Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/313

Rh contained many grand ideas and pictures of striking beauty, thus giving abundant evidence both of Wergeland's eminent talents and of his lack of intellectual maturity. He afterward revised this work, which he regarded as his masterpiece, but even in its altered form it is upon the whole chaotic and unattractive. The most prominent features of the first period of his literary activity are, generally speaking, a heaven-storming enthusiasm and a complete disregard of the laws of poetry. His mind is a seething, eddying chaos from whose dense mist flashes of grand ideas ever and anon dart forth. The great work above mentioned, accordingly found but few readers, nor did his other productions make any great impression, though they were hailed with great enthusiasm by a certain circle as the first point of a distinctly Norwegian literature. Still he was even in his first period a man of great influence, both on account of his marked personality and on account of his literary activity. Wergeland carried his love of freedom and country to the extreme and partook with his whole soul in the national movement, which without being able to produce any practical results, blindly waged war against all existing institutions, against the bureaucracy and, in short, against everything that pretended to be of Danish origin. He was a friend of the common people and promoted their welfare to the best of his ability. He watched jealously over the independence of Norway, and by his agitations he brought about that the 17th of May, the anniversary of the adoption of the Norwegian constitution, was raised to a national holiday of the Norwegian nation, in other words, he was the leader of the ultra-Norwegian party. Thus when the contest broke out between himself and Welhaven, the war was not limited to the domain of æsthetics, but it was based mainly on the wide difference between the contending parties in regard to all social relations and in regard to the principles which the development of culture in Norway ought to follow. The ultra-Norwegian party adopted the absolutely national prin-