of the three Scandinavian countries, but
as the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of what
it would become. In 1880, Norway, the youngest and long the rawest of
the three civilizations, was now the foremost in activity, and though
the influence of Bjoernson and Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was not
to be compared for breadth and complexity with that of Ibsen. The nature
of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between
1880 and 1890, that is to say from _Ghosts_ to _Hedda Gabler_, was
destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama
of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace
and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and
sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in
Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and
catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the
old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its
faded elegance it withered up and vanished.

The next event was that the new generation in the three Northern
countries, deprived of its traditional authorities, looked about for a
prophet and a father, and they found what they wanted in the exceedingly
uncompromising elderly gentleman who remained so silent in the cafes
of Rome and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this unseen and
unsympathetic personage was extraordinary, and took forms of amazing
extravagance. Ibsen's impassivity merely heightened the enthusiasm of
his countless admirers, who were found, it should be stated, almost
entirely among persons who were born after his exile from Norway.
His writings supplied a challenge to character and intelligence
which appealed to those who disliked the earlier system of morals and
aesthetics against which he had so long fought single-handed.

Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the position
that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country,
that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling
group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied
laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented,
for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and with
those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little
later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthful
minds of any vigor or elasticity.