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Johan Bojer.

A definition of the modern novel would be wellnigh impossible, because it would need to include such diverse and even contradictory creations. The younger English novelists swamp the market with volumes dealing with the development of superficial, dilletante Oxford youths, and incidentally revealing the unsoundness of the Upper Ten of British Society. One's head aches at the utter worthlessness of Stephen McKenna's Margot-Asquithian characters, or Compton MacKenzie's Guy Hazelwoods. It is very similar to the state of poetry during the Civil War, when the gallant Caroline poets seemed to have no grasp of the deeper meaning of the changes around them. With what relief one turns to the more virile democracies, where the novel is a vehicle for a different spirit!

Among the Norwegians, Johan Bojer is a novelist whose stories are charged with a wide spiritual purport. Here you have sincerity and the recognition of the sufferings of mankind in place of the jejune posturing of the Englishmen. His heroes are men who have tasted the gall and wormwood of life and who have not just aimlessly toyed round with its superficialities.

The philosophy underlying his books is typically that of the twentieth century. Having well emerged from the depressing shadow of Christianity, he is free to look on man with scaleless eyes. He can gaze in admiration at mankind's great imaginative power in creating its successive Gods, when he realises that these deities are just its fears and aspirations objectified and projected into the skies and endowed with life. Such is his attitude in the sublime pean at the end of "The Great Hunger."—

"And yet man smiles and laughs in the face of his tragic fate. In the midst of his thraldom he has created the beautiful on earth; in the midst of his torments he has had so much surplus energy of soul that he has sent it radiating forth into the cold deeps of space and warmed them with God. ... So marvellous art thou, o spirit of man! So godlike in thy very nature! Thou dost reap death, and in return thou sowest the dream of everlasting life. In revenge for thy evil fate thou dost fill the universe with an allloving God."

Such writing would have been impossible for those in the nineteenth century. The worthy members of the R.P.A. poured immense vituperation on God and the Churches, but one feels that the very intensity of their antagonism was due to the necessity of fortifying themselves in their new scepticism. In the jargon of the new psychology, they had inbred a strong religious complex, so that when their anticlerical complex arose it needed to have strong pugnacious emotion attached to overshadow the earlier one. Swinburne's "Hymn of Man," represents the transition period. It is a mixture of hatred of the old God and adulation to the new, which is the Divine Fire in each man's breast.

"O thou, the Lord God of our tyrants; they call thee their God, by thy name, By thy name that in hellfire was written, and burned at the point of thy sword,
Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten, thy death' is upon thee, Lord!
And the love song of earth as thou diest, resounds through the wind of her wings—
Glory to man in the highrst! for Man is the mastor of things."

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Since this, other typical products of this age have enunciated the new religion in terms very similar to Bojer's. For example, H. G. Wells in his "Undying Fire," and Bertrand Russell in his essay on "The Religion of a Free Man."

Of course in different ages, disinterested spirits have been to admire the Gods as lifelike works of the art of the sculptor, Man. In the seventh century, B.C., Xenophanes wrote:—

"Men make gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and fair hair. If horses, or oxen or lions had hands and could produce works of art, they too would represent the gods after their own fashion."

And in the dark seventeenth century Spinoza wrote at length against the childlike assumption that the universe was ordered for man's benefit. He traces its origin and says:—

"Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, but in their endeavour to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e., nothing that is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods and men are all mad together. Among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, so they declared the gods were angry at some wrong done by men. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of the pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice."

Bojer's scepticism as to the value of applied science is even greater than Mill's. The hero of "The Great Hunger," in commenting on a remark about the White Man's Burden of culturising the backward races, says: "Culture! One wheel begets ten new ones; more speed, more competition—and all for what? For culture? No, for money. Missionary! I tell you, as long as Western Civilisation with all its wonders of modern science and its Christianity has not turned out a better type of humanity than the mean ruck of men we have now we'd do best to stay at home."

The truth of this has been brought home to many more since the War. Soon we shall demand that science and morals be not divorced. What a travesty it is, if, through following out the dictum of the disinterested search for knowledge, the scientific specialists—those astoundingly politicallyignorant geniuses, are cajoled into permitting all their labours to be used to exterminate mankind! In future we must see that these men turn some of their critical powers on to the structure of human society. And then they will refuse to cooperate in making poison gases.

In "The Power of a Lie," Bojer states in a new light the old problem of the evil man flourishing. As Dewey has shown, the Old Testament contains several attempts to solve the problem of evil. At first it was assumed that good and evil were rewarded here, but when this was found fallacious the Hebrews felt the need of a heaven where injustice would be righted. To the further question as to why there need be evil, even Job could only answer that the ways of God are inscrutable. The reincarnation of the Theosophists is inspired by the same motive of doing away with injustice. None of these proved lastingly satisfactory; but at last the solution was reached that virtue was not rewarded by material prosperity anywhere, but by inward contentment. That this also is specious Bojer page 56 shows in this book. Here the man who tells the lie, in his efforts to justify his sin to himself, finally becomes a nobler man and the bite of remorse dies. The victim of the lie, on the other hand, becomes a wastrel in spite of his innocence. Hall Caine, an exponent of the orthodox view, with his dark sombre novels of Sin and Remorse and Inevitable Retribution, denies the possibility of this solution. Freudian psychology, however, supports Bojer and could give thousands of instances where the unpleasant is successfully banished for ever into the subconscious. As a writer in "The Times" says in a different connection: "How many men have been soured into cynicism or cowed into acquiescence by the consequences of their attempt to do good? Contrariwise, how many saints, an Augustine, a Rance, have been turned towards virtue by the taste of the dregs of their vices? It was after a murder, not after a good deed, that Saul went on the road to Damascus. Within the phenomenal process neither natural nor spiritual rewards of goodness can be invariably traced."

Although so full of philosophical meaning, Bojer's characters are not mere puppets voicing his ideas; and his frequent use of natural catastrophes, fires, landslides and floods is solely to illustrate the indifference of Nature to man, not as a deus ex machina except in the case of "Our Kingdom." Some of the minor characters, especially the old farm hand in that book, are exceedingly well drawn. His women, however, are not so powerful or so original as his men. They are often mere foils to show up the intense intellect of the men. Perhaps he has not learnt the great lesson of Ibsen that man must not sacrifice woman to develop himself, and that her personality is as sacred as his own. Poor Merle's obedience to Peer is not unlike Agnes's sacrifice to Brand.

—W. M. B.