to a far greater degree than any other intellectual
or, for the time being, even political question. From 1834 to 1838 the
interests of all cultivated people centred around what was called
the "Twilight Feud" (_Daemringsfejden_), and no record of Ibsen's
intellectual development can be complete without a reference to
this celebrated controversy, the results of which long outlived the
popularity of its skits and pamphlets.

Modern Norwegian literature began with this great fight. The
protagonists were two poets of undoubted talent, whose temperaments
and tendencies were so diametrically opposed that it seemed as
though Providence must have set them down in that raw and inflammable
civilization for the express purpose of setting the standing corn of
thought on fire. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was a belated son of the
French Revolution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusiasms fermented
in his ill-regulated brain, and he poured forth verses in a violent
and endless stream. It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavian
opinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Wergeland. The critics of
Norway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglect
and ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as
_himmelstraevende sublim_ ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); the
Danes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither view
commends itself to a foreign reader of the poet.

The fact, internationally stated, seems rather to be this. In Wergeland
we have a typical example of the effects of excess of fancy in a
violently productive but essential uncritical nature. He was ecstatic,
unmeasured, a reckless improvisatore. In his ideas he was preposterously
humanitarian; a prodigious worker, his vigor of mind seemed never
exhausted by his labors; in theory an idealist, in his private life he
was charged with being scandalously sensual. He was so much the victim
of his inspiration that it would come upon him like a descending wind,
and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of
the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the
enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos.
We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, _Creation, Man
and the Messiah_ (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by
descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar
and turbidity of genius, with none of its pur