_The King_ is composed of curiously incongruous elements. The
railway meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to
compare with the meeting in Ibsen's _An Enemy of Society_; the last
act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting
social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always
underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the
melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the
third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of
much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone
before: And--strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially
"actual"--there is in the original, between each act, a mysterious
"mellemspil," or "interlude," in verse, consisting of somewhat
cryptic dialogues between Genii and Unseen Choirs in the clouds,
between an "Old Grey Man" and a "Chorus of Tyrants" in a desolate
scene of snow and ice, between Choruses of Men, Women, and Children
in a sylvan landscape, and so forth--their utterances being of the
nature of the obscurest choruses in the Greek dramatists, but for
the most part with a less obvious relevance to the play itself.
Such a device leads the present-day reader's thoughts inevitably to
the use made of the "unseen chorus," in a similar way, by Thomas
Hardy in _The Dynasts_; but Hardy's interludes are closely relevant
to his drama and help it on its way, which Bjornson's do not.
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