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his brooding mood of isolation and quietism, roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he had haunted those of Rome, by night or at unfrequented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors, writing few letters, slowly finishing his “photographic” comedy, which he did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although 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,”[1] but it excludes it from
- ↑ It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers The League of Youth to Björnson’s The Newly Married Couple (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.
