Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has, unquestionably, had the greatest influence upon me.  It is his most delicate and most imaginative work, appealing quite as much through its intellectual significance as through its noble, humane spirit.  I read it first in Eiksdal when I was writing Arne, and I felt rebuked for the gloomy feelings under the spell of which that book was written.  But I took the lesson to heart:  I felt that I had in my soul something that could produce a play with a little of the fancy and joy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—­and I made resolutions.  But the conditions under which a worker in art lives in Norway are hard, and all we say or promise avails nothing.  But this I know:  I am closer to the ideal of this play now than then, I have a fuller capacity for joy and a greater power to protect my joy and keep it inviolate.  And if, after all, I never succeed in writing such a play, it means that circumstances have conquered, and that I have not achieved what I have ever sought to achieve.

“And one longs to present a play which has been a guiding star to oneself.  I knew perfectly well that a public fresh from Orpheus would not at once respond, but I felt assured that response would come in time.  As soon, therefore, as I had become acclimated as director and knew something of the resources of the theater, I made the venture.  This is not a play to be given toward the end; it is too valuable as a means of gaining that which is to be the end—­for the players and for the audience.  So far as the actors are concerned, our exertions have been profitable.  The play might doubtless be better presented—­we shall give it better next year—­but, all in all, we are making progress.  You may call this naivete, poetic innocence, or obstinacy and arrogance—­whatever it is, this play is of great moment to me, for it is the link which binds me to my public, it is my appeal to the public.  If the public does not care to be led whither this leads, then I am not the proper guide.  If people wish to get me out of the theater, they may attack me here.  Here I am vulnerable.”

In Morgenbladet for May 1st the reviewer made a sharp reply.  He insists again that the local theater is not equal to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  But it is not strange that Bjornson will not admit his own failure.  His eloquent tribute to the play and all that it has meant to him has, moreover, nothing to do with the question.  All that he says may be true, but certainly such facts ought to be the very thing to deter him from giving Shakespeare into the hands of untrained actors.  For if Bjornson feels that the play was adequately presented, then we are at a loss to understand how he has been able to produce original work of unquestionable merit.  One is forced to believe that he is hiding a failure behind his own name and fame.  After all, concludes the writer, the director has no right to make this a personal matter.  Criticism has no right to turn aside for injured feelings, and all Bjornson’s declarations about the passions of the hour have nothing to do with the case.