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.