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* will be permitted to keep, in its entirety, what rightfully belongs to him.

In writing The Feast of Solhoug in connection with Svend Dyring’s House, George Brandes expresses the opinion, not that the former play is founded upon any idea borrowed from the latter, but that it has been written under an influence exercised by the older author upon the younger.  Brandes invariably criticises my work in such a friendly spirit that I have all reason to be obliged to him for this suggestion, as for so much else.

Nevertheless I must maintain that he, too, is in this instance mistaken.  I have never specially admired Henrik Hertz as a dramatist.  Hence it is impossible for me to believe that he should, unknown to myself, have been able to exercise any influence on by dramatic production.

As regards this point and the matter in general, I might confine myself to referring those interested to the writings of Dr. Valfrid Vasenius, lecturer on Aesthetics at the University of Helsingfors.  In the thesis which gained him his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Henrik Ibsen’s Dramatic Poetry in its First stage (1879), and also in Henrik Ibsen:  The Portrait of a Skald (Jos.  Seligman & Co., Stockholm, 1882), Valsenious states and supports his views on the subject of the play at present in question, supplementing them in the latter work by what I told him, very briefly, when we were together at Munich three years ago.