I gazed and stared,
fascinated, and took this new thing aboard along the whole gunwale.
Here, I felt, were definite forms, no mere dusk and fantastic
haze--something to fashion into poetry.... From the first hour you knew
how to look straight into this strange twilight of mine, and you espied
flashes of the aurora there when no one else did, like the true and
faithful friend you are. You helped and guided and found grains of
gold, where others saw mostly nonsense, and perhaps half a screw loose.
While I was straying in search of the spiritual tinsel, with which the
_esprits forts_ of the age were glittering, you taught me, and impressed
upon me, again and again, that I had to seek in myself for whatever I
might possess of sentiment and simplicity--and that it was out of this I
would have to build my fiction."
This bit of confession is extremely significant. The Finnish Hyde was
evidently yet uppermost. Bjoernson taught Lie to distrust the tinsel
glitter of mere rhetoric, and the fantastic exuberance of invention in
which the young Nordlander believed that he had his _forte_.
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