This is so obviously a closet-drama that it is difficult to imagine how it would look under the illumination of the foot-lights. For all that, I see a recent announcement that the trial is soon to be made at the _Theatre Libre_ in Paris.[10] No Scandinavian theatre, as far as I know, has as yet had the courage to risk the experiment. In his next play, however, "Love and Geography" (1885), Bjoernson reconquered the stage and repeated his early triumphs. From the scientific seriousness of "Beyond their Strength" his pendulum swung to the opposite extreme of light comedy, almost bordering on farce. Not that "Love and Geography" is without a Bjoernsonian moral, but it is amusingly, jocosely enforced in scenes of great vivacity and theatrical effect. This time it is himself the author has chosen to satirize. The unconscious tyranny of a man who has a mission, a life-work, is delightfully illustrated in the person of the geographer, Professor Tygesen, to whom Bjoern Bjoernson, the actor, when he played the part at the Christiania Theatre, had the boldness to give his father's mask. Professor Tygesen is engaged upon a great geographical opus, and gradually takes possession of the whole house with his maps, globes, and books, driving his wife from the parlor floor and his daughter to boarding-school. So absorbed is he in his work that he can talk and think of nothing else. He neglects the social forms from sheer abstraction and becomes almost a boor, because all the world outside of his book pales into insignificance, and all persons and events are merely interesting in so far as they can stimulate inquiry or furnish information bearing upon the immortal opus. The inevitable consequence follows. The professor alienates all who come in contact with him. He is on the point of losing the affection of his wife, and his daughter comes near going astray for want of paternal supervision. Both these calamities are, however, averted, though in an arbitrary and highly eccentric manner. The professor's eyes are opened to the error of his ways, he does penance, and the curtain falls upon a reunited family. [10] July, 1894. The unpretentious little story "Dust" (_Stoev_, 1882) undertakes to demonstrate the unwholesomeness of the religious ideas regarding the life to come usually impressed upon children by parents and teachers. By dust Bjoernson means all obsolete, lifeless matter in the world of thought which settles upon, and often impairs, the vitality of the living growth, or even chokes it outright. "When children are taught that the life here is nothing compared to the life to come--that to be visible is nothing compared to being invisible--that to be a man is nothing compared to being an angel--that to be alive is nothing compared to being dead--then that is not the way to give them the right view of life; not the way to teach them to love life; not the way to inspire them with courage, energy, and patriotism."