ot unnatural that Welhaven should
look upon the corybantic music of Wergeland as the source and origin
of an evil of which it was really the symptom; he gathered his powers
together to crush it, and he published a thunderbolt of sonnets.

The English reader, familiar with the powerlessness of even the best
verse to make any impression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile to
think of a great moral and ethical attack conducted with no better
weapon than a paper of sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small,
intensely local, easily agitated society of persons, all keenly
though narrowly educated, and all accustomed to be addressed in verse.
Welhaven's pamphlet was entitled _The Twilight of Norway_ (1834), and
the sonnets of which it consisted were highly polished in form, filled
with direct and pointed references to familiar persons and events and
absolutely unshrinking in attack. No poetry of equal excellence had
been produced in Norway since the Union. It is not surprising that
this invective against the tendencies of the youthful bard over whose
rhapsodies all Norway was growing crazy with praise should arrest
universal attention, although in the _Twilight_ Welhaven adroitly
avoided mentioning Wergeland by name. Fanaticism gathered in an angry
army around the outraged standard of the republican poet, but the lovers
of order and discipline had found a voice, and they clustered about
Welhaven with their support. Language was not minced by the assailants,
and still less by the defenders. The lovers of Wergeland were told that
politics and brandy were their only pleasures, but those of Welhaven
were warned that they were known to be fed with bribes from Copenhagen.
Meanwhile Welhaven himself, in successive publications, calmly analyzed
the writings of his antagonist, and proved them to be "in complete
rebellion against sound thought and the laws of beauty." The feud raged
from 1834 to 1838, and left Norway divided into two rival camps of
taste.

Although the "Twilight Feud" had passed away before Ibsen ceased to be a
boy, the effect of it was too widely spread not to affect him. In point
of fact, we see by the earliest of his lyric poems that while he was
at Grimstad he had fully made up his mind. His early songs and
complimentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if they show
any native influence at all, it is that of Welhaven. The extreme
superficiality of Wergeland would naturally be hateful to so arduous a
c