The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had become
clogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sources
of emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies,
spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it was
Ibsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded the
emancipation.
The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always according to
knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the abuse
showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are now
describing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian and
German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: "Stella Kleve" (Mathilda
Malling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen how
many "misunderstood" women would leave their homes in imitation of Nora,
and how many lovesick housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca,
he would have thrown ashes on his head and have retreated into the
deserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the
tragic circumstance where much was so purely comic.
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