In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for Ibsen took forms of almost
preposterous violence. The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam,
has given a curious and amusing account of the rage for Ibsen which came
to its height about 1880. The question which every student asked his
friend, every lover his mistress, was "What do you think of Ibsen?" Not
to be a believer in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which love
or friendship might easily be shipwrecked. It was quoted gravely as
an insufferable incompatibility for the state of marriage. There was
a curious and secret symbolism running through the whole of youthful
Swedish society, from which their elders were cunningly excluded, by
which the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to hand, presented on
solemn occasions, became the emblems of the problems interesting to
generous youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty and truth.
The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had become
clogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sources
of emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies,
spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it was
Ibsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded the
emancipation.

The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always according
to knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the
abuse showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are now
describing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian
and German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: "Stella Kleve" (Mathilda
Malling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen how
many "misunderstood" women would leave their homes in imitation of Nora,
and how many lovesick housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca,
he would have thrown ashes on his head and have retreated into the
deserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the
tragic circumstance where much was so purely comic. But if there were
elements of tragicomedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far more
important elements of vigorous and wholesome intellectual independence;
and it was during this period of Ibsen's almost hectic popularity that
the foundations of a new fiction and a new drama were laid in Sweden,
Denmark and Norway. A whole generation sucked strength and energy from
his early writings, since it is to be remarked that, from 1880 to 1890,
th