_Copyright Edition_ _First printed January 1907_ _Second Impression December 1910_ CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION TO “THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH” vii INTRODUCTION TO “PILLARS OF SOCIETY” xv “THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH” 1 _Translated by_ WILLIAM ARCHER “PILLARS OF SOCIETY” 227 _Translated by_ WILLIAM ARCHER THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH. INTRODUCTION. After the momentous four years of his first visit to Italy, to which we owe _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_, Ibsen left Rome in May 1868, visited Florence, and then spent the summer at Berchtesgaden in Southern Bavaria. There he was busy “mentally wrestling” with the new play which was to take shape as _De Unges Forbund_ (_The League of Youth_); but he did not begin to put it on paper until, after a short stay at Munich, he settled down in Dresden, in the early autumn. Thence he wrote to his publisher, Hegel, on October 31: “My new work is making rapid progress.... The whole outline is finished and written down. The first act is completed, the second will be in the course of a week, and by the end of the year I hope to have the play ready. It will be in prose, and in every way adapted for the stage. The title is _The League of Youth; or, The Almighty & Co._, a comedy, in five acts.” At Hegel’s suggestion he omitted the second title, “though,” he wrote, “it could have given offence to no one _who had read the play_.” Apparently the polishing of the dialogue took longer than Ibsen anticipated. It was his first play in modern prose, and the medium did not come easy to him. Six or seven years earlier, he wrote the opening scenes of _Love’s Comedy_ in prose, but was dissatisfied with the effect, and recast the dialogue in rhymed verse. Having now outgrown his youthful romanticism, and laid down, in _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_, the fundamental positions of his criticism of life, he felt that to carry that criticism into detail he must come to close quarters with reality; and to that end he required a suppler instrument than verse. He must cultivate, as he afterwards[1] put it, “the very much more difficult art of writing the genuine, plain language spoken in real life.” Probably the mastery of this new art cost him more effort than he anticipated, for, instead of having the play finished by the end of 1868, he did not despatch the manuscript to Copenhagen until March 1869. It was published on September 30 of that year.