Björnson began his literary career as a writer of peasant tales, followed by a succession of historical dramas; but when the age began to demand a new form of literature, his creative faculty came to a standstill. His last works in the old style are not to be compared with his earlier ones. In 1869, Ibsen wrote _The League of Youth_, which was the first of his social dramas. It is connected with peculiar circumstances to which I shall return later. Björnson’s next piece was called _A Bankrupt_, and as an emotional drama it manifested the same tendency as Ibsen’s satire, _i.e._ the tendency to criticise society. Next followed an overwhelming mass of literary productions with ever-widening horizons, and Björnson became a European celebrity. From henceforward he became the most important factor in the progress of culture in Germany. The causes of this revolution were threefold. In the first place it was probably due to a disheartening sense of failure which led him to seek for a wider scope, forced him to break through the innate narrowness and stability of his mind with violence to himself, and drove him to become a disciple of Brandes and to take food for the mind wherever he might find it, in Stuart Mill, Darwin, Spencer, the religious critics of Germany, Taine, and the modern Frenchmen. Next the stimulating influence of Brandes himself, who drove the contemporary generation of northern writers into the mazes of problematic literature, and finally--but, as I think, chiefly--the example of Ibsen. Björnson, as an author, was always a genius, and consequently he was not able to accomplish much by means of teaching, lecturing, philosophical discussions and hairbreadth argumentations; these remained dead to him, until one came who showed him the way. Next followed a succession of sketches from modern life on a basis of reform. The tragi-comedy of the merchant’s worm-eaten house was followed by the tragi-comedy of modern publishing, as treated in _The Editor_. The prudery of the modern system of educating girls, and the misfortune of having a dissolute father, provides material for a drama entitled _The New System_; while in _Leonarda_, the snivelling morality of the present day is contrasted with the cheerful and unprejudiced views of the grandmother. Here also Björnson was the energetic, gifted pedagogue, who by fair means or foul was the first to inculcate the elements of tolerance into his countrymen. He had not much psychological depth, and his tendency was in favour of atonement in the old æsthetic sense as it originated in Germany. In just this sense life was not realised in full earnest, nor life’s contrasts in their inexorability. There were always mistakes which only needed to be explained in order that repentance and amendment might ensue.