lhoug_, and of _Olaf
Liljekrans_ must be taken in spite of anything their author chose to say
nearly thirty years afterwards. Great poets, without the least wish to
mystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover their tracks." Tennyson, in
advanced years, denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley or
Keats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his style of the lyrical
dramas of Hertz. But we must appeal from the arrogance of old age to the
actual works of youth.

Henrik Hertz (1798-1870) was the most exquisite, the most delicate,
of the Danish writers of his age. He was deeply impressed with the
importance of form in drama, and at the height of his powers he began to
compose rhymed plays which were like old ballads put into dialogue.
His comedy of _Cupid's Strokes of Genius_ (1830) began a series of
tragi-comedies which gradually deepened in passion and melody, till they
culminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage,
_Svend Dyring's House_ (1837) and _King Rene's Daughter_ (1845). The
genius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in all
Europe there were not two authors less alike. Hertz would have pleased
Kenelm Digby, and if that romantic being had read Danish, the poet of
chivalry must have had a niche in _The Broad Stone of Honour_. Hertz's
style is delicate to the verge of sweetness; his choice of words is
fantastically exquisite, yet so apposite as to give an impression of the
inevitable. He cares very little for psychological exactitude or truth
of observation; but he is the very type of what we mean by a verbal
artist.

Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and possibly with the person, of
Hertz, when he was in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt whatever
that, while he was anxiously questioning his own future, and conscious
of crude faults in _Lady Inger_, he set himself, as a task, to write in
the manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt that it was a deliberate
exercise, and we see the results in _The Feast at Solhoug_ and in _Olaf
Liljekrans_. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and prose, like
Hertz's romantic dramas; there is the same determination to achieve the
chivalric ideal; but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master.
Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering about him, dances without
an ungraceful gesture through the elaborate and yet simple masque that
he has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high and sudden flights of
metrical wr