there grew up about 1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight in
poetry. This instinct was presently satisfied by the effusion of a vast
quantity of metrical writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperated
by a violent personal feud which for a while interested all educated
persons in Norway to a far greater degree than any other intellectual
or, for the time being, even political question. From 1834 to 1838 the
interests of all cultivated people centred around what was called the
"Twilight Feud" (_Daemringsfejden_), and no record of Ibsen's
intellectual development can be complete without a reference to this
celebrated controversy, the results of which long outlived the
popularity of its skits and pamphlets.

Modern Norwegian literature began with this great fight. The
protagonists were two poets of undoubted talent, whose temperaments and
tendencies were so diametrically opposed that it seemed as though
Providence must have set them down in that raw and inflammable
civilization for the express purpose of setting the standing corn of
thought on fire. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was a belated son of the
French Revolution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusiasms fermented in
his ill-regulated brain, and he poured forth verses in a violent and
endless stream. It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavian
opinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Wergeland. The critics of
Norway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglect
and ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as
_himmelstraevende sublim_ ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); the
Danes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither view
commends itself to a foreign reader of the poet.

The fact, internationally stated, seems rather to be this. In Wergeland
we have a typical example of the effects of excess of fancy in a