Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/618

 614 Sturtevant father was present, Trend had to keep quiet. " Trond naturally feels his father's presence as an impersonation of authority and an intrusion upon the freedom of youth. Furthermore, this sort of 'truant officer' fear is aggravated by the conscious- ness that his father is not in sympathy with his interests. Under the existing conditions of family tradition Trend's instinct is perfectly correct. But far different is his feeling for his mother, who sees the child's heart, lives in the child's world and devotes her life to the child's happiness. When the boy gets his first treasure, a new violin, he imagines his mother as the e-string "the tender sweet chord", but his father as the ^-string "the low, deep sounding chord" , "which he never played on very much either." This fine, sensitive chord vibrating in harmony with the child's soul, is beautifully illustrated, for instance, in En Glad Gut When Marit's grandfather brings to 0yvind's family his message of ill-will, whereby the boy's whole future happiness hangs, as it were, by a thread, Bj^rnson says: "His mother, who from the kitchen-door had heard everything, gazed with grief upon 0yvind and almost burst into tears; but she didn't want to make it harder for him by saying even a single word." This delicacy of feeling in the simple peasant woman is exactly the quality of little Trend's e-string. The child's naturally wilful disposition Bj^rnson depicts most skilfully in En Livsgade (1869). When little Agnes, for instance, tries to teach her baby brother the Lord's Prayer, the little fellow repeats each verse very dutifully until he reaches the command: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done," whereupon he suddenly turns against his perceptress with a determined " No, no, I won't. " This naturally wilful and stubborn nature in the child the father seeks to overrule by force, while the mother tries to bend the child's will by moral suasion and a sympathetic understand- ing of the child's nature. The mother, therefore, meets the difficulty with far greater intelligence than does the father, and with far less disastrous effects upon the child's character. The disastrous effects of this attitude upon the part of the father (altho the mother is also partly to blame) Bj0rnson well illustrates in his tragic story St0v. The father has been reading Spencer's "Essays on Education" and seeks to apply Spencer's