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_.
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