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. The political conditions which led to the writing of The League of Youth are old history now. There was the “liberal” element in Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and more hampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence of Sören Jaabek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views, who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any pensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen.
Now Björnson, in the development of his career as a political publicist, had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideas and this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense before Jaabak, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of Dresden, genuinely believed that Björnson, with his ardor and his energy and his eloquence, was becoming a national danger. We have seen that Björnson had piqued Ibsen’s vanity about Peer Gynt, and nothing exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Björnson was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Björnson
