Dyring's House had borrowed, and that to no inconsiderable extent, from Heinrich von Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn, a play written at the beginning of this century. Käthchen's relation to Count Wetterstrahl is in all essentials the same as Ragnhild's to the knight, Stig Hvide. Like Ragnhild, Käthchen 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 Käthchen 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 Henrik Hertz as Käthchen 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
