The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, so passionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to be welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an extravagant character. At the present moment any one conversant with Norwegian society who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will be surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the attractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almost universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national conscience, that even works like Ghosts, which shocked, and works like Rosmersholm, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, were excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at every national habit and showed a worm at the root of every national tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be accompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation," and he who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last resting place by a Parliament and a King.
It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to the whole world—his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this dissemination—yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between his country and himself was complete long before the prophet died. As he walked about, the strange, picturesque little old man, in the streets of Christiania, his fellow-citizens gazed at him with a little fear, but with some affection and with unbounded reverence. They understood at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante said in the New Life:—
è costui Che viene a consolar la nostra mente, Ed è la sua tanto possente, Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui.
No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his virtù, upon the Norwegian conscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it and had banished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows will doubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, and at the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the world, owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurtured in that new temper of mind, that spiritel nuovo d'amore which was inculcated by the whole work of Ibsen.