Oddly
enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of
Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance
to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps,
like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own
language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching
but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not
realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de
lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry,
Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the
manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always
something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims.
Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant,
does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I
read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the
stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn
society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the
early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the
sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with
the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult
for an outsider--so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly
from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of
Copenhagen.
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