The Merchant. I have not been able to go to church very much of late because of my cough. And in the foul air. ...
The King. You go to sleep. But are you a Christian?
The. Merchant. That goes without saying.
The King. (to the Priest.) And you are naturally one?
The Priest. By the grace of Jesus I hope that I am.
The King. That is the formula, boys, that is the accepted thing to say. Therefore, you are a Christian community, and it is no fault of mine if such a community will not deal seriously with what concerns Christianity. Greet it from me, and say that it must have an eye to the institution of monarchy.
The Priest. Christianity has nothing to do with such matters. It searches the inner man.
The King. That tone! I know it—it does not search the air in which the patient lives, but the lungs. There you have it! Nevertheless, Christianity must have an eye to the monarchy—must pluck the lie from it—must not follow it to its coronation in the church, as an ape follows a peacock. I know what I felt in that situation. I had gone through with a rehearsal the day before—ho, ho! Ask the Christianity in this land, if it be not time to concern itself with the monarchy. It should hardly any longer, it seems to me, let the monarchy play the part of the seductive wanton who turns the thoughts of all citizens to war—which is much against the message of Christianity—and to class distinctions, to luxury, to show and vanity. The monarchy is now so great a lie that it compels the most upright man to share in its falsehood."
The conversation that follows is in a vein of bitterness on the one side, and of obtuse smugness on the other; the tragic irony of the action grows deeper and deeper, until in the end the king, completely disheartened and despairing, goes into an adjoining room, and dies by his own hand, to the consternation of the men from whom he has just parted. They give utterance to a few polite phrases, charitably accounting for the deed by the easy attribution of insanity to the king, and the curtain falls.
It may well be imagined that "The King" made a stir in literary and social circles, and quite noticeably fluttered the dovecotes of conventionality and conservatism. Such plain speaking and such deadly earnestness of conviction were indeed far removed from the idyllic simplicity of the peasant tales and from the poetical reconstructions of the legendary past. Eight years later, Björnson prefaced a new edition of this work with a series of reflections upon "Intellectual Freedom" that constitute one of the most vigorous and remarkable examples of his serious prose. The central ideas of his political faith are embodied in the following sentences from this preface:—