V THE YOUNG MEN'S LEAGUE (1869) The Young Men's League is actually the first of the prose social dramas, though in Love's Comedy, published seven years earlier, we find the poet preoccupied with love and marriage. Politics and politicians fill the picture, an exceedingly animated one of the new play. Some critics pretend to see in the figure of Steensgaard a burlesque of Björnson, with whom about this time Ibsen had a quarrel. But this has been denied. Steensgaard is the ideal politician,--that is, the politician without ideals. He is carried away by the sound of his own sonorous voice, by the rumbling of his own empty rhetoric. Brought up in low environment, he snobbishly worships all this as base and vulgar. So we find him capitulating to the enemy at the first attack, a little flattery, a pleasant visit to an aristocratic house, a peep at the daughter, and Steensgaard has changed his political skin. He has so long misled himself that he misleads others. He is a phrase-monger, a _parvenu_, a turn-coat. He is, in a word, a politician all the world over. Thackeray would have delighted in the portrait of this blathering, self-confident, self-deceived--a Peer Gynt in politics, but without Peer's brilliant imagination. The characters grouped about him are very vital,--the pompous aristocrat, Chamberlain Bratsberg; the impressionable Selma; Monsen the swindler, Bastian and Ragna his children; the shrewd Dr. Fjeldbo; Daniel Heire and Madame Rundholmen--the latter one of those incomparably observed women of the lower middle classes so grateful to Ibsen's powers of depiction. When the comedy was produced, a scandal ensued. The dramatist had spared neither high nor low. The piece was hissed and applauded until the authorities interfered. It is more local than any of the plays, though some of the characters are sufficiently universal to be appreciated on any stage, Steensgaard the lying lawyer-politician in particular. * * * * * VI PILLARS OF SOCIETY (1877) Pillars of Society is the fifteenth play of Henrik Ibsen, several of which, among them Norma and The Warriors' Tomb, have not yet been published. Written in Munich, it appeared in the summer of 1877. The ensuing autumn saw the play on the boards of nearly all the Scandinavian theatres; Germany followed suit early the next year, and the success of this satiric social comedy ran like wildfire throughout the continent. It was not until December 15, at the Gaiety Theatre, London, that it had an English hearing.