complimentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if they show any
native influence at all, it is that of Welhaven. The extreme
superficiality of Wergeland would naturally be hateful to so arduous a
craftsman as Ibsen, and it is a fact that so far as his writings reveal
his mind to us, the all-popular poet of his youth appears to be
absolutely unknown to him. What this signifies may be realized if we say
that it is as though a great English or French poet of the second half
of the nineteenth century should seem to have never heard of Tennyson or
Victor Hugo. On the other hand, at one crucial point of a late play,
_Little Eyolf_, Ibsen actually pauses to quote Welhaven.

In critical history the absence of an influence is sometimes as
significant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style,
its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshod
violence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewed
with horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets of
Norway," only recently printed, dates from his early months in
Christiania, and shows that even in 1850 Ibsen was impatient with the
conventional literature of his day. "Less about the glaciers and the
pine-forests," he cries, "less about the dusty legends of the past, and
more about what is going on in the silent hearts of your brethren!" Here
already is sounded the note which was ultimately to distinguish him from
all the previous writers of the North.

No letters have been published which throw light on Ibsen's first two
years in the capital. We know that he did not communicate with his
parents, whose poverty was equalled by his own. He could receive no help
from them, nor offer them any, and he refrained, as they refrained, from
letter writing. This separation from his family, begun in this way, grew
into a habit, so that when his father died in 1877 no word had passed