For over half a century this intellectual athlete has been one of the busiest men in the world. A partisan fighter born and bred, he has been active in every political Skandinavian struggle; in religious questions he has fought first on one side and then on the other, changing only by honest conviction, and hitting with all his might every time; to him the word "education" is as a red rag to a bull, for he believes that it has been mainly bad, and if people will only listen, he can make it mainly good; in a passion of chivalry, he has drawn his pen for the cause of Woman, whose "sphere" he hopes to change--the most modern and the most popular of all the vain attempts to square the circle; his powerful voice has been heard on the lecture platform, not only in his own beloved country, but all over Europe and in America; he has served for years as Theatre-Director, in the determination to convert the playhouse, like everything else he touches, into a vast moral force. In addition to all the excitement of a life spent in fighting, his purely literary activity has been enormous in quantity and astonishing in range. His numerous dramas treat of all possible themes, from the old Sagas to modern divorce laws; and after exhausting all earthly material, he has boldly advanced into the realm of the supernatural; his splendid play, _Beyond Human Power_, holds the boards in most European cities, and has exercised a profound influence on modern drama. His novels are as different in style and purpose as it is possible for the novels of one man to be; and some of them are already classics. A man with such an endowment, with such tremendous convictions, with buoyant optimism and terrific energy, has made no small stir in the world, and it will be a long time before the name of Björnstjerne Björnson is forgotten.