Leaf after leaf was turned; not a
smile, not a single encouraging word! The young poet had good reason to
regard the battle as lost. At last the pipe, the bottle, and the book
were finished. Then the merciless Stoic rose and began to dress, and the
following little exclamation escaped him: 'That is, the devil take me,
the best book I have read in all my life.'"
Bjoernson's style was no less novel than his theme. It may or it may not
have been consciously modelled after the saga style, to which, however,
it bears an obvious resemblance. In his early childhood, while he lived
among the peasants, he became familiar with their mode of thought and
speech, and it entered into his being, and became his own natural mode
of expression. There is in his daily conversation a certain grim
directness, and a laconic weightiness, which give an air of importance
and authority even to his simplest utterances. This tendency to
compression frequently has the effect of obscurity, not because his
thought is obscure, but rather because energetic brevity of expression
has fallen into disuse, and even a Norse public, long accustomed to the
wordy diffuseness of latter-day bards, have in part lost the faculty to
comprehend the genius of their own language.
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