The Feast at Solhoug | Page 3

Dead) had at a still earlier
period made a similar attack on the great author who wrote both Axel
and Valborg and Hakon Jarl.
A quantity of other information useful to a critic was to be extracted
from these writings. From them one learned, for instance, that taste
obliged a good critic to be scandalised by a hiatus. Did the young
critical Jeronimuses of Christiania encounter such a monstrosity in any
new verse, they were as certain as their prototype in Holberg to shout
their "Hoity-toity! the world will not last till Easter!"
The origin of another peculiar characteristic of the criticism then
prevalent in the Norwegian capital was long a puzzle to me. Every time
a new author published a book or had a little play acted, our critics
were in the habit of flying into an ungovernable passion and behaving
as if the publication of the book or the performance of the play were a
mortal insult to themselves and the newspapers in which they wrote. As
already remarked, I puzzled long over this peculiarity. At last I got to
the bottom of the matter. Whilst reading the Danish Monthly Journal of
Literature I was struck by the fact that old State-Councillor Molbech
was invariably seized with a fit of rage when a young author published
a book or had a play acted in Copenhagen.
Thus, or in a manner closely resembling this, had the tribunal qualified
itself, which now, in the daily press, summoned _The Feast at
Solhoug_ to the bar of criticism in Christiania. It was principally
composed of young men who, as regards criticism, lived upon loans
from various quarters. Their critical thought had long ago been thought
and expressed by others; their opinions had long ere now been

formulated elsewhere. Their aesthetic principles were borrowed; their
critical method was borrowed; the polemical tactics they employed
were borrowed in every particular, great and small. Their very frame of
mind was borrowed. Borrowing, borrowing, here, there, and
everywhere! The single original thing about them was that they
invariably made a wrong and unseasonable application of their
borrowings.
It can surprise no one that this body, the members of which, as critics,
supported themselves by borrowing, should have presupposed similar
action on my part, as author. Two, possibly more than two, of the
newspapers promptly discovered that I had borrowed this, that, and the
other thing form Henrik Hertz's play, _Svend Dyring's House_.
This is a baseless and indefensible critical assertion. It is evidently to
be ascribed to the fact that the metre of the ancient ballads is employed
in both plays. But my tone is quite different from Hertz's; the language
of my play has a different ring; a light summer breeze plays over the
rhythm of my verse: over that or Hertz's brood the storms of autumn.
Nor, as regards the characters, the action, and the contents of the plays
generally, is there any other or any greater resemblance between them
than that which is a natural consequence of the derivation of the
subjects of both from the narrow circle of ideas in which the ancient
ballads move.
It might be maintained with quite as much, or even more, reason that
Hertz in his Svend Dyring's House had borrowed, and that to no
inconsiderable extent, from Heinrich von Kleist's _Kathchen von
Heilbronn_, a play written at the beginning of this century. Kathchen's
relation to Count Wetterstrahl is in all essentials the same as Tagnhild's
to the knight, Stig Hvide. Like Ragnhild, Kathchen is compelled by a
mysterious, inexplicable power to follow the man she loves wherever
he goes, to steal secretly after him, to lay herself down to sleep near
him, to come back to him, as by some innate compulsion, however
often she may be driven away. And other instances of supernatural
interference are to be met with both in Kleist's and in Hertz's play.

But does any one doubt that it would be possible, with a little good--or
a little ill-will, to discover among still older dramatic literature a play
from which it could be maintained that Kleist had borrowed here and
there in his Kathchen von Heilbronn? I, for my part, do not doubt it.
But such suggestions of indebtedness are futile. What makes a work of
art the spiritual property of its creator is the fact that he has imprinted
on it the stamp of his own personality. Therefore I hold that, in spite of
the above-mentioned points of resemblance, Svend Dyring's House is
as incontestably and entirely an original work by Henrick Hertz as
Katchen von Heilbronn is an original work by Heinrich von Kleist.
I advance the same claim on my own behalf as regards _The Feast at
Solhoug_, and I trust that, for the future, each of the three namesakes*