Such a motive was characteristic of the vehement honesty
of Bjornson's own character; he must always, as he says in one of
his letters, go over to the side of any one whom he believed to
"hold the truth in his hands."
_The Editor_ (_Redaktoeren_) was written while Bjornson was in
Florence, and was published at Copenhagen in 1874. It was at first
not accepted for performance at Christiania or Copenhagen, though
an unauthorised performance of it was given at one of the lesser
Christiania theatres in 1875, Meanwhile a Swedish version of it had
been produced, authoritatively, at Stockholm in February of that
year. The play eventually made its way on the Norwegian and Danish
stage; but, before that, it had been seen in German dress at Munich
and Hamburg. As an inevitable result of his recent activities as a
political speaker and pamphleteer, Bjornson had come in for a good
deal of vituperation in the press, a fact which no doubt added some
gall to the ink with which he drew the portrait of the journalist
in this play. The Stockholm critics, indeed, had condemned _The
Editor_ as merely a pamphleteering attack on the editor of a
well-known journal. In answer to this criticism Bjornson wrote from
Rome in March, 1875: "It is said that my play is a pamphleteering
attack on a certain individual.
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