As regards the themes of these "novelettes" (from which the present collection is chiefly made up), it was remarked at the time of their first appearance that they hinted at a more serious purpose than their style seemed to imply. Who can read, for instance, "Pharaoh" (which in the original is entitled "A Hall Mood") without detecting the revolutionary note which trembles quite audibly through the calm and unimpassioned language? There is, by-the-way, a little touch of melodrama in this tale which is very unusual with Kielland. "Romance and Reality," too, is glaringly at variance with the conventional romanticism in its satirical contributing of the pre-matrimonial and the post-matrimonial view of love and marriage. The same persistent tendency to present the wrong side as well as the right side--and not, as literary good-manners are supposed to prescribe, ignore the former--is obvious in the charming tale "At the Fair," where a little spice of wholesome truth spoils the thoughtlessly festive mood; and the squalor, the want, the envy, hate, and greed which prudence and a regard for business compel the performers to disguise to the public, become the more cruelly visible to the visitors of the little alley-way at the rear of the tents. In "A Good Conscience" the satirical note has a still more serious ring; but the same admirable self-restraint which, next to the power of thought and expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much--from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, _à la_ George Eliot. But he must be obtuse, indeed, to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page of philosophical moralizing.
"Hope's Clad in April Green" and "The Battle of Waterloo" (the first and the last tale in the Norwegian edition), are more untinged with a moral tendency than any of the foregoing. The former is a mere _jeu d'esprit_, full of good-natured satire on the calf-love of very young people, and the amusing over-estimate of our importance to which we are all, at that age, peculiarly liable.
As an organist with vaguely-melodious hints foreshadows in his prelude the musical _motifs_ which he means to vary and elaborate in his fugue, so Kielland lightly touched in these "novelettes" the themes which in his later works he has struck with a fuller volume and power. What he gave in this little book was it light sketch of his mental physiognomy, from which, perhaps, his horoscope might be cast and his literary future predicted.