The earliest attempt at the opening of a National Theatre had been made
at Christiania by the Swede, J. P. Stroemberg, in 1827; this was not
successful, and his theatre was burned down in 1835. In it some effort
had been made to use the Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, but
it had been to no avail. The play-going public liked their plays to be
Danish, and even nationalists of a pronounced species could not deny
that dramas, like the great historical tragedies of Oehlenschlaeger, many
of which dealt enthusiastically with legends that were peculiarly
Norwegian, were as national as it was possible for poems by a foreign
poet to be. All this time, it must be remembered, Christiania was to
Copenhagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as New York was half
a century ago. It is in the arts that the old colonial instinct of
dependence is most loath to disappear.
The party of the nationalists, however, had been steadily increasing in
activity, and the universal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 had
not been without its direct action upon Norway.
Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal policy, there was perhaps
no country in Europe where this period of seismic disturbance led to
less public turmoil than precisely here in the North.
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