Henrik Ibsen by Edmund Gosse

Temperament and environment combined at the period we have now reached to turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm und Drang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature were awakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of his age. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until 1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama. But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic rhyme.

With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must be borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_, was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire -- which had been rampant in the generation of Byron -- in the famous words: --