and environment combined at the period we have now reached
to turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm und
Drang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature were
awakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of his
age. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted
away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no
longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a
work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until
1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section
of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of
his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The
Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama.
But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section
which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic
rhyme.

With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great
difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must
be borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the
sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_,
was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had been
rampant in the generation of Byron--in the famous words:--

I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.

What England repudiated, Norway comprehended, and in certain hands
enjoyed. Polemical literature, if seldom of a high class, was abundant
and was much appreciated. The masterpiece of modern Norwegian poetry
was, still, the satiric cycle of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, the
tone was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled more violently, than
English taste at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to
crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself,
and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw
"afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches," as
Dryden said.

Yet it was not an age of gross and open vices; manners were not
flagitious, they were merely of a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown with
anger as with wine, could find no outrageous offences to lash, and all
he could invite the age to do was to laugh at certain conventions and to
reconsider some prejudicat