to poetize or symbolize it—as in those marvellous chapters of Workpeople in which he describes the coming of spring to Norway, and the passage of a mail-steamer along the coast with its freight of joy and sorrow. For symbolic description, if I may call it so, he has a peculiar talent; witness the picture in Fortuna of the inflation of credit preceding a commercial crash, and the passages in Snow which give the book its title. His humour, which is, I think, fully exemplified in the following pages, is never allowed to run riot. Exquisitely comic though it be, the toddy-drinking of the two old sailors in Skipper Worsë is at the same time a piece of pure realism. Even in an irresponsibly fantastic sketch like The Battle of Waterloo, the humour is sober, and does not stray into wanton caricature. But the natural cast of Kielland's genius is tragic, almost pessimistic. If his books do not, on the whole, appear so sombre as those of some other novelists of the modern school, it is only because of the extreme alertness of his style. Two of them, Workpeople and Elsa, are pictures of social corruption; one, St. John's Day, deals with clerical tyranny; the rest may be broadly described as studies in the degeneration of character. To this class belong his two finest
