Los Angeles herald., 1909-07-18

SAINTS piece of String" and 1.-THE
"A Necklace in tracing the baleful
r-sults of a petty human act is THE
Power of a Lie," translated from the
Norwegian of Johan Bojer by Jessie
Muir, with a remarkably obtuse intro
duction by Hall Caine A tritling false
hood, permitted at first rather than
told outright, and allowed to gain
credence on the wings of gossip,
wrencheS the moral center of two lives
and shakes the entire fabric of char
acter of an entire village, sending
waves and ripples of evil influence to
faroff folk unconscious of their con-
tamination. We see the law of the
universe, not as some relative thing
which fleeting repentance may reverse,
but as a chain of cause and effect
which fetters its human trespassers to
indefinite futurity.
Knut Norby, a prosperous Norwegian
farmer, signs a friends bond. The
friend becomes bankrupt through his
own visionary recklessness. Norby
fears to tell his wife of the loss, as
he had feared to apprise her of his
original thoughtless risk in becoming
surety. When the wife questions him
as to the rumor that he has signed,
and denounces the signature as for
gerry, Norby weakly assents, meaning
to right the wrong before the matter
assumes any legal complexities. From
mouth to mouth travels the lie, and
by the time for the trial of Wangen,
the bankrupt, on the charge of forgery,
Norby, in representation, fights with
his whole strength to establish it,
Here enters that far-northern subtle
ty of human comprehension which re-
calls the Ibsen touch and in which Mr..
Hall Caine founders timorously in the
mild disparagement which family col
ors his Introduction. The liar, but
tressed by support of the solid people
of the town and cumulatively self-de-
ceived by his own subsiding conscience,
begins to tread the well-worn path of
self-justification. The man he accuses,
righteously indignant at the injustice
done him, blinds himself to the folly
which wrecked his business, and be-
gins to excuse every misstep in his
inept past on the score of his inno-
cence of one false charge. Both men
obscure the point in which they have
erred while bathing in the dazzling
light of conscious rectitude. Each
filings untrue allegations against the
other broadcast, and each in turn de-
riVes added assurance of virtue from
the ISLANDERS of the other. At the last
each has "a good conscience such as a
man may have who, being innocent on
twenty charges, forgets that he is
guilty on the twenty-first." When
each thinks of the twenty, "he, as it
were, tells God Almighty that they
balance" Wangen begins to think of
the people whom his failure has de-
frauded, his indignation against him
self is turned to fury against the man
who was his surety, and he feels with
in him the birthpangs of a call to lead
an uprising of the poor against the
rich.
The infection spreads, and Wangen's )
wife-a noble, tragic figure-in desper-
ate endeavor to be true to her vows as
a helpmeet, at length connives at II
real forgery by which her husband at
tempts to show that a witness to Nor
bys signature exists. The ruse is de-
tected and Wangen goes to prison,
while we catch a breathless glimpse of
the wife in flight and fighting to Danish
the specter of suicide which beckons
her on.
Norby's son, who has ceased his
study for holy orders because consci-
entiously unable to accept the ortho-
dox creed, had heard his father say he
had gone surety for Wangen. In his
SOUL too, the battle between truth and
falsehood wages, and he yields to the
devil of opportunism in the very court
room whittier he has gone with ago
nized intent to betray his father, keep
ing silent and later hushing his inward
monitor with the hasheesh of a love
affair. There is also the curious case
of Pastor Boring, who secretly doubts
both the atonement and the sacra-
ments, yet is pictured as becoming a
good man because of the watch his
covert inf1delity bids him keep over