It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all Ibsen's mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the local conditions" or "situation." The play is all concerned with _de lokale forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being, as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Björnson's _The Newly Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry, Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims.
Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past 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 Jaabaek (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.