The boy Pelle I love most,—that imaginative, creative little Pelle who went about carving his animals and ships, helping Lasse in the cow-barns and sleeping there on the dung-piles, making his way through the strange and violent life at Stone Farm. This Pelle seems to disappear entirely in the labor struggle, during the time when he himself feels that whatever he gains for the poor is not what the poor most needs. But through all the story the love of Pelle and Lasse runs like music,—dear old smelly Lasse who was never able to match his idea of himself with the world. After a life of crushing labor and frustrated courage he crawls away to die in some horrible cellars under the docks, bound to be independent to the last. Pelle finds him there,—Pelle who couldn’t take care of one because he was caring for thousands. Like the rest of us he learned that little trick from God. People say to me that the town where Pelle learned his trade is overdrawn. “Why make a town without one normal person in it? It isn’t true to life!” It’s truer than life: it’s as true as art. Poverty, like some great Rodin, has brought these people out of the earth: some twisted, warped, grotesque, brutally handled; others beautiful or gigantic, cut passionately; their feet only left in the ground—all part of that from which they are hewn. In the Ark Nexø shows you something quite different of the poor—the city poor. My heart always aches about the Ark, not because they are so cold there and so without every last thing in the world; but because it is such an amazing and wonderful thing to be poor. Nexø doesn’t tell about the poor from any angle of the middle-classes; he doesn’t thrust upon them the psychology of any other class; he leaves them their own souls, and their own world. He isn’t writing of the abject, of failures, or of social settlement charges. He is writing of the Poor—the poor you have always with you. It isn’t the things they don’t have that make them so poignant: it’s what they have. He tells you of one little possession and you know all they have never possessed. I am waiting for the fourth volume to find out what it was that Ellen did. Every reviewer in the country has taken it for granted that Ellen resorted to prostitution to save Pelle and their children from starvation. But if I know Ellen she did nothing of the kind. She never could have done that. She took Pelle’s carving of the ten-croner note and had it made into money, thereby causing Pelle’s arrest for counterfeiting. If this isn’t what happened then there is no psychology for women. Out of all the stories in _Pelle_ I choose these three: the story of Hanne, of the end of her proud youth; the story the old grandmother at Kalle’s tells of her love; and the story of the Great Power and his wasted Art. There never was a story like the Great Power. It alone tells all there is to tell of the working classes,—how labor jumps at the throat of labor and the poor destroys its own. ----------