Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/628

 524 Sturtevant for love's sake sacrifices his honor. " Nora replies: "Hundreds of thousands of women have done so " ; yet she deliberately refuses to sacrifice 'self for the sake of her children who are the mother's first and supreme object of love. In Bj^rnson's stories there are no such moral incongruities as are represented in Ibsen's dramas. An interesting example of this may be afforded by the following parallel from Mors Hander and Ei Dukkehjem. When in Mors Hcender the daughter, who shares the aris- tocratic ideal that manual labor is degrading, feels disgraced because of her mother's coarse and unladylike hands, her mother replies: "If you have lived in a society where it is a shame for a lady to have such hands, then that is a bad society. " In Ibsen's Dukkehjem exactly the same conflict arises between the individual sense of righteousness and established convention, but convention as represented by the civil law and founded upon generally agreed principles of morality (which is not the case in Mors Hcender where convention represents a purely aristocratic code). Et Dukkehjem Act I. Krogstad. The laws take no account of motives. Nora. Then they must be very bad laws. Thus Bj0rnson again avoids the ethical dilemma into which Ibsen's dramatic instinct and his doctrine of non-compromise lead us. e) Character of the Mother Common sense is a virtue which nearly 17 all Bj0rnson's mothers possess, even if they are temporarily led astray. A conspicuous example of this is Gunlaug in Fiskerjcenten. Altho Gunlaug did everything within her power to prevent the lure of a larger life from taking her daughter away from lier, nevertheless, so soon as she found this to be impossible, she did not, like Dr. Stockman in Ibsen's En Folkefiende, fight out the battle against overwhelming odds but secretly aided her daughter to escape from her. Her admirable coolness 17 Kirsten Ravn and the mother in Stfiv may in some respects be an excep- tion to this rule.