With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted
away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no
longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a
work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until 1863,
it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section of
Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of his
national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The
Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama.
But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section
which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic
rhyme.
With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great
difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must be
borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the
sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_, was
giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had been
rampant in the generation of Byron--in the famous words:--
I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.
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