Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/623

 The Family in Bjtfrnson's Tales 619 The first essential to the child's moral training is, as Bj0rn- son said in Det Flager (cf. above p. 6 10), a relation of absolute confidence between mother and child. Here again Kirsten Ravn makes a fatal mistake in not telling her son the whole story of his father's life. The boy, therefore, is ignorant of the fact that his father's financial downfall was due primarily to the inherited trait of stubbornness and insolence in the Kurt family; his father would not tolerate his wife as an equal or accept her as a partner in his enterprises. His father had discovered traces of cement deposit on their estate and upon the basis of his discovery engaged in an enter- prise for mining the cement, which resulted in complete finan- cial ruin. Now, when Rafael discovers the same deposits he naturally seeks to convert them into wealth, just as his father did, but here his mother interposes and to prevent a recurrence of the disaster she is forced to tell her son this incident in his father's life, which she had heretofore concealed. Instead of understanding her attitude as that of a well intentioned desire to prevent a repetition of his father's failure, Rafael interprets his mother's former secrecy as a sign of her lack of confidence in his abilities. As in the case of Oswald in Ibsen's Gengangere, suppressed inherited traits of character come to the surface. A misunderstanding of his mother's motives leads him to rebel against her authority and arouses within him the fatal sus- picion that his father's wilfumess was due not so much to inherited tendencies as to his mother's attitude of distrust. By comparing his own case with his father's, he concludes that his father was right in overruling his mother. Thus Kirsten Ravn, by her mistaken policy of supression, again brings about just the opposite result from that which she had desired. Her son's suspicions, fostered by her dictatorial methods, now grow into a conviction and an open break ensues. 16 16 Of all Bj^rnson's stories Absalon's Ear best illustrates the failure of the 'modern' cultural ideal thru a lack of practical wisdom. An analogous situation arises in Ibsen's Vildanden, where the ideal of truth fails of realization because it is applied under unfavorable conditions. In either case practical wisdom would have saved the situation; whether the truth should be divulged or not depends upon circumstances. The tragedy of Vildanden, however, Bj0rnson avoids by endowing Rafael's mother with an ideal devotion which finally tri- umphs over all her own mistakes and redeems her son's character.