ould not pause to
consider the worldly advantages of their match, but should fly in
secret to each other's arms. By the law of battle, the female should be
snatched to the conqueror's saddle-bow, and ridden away with into
the night, not subjected to the jokes and the good advice and the
impertinent congratulations of the clan. Young Lochinvar does not wait
to ask the counsel of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of her
aunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where ford there is none. Ibsen
is in favor of the _mariage de convenance_, which suppresses, without
favor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above all, anything is better than
the publicity, the meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal, which
kills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are apt to break their own
eggs if intruding hands have touched them.

This is the central point in _Love's Comedy_, but there is much beside
this in its reckless satire on the "sanctities" of domestic life. The
burden of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the impertinent poet
touches with levity upon the question of the duration of marriage:

With my living, with my singing,
I will tear the hedges down!
Sweep the grass and heap the blossom!
Let it shrivel, pale and blown!
Throw the wicket wide! Sheep, cattle,
Let them browse among the best!
_I_ broke off the flowers; what matter
Who may graze among the rest!

_Love's Comedy_ is perhaps the most diverting of Ibsen's works; it is
certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian
society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A
prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross,
unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body
the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was
unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen
definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait
of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks for
an audience, was not less deeply outraged by the want of indulgence
which he had shown for all forms of amorous sentiment, although Ibsen
had really, through his satire on the methods of betrothal, risen
to something like a philosophical examination of the essence of love
itself.

To Brandes, who reproached him for not recording the history of ideal
engagements, and who remarked, "You know, there a