the larger European view. 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
