h he was still
very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write for
journals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at long
intervals, with finished works of importance.

It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely
instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much
interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all
Ibsen's mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of
it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the local
conditions" or "situation." The play is all concerned with _de lokale
forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about
the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being,
as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in
Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer
deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Bjoernson's _The Newly
Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more
amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly
enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of
Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance
to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps,
like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own
language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching
but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not
realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de
lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry,
Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the
manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always
something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims.

Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant,
does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I
read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the
stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn
society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in
the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the
sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with
the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult
for an outsider--so difficult, in