In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator.  So far at least as its external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to,—­a kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage.  What he did was to take over the theater as a going concern, holding himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered it satisfactorily.  Considering Ibsen’s inexperience as a writer of prose-plays dealing with contemporary life, the ‘League of Youth’ is really very remarkable as a first attempt.  Indeed, its defects are those of its models; and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned on Stensgard, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has approached.

As Lowell has said:  “It is of less consequence where a man buys his tools than what use he makes of them”; but it so happened that Ibsen acquired his stage-craft in the place where it is most easily attained, in the place where Shakspere and Moliere had acquired it,—­in the theater itself.  In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been appointed “theater-poet” to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be director of a new theater, where he was to remain yet another five years.  In this decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also original in his native tongue by Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and many more translated from Scribe, from Scribe’s collaborators and from Scribe’s contemporaries.  In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe was dominant, as it was all over the civilized world in the mid-years of the century.

As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the “well-made play” of Scribe when he wrote the ‘League of Youth,’ which is his earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway.  There is obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen’s dramas, those which have won widest popularity in the theater itself are those which most frankly accept the Gallic framework,—­the ‘Pillars of Society,’ the ‘Doll’s House,’ and ‘Hedda Gabler.’  Yet it is significant, also, that even in the least individual of Ibsen’s earlier pieces, the action is expressive of character; and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen’s personages control the plot; whereas, in the dramas of Scribe, the situations may be said almost to create the characters, which, indeed, exist only for the purposes of that particular story.

IV