achievements, in my esteem—Skipper Worsë and Gift (Poison). Pietism is the subject of the former, social hypocrisy of the latter. My personal preference, though I should perhaps be at a loss to give very good reasons for it, points to Gift as his masterpiece. It tells of the struggle between a father and mother for the soul of their son—a struggle in which the mother, a woman of singularly fine and upright nature, is pitifully worsted. But I must not be betrayed into the futility of attempting to arrange the works of so fine an artist in a definite order of merit; especially as the reader is probably not in a position to check my conclusions. The present volume contains in germ all the best qualities of Kielland's talent—his humour in Hope's clad in April Green, his fantasy in The Peat Moor, his tenderness in The Parsonage, his sarcasm in A Good Conscience, his vivid social sympathies in At the Fair. He is not a clairvoyant psychologist, like Meredith, nor a stereoscopic realist like Maupassant; but he is an observer, a humorist, an artist, a poet, and, above all, a born story-teller and creator of living men and women.[1]
- ↑ For the principal facts in this biographical sketch I am indebted to Herr J. B. Halvorsen's excellent Norsk Forfatterlexikon.
