre-war I. W. W. that figures here), and saddest of all, the reader knows that the girl is going to die. He knows that the moment he sees she cannot marry the manager—he gets killed, if I remember aright—and that she is due to give birth to a child of which he was the father. Kind people take her in, and the child is born. But no respectable American novel could harbor a young woman, unmarried, with a living to earn, and a child to keep and explain. So the girl has to die. Not of any disease or by an accident, but just by fading away. There was no artistic necessity for it, and certainly none in physiology, but Mr. Churchill was writing sentimentally to please a sentimental public.

But how differently does Bojer handle things. How unsentimental is the figure of Peer Holm finding God at the expense of everything else. What a rebuke to sentiment there is in Erik Evje paying for his private sins by doing good to people who did not ask him to come into their lives—doing them good until his good tumbles down in irretrievable disaster. And with what surgical calmness does Bojer show us the figure of Evje, himself unhurt by the catastrophe he has caused, his life and most of his land safe while other people's lives and lands have gone down together—Evje, standing over the wreckage, and lamenting, not the loss, not the dishonesty in himself that caused him to make these people a sacrifice for his own sins; but lamenting the fact that this disaster had hurt him—had robbed him of the protection that he had built against the assaults of his own conscience.

This lack of sentimentality does not imply brutality. For at the point we have mentioned the author leaves Evje, and ends his book with one of the characters, a farm worker, who had escaped from the disaster, a lad whom Evje, in his zeal for other people's righteousness, had persuaded to marry a girl whom he had wronged. But Lars had done this in spite of the fact that he loved another woman: well, if the reader has not seen the book I will not spoil his enjoyment of it by retelling the end, but for actual beauty of human feeling, for unpretentious but real pathos, this ending is one of the most beautiful things that a novelist has done for a long time. Certainly few contemporary English-writing novelists have approached it.

It is a dangerous thing to sum up a novelist's contribution to us in terms of the philosophy he expresses. And yet the novel is the form that does, more than any other, deal with conduct and with world views. What saves Bojer's novels from being didactic and, therefore, misleading is his adherence to the great truth that there is no such thing as a science of ethics, but that there is such a thing as an art of conduct. You cannot make general rules of conduct, for every case has its not to be duplicated features. Human situations are not like the situations of geometry, infinitely repeatable. But the general "lie of the land" in the case of an author may, at least, be indicated roughly.

And in all four of these novels we see men trying this, that and the other patent medicine of conduct. They try to compound their secret sins not so much by damning those they are not inclined to as by trying to remedy their effects—as did Evje—or they rely upon the justice of their "cause"—as Wangen in The Power of a Lie relied upon the fact of his innocence to excuse that in them which is not just and not innocent. Or, like Doctor Mark in The Face of the World, they try to find peace by taking the sins of the world upon their own too weak shoulders, and find that they cannot help the world, and that they have lost the strength that might, at least, have upheld their own loved ones who suffer while they agonize over suffering that they cannot stop. Dr. Mark may well be contrasted with Evje: a good man and a bad man each trying by almost the same means to find peace.

The typical Bojer novel may be said to exhibit a modern soul tortured with moral ideas, as Rolland said of Tolstoy; "sometimes, too, pregnant with a hidden god," but always blundering toward an adjustment with the world, Blundering hopefully, but really, not finding a chart as our ethical teachers would assure us is possible, but finding that there is no chart and that we must keep on blundering until, by trial and error, we make our own adjustment to life. After all it is the method of all human advance. Science is the finding of things out by experiment, and an experiment is simply a success following a number of blunders. If the world were really what homilists try to assure us it is, science would be unnecessary because we could deduce all knowledge from a priori principles. And the novelists of piety have their a priori principles of charity and fidelity and courage and truth-telling, and, like Harold Bell Wright, begin with those abstractions and clothe them in human garments.

So Bojer shows us the futility of charts and the great perils of self-deception. We keep our souls by eternal vigilance and by feeding them upon the bread of the moment. Dr. Mark ends by embracing love and taking all that he can get from the world's stores—the philosophy of Jesus as well as the music of Beethoven. And Peer Holm sows his neighbor's field "that God may exist."

And Peter Wangen, disdaining the spiritual food of his wife's love when he is under the cloud of a false accusation, becoming self-righteous because he knows that he is innocent, overdraws his account. He asks too much from that little stock of innocency—as if thousands of men, though not falsely accused, were not just as innocent as he was. He overdraws and spends lavishly. He becomes wicked, that is to say, bankrupt of virtue, because he magnifies the virtue that is maligned by Knut Norby's accusation of forgery against him. He makes the accusation almost a true one by becoming a forger. And Norby, tortured by his conscience for his misdeed—for he had not intended to accuse Wangen of forgery until chance set the rumor going and so suggested this sin to him—Norby, so tortured as long as Wangen is a helpless adversary, is hardened in his course and relieved of remorse when Wangen begins falsely to accuse him, to ascribe to him motives for the injury that were far from his mind. Then, when public opinion lets Norby know that it is behind him, that it considers him an honest man traduced by a blackguard, Norby actually forgets he was anything but an honest man, he expands in the smiles of approval, and actually does become a better man than he had ever been before, simply because he feeds on the spiritual food that is brought to him on the winds of circumstance.

That the food was stolen, that he was not innocent, is what will shock the sentimental reader, as it has shocked Hall Caine who writes an introduction for this latest novel. That is because Hall Caine believes that life is a charted affair, that setting a certain course always brings you to a certain destination, and he cannot see how the course of evil brings Norby to the destination of good. But Bojer knows that the world as such is amoral, uncharted. Stolen money is as likely to earn a safe six per cent as money that was toiled for. Nature is not a justice of the peace, and she does not protect the Wangens because they are honest or punish the Norbys because they are dishonest. Both the Norbys and the Wangens reward or punish themselves. Wangen was weak. In his trouble he leaned on the outside fact of his innocence, just as Mark, a good man, and Evje, a bad man, tried to lean on the outside facts of Socialism and philanthropy. They all three found that outside facts are likely to fail us.

Norby was ethically in the wrong, but he did not squeal or run after sympathy. He faced his sin in his own bosom until the tactics of the innocent aroused his fighting blood. He was a scoundrel, undoubtedly, but he was not trying to live above his ethical means: he did not try to overdraw his moral account. He does not beg spiritual sympathy—and lo, it comes flooding in upon and makes him virtuous in spite of himself.

That is rather bitter teaching for our nation of well-intentioned people. It was too bitter for Mr. Hall Caine, and he frankly says so in his introduction.

But when one reflects upon the unique reception which the work of Bojer has had in America, one wonders whether we are not beginning to grow up, whether our reading public is not ceasing to be juvenile or adolescent, and becoming mature. Certainly that large proportion of it which is reading Bojer will never again be satisfied with sentimentality in fiction. They will have seen how even the most ethical aspects of life, the most pressing "problems" of conduct, may be made the subject matter of novels at once utterly sincere in their approach to life, beautifully proportioned in their massing of background, circumstances, and character, and psychologically honest and significant in their illumination of the depths of the human soul.