Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/621

 The Family in Bjtfrnson's Tales 617 d) The Son and the Mother Such innate stubbornness and self-reliant individualism is perhaps the most difficult trait in the boy's character with which the parents have to contend. Even the mother some- times fails to understand this, and consequently a catastrophe cannot be avoided, however sound or progressive her theories as to moral education may otherwise be, or however unselfish the love which she may bestow upon her son. Such is the tragedy most skilfully portrayed in Absalorfs Hdr. The boy Rafael has inherited the sensual and rebellious nature of the Kurt family; " han var opro'rets s0n." At first he rebels against his father because of the latter's brutality towards his mother. "It became the boy's secret religion," says Bj^rnson, "to oppose him (his father) and to help his mother, for she was the one who suffered." After his father's death he rebels in turn against his mother (Kirsten Ravn), who endeavors to realize her ideal in the boy by giving him all the advantages of an education and culture which his father had denied him. But by putting her son into a social and pedagogical straitjacket she arouses in him that slumbering spirit of rebellion which had previously asserted itself against his father; her methods thus result in just the opposite of that which she desires. She quite correctly attributes his sensual and rebellious nature to his inheritance from his father (the degenerate Kurt blood), but she never for a moment suspects that by her arbitrary methods she herself is to blame for the manifestation of the Kurt character in her son. In Absalon's Hdr the 'modern' mother appears in a most unfavorable light, because she has failed to recognize the fundamental instincts of human nature in her son and has consequently allowed her modern theories of culture to over- shadow the necessary principle of intelligent co-operation. Both Ingrid and Arne's mother, altho limited by the peasant ideals of family life, take due cognizance of these fundamental principles and, therefore, even tho intellectually inferior, these women are in this regard far more intelligent than Kirsten Ravn. The latter has unwittingly fallen into the same error as that upon which the inherited traditions of parental authority were founded and to which she herself is violently opposed,