to be
welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in
Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an
extravagant character. At the present moment any one conversant with
Norwegian society who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer
or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will be
surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the
attractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almost
universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be
found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into
the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national
conscience, that even works like _Ghosts_, which shocked, and works like
_Rosmersholm_, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, were
excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who
reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at
every national habit and showed a worm at the root of every national
tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be
accompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation," and
he who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last resting
place by a Parliament and a King.

It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to the
whole world--his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this
dissemination--yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home
that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how
hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between
his country and himself was complete long before the prophet died. As he
walked about, the strange, picturesque little old man, in the streets
of Christiania, his fellow-citizens gazed at him with a little fear,
but with some affection and with unbounded reverence. They understood
at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it
applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it
their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante
said in the _New Life_:--

e costui Che viene a consolar la nostra mente, Ed e la sua tanto
possente, Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui.

No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which
Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his _virtu_, upon the Norwegian
conscience, not halting