"The Story of Thomas Friis" undertakes to show, in
the career of a Danish youth who is meant to be typical, the futility of
the vainglorious imaginings with which the little nation has inflated
itself to a size out of proportion to its actual historic _role_. In
"The Old Pharmacy" the necessity of facing the changed reality of the
modern world, instead of desperately hugging an expiring past, is
enforced in a series of vivid and vigorous pictures of provincial life.
"The Forester's Children," which is one of the latest of this author's
novels, suffers by comparison with its predecessors, but is yet full of
cleverness and smacks of the soil.
Schandorph's naturalism is not pathological; not in the nature of an
autopsy or a diagnosis of disease. It is full-blooded and vigorous--not
particularly squeamish--but always fresh and wholesome. His shorter
tales and sketches ("From the Province," "Five Stories," "Novelettes")
are of more unequal merit, but are all more or less strongly
characterized by the qualities which fascinate in his novels.
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