Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 13 Scribner's).pdf/20

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
xii
PREFACE

mann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole work by those volumes of it which have already appeared, I have little hesitation in saying that no other foreign author of the second half of the nineteenth century has been so ably and exhaustively edited in English as Ibsen has been in this instance.

The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further be recommended to the study of Carl Nerup’s Norsk Litteraturhistories siste Tidsrum (1905), a critical history of Norwegian literature since 1890, which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modern ideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway, scarcely one of whom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the tyranny of Ibsen’s personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen in England and France has often missed something of its historical value by not taking into consideration that movement of intellectual life in Norway which has surrounded him and which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may be allowed to say of my little book that this side of the subject has been particularly borne in mind in the course of its composition.

E. G. Klobenstein.