Henrik Ibsen

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

IRVINE

FROM THE LIBRARY OF
R. BENNETT WEAVER

9

LITERARY LIVES

EDITED BY

W. ROBERTSON NICOLL

HENRIK IBSEN

LITERARY LIVES

Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.

HENRIK IBSEN. By Edmund Gosse.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G. W. E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
COVENTRY PATMORE. By Edmund Gosse.
ERNEST RENAN. By William Barry, D.D.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Andrew Lang.

IN PREPARATION

GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.

Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00 net. Postage to cts.

O

Literarp Litoe*

HENRIK IBSEN

BY

EDMUND GOSSE

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1908

COPYRIGHT 1907 BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

CHAPTER II
EARLY INFLUENCES 25

CHAPTER III
LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 51

CHAPTER IV
THE SATIRES (1857-67) 78

CHAPTER V
1868-75 ri°

CHAPTER VI
1875-82 . . 134

vi CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER VII
1883-91 156

CHAPTER VIII
LAST YEARS 179

CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 211

CHAPTER X
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 233

FACING
PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Henrik Ibsen Frontispu

Ibsen in 1868 32

Ibsen in Dresden, October, 1873 64

From a drawing by Gustav Laerum 88

Facsimile of Ibsen's Handwriting 116

Ibsen. From the painting by Eilif Petersen . . 190

Bust of Ibsen, about 1865 214

PREFACE

NUMEROUS and varied as have been the anal-
yses of Ibsen's works published, in all languages,
since the completion of his writings, there exists
no biographical study which brings together, on
a general plan, what has been recorded of his
adventures as an author. Hitherto the only ac-
cepted Life of Ibsen has been Et literczrt Livs-
billede, published in 1888 by Henrik Jaeger; of
this an English translation was issued in 1890.
Henrik Jaeger (who must not be confounded with
the novelist, Hans Henrik Jaeger) was a lecturer
and dramatic critic, residing near Bergen, whose
book would possess little value had he not suc-
ceeded in persuading Ibsen to give him a good deal
of valuable information respecting his early life
in that city. In its own day, principally on this
account, Jaeger's volume was useful, supplying
a large number of facts which were new to the
public. But the advance of Ibsen's activity, and
the increase of knowledge since his death, have
so much extended and modified the poet's his-
tory that Et literart Livsbillede has become ob-
solete.

x PREFACE

The principal authorities of which I have made
use in the following pages are the minute bibli-
ographical Oplysninger of J. B. Halvorsen, mar-
vels of ingenious labor, continued after Hal-
vorsen's death by Sten Konow (1901); the Letters
of Hennk Ibsen, published in two volumes, by
H. Koht and J. Elias, in 1904, and now issued in
an English translation (Hodder & Stoughton);
the recollections and notes of various friends, pub-
lished in the periodicals of Scandinavia and
Germany after his death; T. Blanc's Et Bidrag
til den Ibsenskte Digtnings Scenehistorie (1906);
and, most of all, the invaluable Samliv med Ibsen
(1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned
writer aspires, in measure, to be Ibsen's Boswell,
and his book is a series of chapters reminiscent
of the dramatist's talk and manners, chiefly dur-
ing those central years of his life which he spent
in Germany. It is a trivial, naive and rather
thin production, but it has something of the true
Boswellian touch, and builds up before us a life-
like portrait.

From the materials, too, collected for many
years past by Mr. William Archer, I have received
important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it is
difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak
with moderation. It is true that thirty-six years
ago some of Ibsen's early metrical writings fell

PREFACE xi

into the hands of the writer of this little volume,
and that I had the privilege, in consequence, of
being the first person to introduce Ibsen's name
to the British public. Nor will I pretend for a
moment that it is not a gratification to me, after
so many years and after such surprising develop-
ments, to know that this was the fact. But, save
for this accident of time, it was Mr. Archer and
no other who was really the introducer of Ibsen
to English readers. For a quarter of a century
he was the protagonist in the fight against mis-
construction and stupidity; with wonderful cour-
age, with not less wonderful good temper and
persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen
take the place of the false, and on securing for
him the recognition due to his genius. Mr.
William Archer has his reward; his own name is
permanently attached to the intelligent apprecia-
tion of the Norwegian playwright in England and
America.

In these pages, where the space at my disposal
was so small, I have not been willing to waste it
by repeating the plots of any of those plays of
Ibsen which are open to the English reader. It
would please me best if this book might be read
in connection with the final edition of Ibsen s
Complete Dramatic Works, now being prepared
by Mr. Archer in eleven volumes (W. Heine-

xii PREFACE

mann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole work
by those volumes of it which have already ap-
peared, I have little hesitation in saying that no
other foreign author of the second half of the
nineteenth century has been so ably and exhaust-
ively edited in English as Ibsen has been in this
instance.

The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian
language may further be recommended to the
study of Carl Naerup's Norsk Litter aturhi stories
siste Tidsrum (1905), a critical history of Nor-
wegian literature since 1890, which is invaluable
in giving a notion of the effect of modern ideas on
the very numerous younger writers of Norway,
scarcely one of whom has not been influenced in
one direction or another by the tyranny of Ibsen's
personal genius. What has been written about
Ibsen in England and France has often missed
something of its historical value by not taking
into consideration that movement of intellectual
life in Norway which has surrounded him and
which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may be
allowed to say of my little book that this side of
the subject has been particularly borne in mind
in the course of its composition.

E. G.

KLOBENSTEIN.

CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

THE parentage of the poet has been traced back
to a certain Danish skipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the
beginning of the eighteenth century, made his way
over from Stege, the capital of the island of Moen,
and became a citizen of Bergen. From that time
forth the men of the family, all following the sea
in their youth, jovial men of a humorous disposi-
tion, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway,
marrying sinister and taciturn wives, who, by the
way, were always, it would seem, Danes or Ger-
mans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet
had, after a hundred years and more of Nor-
wegian habitation, not one drop of pure Norse
blood to inherit from his parents. His grand-
fa ther,Henrik, was wrecked in 1798 in his own ship,
which went down with all souls lost on Hesnaes,
near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's
animated poem ofTerje Viken. His father, Knud,
who was born in 1797, married in 1825 a German,
Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same
town of Skien; she was one year his senior, and the

2 IBSEN

daughter of a merchant. It was in 1771 that the
Ibsens, leaving Bergen, had settled in Skien,
which was, and still is, an important centre of the
timber and shipping trades on the south-east shore
of the country.

It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish
days, was a sort of Poole or Dartmouth, existing
solely for purposes of marine merchandise, and
depending for prosperity, and life iself, on the
sea. Much of a wire-drawn ingenuity has been
conjectured about the probable strains of hered-
ity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do
more than to recognize the slight but obstinate
exoticism, which kept all his forbears more or less
foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to
insist on the mixture of adventurousness and
plain common sense which marked their move-
ments by sea and shore. The stock was intensely
provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be
difficult to find anywhere a specimen of the lower
middle class more consistent than the Ibsens had
been in preserving their respectable dead level.
Even in that inability to resist the call of the sea,
generation after generation, if there was a little of
the dare-devil there was still more of the conven-
tional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to de-
tect elements of his ancestors in the extremely
startling and unprecedented son who was born to

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 3

Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three
months after their marriage.

This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, al-
though he never used the second name, was born
in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House,
in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20,
1828. The house stood on one side of a large,
open square; the town pillory was at the right of
it, and the mad-house, the lock-up and other
amiable 'urban institutions to the left; in front was
the Latin school and the grammar school, while
the church occupied the middle of the square.
Over this stern prospect the tourist can no longer
sentimentalize, for the whole of this part of Skien
was burned down in 1886, to the poet's unbridled
satisfaction. "The inhabitants of Skien," he said
with grim humor, "were quite unworthy to possess
my birthplace."

He declared that the harsh elements of land-
scape, mentioned above, were those which earliest
captivated his infant attention, and he added that
the square space, with the church in the midst of
it, was filled all day long with the dull and droning
sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn to dusk
this drone of waters was constantly cut through by
a sound that was like the sharp screaming and
moaning of women. This was caused by hundreds
of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking ad-

4 IBSEN

vantage of that force. "Afterwards, when I read
about the guillotine, I always thought of those
saws," said the poet, whose earliest flight of fancy
seems to have been this association of woman-
hood with the shriek of the sawmill.

In 1888, just before his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen
wrote out for Henrik Jaeger certain autobiograph-
ical recollections of his childhood. It is from
these that the striking phrase about the scream of
the saws is taken, and that is perhaps the most
telling of these infant memories, many of which
are slight and naive. It is interesting, however,
to find that his earliest impressions of life at home
were of an optimistic character. "Skien," he
says, "in my young days, was an exceedingly
lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it
afterwards became. Several highly cultivated and
wealthy families lived in the town itself or close
by on their estates. Most of these families were
more or less closely related, and dances, dinners
and music parties followed each other, winter and
summer, in almost unbroken sequence. Many
travellers, too, passed through the town, and, as
there were as yet no regular inns, they lodged with
friends or connections. We almost always had
guests in our large, roomy house, especially at
Christmas and Fair-time, when the house was full,
and we kept open table from morning till night."

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 5

The mind reverts to the majestic old wooden man-
sions which play so prominent a part in Thomas
Krag's novels, or to the house of Mrs. Solness'
parents, the burning down of which started the
Master-Builder's fortunes. Most of these grand
old timber houses in Norway have indeed, by
this time, been so burned down.

We may speculate on what the effect of this
genial open-handedness might have been, had it
lasted, on the genius of the poet. But fortune
had harsher views of what befitted the training of
so acrid a nature. When Ibsen was eight years of
age, his father's business was found to be in such
disorder that everything had to be sold to meet
his creditors. The only piece of property left
when this process had been gone through was a
little broken-down farmhouse called Venstob, in
the outskirts of Skien. Ibsen afterwards stated
that those who had taken most advantage of his
parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were
precisely those who now most markedly turned
the cold shoulder on them. It is likely enough
that this may have been the case, but one sees
how inevitably Ibsen would, in after years, be con-
vinced that it was. He believed himself to have
been, personally, much mortified and humiliated
in childhood by the change in the family status.
Already, by all accounts, he had begun to live a

6 IBSEN

life of moral isolation. His excellent sister long
afterwards described him as an unsociable child,
never a pleasant companion, and out of sympathy
with all the rest of the family.

We recollect, in The Wild Duck, the garret
which was the domain of Hedvig and of that
symbolic bird. At Venstob, the infant Ibsen
possessed a like retreat, a little room near the
back entrance, which was sacred to him and into
the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt
himself. Here were some dreary old books,
among others Harrison's folio History of the City
of London, as well as a paint-box, an hour-glass,
an extinct eight-day clock, properties which were
faithfully introduced, half a century later, into
The Wild Duck. His sister says that the only out-
door amusement he cared for as a boy was build-
ing, and she describes the prolonged construction
of a castle, in the spirit of The M aster-Builder.

Very soon he began to go to school, but to
neither of the public institutions in the town.
He attended what is described as a "small middle-
class school," kept by a man called Johan Hansen,
who was the only person connected with his child-
hood, except his sister, for whom the poet retained
in after life any agreeable sentiment. " Johan
Hansen," he says, "had a mild, amiable temper,
like that of a child," and when he died, in 1865,

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 7

Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who
helped in the lessons, described the poet afterwards
as " a quiet boy «with a pair of wonderful eyes, but
with no sort of cleverness except an unusual gift
for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and
theology, gently, perseveringly, without any strik-
ing results; that the pupil afterwards boasted of
having successfully perused Phaedrus in the orig-
inal is in itself significant. So little was talent
expected from him that when, at the age of about
fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic de-
scription of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at
him gloomily, and said he must have copied it
out of some book! One can imagine the shocked
silence of the author, "passive at the nadir of
dismay."

No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus
ever began life as a more ungainly duckling than
Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has
done its best to brighten up the dreary record of
his childhood with anecdotes, yet the sum of
them all is but a dismal story. The only talent
which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that
for painting. A little while before he left school,
he was found to have been working hard with
water-colors. Various persons have recalled fin-
ished works of the young Ibsen — a romantic land-
scape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view from

8 IBSEN

the windows at Venstob, a boy in peasant dress
seated on a rock, the latter described by a dignitary
of the church as "awfully splendid," overmaade
prcegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this
must have been, founded on some impression of
Fearnley and Tidemann, a far-away following of
the new "national" art of the praiseworthy
"patriot-painters" of the school of Dahl.

It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had
considerable intellectual relationship with Ibsen,
also nourished in childhood the ambition to be a
painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks
and months. As he to the insipid Jervases and
Knellers whom he copied, so Ibsen to the con-
scientious romantic artists of Norway's prime.
In neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a
Pope should be secured for the National Gallery,
but it is highly significant that such earnest
students of precise excellence in another art should
first of all have schooled their eyes to exactitude
by grappling with form and color.

In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was
confirmed and taken away from school. These
events marked the beginning of adolescence with
a young middle-class Norwegian of those days,
for whom the future proposed no task in life de-
manding a more elaborate education than the
local schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 9

his wish to be a professional artist, but that was
one which could not be indulged. Until a later
date than this, every artist in Norway was forced
to go abroad for the necessary technical training:
as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J. C.
Dahl was there; but many settled in Diisseldorf,
where the teaching attracted them. In any case,
the adoption of a plastic profession meant a long
and serious expenditure of money, together with
a very doubtful prospect of ultimate remuner-
ation. Fearnley, who had seemed the very genius
of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having
scarcely begun to sell his pictures, at the age of
forty. It is not surprising that Knud Ibsen, whose
affairs were in a worse condition than ever, re-
fused even to consider a course of life which would
entail a heavy and long-continued expense.

Ibsen hung about at home for a few months,
and then, shortly before his sixteenth birthday, he
was apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of
Reimann, at the little town of Grimstad, between
Arendal and Christianssand, on the extreme
south-east corner of the Norwegian coast. This
was his home for more than five years; here he
became a poet, and here the peculiar color and
tone of his temperament were developed. So far
as the genius of a very great man is influenced
by his surroundings, and by his physical con-

io IBSEN

dition in those surroundings, it was the atmos-
phere of Grimstad and of its drug-store which
moulded the character of Ibsen. Skien and his
father's house dropped from him like an old suit
of clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely
knew, the town which he hated, the schoolmates
and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly
dunce. We find him next, with an apron round
his middle and a pestle in his hand, pounding
drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad.
What Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats

" Back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters,
pills and ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the
author of Endymion, was strictly true of the author
of Peer Gynt.

Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author
of these lines to Grimstad. It is a marvellous
object-lesson on the development of genius. For
nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those
years the most important of all in the moulding
of character and talent, one of the most original
and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has
seen for a century was cooped up here among
ointment-boxes, pills and plasters. Grimstad is a
small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with
nothing at all, visitable only by steamer. Feature-
less hills surround it, and it looks out into the east
wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked rocks.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH n

No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity,
a perfect uniformity of little red houses where
nobody seems to be doing anything; in Ibsen's
time there are said to have been about five hundred
of these apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for
six interminable years, one of the acutest brains
in Europe had to interest itself in fraying ipecacu-
anha and mixing black draughts behind an apoth-
ecary's counter.

For several years nothing is recorded, and there
was probably very little that demanded record, of
Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own interesting
notes, it is obvious, refer only to the closing months
of the period. Ten years before the birth of Ib-
sen one of the greatest poets of Europe had writ-
ten words which seem meant to characterize an
adolescence such as his. "The imagination of a
boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a
man is healthy; but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment, the character un-
decided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition
thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness and a
thousand bitters."

It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his six-
teenth to his twentieth year, suffered acutely from
this moral and intellectual distemper. He was at
war — the phrase is his own — with the little com-
munity in which he lived. And yet it seems to

12 IBSEN

have been, in its tiny way, a tolerant and even
friendly little community. It is difficult for us
to realize what life in a remote coast-town of
Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection
with the capital would be rare and difficult, and,
when achieved, the capital was as yet little more
than we should call a village. There would,
perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education
among the best inhabitants of Grimstad than we
are prepared to suppose. A certain graceful
veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish ele-
gance reflected from Copenhagen, would mark
the more conservative citizens, male and female.
A fierier generation — not hot enough, however,
to set the fjord on flame — would celebrate the
comparatively recent freedom of the country in
numerous patriotic forms. It is probable that a
dark boy like Ibsen would, on the whole, prefer
the former type, but he would despise them
both.

He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a pov-
erty that excluded all indulgence, beyond the bare
necessities, in food and clothes and books. We
can conceive the meagre advance of his position,
first a mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally
buoyed up by the advice of friends to study
medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being,
some bright day, himself no less than the owner of

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 13

a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know this, or was
it the sheer adventure of genius, when he conr
centrated the qualities of the master into "Pill-
Doctor Herdal," compounding "beautiful rain-
bow-colored powders that will give one a real
grip on the world " ? Ibsen, it is allowable to
think, may sometimes have dreamed of a pill,
"with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and
strychnine, and the best beetle-killer," which
would decimate the admirable inhabitants of Grim-
stad, strewing the rocks with their bodies in their
best go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had
in him that source of anger, against which all argu-
ment is useless, which bubbles up in the heart of
a youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of
great native energy, and knows not how to stir a
hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage
in manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and,
as he himself has told us with pathetic naivete,
unable to express the real gratitude he felt to the
few who would willingly have extended friendship
to him if he had permitted it.

As he advanced in age, he does not seem to
have progressed in grace. By the respectable
citizens of Grimstad — and even Grimstad had its
little inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy — he
was regarded as "not quite nice." The apothe-
cary's assistant was a bold young man, who did

I4 IBSEN

not seem to realize his menial position. He was
certainly intelligent, and Grimstad would have
overlooked the pills and ointments if his manners
had been engaging, but he was rude, truculent
and contradictory. The youthful female sex is
not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of its
elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson
has, in such conditions, enjoyed substantial suc-
cesses. But young Ibsen was not a favorite even
with the girls, whom he alarmed and discon-
certed. One of the young ladies of Grimstad in
after years attempted to describe the effect which
the poet made upon them. They had none of
them liked him, she said, "because" — she hesi-
tated for the word — "because he was so spectral"
This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to
us for a moment the distempered youth, almost
incorporeal, displayed wandering about at twilight
and in lonely places, held in common esteem to be
malevolent, and expressing by gestures rather than
by words sentiments of a nature far from compli-
mentary or agreeable.

Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded
until Ibsen reached his twenty-first year. In this
quiet backwater of a seaport village the passage
of time was deliberate, and the development of
hard-worked apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nat-
ure was not in any sense precocious, and even if

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 15

he had not languished in so lost a corner of so-
ciety, it is unlikely that he would have started
prematurely in life or literature. The actual
waking up, when it came at last, seems to have
been almost an accident. There had been some
composing of verses, now happily lost, and some
more significant distribution of "epigrams" and
"caricatures" to the vexation of various worthy
persons. The earliest trace of talent seems to
have been in this direction, in the form of lampoons
or "characters," as people called them in the
seventeenth century, sarcastic descriptions of
types in which certain individuals could be recog-
nized. No doubt if these could be recovered, we
should find them rough and artless, but contain-
ing germs of the future keenness of portraiture.
They were keen enough, it seems, to rouse great
resentment in Grimstad.

There is evidence to show that the lad had
docility enough, at all events, to look about for
some aid in the composition of Norwegian prose.
We should know nothing of it but for a passage
in Ibsen's later polemic with Paul Jansenius
Stub of Bergen. In 1848 Stub was an invalid
schoolmaster, who, it appears, eked out his in-
come by giving instruction, by correspondence,
in style. How Ibsen heard of him does not seem
to be known, but when, in 1851, Ibsen entered,

16 IBSEN

with needless acrimony, into a controversy with
his previous teacher about the theatre, Stub com-
plained of his ingratitude, since he had "taught
the boy to write.'* Stub's intervention in the mat-
ter, doubtless, was limited to the correction of a
few exercises.

Ibsen's own theory was that his intellect and
character were awakened by the stir of revolution
throughout Europe. The first political event
which really interested him was the proclamation
of the French Republic, which almost coincided
with his twentieth birthday. He was born again,
a child of '48. There were risings in Vienna, in
Milan, in Rome. Venice was proclaimed a re-
public, the Pope fled to Gaeta, the streets of Ber-
lin ran with the blood of the populace. The
Magyars rose against Jellalic and his Croat
troops; the Czechs demanded their autonomy; in
response to the revolutionary feeling in Germany,
Schleswig-Holstein was up in arms.

Each of these events, and others like them, and
all occurring in the rapid months of that momen-
tous year, smote like hammers on the door of
Ibsen's brain, till it quivered with enthusiasm and
excitement. The old brooding languor was at
an end, and with surprising clearness and firmness
he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet
and as a man. The old clouds vanished, and

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 17

though the social difficulties which hemmed in
his career were as gross as ever, he himself no
longer doubted what was to be his aim in life.
The cry of revolution came to him, of revolution
faint indeed and broken, the voice of a minority
appealing frantically and for a moment against
the overwhelming forces of a respectable majority,
but it came to him just at the moment when his
young spirit was prepared to receive it with faith
and joy. The effect on Ibsen's character was
sudden and it was final:

Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,

And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,

And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must

And what things may be, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust

And alter; and his spirit's meat
Was freedom, and his staff was wrought
Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

We are not left to conjecture on the subject;
in a document of extreme interest, which seems
somehow to have escaped the notice of his
commentators, the preface to the second (1876)
edition of Catilina, he has described what the in-
fluences were which roused him out of the wretch-
edness of Grimstad; they were precisely the

18 IBSEN

revolution of February, the risings in Hungary,
the first Schleswig war. He wrote a series of
sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar,
imploring him to take up arms for the help of
Denmark, and of nights, when all his duties were
over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep
to the garret where he slept, and dream himself
fighting at the centre of the world, instead of lost
on its extreme circumference. And here he be-
gan his first drama, the opening lines of which,

"I must, I must; a voice is crying to me
From my soul's depth, and I will follow it,"

might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole
life's work.

In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has
noted, with that clairvoyance which marks some
of his utterances about himself, the " full-blooded
egotism" which developed in him during his last
year of mental and moral starvation at Grimstad.
Through the whole series of his satiric dramas we
see the little narrow-minded borough, with its
ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical
social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances,
modified here and there, expanded sometimes,
modernized and brought up to date, but always
recurrent in the poet's memory. To the last, the
images and the rebellions which were burned into

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19

his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over
again to his readers.

But the necessity of facing the examination at
Christiania now presented itself. He was so
busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he says,
to steal his hours for study. He still inhabited the
upper room, which he calls a garret; it would not
seem that the alteration in his status, assistant
now and no longer apprentice, had increased his
social conveniences. He was still the over-
worked apothecary, pounding drugs with a pestle
and mortar from morning till night. Someone
has pointed out the odd circumstance that almost
every scene in the drama of Catilina takes place
in the dark. This was the unconscious result of
the fact that all the attention which the future
realist could give to the story had to be given in
the night hours. When he emerged from the gar-
ret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in the-
ology, a Mr. Monrad, brother of the afterwards
famous professor. By a remarkable chance, the
subject given by the University for examination
was the Conspiracy of Catiline, to be studied in
the history of Sallust and the oration of Cicero.

No theme could have been more singularly
well fitted to fire the enthusiasm of Ibsen. At
no time of his life a linguist, or much interested
in history, it is probable that the difficulty of con-

20 IBSEN

centrating his attention on a Latin text would
have been insurmountable had the subject been
less intimately sympathetic to him. But he tells
us that he had no sooner perceived the character of
the man against whom these diatribes are directed
than he devoured them greedily (jeg slugte disse
sknfter). The opening words of Sallust, which
every schoolboy has to read — we can imagine with
what an extraordinary force they would strike
upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as
Ibsen. Lucius Catllina nobili genere natus, magna
vi et animi et corporis, sed ingenio malo pravoque
— how does this at once bring up an image of the
arch-rebel, of Satan himself, as the poets have con-
ceived him, how does it attract, with its effects of
energy, intelligence and pride, the curiosity of one
whose way of life, as Keats would say, is still un-
decided, his ambition still thick-sighted!

It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that
absorbed Ibsen. Criticism likes to trace a prede-
cessor behind every genius, a Perugino for Raffa-
elle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for
the master-mind that started Ibsen, it is not to
be found among the writers of his age or of his
language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust.
There can be no doubt that the cold and bitter
strength of Sallust; his unflinching method of
building up his edifice of invective, stone by

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21

stone; his close, unidealistic, dry penetration into
character; his clinical attitude, unmoved at the
death-bed of a reputation; that all these qualities
were directly operative on the mind and intellect-
ual character of Ibsen, and went a long way to
mould it while moulding was still possible.

There is no evidence to show that the oration
of Cicero moved him nearly so much as the narra-
tives of Sallust. After all, the object of Cicero
was to crush the conspiracy, but what Ibsen was
interested in was the character of Catiline, and
this was placed before him in a more thrilling way
by the austere reserve of the historian. No
doubt, to a young poet, when that poet was Ibsen,
there would be something deeply attractive in the
sombre, archaic style, and icy violence of Sallust.
How thankful we ought to be that the historian,
with his long sonorous words — flagitiosorum ac
facinorosorum — did not make of our perfervid
apothecary a mere tub-thumper of Corinthian
prose!

Ibsen now formed the two earliest friendships
of his life. He had reached the age of twenty
without, as it would seem, having been able to
make his inner nature audible to those around
him. He had been to the inhabitants of Grim-
stad a stranger within their gates, not speaking
their language; or, rather, wholly "spectral,"

22 IBSEN

speaking no language at all, but indulging in cat-
calls and grimaces. He was now discovered like
Caliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the
strenuous arts of friendship. One of those who
thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due,
who held a post in the custom-house; the other
was Ole Schulerud (1827-59), wri° deserves a
cordial acknowledgment from every admirer of
Ibsen. He also was in the receipt of custom, and
a young man of small independent means. To
Schulerud and to Due, Ibsen revealed his poetic
plans, and he seems to have found in them both
sympathizers with his republican enthusiasms and
transcendental schemes for the liberation of the
peoples. It was a stirring time, in 1848, and all
generous young blood was flowing fast in the
same direction.

Since Ibsen's death, Due has published a very
lively paper of recollections of the old Grimstad
days. He says :

His daily schedule admitted few intervals for rest or sleep.
Yet I never heard Ibsen complain of being tired. His health
was uniformly good. He must have had an exceptionally
strong constitution, for when his financial conditions com-
pelled him to practice the most stringent economy, he tried
to do without underclothing, and finally even without stock-
ings. In these experiments he succeeded; and in winter
he went without an overcoat ; yet without being troubled by
colds or other bodily ills.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23

We have seen that Ibsen was so busy that he
had to steal from his duties the necessary hours
for study. But out of these hours, he tells us, he
stole moments for the writing of poetry, of the
revolutionary poetry of which we have spoken,
and for a great quantity of lyrics of a sentimental
and fanciful kind. Due was the confidant to
whom he recited the latter, and one at least of
these early pieces survives, set to music by this
friend. But to Schulerud a graver secret was
intrusted, no less than that in the night hours of
1848-49 there was being composed in the garret
over the apothecary's shop a three-act tragedy in
blank verse, on the conspiracy of Catiline. With
his own hand, when the first draft was completed,
Schulerud made a clean copy of the drama, and
in the autumn of 1849 he went to Christiania with
the double purpose of placing Catilina at the
theatre and securing a publisher for it. A letter
(October 15, 1849) from Ibsen, first printed in
1904 — the only document we possess of this ear-
liest period — displays to a painful degree the
torturing anxiety with which the poet awaited
news of his play, and, incidentally, exposes his
poverty. With all Schulerud's energy, he found
it impossible to gain attention for Catilina at the
theatre, and in January, 1850, Ibsen received
what he called its "death warrant," but it was

24 IBSEN

presently brought out as a volume, under the
pseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme, at Schulerud's
expense. Of Catilina about thirty copies were
sold, and it attracted no notice whatever from
the press.

Meanwhile, left alone in Grimstad, since Due
was now with Schulerud in Christiania, Ibsen had
been busy with many literary projects. He had
been writing an abundance of lyrics, he had begun
a one-act drama called "The Normans," after-
wards turned into Kcempehojen; he was planning
a romance, The Prisoner at Akershus (this was to
deal with the story of Christian Lofthus); and
above all he was busy writing a tragedy of Olaf
Trygveson.1

One of his poems had already been printed in
a Christiania newspaper. The call was over-
whelming; he could endure Grimstad and the
gallipots no longer. In March, 1850, at the age
of twenty-one, Ibsen stuck a few dollars in his
pocket and went off to try his fortune in the
capital.

> On the authority of the Breve, pp. 58, 59, where Halvdan Koht
prints "Olaf Tr." and "Olaf T." expanding these to Trfygveson].
But is it quite certain that what Ibsen wrote in these letters was not
"Olaf Li." and "Olaf L.," and that the reference is not to Olaj
Liljekrans, which was certainly begun at Grimstad? Is there any
other evidence that Ibsen ever started an Ola} Trygveson ?

CHAPTER II
EARLY INFLUENCES

IN middle life Ibsen, who suppressed for as
long a time as he could most of his other juvenile
works, deliberately lifted Catilina from the ob-
livion into which it had fallen, and replaced it in
the series of his writings. This is enough to in-
dicate to us that he regarded it as of relative im-
portance, and imperfect as it is, and unlike his
later plays, it demands some critical examination.
I do not know whether any one ever happened to
ask Ibsen whether he had been aware that Alex-
andre Dumas produced in Paris a five-act drama
of Catiline at the very moment (October, 1848)
when Ibsen started the composition of his. It
is quite possible that the young Norwegian saw
this fact noted in a newspaper, and immediately
determined to try what he could make of the same
subject. In Dumas' play Catiline is presented
merely as a demagogue; he is the red Flag per-
sonified, and the political situation in France is
discussed under a slight veil of Roman history.

as

26 IBSEN

Catiline is simply a sort of Robespierre brought
up to date. There is no trace of all this in
Ibsen.

Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily
explained, we find much more similarity when we
compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy
of Catiline which Ben Jonson published in 1611.
Needless to state, Ibsen had never read the old
English play; it would be safe to lay a wager that,
when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the
name of Ben Jonson. Yet there is an odd sort of
resemblance, founded on the fact that each poet
keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the
Latins. Neither of them takes Sallust's present-
ment of the character of Catiline as if it were
gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the
narrative, each contrives to add a native grandeur
to the character of the arch-conspirator, such as his
original detractors denied him. In both poems,
Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is—

Armed with a glory high as his despair.

Another resemblance between the old English
and the modern Norwegian dramatist is that each
has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require
lightening, and has attempted to provide this by
means, in Ben Jonson's case, of solemn "choruses,"
in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance the

EARLY INFLUENCES 27

tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little
suited to the stage.

This is a very curious example, among many
which might be brought forward, of Ibsen's
native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all his
early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical
mood. This tendency reached its height nearly
twenty years later in Brand and Peer Gynt, and
the truth about the austere prose which he then
adopted for his dramas is probably this, not that
the lyrical faculty had quitted him, but that he
found it to be hampering his purely dramatic ex-
pression, and that he determined, by a self-deny-
ing ordinance, to tear it altogether off his shoulders,
like an embroidered mantle, which is in itself very
ornamental, but which checks an actor's move-
ments.

The close of Ibsen's Catilina is, as we have said,
composed entirely in rhyme, and the effect of this
is curious. It is as though the young poet could
not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and
was obliged to start running, although the mo-
ment was plainly one for walking. Here is a
fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left
her in the tent for dead. But while he was solilo-
quizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia has stabbed
him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes
a speech which ends thus: —

28 IBSEN

See, the pathway breaks, divided! I will wander, dumb,
To the left hand.

AURELIA

(appearing, blood-stained, at the door o] the tent).
Nay! the right hand! Towards Elysium.

CATILINE
(greatly alarmed).

O yon pallid apparition, how it fills me with remorse.
'Tis herself! Aurelia! tell me, art thou living? not a corse?

AURELIA.

Yes, I live that I may lull thy sea of sorrows, and may lie
With my bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then
die.

CATILINE
(bewildered).
What? thou livest?

AURELIA.

Death's pale herald o'er my senses threw a pall,
But my dulled eye tracked thy footsteps, and I saw, I saw

it all,

And my passion a wife's forces to my wounded body gave;
Breast to breast, my Catiline, let us sink into our grave.1

He had slipped far out of the sobriety of Sallust
when he floundered, in this way, in the deep
waters of romanticism. In the isolation of Grim-

1 In 1875 Ibsen practically rewrote the whole of this part of Catilina,
without, however, improving it. Why will great authors confuse the
history of literature by tampering with their early texts?

EARLY INFLUENCES 29

stad he had but himself to consult, and the mind
of a young poet who has not yet enjoyed any
generous communication with life is invariably
sentimental and romantic. The critics of the
North have expended a great deal of ingenuity in
trying to prove that Ibsen exposed his own temper-
ament and character in the course of Catilina.
No doubt there is a great temptation to indulge
in this species of analysis, but it is amusing
to note that some of the soliloquies which have
been pointed out as particularly self-revealing
are translated almost word for word out of
Sallust. Perhaps the one passage in the play
which is really significant is that in which the
hero says: —

If but for one brief moment I could flame
And blaze through space, and be a falling star;
If only once, and by one glorious deed,
I could but knit the name of Catiline
With glory and with deathless high renown, —
Then should I blithely, in the hour of conquest,
Leave all, and hie me to an alien shore,
Press the keen dagger gayly to my heart,
And die; for then I should have lived indeed.

This has its personal interest, since we know,
on the evidence of his sister, that such was the
tenor of Ibsen's private talk about himself at that
precise time.

3o IBSEN

Very imperfect as Catilina is in dramatic art,
and very primitive as is the development of plot
in it, it presents one aspect, as a literary work,
which is notable. That it should exist at all is
curious, since, surprising as it seems, it had no
precursor. Although, during the thirty-five years
of Norwegian independence, various classes of
literature had been cultivated with extreme dili-
gence, the drama had hitherto been totally neg-
lected. With the exception of a graceful opera
by Bjerregaard, which enjoyed a success sustained
over a quarter of a century, the only writings in
dramatic form produced in Norway between 1815
and 1850 were the absurd lyrical farces of Werge-
land, which were devoid of all importance. Such
a thing as a three-act tragedy in blank verse was
unknown in modern Norway, so that the youthful
apothecary in Grimstad, whatever he was doing,
was not slavishly copying the fashions of his own
countrymen.

The principal, if not the only influence which
acted upon Ibsen at this moment, was that of the
great Danish tragedian, Adam Oehlenschlager.
It might be fantastically held that the leading
romantic luminary of Scandinavia withdrew on
purpose to make room for his realistic successor,
since Oehlenschlager's latest play, Kiartan and
Gudrun, appeared just when Ibsen was planning

EARLY INFLUENCES 31

Catilina, while the death of the Danish poet
(January 20, 1850) was practically simultaneous
with Ibsen's arrival in Christiania. In later years,
Ibsen thought that Holberg and Oehlenschlager
were the only dramatists he had read when his
own first play was written; he was sure that he
knew nothing of Schiller, Shakespeare or the
French. Of the rich and varied dramatic litera-
ture of Denmark, in the generation between
Oehlenschlager's and his own, he must also for the
present have known nothing. The influence of
Heiberg and of Hertz, presently to be so potent,
had evidently not yet begun. But it is impor-
tant to perceive that already Norway, and Nor-
wegian taste and opinion, were nothing to him
in his selection of themes and forms.

It is not to be supposed that the taste for
dramatic performances did not exist in Norway,
because no Norwegian plays were written. On
the contrary, in most of the large towns there
were, and had long been, private theatres or
rooms which could be fitted up with a stage, at
which wandering troupes of actors gave perform-
ances that were eagerly attended by "the best
people." These actors, however, were exclu-
sively Danes, and there was an accepted tradition
that Norwegians could not act. If they at-
tempted to do so, their native accents proved

32 IBSEN

disagreeable to their fellow-citizens, who de-
manded, as an imperative condition, the peculiar
intonation and pronunciation cultivated at the
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, as well as an
absence of all native peculiarities of language.
The stage, therefore — and this is very important
in a consideration of the career of Ibsen — had
come to be the symbol of a certain bias in political
feeling. Society in Norway was divided into two
classes, the "Danomaniacs" and the "Patriots."
Neither of these had any desire to alter the con-
stitutional balance of power, but while the latter
wished Norway to be intellectually self-productive,
and leaned to a further isolation in language,
literature, art and manners, the former thought
that danger of barbarism lay in every direction
save that of keeping close to the tradition of Den-
mark, from which all that was witty, graceful and
civilized had proceeded.

Accordingly the theatre, at which exclusively
Danish plays were acted, in the Danish style, by
Danish actors and actresses, was extremely popu-
lar with the conservative class, who thought, by
attendance on these performances, to preserve the
distinction of language and the varnish of "high
life" which came, with so much prestige, from
Copenhagen. By the patriotic party, on the other
hand, the stage was looked upon with grave sus-

'•

Ibsen in 1868.

EARLY INFLUENCES 33

picion as likely to undermine the purity of national
feeling.

The earliest attempt at the opening of a National
Theatre had been made at Christiania by the
Swede, J. P. Stromberg, in 1827; this was not
successful, and his theatre was burned down in
1835. In it some effort had been made to use the
Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, but
it had been to no avail. The play-going public
liked their plays to be Danish, and even nation-
alists of a pronounced species could not deny
that dramas like the great historical tragedies
of Oehlenschlager, many of which dealt enthu-
siastically with legends that were peculiarly
Norwegian, were as national as it was possible for
poems by a foreign poet to be. All this time, it
must be remembered, Christiania was to Copen-
hagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as
New York was half a century ago. It is in the
arts that the old colonial instinct of dependence
is most loath to disappear.

The party of the nationalists, however, had
been steadily increasing in activity, and the uni-
versal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 had
not been without its direct action upon Norway.
Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal
policy, there was perhaps no country in Europe
where this period of seismic disturbance led to

34 IBSEN

less public turmoil than precisely here in the
North. The accession of a new king, Oscar I, in
1844, had been followed by a sense of renewed
national security; the peasants were satisfied that
the fresh reign would be favorable to their rights
and liberties; and the monarch showed every
inclination to leave his country of Norway as much
as possible to its own devices. The result of all
this was that '48 left no mark on the internal
history of the country, and the fever which burned
in youthful bosoms was mainly, if not entirely,
intellectual and transcendental. The young Cati-
line from Grimstad, therefore, met with several
sympathetic rebels, but found nobody willing to
conspire. But what he did find is so important
in the consideration of his future development that
it is needful briefly to examine it.

Norway had, in 1850, been independent of
Denmark for thirty-six years. During the greater
part of that time the fiery excitements of a struggle
for politic existence had fairly exhausted her
mental resources, and had left her powerless to
inaugurate a national literature. Meanwhile, there
was no such discontinuity in the literary and
scientific relations of the two countries as that
which had broken their constitutional union. A
tremendous effort was made by certain patriots to
discover the basis of an entirely independent intel-

EARLY INFLUENCES 35

lectual life, something that should start like the
phoenix from the ashes of the old regime, and
should offer no likeness with what continued to
flourish south of the Skagarak. But all the efforts
of the University of Christiania were vain to pre-
vent the cultivated classes from looking to Copen-
hagen as their centre of light. Such authors as
there were, and they were few indeed, followed
humbly in the footsteps of their Danish brethren.

Patriotic historians of literature are not always
to be trusted, and those who study native hand-
books of Norwegian criticism must be on their
guard when these deal with the three poets who
"inaugurated in song the young liberties of
Norway.'' The writings of the three celebrated
lyric patriots, Schwach, Bjerregaard and Hansen,
will not bear to have the blaze of European ex-
perience cast upon them; their tapers dwindle
to sparks in the light of day. They gratified the
vanity of the first generation after 1815, but they
deserve no record in the chronicles of poetic art.
If Ibsen ever read these rhymes of circumstance,
it must have been to treat them with contempt.

Twenty years after the Union, however, and in
Ibsen's early childhood, an event occurred which
was unique in the history of Norwegian literature,
and the consequences of which were far-reaching.
As is often the case in countries where the art of

36 IBSEN

verse is as yet little exercised, there grew up about
1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight
in poetry. This instinct was presently satisfied
by the effusion of a vast quantity of metrical
writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperated
by a violent personal feud which for a while in-
terested all educated persons in Norway to a far
greater degree than any other intellectual or, for
the time being, even political question. From
1834 to 1838 the interests of all cultivated people
centred around what was called the "Twilight
Feud" (D&mringsfejden), and no record of Ibsen's
intellectual development can be complete with-
out a reference to this celebrated controversy,
the results of which long outlived the popularity
of its skits and pamphlets.

Modern Norwegian literature began with this
great fight. The protagonists were two poets of
undoubted talent, whose temperaments and ten-
dencies were so diametrically opposed that it
seemed as though Providence must have set them
down in that raw and inflammable civilization
for the express purpose of setting the standing
corn of thought on fire. Henrik Wergeland
(1808-45) was a belated son of the French Rev-
olution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusi-
asms fermented in his ill-regulated brain, and he
poured forth verses in a violent and endless stream.

EARLY INFLUENCES 37

It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavian
opinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Werge-
land. The critics of Norway as persistently over-
rate his talents as those of Denmark neglect and
ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still
speak of him as himmelstrczvende sublim ("sub-
lime in his heavenly aspiration"); the Danes
will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster.
Neither view commends itself to a foreign reader
of the poet.

The fact, internationally stated, seems rather
to be this. In Wergeland we have a typical
example of the effects of excess of fancy in a vio-
lently productive but essential uncritical nature.
He was ecstatic, unmeasured, a reckless improvis-
atore. In his ideas he was preposterously human-
itarian; a prodigious worker, his vigor of mind
seemed never exhausted by his labors; in theory
an idealist, in his private life he was charged
with being scandalously sensual. He was so much
the victim of his inspiration that it would come
upon him like a descending wind, and leave him
physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an
instance of the poetical temper in its most un-
bridled form. A glance through the enormous
range of his collected works is like an excursion
into chaos. We are met almost at the threshold
by a colossal epic, Creation, Man and the Messiah

38 IBSEN

(1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes,
by descriptive pieces which embrace the universe,
by all the froth and roar and turbidity of genius,
with none of its purity and calm. The genius is
there; it is idle to deny it; but it is in a state of
violent turmoil.

It is when the ruling talent of an age is of the
character of Wergeland's—

Thundering and bursting,
In torrents, in waves,
Carolling and shouting
Over tombs, over graves —

that delicate spirits, as in Matthew Arnold's
poem, sigh for the silence and the hush, and rise
at length in open rebellion against lacchus and
his maenads, who destroy all the quiet of life and
who madden innocent blood with their riot. Johan
Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) was a student at
the University with Wergeland, and he remained
silent while the latter made the welkin ring louder
and louder with his lyric shrieks. Welhaven
endured the rationalist and republican rhetoric
of Wergeland as long as he could, although with
growing exasperation, until the rhapsodical author
of Creation, transgressing all moderation, accused
those who held reasonable views in literature
and politics of being traitors. Then it became

EARLY INFLUENCES 39

necessary to deal with this raw and local par-
ody of Victor Hugo. When, in the words of
The Cask of Amontillado, Wergeland "ventured
upon insult," Welhaven "vowed he would be
avenged."

Welhaven formed as complete a contrast to his
antagonist as could be imagined. He was of the
class of Sully Prudhomme, of Matthew Arnold,
of Lowell, to name three of his younger contem-
poraries. In his nature all was based upon
equilibrium; his spirit, though full of graceful
and philosophical intuitions, was critical rather
than creative. He wrote little, and with diffi-
culty, and in exquisite form. His life was as
blamelessly correct as his literary art was har-
monious. Wergeland knew nothing of the Da-
nish tradition of his day, which he treated with
violent and bitter contempt. Welhaven, who
had moved in the circle of the friends of Rahbek,
instinctively referred every literary problem to
the tribunal of Danish taste. He saw that with
the enthusiasm with which the poetry of Werge-
land was received in Norway was connected a sus-
picion of mental discipline, a growing worship of
the peasant and a hatred and scorn of Denmark,
with all of which he had no sympathy. He
thought the time had come for better things; that
the national temper ought to be mollified with the

40 IBSEN

improved economic situation of the country; that
the students, who were taking a more and more
prominent place, ought to be on the side of the
angels. It was not unnatural that Welhaven
should look upon the corybantic music of Werge-
land as the source and origin of an evil of which it
was really the symptom; he gathered his powers
together to crush it, and he published a thunder-
bolt of sonnets.

The English reader, familiar with the power-
lessness of even the best verse to make any im-
pression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile
to think of a great moral and ethical attack con-
ducted with no better weapon than a paper of
sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small,
intensely local, easily agitated society of persons,
all keenly though narrowly educated, and all ac-
customed to be addressed in verse. Welhaven's
pamphlet was entitled The Twilight of Norway
(1834), and the sonnets of which it consisted were
highly polished in form, filled with direct and
pointed references to familiar persons and events
and absolutely unshrinking in attack. No poetry
of equal excellence had been produced in Norway
since the Union. It is not surprising that this
invective against the tendencies of the youthful
bard over whose rhapsodies all Norway was
growing crazy with praise should arrest universal

EARLY INFLUENCES 41

attention, although in the Twilight Welhaven
adroitly avoided mentioning Wergeland by name.
Fanaticism gathered in an angry army around
the outraged standard of the republican poet, but
the lovers of order and discipline had found a
voice, and they clustered about Welhaven with
their support. Language was not minced by the
assailants, and still less by the defenders. The
lovers of Wergeland were told that politics and
brandy were their only pleasures, but those of
Welhaven were warned that they were known to
be fed with bribes from Copenhagen. Mean-
while Welhaven himself, in successive publica-
tions, calmly analyzed the writings of his antago-
nist, and proved them to be "in complete rebellion
against sound thought and the laws of beauty."
The feud raged from 1834 to 1838, and left Nor-
way divided into two rival camps of taste.

Although the "Twilight Feud" had passed
away before Ibsen ceased to be a boy, the effect
of it was too widely spread not to affect him. In
point of fact, we see by the earliest of his lyric
poems that while he was at Grimstad he had fully
made up his mind. His early songs and compli-
mentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if
they show any native influence at all, it is that of
Welhaven. The extreme superficiality of Werge-
land would naturally be hateful to so arduous a

42 IBSEN

craftsman as Ibsen, and it is a fact that so far as
his writings reveal his mind to us, the all-popular
poet of his youth appears to be absolutely unknown
to him. What this signifies may be realized if
we say that it is as though a great English or
French poet of the second half of the nineteenth
century should seem to have never heard of Tenny-
son or Victor Hugo. On the other hand, at one
crucial point of a late play, Little Eyolf, Ibsen
actually pauses to quote Welhaven.

In critical history the absence of an influence is
sometimes as significant as the presence of it.
The looseness of Wergeland's style, its frothy
abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its
slipshod violence, would be to Ibsen so many
beacons of warning, to be viewed with horror and
alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets
of Norway," only recently printed, dates from his
early months in Christiania, and shows that even
in 1850 Ibsen was impatient with the conven-
tional literature of his day. "Less about the
glaciers and the pine-forests," he cries, "less
about the dusty legends of the past, and more
about what is going on in the silent hearts of your
brethren!" Here already is sounded the note
which was ultimately to distinguish him from all
the previous writers of the North.

No letters have been published which throw

EARLY INFLUENCES 43

light on Ibsen's first two years in the capital. We
know that he did not communicate with his
parents, whose poverty was equalled by his own.
He could receive no help from them, nor offer
them any, and he refrained, as they refrained,
from letter writing. This separation from his fam-
ily, begun in this way, grew into a habit, so that
when his father died in 1877 no word had passed
between him and his son for nearly thirty years.
When Ibsen reached Christiania, in March, 1850,
his first act was to seek out his friend Schulerud,
who was already a student. For some time he
shared the room of Schulerud and his thrifty
meals; later on the two friends, in company with
Theodor Abildgaard, a young revolutionary jour-
nalist, lived in lodgings kept by a certain Mother
Saether.

Schulerud received a monthly allowance which
was "not enough for one, and starvation for
two"; but Ibsen's few dollars soon came to an
end, and he seems to have lived on the kindness
of Schulerud to their great mutual privation.
Both young men attended the classes of a cele-
brated "crammer" of that day, H. A. S. Helt-
berg, who had opened in 1843 a Latin school
where elder pupils came for a two-years' course to
prepare them for taking their degree. This place,
known familiarly as "the Student Factory," holds

44 IBSEN

quite a prominent place in Norwegian literary
history, Ibsen, Bjornson, Vinje and Jonas Lie
having attended its classes and passed from it to
the University.

Between these young men, the leading forces
of literature in the coming age, a generous friend-
ship sprang up, despite the disparity in their ages.
Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-
two; he had been a village schoolmaster and had
only now, in 1850, contrived to reach the Uni-
versity. With Vinje, the founder of the move-
ment for writing exclusively in Norwegian patois^
Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy, while he
gave no intellectual adherence to his theories.
Between the births of Vinje and Bjornson there
stretched a period of fourteen years, yet Bjornson
was a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That
Ibsen immediately formed Bjb'rnson's acquaint-
ance seems to be proved from the fact that they
both signed a protest against the deportation of
a Dane called Harring on May 29, 1850. It was
a fortunate chance which threw Ibsen thus sud-
denly into the midst of a group of those in whom
the hopes of the new generation were centred.
But we are left largely to conjecture in what man-
ner their acquaintanceship acted upon his mind.

His material life during the next year is obscure.
Driven by the extremity of need, it is plain that

EARLY INFLUENCES 45

he adopted every means open to him by which
he could add a few dollars to Schulerud's little
store. He wrote for the poor and fugitive jour-
nals of the day, in prose and verse; but the pay-
ment of the Norwegian press in those days was
almost nothing. It is difficult to know how he
subsisted, yet he continued to exist. Although
none of his letters of this period seem to have
been preserved, a few landmarks are left us. The
little play called Kcempelnoien (The Warrior's
Barrow), which he had brought unfinished with
him from Grimstad, was completed and put into
shape in May, 1850, accepted at the Christiania
Theatre, and acted three times during the follow-
ing autumn. Perhaps the most interesting fact
connected with this performance was that the
only female part, that of Blanka, was taken by a
young debutante, Laura Svendsen; this was the
actress afterwards to rise to the height of eminence
as the celebrated Mrs. Gundersen, no doubt the
most gifted of all Ibsen's original interpreters.

It was a matter of course that the poet was
greatly cheered by the acceptance of his play,
and he immediately set to work on another, Olaf
Ltljekrans; but this he put aside when Kcempe-
hoien practically failed. He wrote a satirical
comedy called Norma. He endeavored to get
certain of his works, dramatic and lyric, published

46 IBSEN

in Christiania, but all the schemes fell through. It
is certain that 1851 began darkly for the young
man, and that his misfortunes encouraged in him
a sour and rebellious ^temper. For the first and
only time in his life he meddled with practical
politics. Vinje and he — in company with a
charming person, Paul Botten-Hansen (1824-69),
who flits very pleasantly through the literary
history of this time — founded a newspaper called
Andhrimner, which lasted for nine months.

One of the contributors was Abildgaard, who, as
we have seen, lived in the same house with Ibsen.
He was a wild being, who had adopted the repub-
lican theories of the day in their crudest form.
He posed as the head of a little body whose object
was to dethrone the king, and to found a democracy
in Norway. On July 7, 1851, the police made a
raid upon these childish conspirators, the leaders
being arrested and punished with a long im-
prisonment. The poet escaped, as by the skin
of his teeth, and the warning was a lifelong one.
He never meddled with politics any more. This
was, indeed, as perhaps he felt, no time for re-
bellion; all over Europe the eruption of socialism
had spent itself, and the docility of the popula-
tions had become wonderful.

The discomfort and uncertainty of Ibsen's posi-
tion in Christiania made him glad to fill a post

EARLY INFLUENCES 47

which the violinist, Ole Bull, offered him during
the autumn. The newly constituted National
Theatre in Bergen (opened Jan. 2, 1850) had
accepted a prologue written for an occasion by
the young poet, and on November 6, 1851, Ibsen
entered into a contract by which he bound him-
self to go to Bergen "to assist the theatre as dra-
matic author." The salary was less than £jo a
year, but it was eked out by travelling grants,
and little as it might be, it was substantially more
than the nothing-at-all which Ibsen had been
enjoying in Christiania.

It is difficult to imagine what asset could be
brought to the treasuries of a public theatre by
a youth of three and twenty so ill-educated, so
empty of experience and so ill-read as Ibsen was
in 1851. His crudity, we may be sure, passed
belief. He was the novice who has not learned
his business, the tyro to whom the elements of
his occupation are unknown. We have seen that
when he wrote Catilina he had neither sat through
nor read any of the plays of the world, whether
ancient or modern. The pieces which belong
to his student years reveal a preoccupation with
Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlen-
schlager and (if we may guess what Norma was)
Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull,
one of the most far-sighted men of his time, must

48 IBSEN

have perceived the germs of theatrical genius in
him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed his ap-
pointment more to what this wise patron felt in
his future than what Ole Bull or any one else
could possibly point to as yet accomplished. Un-
questionably, a rude theatrical penetration could
already he divined in his talk about the stage,
vague and empirical as that must have been.

At all events, to Bergen he went, as a sort of
literary manager, as a Claretie or Antoine, to
compare a small thing with great ones, and the
fact was of inestimable value. It may even be
held, without fear of paradox, that this was the
turning-point of Ibsen's life, that this blind step
in the dark, taken in the magnificent freedom of
youth, was what made him what he became. No
Bergen in 1851, we may say, and no Doll's House
or Hedda Gabler ultimately to follow. For what
it did was to force this stubborn genius, which
might so easily have slipped into sinister and
abnormal paths, and have missed the real human-
ity of the stage, to take the tastes of the vulgar
into due consideration and to acquaint himself
with the necessary laws of play-composition.

Ibsen may seem to have little relation with
the drama of the world, but in reality he is linked
with it at every step. There is something of
Shakespeare in John Gabriel Borkman, something

EARLY INFLUENCES 49

of Moliere in Ghosts, something of Goethe in
Peer Gynt. We may go further and say, though
it would have made Ibsen wince, that there is
something of Scribe in An Enemy of the People.
It is very doubtful whether, without the disci-
pline which forced him to put on the stage, at
Bergen and in Christiania, plays evidently un-
sympathetic to his own taste, which obliged him
to do his best for the popular reception of those
plays, and which forced him minutely to analyze
their effects, he would ever have been the world-
moving dramatist which, as all sane critics must
admit, he at length became.

He made some mistakes at first; how could he
fail to do so ? It was the recognition of these
blunders, and perhaps the rough censure of them
in the local press, which induced the Bergen
theatre to scrape a few dollars together and send
him, in charge of some of the leading actors and
actresses, to Copenhagen and Dresden for in-
struction. To go from Bergen to Copenhagen
was like travelling from Abdera to Athens, and to
find a species of Sophocles in J. A. Heiberg, who
had since 1849 been sole manager of the Royal
Theatre. Here the drama of the world, all the
salutary names, all the fine traditions, burst upon
the pilgrims from the North. Heiberg, the gra-
cious and many-sided, was the centre of light in

50 IBSEN

those days; no one knew the stage as he knew
it, no one interpreted it with such splendid in-
telligence, and he received the crude Norwegian
"dramatist-manager" with the utmost elegance
of cordiality. Among the teachers of Ibsen,
Heiberg ranks as the foremost. We may go
farther and say that he was the last. When Ibsen
had learned the lesson of Heiberg, only nature
and his own genius had anything more to teach
him.1 In August, 1852, rich with the spoils of
time, but otherwise poor indeed, Ibsen made his
way back to his duties in Bergen.

1 Perhaps no author, during the whole of his career, more deeply
impressed Ibsen with reverence and affection than Johan Ludvig
Heiberg did. When the great Danish poet died (at Bonderup, August
25, 1860), Ibsen threw on his tomb the characteristic bunch of bitter
herbs called Til de genlevende — "To the Survivors," in which he ex-
pressed the faintest appreciation of those who lavished posthumous
honor on Heiberg in Denmark:

In your land a torch he lifted;

With its flame ye scorched his forehead.

How to swing the sword he taught you,
And, — ye plunged it in his bosom.

While he routed trolls of darkness, —

With your shields you tripped and bruised him.

But his glittering star of conquest
Ye must guard, since he has left you:

Try, at least, to keep it shining,

While the thorn-crowned conqueror slumbers.

CHAPTER III
LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57)

IBSEN'S native biographers have not found
much to record, and still less that deserves to
be recorded, about his life during the next five
years. He remained in Bergen, cramped by want
of means in his material condition, and much
harassed and worried by the little pressing re-
quirements of the theatre. It seems that every
responsibility fell upon his shoulders, and that
there was no part of stage-life that it was not his
duty to look after. The dresses of the actresses,
the furniture, the scene-painting, the instruction
of raw Norwegian actors and actresses, the selec-
tion of plays, now to please himself, now to please
the bourgeois of Bergen, all this must be done by
the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundred
years earlier, we may imagine Moliere, at Car-
cassonne or Albi, bearing up in his arms, a weary
Titan, all the frivolities and anxieties and mis-
deeds of a whole company of comedians.

So far as our very scanty evidence goes, we find
the poet isolated from his fellows, so far as iso-

52 IBSEN

lation was possible, during his long stay at Bergen.
He was not accused, and if there had been a
chance he would have been accused, of dereliction.
No doubt he pushed through the work of the
theatre doggedly, but certainly not in a con-
vivial spirit. The Norwegians are a hospitable
and festal people, and there is no question that
the manager of the theatre would have unusual
opportunities of being jolly with his friends. But
it does not appear that Ibsen made friends; if
so, they were few, and they were as quiet as him-
self. Even in these early years he did not invite
confidences, and no one found him wearing his
heart upon his sleeve. He went through his work
without effusion, and there is no doubt that what
leisure he enjoyed he spent in study, mainly of
dramatic literature.

His reading must have been limited by his
insensibility to foreign languages. All through
his life he forgot the tongues of other countries
almost faster than he gained them. Probably,
at this time, he had begun to know German, a
language in which he did ultimately achieve a
fluency which was, it appears, always ungram-
matical. But, as is not unfrequent with a man
who is fond of reading but no linguist, Ibsen's
French and English came and went in a trem-
bling uncertainty. As time passed on, he gave

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 53

up the effort to read, even a newspaper, in either
language.

The mile-stones in this otherwise blank time are
the original plays which, perhaps in accordance
with some clause in his agreement, he produced
at his theatre in the first week of January in each
year. A list of them cannot be spared in this
place to the most indolent of readers, since it
offers, in a nutshell, a resume of what the busy
imagination of Ibsen was at work upon up to his
thirtieth year. His earliest new-year's gift to
the play-goers of Bergen was St. John's Night,
1853, a piece which has not been printed; in
1854 he revived The Warrior s Barrow; in 1855
he made an immense although irregular advance
with Lady Inger at Ostraat; in 1856 he produced
The Feast at Solhoug; in 1857 a rewritten version
of the early 01 af Liljekrans. These are the juve-
nile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted in
the recognized canon of his writings. None of
them is completely representative of his genius,
and several are not yet within reach of the English
reader. Yet they have a considerable importance,
and must detain us for a while. They are remark-
able as showing the vigor of the effort by which
he attempted to create an independent style for
himself, no less than the great difficulties which
he encountered in following this admirable aim.

54 IBSEN

Lady Inger at Ostraat, written in the winter of
1854 but not published until 1857, is unique
among Ibsen's works as a romantic exercise in the
manner of Scribe. It is the sole example of a
theme taken by him directly from comparatively
modern history, and treated purely for its value
as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this
point of view it curiously exemplifies a remark of
Hazlitt: "The progress of manners and knowl-
edge has an influence on the stage, and will in
time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy.
... At last, there will be nothing left, good nor
bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or
in real life."

When Ibsen undertook to write about Inger
Gyldenlove, he was but little acquainted with the
particulars of her history. He conceived her, as
he found her in the incomplete chronicles he con-
sulted, as a Matriarch, a wonderful and heroic
elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an
embittered patriotism were legitimately centred.
Unfortunately, "the progress of knowledge," as
Hazlitt would say, exposed the falsity of this
conception. A closer inspection of the docu-
ments, and further analysis of the condition of
Norway in 1528, destroyed the fair illusion, and
showed Ibsen in the light of an indulgent
idealist.

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 55

Here is what Jaeger1 has to give us of the dis-
concerting results of research:

In real life Lady Inger was not a woman formed upon so
grand a plan. She was the descendant of an old and noble
family which had preserved its dignity, and she consequently
was the wealthiest landowner in the country. This, and this
alone, gives her a right to a place in history. If we study her
life, we find no reason to suppose that patriotic considerations
ever affected her conduct. The motive power of her actions
was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly
in an amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and
her status. We find her, for instance, on one occasion
seizing the estates of a neighbor, and holding them till she
was actually forced to resign them. When she gave her
daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it was to secure
direct advantage from alliance with the most high-born sons-
in-law procurable. When she took a convent under her
protection, she contrived to extort a rent which well repaid
her. Even for a good action she exacted a return, and
when she offered harbor to the persecuted Chancellor, she
had the adroitness to be well rewarded by a large sum in
rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden.

All this could not fail to be highly exasperating
to Ibsen, who had set out to be a realist, and was
convicted by the spiteful hand of history of hav-
ing been an idealist of the rose-water class. No
wonder that he never touched the sequence of
modern events any more.

i In Et litercert Livsbillede.

56 IBSEN

There is some slight, but of course unconscious,
resemblance to Macbeth in the external charac-
ter of Lady Inger. This play has something of
the roughness of a mediaeval record, and it de-
picts a condition of life where barbarism uncouthly
mingles with a certain luxury of condition. There
is, however, this radical difference that in Lady
Inger there is nothing preternatural, and it is,
indeed, in this play that Ibsen seems first to ap-
preciate the value of a stiff attention to realism.
The romantic elements of the story, however,
completely dominate his imagination, and when
we have read the play carefully what remains with
us most vividly is the picturesqueness and unity
of the scene. The action, vehement and tumul-
tuous as it is, takes place entirely within the walls
of Ostraat castle, a mysterious edifice, sombre and
ancient, built on a crag over the ocean, and dimly
lighted by

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.

The action is exclusively nocturnal, and so
large a place in it is taken by huge and portable
candlesticks that it might be called the Tragedy
of the Candelabra. Through the windows, on
the landward side, a procession of mysterious
visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 57

fraught with the solemnity of fate. The play is
full of striking pictures, groups in light and shade,
pictorial appeals to terror and pity.

The fault of the drama lies in the uncertain
conception of the characters, and particularly of
that of the Matriarch herself. Inger is described
to us as the Mother of the Norwegian People, as
the one strong, inflexible and implacable brain
moving in a world of depressed and irritated men.
"Now there is no knight left in our land," says
Finn, but — and this is the point from which the
play starts — there is Inger Gyldenlove. We have
approached the moment of crisis when the fort-
unes and the fates of Norway rest upon the
firmness of this majestic woman. Inger is driven
forward on the tide of circumstance, and, how-
ever she may ultimately fail, we demand evidence
of her inherent greatness. This, however, we fail
to receive, and partly, no doubt, because Ibsen was
still distracted at the division of the ways.

Oehlenschlager, if he had attempted this theme,
would have made no attempt after subtlety of
character painting and still less after correctness
of historic color. He would have given small
shrift to Olaf Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw.
But he would have drawn Inger, the Mother of
her People, in majestic strokes, and we should
have had a great simplicity, a noble outline with

58 IBSEN

none of the detail put in. Ibsen, already, cannot
be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every-
thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity
between the cartoon and the finished work.

Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress
us with greatness. "The deed no less than the
attempt confounds" her. She displays, from the
opening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but
excludes all evidence of her energy. The ascen-
dency of Nils Lykke, over herself and over her
singularly and unconvincingly modern daughter,
Elima, in what does it consist ? In a presentation
of a purely physical attractiveness; Nils Lykke
is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fort-
unes, with impudent ease, in the home of his
ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in his
only, the majestic Inger is reduced from a queen
to a pawn. All manhood, we are told, is dead in
Norway; if this be so, then what a field is cleared
where a heroine like Inger, not young and a vic-
tim to her passions, nor old and delivered to de-
crepit fears, may show us how a woman of intel-
lect and force can take the place of man. In-
stead of this, one disguised and anonymous ad-
venturer after another comes forth out of the
night, and confuses her with pretensions and
traps her with deceits against which her intellect
protests but her will is powerless to contend.

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 59

Another feature in the conduct of Lady Inger
betrays the ambitious but the inexperienced dram-
atist. No doubt a pious commentator can suc-
cessfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but
the spectator demands that a play should be
clearly and easily intelligible. The audience,
however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this
awful third night after Martinmas, and resents
the obscurity of all this intrigue by candlelight.
Why do the various persons meet at Ostraat?
Who sends them ? Whence do they come and
whither do they go ? To these questions, no
doubt, an answer can be found, and it is partly
given, and very awkwardly, by the incessant in-
troduction of narrative. The confused and melo-
dramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils
Lykke and Skaktavl is of central importance, but
what is it about ? The business with Lucia's
coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Web-
ster or of Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings
are slurred over by the enthusiastic critics of Scan-
dinavia, yet they call for indulgence. The fact is
that Lady Inger is a brilliant piece of romantic
extravagance, which is extremely interesting in
illuminating the evolution of Ibsen's genius, and
particularly as showing him in the act of emanci-
pating himself from Danish traditions, but which
has little positive value as a drama.

60 IBSEN

The direct result of the failure of Lady Inger —
for it did not please the play-goers of Bergen and
but partly satisfied its author — was, however, to
send him back, for the moment, more violently
than ever to the Danish tradition. Any record
of this interesting phase in Ibsen's career is, how-
ever, complicated by the fact that late in his life
(in 1883) he did what was very unusual with him:
he wrote a detailed account of the circumstances
of his poetical work in 1855 and 1856. He de-
nied, in short, that he had undergone any influence
from the Danish poet whom he had been per-
sistently accused of imitating, and he traced the
movement of his mind to purely Norwegian
sources. During the remainder of his lifetime,
of course, this statement greatly confounded
criticism, and there is still a danger of Ibsen's
disclaimer being accepted for gospel. However,
literary history must be built on the evidence be-
fore it, and the actual text of The Feast at Solhoug
and of Olaf Liljekrans must be taken in spite of
anything their author chose to say nearly thirty
years afterwards. Great poets, without the least
wish to mystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover
their tracks." Tennyson, in advanced years,
denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley
or Keats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his
style of the lyrical dramas of Hertz. But we

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 61

must appeal from the arrogance of old age to the
actual works of youth.

Henrik Hertz (1798-1870) was the most ex-
quisite, the most delicate, of the Danish writers
of his age. He was deeply impressed with the
importance of form in drama, and at the height
of his powers he began to compose rhymed plays
which were like old ballads put into dialogue.
His comedy of Cupid's Strokes of Genius (1830)
began a series of tragi-comedies which gradually
deepened in passion and melody, till they culmi-
nated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of
the Danish stage, Svend Dyrings House (1837)
and King Rene's Daughter (1845). The genius of
Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen;
in all Europe there were not two authors less
alike. Hertz would have pleased Kenelm Digby,
and if that romantic being had read Danish, the
poet of chivalry must have had a niche in The
Broad Stone of Honour. Hertz's style is delicate
to the verge of sweetness; his choice of words is
fantastically exquisite, yet so apposite as to give
an impression of the inevitable. He cares very
little for psychological exactitude or truth of ob-
servation; but he is the very type of what we mean
by a verbal artist.

Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and
possibly with the person, of Hertz, when he was

62 IBSEN

in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt
whatever that, while he was anxiously questioning
his own future, and conscious of crude faults in
Lady Inger, he set himself, as a task, to write in
the manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt
that it was a deliberate exercise, and we see the
results in The Feast at Solhoug and in Olaf Lilje-
krans. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and
prose, like Hertz's romantic dramas; there is the
same determination to achieve the chivalric ideal;
but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master.
Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering
about him, dances without an ungraceful gesture
through the elaborate and yet simple masque that
he has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high
and sudden flights of metrical writing, but breaks
down surprisingly at awkward intervals, and dis-
plays a hopeless inconsistency between his own
nature and the medium in which he is forcing
himself to write. As a proof that the similarity
between The Feast at Solhoug and Svend Dyrings
House is accidental, it has been pointed out that
Ibsen produced his own play on the Bergen stage
in January, 1856, and revived Hertz's a month
later. It might, surely, be more sensibly urged
that this fact shows how much he was captivated
by the charm of the Danish dramatist.

The sensible thing, in spite of Ibsen's late dis-

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 63

claimer, is to suppose that, in the consciousness
of his crudity and inexperience as a writer, he
voluntarily sat at the feet of the one great poet
whom he felt had most to teach him. On the
boards at Bergen, The Feast at Solhoug was a
success, while Olaf Liljekrans was a failure; but
neither incident could have meant very much to
Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet who lived in
the future, was waiting and watching for the
development of his own genius. Slowly, without
precocity, without even that joy in strength of
maturity which comes to most great writers be-
fore the age of thirty, he toiled on in a sort of
vacuum. His youth was one of unusual darkness,
because he had not merely poverty, isolation,
citizenship of a remote and imperfectly civilized
country to contend against, but because his
critical sense was acute enough to teach him that
he himself was still unripe, still unworthy of the
fame that he thirsted for. He had not even the
consolation which a proud confidence in them-
selves gives to the unappreciated young, for in
his heart of hearts he knew that he had as yet
done nothing which deserved the highest praise.
But his imagination was expanding with a steady
sureness, and the long years of his apprenticeship
were drawing to a close.

Ibsen was now, like other young Norwegian

64 IBSEN

poets, and particularly Bjornson, coming into the
range of that wind of nationalistic inspiration
which had begun to blow down from the moun-

O

tains and to fill every valley with music. The
Norwegians were discovering that they possessed
a wonderful hidden treasure in their own ancient
poetry and legend. It was a gentle, clerically
minded poet — himself the son of a peasant —
Jorgen Moe (1813-82), long afterwards Bishop of
Christianssand, who, as far back as 1834, began to
collect from peasants the folk-tales of Norway.
The childlike innocence and playful humor of
these stories were charming to the mind of Moe,
who was fortunately joined by a stronger though
less delicate spirit in the person of Peter Christian
Asbjornsen. Their earliest collection of folk-lore
in collaboration appeared in 1841, but it was the
full edition of 1856 which produced a national
sensation, and doubtless awakened Ibsen in
Bergen. Meanwhile, in 1853, M. B. Landstad
had published the earliest of his collections of
the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M.
Lindeman in the same years (1853-59) was pub-
lishing, in installments, the peasant melodies of
Norway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Ice-
landic, was studying the ancient sagas in the
faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and
all combined to determine him to make an ex-

Ibsen in Dresden, October, 1873.

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 65

periment in a purely national and archaistic
direction.

Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his
theory, has given rather a confused account of
the circumstances that led to the composition of
his next play, The Fikings at Helgeland. But it
is clear that in looking through Petersen for a
subject which would display, in broad and primi-
tive forms, the clash of character in an ancient
Norwegian family, he fell upon "Volsungasaga,"
and somewhat rashly responded to its vigorous
appeal. He thought that in this particular epi-
sode, "the titanic conditions and occurrences of
the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other pro-mediaeval
legends had "been reduced to human dimen-
sions." He believed that to dramatize such a
story would lift what he called "our national epic
material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase
in his essay which is very interesting, in the light
it throws upon the object which the author had
before him in writing The Fikings at Helgeland.
He says clearly — and this was intended as a revolt
against the tradition of Oehlenschlager — "it was
not my aim to present our mythic world, but
simply our life in primitive times." Brandes says
of this departure that it is "indeed a new con-
quest, but, like so many conquests, associated with
very extensive plundering."

66 IBSEN

In turning to an examination of The Vikings,
the first point which demands notice is that Ibsen
has gained a surprising mastery over the arts of
theatrical writing since we met with him last.
There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the
verse in The Feast at Solhoug about the trenchant
prose of The Vikings, and the crepuscular dim-
ness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect
lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think
about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of
the vikings, there is no question at all as to what
it is they do and mean. Ibsen has gained, and
for good, that master quality of translucent pres-
entation without which all other stage gifts are
shorn of their value. When we have, however,
praised the limpidity of The Vikings at Helge-
land, we have, in honesty, to make several reser-
vations in our criticism of the author's choice of
a subject. It is valuable to compare Ibsen's
treatment of Icelandic family-saga with that of
William Morris; let us say, in The Lovers of
Gudrun. That enchanting little epic deals with
an episode from one of the great Iceland nar-
ratives, and follows it much more closely than
Ibsen's does. But we are conscious of a less
painful effort and of a more human result. Mor-
ris does successfully what Ibsen unsuccessfully
aimed at doing: he translates the heroic and half-

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 67

fabulous action into terms that are human and
credible.

It was, moreover, an error of judgment on the
part of the Norwegian playwright to make his
tragedy a mosaic of effective bits borrowed hither
and thither from the Sagas. Scandinavian bibli-
ography has toiled to show his indebtedness to this
tale and to that, and he has been accused of con-
cealing his plagiarisms. But to say this is to miss
the mark. A poet is at liberty to steal what he
will, if only he builds his thefts up into a living
structure of his own. For this purpose, however,
it is practically found that, owing perhaps to the
elastic consistency of individual human nature,
it is safest to stick to one story, embroidering and
developing it along its own essential lines.

There is great vigor, however, in many of the
scenes in The Vikings. The appearance of
Hiordis on the stage, in the opening act, marks,
perhaps, the first occasion on which Ibsen had put
forth his full strength as a playwright. This
entrance of Hiordis ought to be extremely ef-
fective; in fact, we understand, it rarely is. The
cause of this disappointment can easily be dis-
covered. It is the misfortune of The Vikings
that it is hardly to be acted by mortal men.
Hiordis herself is superhuman; she has eaten the
heart of a wolf, she claims direct descent from a

68 IBSEN

race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur
about the conception of her form and character,
but it is a grandeur which might well daunt a
human actress. One can faintly imagine the part
being played by Mrs. Siddons, with such an ex-
tremity of fierceness and terror that ladies and
gentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in
hysterics, as in the days of Byron. Where Hiordis
insults her guests, and contrives the horrid murder
of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have a
stage-dilemma presented to us — either the actress
must treat the scene inadequately, or else intoler-
ably. Ne pueros cor am populo Medea trucidet, and
we shrink from Hiordis with a physical disgust.
Her great hands and shrieking mouth are like
Bellona's, and they smell of blood.

What is true of Hiordis is true in less degree
of all the characters in The bikings. They are
"great beautiful half-witted men," as Mr. Ches-
terton would say:

Our sea was dark with dreadful ships

Full of strange spoil and fire,
And hairy men, as strange as sin,
With horrid heads, came wading in

Through the long low sea-mire.

This is the other side of the picture; this is
how Ornulf and his seven terrible sons must have

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 69

appeared to Kaare the peasant, and this is how,
to tell the truth, they wo*uld in real life appear
to us. The persons in The Vikings at Helgoland
are so primitive that they scarcely appeal to our
sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color
that the poet has lavished upon them, and the
majestic sentiments which he has put into their
mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helge-
land must have regarded them as those of Surbiton
regarded the beings who were shot down from
Mars in Mr. Wells' blood-curdling story.

The Vikings at Helgeland is a work of extraor-
dinary violence and agitation. The personages
bark at one another like seals and roar like sea-
lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night."
Ornulf, the aged father of a grim and speechless
clan, is sorely wounded at the beginning of the
play, but it makes no difference to him; no one
binds up his arm, but he talks, fights, travels as
before. We may see here foreshadowed various
features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here
is his favorite conventional tame man, since,
among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers
like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of
unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's
armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it
is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only
fair to say that there is more than this to applaud

70 IBSEN

in The Flkings at Helgeland; it moves on a con-
sistent and high level of austere romantic beauty.
Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more
than any Scandinavian critic has done, justly
draws attention to the nobility of Ornulf's en-
trance in the third act. Yet, on the whole, I
confess myself unable to be surprised at the
severity with which Heiberg judged The Fikings
at its first appearance, a severity which must have
wounded Ibsen to the quick.

The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in
Ibsen's condition. The period for which he had
undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had
now come to a close, and he was not anxious to
prolong it. He had had enough of Bergen, to
which only one chain now bound him. Those
who read the incidents of a poet's life into the
pages of his works may gratify their tendency by
seeing in the discussions between Dagny and
Hiordis some echo of the thoughts which were
occupying Ibsen's mind in relation to the married
state. Since his death, the story has been told of
his love-affair with a very young girl, Rikke
Hoist, who had attracted his notice by throwing
a bunch of wild flowers in his face, and whom he
followed and desired to marry. Her father had
rejected the proposal with indignation. Ibsen had
suffered considerably, but this was, after all, an

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 71

early and a very fugitive sentiment, which made
no deep impression on his heart, although it
seems to have always lingered in his memory.

There had followed a sentiment much deeper
and much more emphatic. A charming, though
fragmentary, set of verses, addressed in January,
1856, to Miss Susannah Thoresen, show that
already for a long while he had come to regard
this girl of twenty as "the young dreaming en-
igma," the possible solution of which interested
him more than that of any other living problem.
It was more than the conversation of a versifying
lover which made Ibsen speak of Miss Thoresen's
"blossoming child-soul" as the bourne of his am-
bitions. In his dark way, he was already vio-
lently in love with her.

The household of her father, Hans Conrad
Thoresen, was the most cultivated in Bergen. He
himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was a bookish,
meditative man of no particular initiative, but he
had married, as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh,
a Dane by birth, and for a long time, with the
possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland's
sister, the most active woman of letters in Nor-
way. Mrs. Thoresen was the step-mother of
Susannah, the only child of her husband's second
marriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and
Ibsen a strong friendship had sprung up, which

72 IBSEN

lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's
best letters are those written to his wife's step-
mother. She worked hard for him at the Bergen
theatre, translating plays from the French, and
it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre
that several of her own pieces were produced.
Her prose stories, in connection with which her
name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet
written; so long as Ibsen was at her side, her
ideas seem to have been concentrated on the
stage. Constant communication with this charm-
ing woman, only nine years his senior, and much
his superior in conventional culture, must have
been a school of refinement to the crude and
powerful young poet. And now the wise Mag-
dalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating
to him the best treasure of the family circle, the
gay and yet mysterious Susannah.

While he was writing The bikings at Helge-
land, and courting Susannah Thoresen, Ibsen
received what seemed a timely invitation to settle
in Christiania as director of the Norwegian
Theatre; he returned, thereupon, to the capital
in the summer of 1857, after an absence of six
years. Now began another period of six years
more, these the most painful in Ibsen's life, when,
as Halvorsen has said, he had to fight not merely
for the existence of himself and his family, but for

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 73

the very existence of Norwegian poetry and the
Norwegian stage. This struggle was an exces-
sively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled
with debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856)
weighed him down with further responsibilities.
The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was a
secondary house, ill-supported by its patrons,
often tottering at the brink of bankruptcy, and
so primitive was the situation of literature in the
country that to attempt to live by poetry and
drama was to court starvation. His slender
salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The
only published volume of Ibsen's which had (up
to 1863) sold at all was The Warriors, by which he
had made in all 227 specie dollars (or about £25).
The Christiania he had come to, however, was
not that which he had left. In many directions
it had developed rapidly. From an intellectual
point of view, the labors of the nationalists had
made themselves felt; the folk-lore of Landstad,
Moe and Asbjornsen had impressed young imag-
inations. In some of its forms the development
was unpleasing and discouraging to Ibsen; the
success of the blank-verse tragedies of Andreas
Munch (Salomon de Caus, 1855; Lord William
Russell, 1857) was, for instance, an irritating step
in the wrong direction. The new-born school of
prose fiction, with Bjornson as its head (Synriove

74 IBSEN

Solbakken, 1857; Arne, 1858), with Camilla
Collett's Prefect's Daughters, 1855, as its herald;
with Ostgaard's sketches of peasant life and
humors in the mountains (1852) — all this was
a direct menace to the popularity of the national
stage, offering an easy and alluring alternative for
home-loving citizens. Was it certain that the
classic Danish, which alone Ibsen cared to write,
would continue to be the language of the culti-
vated classes in Norway ? Here was Ivar Aasen
(in 1853) showing that the irritating landsmaal
could be used for prose and verse.

Wherever he turned Ibsen saw increased vitality,
but in shapes that were either useless or antag-
onistic to himself, and all that was harsh and
saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen,
at this moment of his life, like Shakespeare in
his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortune and
men's eyes," unappreciated and ready to doubt
the reality of his own genius; and murmuring to
himself: —

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,

Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
With what I most enjoy contented least.

How little his greatness was perceived in the
Christiania literary coteries may be gathered from

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 75

the little fact that the species of official anthology
of Modern Norwegian Poets, published in 1859,
though it netted the shallows of national song
very closely, contained not a line by the author
of the lovely lyrics in The Feast at Solhoug. It
was at this low and miserable moment that Ibsen's
talent suddenly took wings; he conceived, in the
summer of 1858, what finally became, five years
later, his first acknowledged masterpiece, and
perhaps the most finished of all his writings, the
sculptural tragedy of The Pretenders.

The Pretenders (Kongsemnerne, properly stuff
from which Kings can be made) is the earliest of
the plays of Ibsen in which the psychological
interest is predominant, and in which there is no
attempt to disguise the fact. Nothing that has
since been written about this drama, the very
perfection of which is baffling to criticism, has
improved upon the impression which Georg
Brandes received from it when he first read it forty
years ago. The passage is classic, and deserves to
be cited, if only as perhaps the very earliest
instance in which the genius of Ibsen was re-
warded by the analysis of a great critic. Brandes
wrote (in 1867): —

What is it that The Pretenders treats of? Looked at
simply, it is an old story. We all know the tale of Aladdin
and Nureddin, the simple legend in the Arabian Nights, and

76 IBSEN

our great poet's [Oehlenschlager's] incomparable poem.
In The Pretenders two figures again stand opposed to one
another as the superior and the inferior being, an Aladdin
and a Nureddin nature. It is towards this contrast that
Ibsen has hitherto unconsciously directed his endeavors,
just as Nature feels her way in her blind preliminary attempts
to form her types. Hakon and Skule are pretenders to the
same throne, scions of royalty out of whom a king may be
made. But the first is the incarnation of fortune, victory,
right and confidence; the second — the principal figure in
the play, masterly in its truth and originality — is the brooder,
a prey to inward struggle and endless distrust, brave and
ambitious, with perhaps every qualification and claim to
be king, but lacking the inexpressible, impalpable somewhat
that would give a value to all the rest — the wonderful Lamp.
"I am a king's arm," he says, " mayhap a king's brain as
well; but Hakon is the whole king." "You have wisdom
and courage, and all noble gifts of the mind," says Hakon to
him; "you are born to stand nearest a king, but not to be a
king yourself."

To a poet the achievements of his greatest
contemporaries in their common art have all the
importance of high deeds in statesmanship and
war. It is, therefore, by no means extravagant to
see in the noble emulation of the two dukes in
The Pretenders some reflection of Ibsen's attitude
to the youthful and brilliant Bjornson. The
luminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence
and good fortune of Bjornson-Hakon could not
but offer a violent contrast with the gloom and

LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) 77

hesitation, the sick revulsions of hope and final
lack of conviction, of Ibsen-Skule. It was
Bjornson's " belt of strength," as it was Hakon's,
that he had utter belief in himself, and with this
his rival could not yet girdle himself. "The
luckiest man is the greatest man," says Bishop
Nicholas in the play, and Bjornson seemed in
these melancholy years as lucky as Ibsen was un-
lucky. But the Bishop's views were not wide
enough, and the end was not yet.

CHAPTER IV
THE SATIRES (1857-67)

TEMPERAMENT and environment combined at
the period we have now reached to turn Ibsen into
a satirist. It was during his time of Sturm und
Drang, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest ele-
ments in his nature were awakened, and that he
became one who loved to lash the follies of his
age. With the advent of prosperity and recog-
nition this phase melted away, leaving Ibsen with-
out illusions and without much pity, but no longer
the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although The
Pretenders, a work of dignified and polished aloof-
ness, was not completed until 1863, it really be-
longs to the earlier and more experimental section
of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the out-
come and the apex of his national studies that it
has seemed best to consider it with The Ft kings
at Helgeland, in spite of its immense advance
upon that drama. But we must now go back a
year, and take up an entirely new section which
overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires
in dramatic rhyme.

With regard to the adoption of that form of
78

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 79

poetic art, a great difference existed between
Norwegian and English taste, and this must be
borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when
Ibsen was inditing the sharp couplets of his Love's
Comedy, Tennyson, in Sea Dreams, was giving
voice to the English abandonment of satire—
which had been rampant in the generation of
Byron — in the famous words: —

I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.

What England repudiated, Norway comprehended,
and in certain hands enjoyed. Polemical litera-
ture, if seldom of a high class, was abundant and
was much appreciated. The masterpiece of mod-
ern Norwegian poetry was, still, the satiric cycle
of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, the tone
was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled
more violently, than English taste at that period
could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to
crush had not minced their own words. The
press was violence itself, and was not tempered
with justice; when the poet looked round he saw
"afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all man-
ner of reproaches," as Dryden said.

Yet it was not an age of gross and open vices;
manners were not flagitious, they were merely of

8o IBSEN

a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown with anger as
with wine, could find no outrageous offences to
lash, and all he could invite the age to do was to
laugh at certain conventions and to reconsider
some prejudicated opinions. He had to be pun-
gent, not openly ferocious; he had to be sarcastic
and to treat the current code of morals as a jest.
He found the society around him excessively
distasteful to him, but there were no crying evils
of a political or ethical kind to be stigmatized.
What was open to him was what an old writer of
our own defined as "a sharp, well-mannered way
of laughing a folly out of countenance."

Unfortunately, the people laughed at will never
consent to think the way well mannered, and
Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste,"
that vaguest and most insidious of accusations.
We are told that he began his enterprise in prose,1
but found that too stiff and bald a medium for a
satire on the social crudity of Norway. In writing
satire, it is all-important that the form should be
adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached
the impeccable perfection of his later colloquial
prose. He started Love's Comedy, therefore, anew,
and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is
not certain that he had any very definite idea of

1 "Svanhild: a Comedy in three acts and in prose: 1860," is un-
derstood to exist still in manuscript.

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 81

the line which his attack should take. He was
very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he
was easily convinced that the times were out of
joint. Then he observed that if there was any-
thing that the Norwegian upper classes prided
themselves upon it was their conduct of betrothal
and marriage. Plato had said that the familiarity
of young persons before marriage prevented
enmity and disappointment in later years, that it
was useful to know the peculiarities of tempera-
ment beforehand, and so, being accustomed to
them, to discount them. But Ibsen was not of this
opinion, or rather, perhaps, he did not choose to be.
The extremely slow and public method of betrothal
in the North gave him his first opportunity.

It is with a song, in the original one of the most
delicious of his lyrics, that he opens the cam-
paign. To a miscellaneous party of Philistines
circled around the tea-table, "all sober and all
" the rebellious hero sings : —

In the sunny orchard-closes,

While the warblers sing and swing,
Care not whether blustering Autumn

Break the promises of Spring;
Rose and white the apple-blossom

Hides you from the sultry sky;
Let it flutter, blown and scattered,

On the meadow by and by.

82 IBSEN

In the sexual struggle, that is to say, the lovers
should not pause to consider the worldly advan-
tages of their match, but should fly in secret to
each other's arms. By the law of battle, the
female should be snatched to the conqueror's
saddle-bow, and ridden away with into the night,
not subjected to the jokes and the good advice
and the impertinent congratulations of the clan.
Young Lochinvar does not wait to ask the counsel
of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of
her aunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where
ford there is none. Ibsen is in favor of the
manage de convenance, which suppresses, with-
out favor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above
all, anything is better than the publicity, the
meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal,
which kills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are
apt to break their own eggs if intruding hands
have touched them.

This is the central point in Loves Comedy, but
there is much beside this in its reckless satire on
the "sanctities" of domestic life. The burden
of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the
impertinent poet touches with levity upon the
question of the duration of marriage:

With my living, with my singing,
I will tear the hedges down!

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 83

Sweep the grass and heap the blossom!

Let it shrivel, pale and blown!
Throw the wicket wide! Sheep, cattle,

Let them browse among the best!
I broke off the flowers; what matter

Who may graze among the rest!

Love's Comedy is perhaps the most diverting of
Ibsen's works; it is certainly the most imperti-
nent. If there was one class in Norwegian so-
ciety which was held to be above criticism it was
the clerical. A prominent character in Ibsen's
comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross,
unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull,
upon whose inert body the arrows of satire con-
verge. This was never forgotten and long was
unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing re-
fused a grant to Ibsen definitely on the ground
of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait of
Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which
every poet looks for an audience, was not less
deeply outraged by the want of indulgence which
he had shown for all forms of amorous senti-
ment, although Ibsen had really, through his
satire on the methods of betrothal, risen to some-
thing like a philosophical examination of the
essence of love itself.

To Brandes, who reproached him for not re-
cording the history of ideal engagements, and who

84 IBSEN

remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes
and rotten potatoes in this world," Ibsen cynically
replied, "I am afraid none of the sound ones have
come under my notice"; and when Guldstad proves
to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount impor-
tance of creature comforts, the last word of dis-
trust in the sustaining power of love had been
said. The popular impression of Ibsen as an
"immoral" writer seems to be primarily founded
on the paradox and fireworks of Love's Comedy.

Much might be forgiven to a man so wretched
as Ibsen was in 1862, and more to a poet so lively,
brilliant and audacious in spite of his misfortunes.
These now gathered over his head and threatened
to submerge him altogether. He was perhaps
momentarily saved by the publication of Terje
Vigen, which enjoyed a solid popularity. This is
the principal and, indeed, almost the only instance
in Ibsen's works of what the Northern critics call
"epic," but what we less ambitiously know as the
tale in verse. Terje Vigen will never be trans-
lated successfully into English, for it is written,
with brilliant lightness and skill, in an adaptation
of the Norwegian ballad-measure which it is im-
possible to reproduce with felicity in our lan-
guage.

Among Ibsen's writings Terje Vigen is unique
as a piece of pure sentimentality carried right

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 85

through without one divagation into irony or
pungency. It is the story of a much-injured
and revengeful Norse pilot, who, having the
chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and
Milady, saves them at the mute appeal of their
blue-eyed English baby. Terje Vigen is a master-
piece of what we may define as the " dash-away-
a-manly-tear" class of narrative. It is extremely
well written and picturesque, but the wonder is
that, of all people in the world, Ibsen should have
written it.

His short lyric poems of this period betray
much more clearly the real temper of the man.
They are filled full and brimming over with long-
ing and impatience, with painful passion and with
hope deferred. It is in the strident lyrics Ibsen
wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can best
read the record of his mind, and share its exas-
perations, and wonder at its elasticity. The
series of sonnets In a Picture Gallery is a strangely
violent confession of distrust in his own genius;
the Epistle to H. 0. Blom a candid admission of
his more than distrust in the talent and honesty
of others. It was the peculiarity and danger of
Ibsen's position that he represented no one but
himself. For instance, the liberty of many of
the expressions in Love's Comedy led those who
were beginning a movement in favor of the

86 IBSEN

emancipation of women to believe that Ibsen was
in sympathy with them, but he was not. All
through his life, although his luminous penetra-
tion into character led him to be scrupulously fair
in his analysis of female character, he was never
a genuine supporter of the extension of public
responsibility to the sex. A little later (in 1869),
when John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women
produced a sensation in Scandinavia, and met with
many enthusiastic supporters, Ibsen coldly re-
served his opinion. He was always an observer,
always a clinical analyst at the bedside of society,
never a prophet, never a propagandist.

His troubles gathered upon him. Neither
theatre consented to act Love's Comedy, and it
would not even have been printed but for the zeal
of the young novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great
honor, bought for about £35 the right to pub-
lish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he was
editing. Then the storm broke out; the press
was unanimously adverse, and in private circles
abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In
1862 the second theatre became bankrupt, and
Ibsen was thrown on the world, the most unpopu-
lar man of his day, and crippled with debts. It
is true that he was engaged at the Christiania
Theatre at a nominal salary of about a pound a
week, but he could not live on that. In August,

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 87

1860, he had made a pathetic appeal to the
Government for a digter-gage^ a payment to a
poet, such as is freely given to talent in the North-
ern countries. Sums were voted to Bjornson
and Vinje, but to Ibsen not a penny. By some
influence, however, for he was not without friends,
he was granted in March, 1862, a travelling grant
of less than £20 to enable him to wander for two
months in western Hardanger and the districts
around the Sognefjord for the purpose of collect-
ing folk-songs and legends. The results of this
journey were prepared for publication, but never
appeared. This interesting excursion, however,
has left its mark stamped broadly upon Brand and
Peer Gynt.

All through 1863 his condition was critical.
He determined that his only hope was to exile
himself definitely from Norway, which had be-
come too hot to hold him. Various private
friends generously helped him over this dreadful
time of adversity, earning a gratitude which, if
it was not expansive, was lifelong. Very grudg-
ing recognition of his gifts was at length made
by the Government in the shape of another
trifling travelling grant (March, 1863), again a
handsome sum being awarded to Bjornson, his
popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair,
to the King himself, who conferred upon him a

88 IBSEN

small pension of £90 a year, which for the imme-
diate future stood between this great poet and
starvation. The news of it was received in
Christiania by the press in terms of despicable
insult.

But in June of this annee terrible Ibsen had a
flash of happiness. He was invited down to
Bergen to the fifth great "Festival of Song," a
national occurrence, and he and his poems met
with a warm reception. Moreover, foe found his
brilliant antagonist, Bjornson, at Bergen on a like
errand, and renewed an old friendship with this
warm-hearted and powerful man of genius,
destined to play through life the part of Hakon
to Ibsen's Skule. They spent much of the sub-
sequent winter together. As Halvdan Koht has
excellently said: "Their intercourse brought
them closer to each other than they had ever been
before. They felt that they were inspired by the
same ideas and the same hopes, and they suffered
the same bitter disappointments. With anguish
they watched the Danish brother-nation's des-
perate struggle against the superior power of
Germany, and saw a province with a population
of Scandinavian race and speech taken from
Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom,
whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in
spite of solemn promises, refrained from yielding

From a drawing by Gustav Laerum.

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 89

any assistance." An attack on Holstein (Decem-
ber 22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish
War, to which a disastrous and humiliating ter-
mination was brought in the following August.

In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step
of quitting his native country. He entered Copen-
hagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well
as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the
citadel of Diippel alone stood between Denmark
and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read
in the indignant lyrics of that spring. A fort-
night later he set out, by Lubeck and Trieste, for
Rome, where he had now determined to reside.
He reached that city in due time, and sank with
ineffable satisfaction into the arms of its antique
repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjdrnson,
"there is blessed peace," and he settled himself
down to the close contemplation of poetry.

The change from the severities of an inter-
minable Northern winter to the glow and splen-
dor of Italy acted on the poet's spirit like an
enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of
Eternity, to Rome's "azure sky, flowers, ruins,
statues, music," and at first the contrast between
the crudity he had left and the glory he had
found was almost intolerable. He could not
work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air and
become as a little child. There has scarcely been

90 IBSEN

another example of a writer of the first class who,
deeply solicitous about beauty, but debarred from
all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year,
has been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic
fountain, into the heart of unclouded loveliness
without transition or preparation. Shelley and
Keats were dead long before they reached the age
at which Ibsen broke free from his prison-house
of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his life,
was closing his romantic career.

Ibsen's earliest impressions of what these poets
had become accustomed to at a ductile age were
contradictory and even incoherent. The passion
of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered
him. He wandered among the vestiges of antique
art, unable to perceive their relation to modern life,
or their original significance. He missed the
impress of the individual on classic sculpture, as
he had missed it — the parallel is strange, but his
own — on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland.
He liked a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the
man who made it. He felt more at home with
Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante
among architects than with artists of a more archaic
type. Shelley, we may remember, labored under a
similar heresy; to each of these poets the attrac-
tiveness of individual character overpowered the
languid flavor of the age in which the artist had

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 91

flourished. Ibsen's admiration of a certain over-
praised monument of Italian architecture would
not be worth recording but for the odd vigor
with which he adds that the man who made that
might have made the moon in his leisure moments.
During the first few months of Ibsen's life in
Rome all was chaos in his mind. He was plunged
in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the
amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such
a life with such an art as he had never dreamed of
and could yet but dimly comprehend. In Septem-
ber, 1864, he tells Bjornson that he is at work
on a poem of considerable length. This must
have been the first draft of Brand, which was
begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns
call it, an "epic" poem; although a sketch for
the Julianas Apostata was already forming in the
back of his head, as a subject which would,
sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He
had left his wife and little son in Copenhagen,
but at the beginning of October they joined him
in Rome. The family lived on an income which
seems almost incredibly small, a maximum of
40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing
to be hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and
Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort of blessed
languor had fallen upon him after all his afflic-
tions. He would loll through half his days

92 IBSEN

among the tombs on the Via Latina, or would
loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way.
It took him weeks to summon energy to visit
S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that
Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though
he was weary with longing to see it. All the tense
chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His soul
was recovering, through a long and blissful con-
valescence, from the aching maladies of its youth.
He took some part in the society of those
Scandinavian writers, painters and sculptors who
gathered in Rome through the years of their
distress. But only one of them attracted him
strongly, the young Swedish lyrical poet, Count
Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the
glory of his country. There was some quaint
diversity between the rude and gloomy Norwegian
dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-
blooded, sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-
three, rich, flattered, and already as famous for
his fashionable bonnes fortunes as Byron. But two
things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a
passionate enthusiasm for their art, and a rebel-
lious attitude towards their immediate precur-
sors in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader
of a new school. The friendship of Ibsen and
Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest of
their lives, for it was founded on a common basis.

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 93

A few years later the writer of these pages re-
ceived an amusing impression of Ibsen at this
period from the Danish poet, Christian Molbech,
who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards.
Ibsen wandering silently about the streets, his
hands plunged far into the pockets of his in-
variable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing
conversation by his sudden moody appearances
at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering the
ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the
antiquaries by a running fire of sarcastic paradox,
this is mainly what the somewhat unsympathetic
Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He
painted a more agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of
his summer flights to the Alban Hills, planned on
terms of the most prudent reference to resources
which seemed ever to be expected and never to
arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines in front of
some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly
be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-
sufficient and self-contained, but not unwilling
to exchange, over a flask of thin wine, common-
places with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia,
in one of these periods of villegiatura, during the
summer and autumn of 1865, that Brand, which
had long been under considerature, suddenly took
final shape, and was written throughout, without
pause or hesitation. In July the poet put every-

94 IBSEN

thing else aside to begin it, and before the end of
September he had completed it.

Brand placed Ibsen at a bound among the
greatest European poets of his age. The advance
over the sculptural perfection of The Pretenders
and the graceful wit of Love's Comedy was so
great as to be startling. Nothing but the veil of
a foreign language, which the best translations
are powerless to tear away from noble verse, pre-
vented this mastery from being perceived at
once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not
exist, for those who had eyes to see, and who were
not blinded by prejudice, it was plain that a very
great writer had arisen in Norway at last. Bjorn-
son had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his Sigurd
Slemle (1862) was a riper work than the elder
friend had produced; but Mary Stuart in Scot-
land (1864) had marked a step backward, and now
Ibsen had once more shot far ahead of his rival.
When we have admitted some want of clearness
in the symbolism which runs through Brand, and
some shifting of the point of view in the two last
acts, an incoherency and a turbidity which are
natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme,
there is very little but praise to be given to a
poem which is as manifold in its emotion and as
melodious in its versification as it is surprising in
its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 95

Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed,
but in its own peculiar province it has not been
approached. It bears some remote likeness to
Faust, but with that exception there is perhaps
nothing in the literature of the world which can
be likened to Brand, except, of course, Peer Gynt.
For a long while it was supposed that the diffi-
culties in the way of performing Brand on the
public stage were too great to be overcome. But
the task was attempted at length, first in Stock-
holm in 1895; and within the last few years this
majestic spectacle has been drawn in full before
the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen,
Berlin, Moscow and elsewhere. In spite of the
timid reluctance of managers, wherever this play
is adequately presented, it captures an emotional
public at a run. It is an appeal against moral
apathy which arouses the languid. It is a clear
and full embodiment of the gospel of energy
which awakens and upbraids the weak. In the
original, its rush of rhymes produces on the nerves
an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as
an oration, it is responded to as a great civic ap-
peal; if as a sermon, it is sternly religious, and
fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain
air, with vague bells ringing high up among the
glaciers, no one asks exactly what Brand ex-
pounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent.

96 IBSEN

Witnessed on the living stage, it takes the citadel
of the soul by storm. When it is read, the critical
judgment becomes cooler.

Carefully examined, Brand is found to present
a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism.
Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and
their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has
constantly been asked, and it was asked at once,
"Is Brand the expression of Ibsen's own nature ?"
Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his
hero, and yet he was careful to remain outside.
Ibsen, as we have already pointed out, was ready
in later life to discuss his own writings, and what
he said about them is often dangerously mystify-
ing. He told Georg Brandes that the religious
vocation of Brand was not essential. "I could
have applied the whole syllogism just as well to
a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest." (He
was to deal with each of these alternations later
on, but with what a difference!) "I could quite
as well," he persisted, "have worked out the im-
pulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo,
for instance, as my hero — assuming, of course,
that Galileo should stand firm and never concede
the fixity of the earth — or you yourself in your
struggle with the Danish reactionaries." This
is not to the point, since in fact neither Georg
Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama,

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 97

could have produced such a capacity for evolution
as is presented by the stern priest whose absolute
certitude, although founded, one admits, on no
rational theory of theology, is yet of the very
essence of religion.

Brand becomes intelligible when we regard
him as a character of the twelfth century trans-
ferred to the nineteenth. He has something of
Peter the Hermit in him. He ought to have
been a crusading Christian king, fighting against
the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling
city of God. He exists in his personage, under
the precipice, above the fjord, like a rude medi-
aeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild
honey in the desert. We cannot comprehend the
action of Brand by any reference to accepted
creeds and codes, because he is so remote from
the religious conventions as hardly to seem ob-
jectively pious at all. He is violent and inco-
herent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants,
but it must be an upheaval of all that exists, and
it must bring Man into closer contact with God.
Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is
marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch
of the ridiculous, by the prosaic nature of his
modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel;
he is liable to fits of anger before which the whole
world trembles; and it is by an avalanche, brought

98 IBSEN

down upon him by his own wrath, that he is finally
buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church.

The judicious reader may like to compare the
character of Brand with that extraordinary study
of violence, the Abbe Jules of Octave Mirbeau.
In each we have the history of revolt, in a suc-
cession of crises, against an invincible vocation.
In each an element of weakness is the pride of
a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully de-
veloped what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau
avoids, a genuine conception of such a rebel's
ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers
or Lammenais, what can it matter whether some
existing priest of insurrection did or did not set
Ibsen for a moment on the track of his colossal im-
agination ? We may leave these discussions to the
commentators; Brand is one of the great poems
of the world, and endless generations of critics
will investigate its purpose and analyze its forms.

There is, however, another than the priestly
side. The poem contains a great deal of super-
ficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporary
Scandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing
in Christiania, of a crafty court in Stockholm, and
of Denmark stretching her bleeding hands to her
sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still
slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the
middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 99

to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of a/i
exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sex-
ton's songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some
chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will
alone that matters," and for the weak of purpose
there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such
waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from
her rude store of graves. Against the mountain
landscape, Brand holds up his motto "All or
Nothing," persistently, almost tiresomely, like a
modern advertising agent affronting the scenery
with his panacea. More truculently still, he in-
sists upon the worship of a deity, not white-
bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to
prudent Lutheran theologians, a prototype of
violent strength.

Yet Brand's own mission remains undefined
to him — if it ever takes exact shape — until Agnes
reveals it to him: —

Choose thy endless loss or gain!
Do thy work and bear thy pain. . . .
Now (he answers) I see my way aright.
In ourselves is that young Earth,
Ripe for the divine new-birth.

And it is in Agnes — as the marvellous fourth act
opens where her love for the little dear dead child
is revealed, and where her patience endures all the

ioo IBSEN

cruelties of her husband's fanaticism — it is in
Agnes that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters
the clear, unembittered note of full humanity.
He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a nurs-
ling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest
be, in a measure, Ibsen as Norway made him,
Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are
the delicate offspring of Italy.

Considerable postponements delayed the pub-
lication of Brandy which saw the light at length,
in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once
welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto
known little of Ibsen, and the poet's audience
was thus very considerably widened. The satire
of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the
popular priest Wexels preached against its ten-
dency. A novel was published, called The Daugh-
ters of Brandy in which the results of its teaching
were analyzed. Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never
experienced before, the light and shade of a dis-
puted but durable popular success. Four large
editions of Brand were exhausted within the year
of its publication, and it took its place, of course,
in more leisurely progress, among the few books
which continued, and still continue, steadily to
sell. It has always been, in the countries of Scan-
dinavia, the best known and the most popular of all
Ibsen's writings.

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 101

This success, however, was largely one of senti-
ment, not of pecuniary fortune. The total in-
come from four editions of a poem like Brandy in
the conditions of Northern literary life forty
years ago, would not much exceed £100. Hardly
had Ibsen become the object of universal dis-
cussion than he found himself assailed, as never
before, by the paralysis of poverty. He could
not breathe, he could not move; he could not
afford to buy postage stamps to stick upon his
business letters. He was threatened with the ab-
solute extinction of his resources. At the very
time when Copenhagen was ringing with his
praise Ibsen was borrowing money for his modest
food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome.

In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly
nervous condition, in the midst of which he was
assailed by a malarious fever which brought him
within sight of the grave. To the agony of his
devoted wife, he lay for some time between life
and death, and the extreme poverty from which
they suffered made it difficult, and even im-
possible, for her to provide for him the allevia-
tions which his state demanded. He gradually
recovered, however, thanks to his wife's care and
to his own magnificent constitution, but the springs
of courage seemed to have snapped within his
breast.

102 IBSEN

In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty
and suspense, he wrote a letter to Bjbrnson, "my
one and only friend," which is one of the most
heart-rending documents in the history of litera-
ture. Few great spirits have been nearer the
extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his
thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits'
end to know what to advise, urged him to write
directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway,
describing his condition, and asking for support.
Simultaneously came the manifest success of
Brandy and, for the first time, the Norwegian
press recognized the poet's merit. There was a
general movement in his favor; King Carl gra-
ciously received his petition of April 15, and on
May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted
Ibsen a ''poet's pension," restricted in amount
but sufficient for his modest needs.

The first use he made of his freedom was to
move out of Rome, where he found it impossible
to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills.
He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo
Gratiosi, two thousand feet above the sea. Thither
he came, with his wife and his little son, and
there he fitted himself up a study; setting his
writing-table at a window that overlooked an
immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing
the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his cor-

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 103

respondence of this time there are suddenly
noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are
elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful
burden was lifted; the dreadful fear of sinking
in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, the
fear which animates his painful letter to King
Carl, was blown away like a cloud and the heaven
of his temper was serene. At Frascati he knew
not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this,
waiting for the heavenly spark to fall. It seems
to have been at Tusculum, and in the autumn
of 1866, that the subject he was looking for de-
scended upon him. He hurried back to Rome,
and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted
himself heart and soul to the composition of Peer
Gynty which he described as to be "a long dra-
matic poem, having as its chief figure one of the
half-mythical and fantastical personages from the
peasant life of modern Norway."

He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than
was his wont, and it was a whole year on the
stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitu-
ally composed with the greatest ease, and Peer
Gynt did not move smoothly until the poet settled
in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the island
of Ischia. His own account was: "After Brand
came Peer Gynt, as though of itself. It was
written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at Sor-

io4 IBSEN

rento. So far away from one's readers one be-
comes reckless. This poem contains much that
has its origin in the circumstances of my own
youth. My own mother — with the necessary
exaggeration — served as the model for Ase."
Peer Gynt was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento
at the end of the autumn, and the MS. was im-
mediately posted to Copenhagen. None of the
delays which had interfered with the appearance
of Brand now afflicted the temper of the poet,
and Peer Gynt was published in November, 1867.
In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself,
who declared that Peer Gynt was diametrically
opposed in spirit to Brand, and that it made no
direct attack upon social questions, the critics of
the later poem have too often persisted in dark-
ening it with their educational pedantries. Ibsen
did well to be angry with his commentators.
"They have discovered," he said, "much more
satire in Peer Gynt than was intended by me.
Why can they not read the book as a poem ? For
as such I wrote it." It has been, however, the
misfortune of Ibsen that he has particularly at-
tracted the attention of those who prefer to see
anything in a poem except its poetry, and who
treat all tulips and roses as if they were cabbages
for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it is sur-
prising that after all that the author said, and

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 105

with the lovely poem shaking the bauble of its
fool's-cap at them, there can still be commen-
tators who see nothing in Peer Gynt but the
"awful interest of the universal problems with
which it deals." This obsession of the critic to
discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has
been one of the main causes of that impatience
and even downright injustice with which his
writings have been received by a large section of
those readers who should naturally have enjoyed
them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and often
reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in
a long black coat and white choker, as though he
were an embodiment of the Nonconformist con-
science.

Casting aside, therefore, the spurious "lessons"
and supposititious "problems" of this merry and
mundane drama, we may recognize among its
irregularities and audacities two main qualities of
merit. Above everything else which we see in
Peer Gynt we see its fun and its picturesqueness.
Written at different times and in different moods,
there is an incoherency in its construction which
its most whole-hearted admirers cannot explain
away. The first act is an inimitable burst of
lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of ab-
surdity, carried along its hilarious career with
no less peril and with no less brilliant success than

io6 IBSEN

Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their
ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende.
In the second act, satire and fantasy become
absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and
dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm,
but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an em-
phatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy,
in this act, from the moment when Peer and
the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon the
porker, down to the fight with the Bbig, gigantic
gelatinous symbol of self-deception, exceeds in
recklessness anything else written since the second
part of Faust. The third act, culminating with
the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of
Ase, is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts
Ibsen in the first rank of creators. In the fourth
act, the introduction of which is abrupt and
grotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I
think, a lower order of imagination. The fifth
act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in the
poem, often seems divided from it in tone, style
and direction, and is more like a symbolic or
mythical gloss upon the first three acts than a
contribution to the growth of the general story.

Throughout this tangled and variegated scene
the spirits of the author remain almost prepos-
terously high. If it were all hilarity and sar-
donic laughter, we should weary of the strain.

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 107

But physical beauty of the most enchanting order
is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony.
It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere
in the dramatic literature of the world, not by
Shakespeare himself, is there introduced into a
play so much loveliness of scenery, and such
varied and exquisite appeal to the eyes, as there
is in Peer Gynt. The fifth act contains much
which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens
with a scene so full of the glory of the mountains
and the sea that I know nothing else in drama to
compare with it. This again is followed by one
of the finest shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after
scene, the first act portrays the cold and solemn
beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's
brush has contrived to do it. For the woodland
background of the Saeter Girls there is no parallel
in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian
paintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm."
Pages might be filled with praise of the pictu-
resqueness of tableau after tableau in each act
of Peer Gynt.

The hero is the apotheosis of selfish vanity, and
he is presented to us, somewhat indecisively, as
the type of one who sets at defiance his own life's
design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful,
a good, or even a successful man ? Certainly
Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote the

io8 IBSEN

first act, in which scarcely anything is observable
except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm,
of the sly, lazy and parasitical class of peasant
rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention;
he found it in those rustic tales, inimitably re-
sumed by Asbjbrnson and Moe, in which he shows
us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he
found the Bbig, a monster of Norse superstition,
vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of
infinite contraction and expansion. The con-
ception that this horror would stand in symbol
for a certain development of selfish national in-
stability seems to have seized him later, and
Peer Gynt, which began as a farce, continued
as a fable. The nearest approach to a justifica-
tion of the moral or "problem" purpose, which
Ibsen's graver prophets attribute to him, is found
in the sixth scene of the fifth act, where, quite in
the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watch-
words and songs and tears take corporeal form
and assail the aged Peer Gynt with their re-
proaches.

Peer Gynt was received in the North with some
critical bewilderment, and it has never been so
great a favorite with the general public as Brand.
But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he
was told that it did not conform to the rules of
poetic art, asserted that the rules must be altered,

THE SATIRES (1857-67) 109

not Peer Gynt. "My book," he wrote, "is poetry;
and if it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian
conception of what poetry is shall be made to fit
my book." There was a struggle at first against
this assumption, but the drama has become a
classic, and it is now generally allowed, that so
long as poetry is a term wide enough to include
The Clouds and the Second Part of Faust, it must
be made wide enough to take in a poem as unique
as they are in its majestic intellectual caprices.

Note. — By far the most exhaustive analysis of Peer Gynt which has
hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these
pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his posthu-
mous Ueber die letzte Dinge (1907). This extraordinary young man,
who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where
Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently
deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising
and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in Peer
Gynt all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But
in Ibsen, unquestionably, time will create profundities, as it has in
Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do
after the death of the mortal men who planted them.

CHAPTER V

1868-75

IBSEN'S four years in Italy were years of rest,
of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to
Italy was totally distinct from that of other
illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The
line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine
down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought
with them a personal interest in Italian affairs;
Italian servitude had roused some of them to
anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia
dreaming of Italian liberty. Casa Guidi Win-
dows may be taken as the extreme type of the
way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He
sought there, and found, under the transparent
azure of the Alban sky, in the harmonious mur-
murs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the moun-
tains, above all in the gray streets of Rome, that
rest of the brain, that ripening of the spiritual
faculties, which he needed most after his rough
and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his
attitude of passive appreciation he was, perhaps,

1868-75 in

more like Landor than like any other of the
illustrious exiles — Landor, who died in Florence
a few days after Ibsen settled in Rome. There
was a side of character, too, on which the young
Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius.
When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Gari-
baldi, at Genoa, announced his intention of march-
ing upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet's
heart "by rose-hung river and light-foot rill,"
but left Ibsen simply disconcerted. If Rome
was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no
longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt
of quietness which the Norwegian desired for the
healing of his spleen and his moral hypochondria.
In October the heralds of liberty crossed the
Papal frontier; on the 3Oth, by a slightly prosaic
touch, it was the French who entered Rome. Of
Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed so-
journ— for he soon determined that if there was
going to be civil war in Italy that country was no
home for him — we hear but little. This autumn,
however, we find him increasingly observant of
the career of Georg Brandes, the brilliant and
revolutionary Danish critic, in whom he was later
on to find his first great interpreter. And we notice
the beginnings of a difference with Bjornson, lam-
entable and hardly explicable, starting, it would
vaguely seem, out of a sense that Bjornson did not

ii2 IBSEN

appreciate the poetry of Peer Gynt at its due value.
Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Hei-
berg, had been looked upon as the doyen of Danish
critics — had pronounced against the poetry of
Peer Gynt, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods,
in a bearish letter, had thrown the blame of this
judgment upon Bjornson.

All through these last months in Rome we find
Ibsen in the worst of humors. If it be admis-
sible to compare him with an animal, he seems
the badger among the writers of his time, noc-
turnal, inoffensive, solitary, but at the rumor of
disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and
bite with terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen
was no joke, and in moments of exasperation he
bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Among
other snaps of the pen, he told Bjornson that if
he was not taken seriously as a poet, he should try
his "fate as a photographer." Bjornson, genially
and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him
to put his photography into the form of a comedy.
But the devil, as Ibsen himself said, was throwing
his shadow between the friends, and all the bene-
fits and all the affection of the old dark days were
rapidly forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather
absurdly, about decorations from kings and minis-
ters; Bjornson having determined to reject all such
gewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of ac-

1868-75

cepting (and wearing) every cross and star that
was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, the
temptation was wholly problematical in both
cases, yet each poet acted on his determination
to the end. But Bjornson's hint about the com-
edy seems to have been, for some years, the last
flicker of friendship between the two. On this
Ibsen presently acted in a manner very offensive
to Bjornson.

In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be
very much indeed incensed with things in general.
"What Norway wants is a national disaster,"
he amiably snarled. It was high time that the
badger should seek shelter in a new burrow, and
in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There
was a farewell banquet, at which Julius Lange,
who was present, remarks that Ibsen showed a
spice of the devil, but "was very witty and ami-
able." He went to Florence for June, then
quitted Italy altogether, settling for three months
at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath"
in the Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and
unfashionable. There he started his five-act
comedy, The League of Youth. All September
he spent in Munich, and in October, 1868, took
root once more, this time at Dresden, which be-
came his home for a considerable number of
years. Almost at once he sank down again into

ii4 IBSEN

his brooding mood of isolation and quietism,
roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he had
haunted those of Rome, by night or at unfre-
quented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors,
writing few letters, slowly finishing his "photo-
graphic" comedy, which he did not get off his
hands until March, 1869. Although he was still
very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors
to write for journals or magazines; he preferred
to appear before the public at long intervals, with
finished works of importance.

It is impossible for a critic who is not a Nor-
wegian, or not closely instructed in the politics
and manners of the North, to take much interest
in The League of Youth, which is the most pro-
vincial of all Ibsen's mature works. There is a
cant phrase minted in the course of it, de lokale
forhold, which we may awkwardly translate as
"the local conditions" or "situation." The play
is all concerned with de lokale forhold, and there
is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about
the intrigue. This does not prevent The League
of Youth from being, as Mr. Archer has said,
"the first prose comedy of any importance in
Norwegian literature,"1 but it excludes it from

1 It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers The
League 0} Youth to Bjornson's The Newly Married Couple (1865), a
slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.

1868-75

the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen
believed, or pretended to believe, that The League
of Youth was a "placable" piece of foolery,
which could give no annoyance to the worst of
offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter.
Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he under-
estimated the violence of his own language; per-
haps, living so long at a distance from Norway
and catching but faintly the reverberations of
its political turmoil, he did not realize how sen-
sitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of
"de lokale for hold." When he found that the
Norwegians were seriously angry, Ibsen bluntly
told them that he had closely studied the ways
and the manners of their "pernicious and lie-
steeped clique." He was always something of a
snake in the grass to his poetic victims.

Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is
extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate
the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read
it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the
tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially
provincial and boringly solemn society of Chris-
tiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in
the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed
to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the
crudity which made communication with the ex-
cellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past

ii6 IBSEN

epoch so difficult for an outsider — so difficult, in
particular, for one coming freshly from the grace
and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth
of Copenhagen. The political conditions which
led to the writing of The League of Youth are old
history now. There was the "liberal" element
in Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becom-
ing rapidly stronger and more hampering to the
Government, and there was the increasing in-
fluence of Soren Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant
farmer of ultra-socialistic views, who had, almost
alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any
pensions to poets, and whose name was an abom-
ination to Ibsen.

Now Bjornson, in the development of his
career as a political publicist, had been flirting
more and more outrageously with these extreme
ideas and this truculent peasant party. He had
even burned incense before Jaabaek, who was the
accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of
Dresden, genuinely believed that Bjornson, with
his ardor and his energy and his eloquence, was
becoming a national danger. We have seen that
Bjornson had piqued Ibsen's vanity about Peer
Gynt, and nothing exasperates a friendship more
fatally than public principle grafted on a private
slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bjornson
was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Bjornson

1868-75 n;

must always be leading the majority, Ibsen had
scruples of conscience if ten persons agreed
with him. They were doomed to disagreement.
Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by creating
the figure of Stensgaard, in The League of Touth,
a frothy and mischievous demagogue whose
rhetoric irresistibly reminded every one of Bjorn-
son's rolling oratory. What Bjornson, not with-
out dignity, objected to was not so much the
personal attack, as that the whole play attempted
"to paint our young party of liberty as a troop
of pushing, phrase-mongering adventurers, whose
patriotism lay solely in their words." Ibsen ac-
knowledged that that was exactly his opinion of
them, and what could follow for such a disjointed
friendship but anger and silence ?

The year 1869, which we now enter, is remark-
able in the career of Ibsen as being that in which
he travelled most, and appeared on the surface of
society in the greatest number of capacities. He
was enabled to do this by a considerable increase
in his pension. First of all, he was induced to
pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being
seized with a sudden strong desire to study con-
ditions in Sweden, a country which he had hitherto
professed to dislike. He had a delightful stay
of two months, received from King Carl the order
of the Wasa, was feted at banquets, renewed his

ii8 IBSEN

acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated
everywhere with the highest distinction. Ibsen
and Bjornson were now beginning to be recog-
nized as the two great writers of Norway, and
their droll balance as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack
Sprat of letters was already becoming defined.
It was doubtless Bjornson's emphatic attacks on
Sweden that at this moment made Ibsen so loving
to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such
clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered
on there indefinitely, if the Khedive had not in-
vited him, in September, to be his guest at the
opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden in-
cursion of an Oriental potentate into the narrative
seems startling until we recollect that illustrious
persons were invited from all countries to this
ceremony. The interesting thing is to see that
Ibsen was now so famous as to be naturally so
selected; the only other Norwegian guest being
Professor J. D. C. Lieblein, the Egyptologist.

The poet started for Egypt, by Dresden and
Paris, on September 28. The League of Youth
was published on the 29th, and first performed
on October 18; Ibsen, therefore, just missed the
scandal and uproar caused by the play in Norway.
In company with eighty-five other people, all
illustrious guests of the Khedive, and under the
care of Mariette Bey, Ibsen made a twenty-four

1868-75

days' expedition up the Nile into Nubia, and then
back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on Novem-
ber 17, in the company of an empress and several
princes of the blood, he saw the Canal formally
opened and graced a grand processional fleet that
sailed out from Port Said towards Ismaila. But
on the quay at Port Said Ibsen's Norwegian mail
was handed to him, and letters and newspapers
alike were full of the violent scenes in the course
of which The League of Touth had been hissed
down at Christiania. Then and there he sent his
defiance back to Norway in At Port Said, one of
the most pointed and effective of all his polemical
lyrics. A version in literal prose must suffice,
though it does cruel injustice to the venomous
melody of the original :

The dawn of the Eastern Land

Over the haven glittered;

Flags from all corners of the globe

Quivered from the masts.

Voices in music

Bore onward the cantata;

A thousand cannon

Christened the Canal.

The steamers passed on

By the obelisk.

In the language of my home

Came to me the chatter of news.

izo IBSEN

The mirror-poem which I had polished

For masculine minxes

Had been smeared at home

By splutterings from penny whistles.

The poison-fly stung;

It made my memories loathsome.

Stars, be thanked! —

My home is what is ancient!

We hailed the frigate

From the roof of the river-boat;

I waved my hat

And saluted the flag.

To the feast, to the feast,

In spite of the fangs of venomous reptiles!

A selected guest

Across the Lakes of Bitterness!

At the close of day

Dreaming, I shall slumber

Where Pharaoh was drowned —

And when Moses passed over.

In this mood of defiance, with rage unabated,
Ibsen returned home by Alexandria and Paris,
and was in Dresden again in December.

The year of 1870 drove him out of Dresden, as
the French occupation had driven him out of
Rome. It was essential for him to be at rest in
the midst of a quiet and alien population. He
was drawn towards Denmark, partly for the sake

1868-75 i2i

of talk with Brandes, who had now become a
factor in his life, partly to arrange about the
performance of one of his early works, and in
particular of The Pretenders. No definite plan,
however, had been formed, when, in the middle
of June, war was declared between Germany and
France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony,
and settled for three months in Copenhagen,
where his reception was charmingly sympathetic.
By the beginning of October, after the fall of
Strasburg and the hemming in of Metz, however,
it was plain on which side the fortunes of the war
would lie, and Ibsen returned "as from a rejuve-
nating bath" of Danish society to a Dresden full
of French prisoners, a Dresden, too, suffering
terribly from the paralysis of trade, and showing
a plentiful lack of enthusiasm for Prussia.

Ibsen turned his back on all such vexatious
themes, and set himself to the collecting and
polishing of a series of lyrical poems, the Digte
of 1871, the earliest, and, indeed, the only such
collection that he published. We may recollect
that, at the very same moment, with far less cause
to isolate himself from the horrors of war, Theo-
phile Gautier was giving the last touches to
Emaux et Camees. In December, 1870, Ibsen
addressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his
"Balloon-Letter," a Hudibrastic rhymed epistle

122 IBSEN

in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a good deal
that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminis-
cences of his trip through Egypt, and some
powerful ironic references to the caravan of
German invaders, with its Hathor and its Horus,
which was then rushing to the assault of Paris
under the doleful colors of the Prussian flag.
Ibsen's sarcasms are all at the ugliness and prosaic
utilitarianism of the Germans; "Moltke," he says,
"has killed the poetry of battles."

Ibsen was now greatly developing and expand-
ing his views, and forming a world-policy of his
own. The success of German discipline deeply
impressed him, and he thought that the day had
probably dawned which would be fatal to all
revolt and "liberal rebellion" for the future.
More than ever he dreaded the revolutionary
doctrines of men like Jaabaek and Bjornson, which
would lead, he thought, to bloodshed and national
disaster. The very same events were impressing
Gold win Smith at the very same moment with
his famous prophecy that the abolition of all
dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand,
with "the tranquil inauguration" of elective in-
dustrial governments throughout the world. So
history moves doggedly on, propheten rechts,
propheten links, a perfectly impassive welt-kind in
the middle of them. In Copenhagen Ibsen had,

i868-75 123

after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a
long and dangerous illness; and all he could do
was to exchange letters with this still unseen but
increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend.
To Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely than to any
one else about the great events which were shaking
the face of Europe and occupying so much of
both their thoughts:—

The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes
on December 20, 1870, two days after the engagement at
Nuits]; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same,
we shall be with one bound in a new age. How ideas will
then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high time
they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but
the crumbs from the revolutionary table of last century, a
food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The
old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them.
Liberty, equality and fraternity are no longer the things they
were in the days of the late-lamented Guillotine. This is
what the politicians will not understand, and therefore I
hate them. They want their own special revolutions —
revolutions in externals, in politics and so forth. But all
this is mere trifling. What is all-important is the revolution
of the Spirit of Man.

This revolution, as exemplified by the Com-
mune in Paris, did not satisfy the anticipations
which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took ad-
vantage of this to tell him that he had not yet
studied politics minutely enough from the scien-

124 IBSEN

tific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did
not possess as knowledge came to him, to a certain
degree, as intuition or instinct. "Let this be as
it may, the poet's essential task is to see, not to
reflect. For me in particular there would be
danger in too much reflection/' Ibsen seems, at
this time, to be in an oscillating frame of mind,
now bent on forming some positive theory of life
out of which his imaginative works shall crystal-
lize, harmoniously explanatory; at another time,
anxious to be unhampered by theories and prin-
ciples, and to represent individuals and excep-
tions exactly as experience presents them to him.
In neither attitude, however, is there discernible
any trace of the moral physician, and this is the
central distinction between Tolstoi and Ibsen,
whose methods, at first sight, sometimes appear
so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition,
but always with the purpose, if he can, of curing
it; Ibsen gives it even closer clinical attention,
but he leaves to others the care of removing a
disease which his business is solely to diagnose.

The Poems, after infinite revision, were pub-
lished at length, in a very large edition, on May 3,
1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad to get this
book off his hands was that it enabled him to con-
centrate his thoughts on the great drama he had
been projecting, at intervals, for seven years past,

i868-75 I25

the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story
of Julian the Apostate. At last Brandts came to
Dresden (July, 1871) and found the tenebrous
poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss,
Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to
him. All through the autumn and winter he was
kept in a chronic state of irritability by the in-
trigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate,
who threatened to reprint, for his own profit,
Ibsen's early and insufficiently protected writings.
This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own
country, where the very law courts, he thought,
were hostile to him. On this subject he used
language of tiresome over-emphasis. "From
Sweden, from Denmark, from Germany, I
hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it
is from Norway that everything bad comes
upon me." It was indicated to would-be Nor-
wegian visitors that they were not welcome at
Dresden. Norwegian friends, he said, were "a
costly luxury" which he was obliged to deny
himself.

The First Part of Julian was finished on Christ-
mas Day, but it took over a year more before
the entire work, as we now possess it, was com-
pleted. "A Herculean labor," the author called
it, when he finally laid down a weary pen in
February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very

i26 IBSEN

quietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tem-
pered by genial visits from some illustrious Danes
of the older generation, as particularly Hans
Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Gold-
schmidt, and by more formal intercourse with a
few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul
Heyse; all this time, let us remember, no Nor-
wegians— "by request." The summer was spent
in long rambles over the mountains of Austria,
ending up with a month of deep repose in Berch-
tesgaden. The next year was like unto this,
except that its roaming, restless summer closed
with several months in Vienna; and on Octo-
ber 17, 1873, nonum in annum, after the Hora-
tian counsel, the prodigious masterpiece, Emperor
and Galilean, was published in Copenhagen at
last.

Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double
drama on the rise and fall of Julian is the most
extensive and the most ambitious. It is not
difficult to understand what it was about the
most subtle and the most speculative of the
figures which animate the decline of antiquity
that fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Suc-
cessive historians have celebrated the flexibility
of intelligence and firmness of purpose which were
combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for
abstract beauty and an enthusiasm for a restored

i 868-75 I27

system of pagan Hellenic worship. There was an
individuality about Julian, an absence of the
common purple convention, of the imperial
rhetoric, which strongly commended him to
Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against
Christianity he offered a fascinating originality to
one who thought the modern world all out of
joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas
of character which could not but passionately
attract the Norwegian poet. His attitude to his
emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case,
in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by
a species of lofty and melancholy fatalism, prom-
ised a theme of the most entrancing complexity.
But there are curious traces in Ibsen's corre-
spondence of the difficulty, very strange in his
case, which he experienced in forming a con-
crete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had
been vaguely drawn to the theme, and when it
was too late to recede, he found himself baffled
by the paradoxes which he encountered, and by
the contradictions of a figure seen darkly through
a mist of historical detraction.

He met these difficulties as well as he could, and
as a prudent dramatic poet should, by close and
observant study of the document. He endeav-
ored to reconcile the evident superiority of Julian
with the absurd eccentricities of his private man-

i28 IBSEN

ners and with the futility of his public acts. He
noted all the Apostate's foibles by the side of his
virtues and his magnanimities. He traced with-
out hesitation the course of that strange insur-
rection which hurled a coarse fanatic from the
throne, only to place in his room a literary pedant
with inked fingers and populous beard. He
accepted everything, from the parasites to the
purple slippers. The dangers of so humble an
attendance upon history were escaped with suc-
cess in the first instalment of his "world drama."
In the strong and mounting scenes of Cczsar's
Apostacy, the rapidity with which the incidents
succeed one another, their inherent significance,
the innocent splendor of Julian's mind in its first
emancipation from the chains of false faith, com-
bine to produce an effect of high dramatic beauty.
Georg Brandes, whose instinct in such matters
was almost infallible, when he read the First
Part shortly after its composition, entreated Ibsen
to give this, as it stood, to the public, and to let
The Emperor 'Julian s End follow independently.
Had Ibsen consented to do this, Cesar's Fall
would certainly take a higher place among his
works than it does at present, when its effect is
somewhat amputated and its meaning threatened
with incoherence by the author's apparent volte-
face in the Second Part.

i 868-75 I29

It was a lifelong disappointment to Ibsen that
Emperov and Galilean, on which he expended far
more consideration and labor than on any other
of his works, was never a favorite either with the
public or among the critics. With the best will
in the world, however, it is not easy to find full
enjoyment in this gigantic work, which by some
caprice of style defiant of analysis, lacks the
vitality which is usually characteristic of Ibsen's
least production. The speeches put into the
mouths of antique characters are appropriate,
but they are seldom vivid; as Bentley said of the
epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You
feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that
you converse with some dreaming pedant, his
elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's
drama was too vast for the very minute and metic-
ulous method he chose to adopt. What he
gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has
painted here and there in miniature. It is a pity
that he chose for dramatic representation so
enormous a field. It would have suited his genius
far better to have abandoned any attempt to
write a conclusive history, and have selected some
critical moment in the life of Julian. He should
rather have concentrated his energies, inde-
pendent of the chroniclers, on the resuscitation
of that episode, and in the course of it have

130

IBSEN

trembled less humbly under the uplifted finger
of Ammianus.

Of Emperor and Galilean Ibsen afterwards said :
"It was the first" (but he might have added
"the only") "poem which I have written under
the influence of German ideas." He was aware
of the danger of living too long away from his
own order of thought and language. But it was
always difficult for him, once planted in a place,
to pull up his roots. A weariness took possession
of him after the publication of his double drama,
and he did practically nothing for four years.
This marks a central joint in the structure of his
career, what the architects call a "channel" in
it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen's
work an aspect of solidity and resource. During
these years he revised some of his early writings,
made a closer study of the arts of sculpture and
painting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a
very brief sojourn in Norway. In the spring of
1875 he definitely moved with his family from
Dresden to Munich.

The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved
very unfortunate. Ibsen was suspicious, the Nor-
wegians of that generation were constitutionally
stiff and reserved; long years among Southern
races had accustomed him to a plenitude in
gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief

1868-75 i3*

time he was in Norway, from an intolerable
malaise. Ten years afterwards, in writing to
Bjornson, the discomfort of that experience was
still unallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly
enough," he said, "to support myself and my
family in the case of my discontinuing my literary
work. And I should be obliged to discontinue
it if I lived in Christiania. . . . This simply
means that I should not write at all. When, ten
years ago, after an absence of ten years, I sailed
up the fjord, I felt a weight settling down on my
breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression.
And this feeling lasted all the time I was at home;
I was not myself under the stare of all those cold,
uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the windows
and in the streets."

Ibsen had now been more than ten years an
exile from Norway, and his sentiments with re-
gard to his own people were still what they were
when, in July, 1872, he had sent home his Ode
for the Millenary Festival. That very striking
poem, one of the most solid of Ibsen's lyrical per-
formances, had opened in the key of unmitigated
defiance to popular opinion at home. It was in-
tended to show Norwegians that they must alter
their attitude towards him, as he would never
change his behavior towards them. " My country-
men," he said: —

132 IBSEN

My countrymen, who filled for me deep bowls
Of wholesome bitter medicine, such as gave
The poet, on the margin of his grave,
Fresh force to fight where broken twilight rolls, —

My countrymen, who sped me o'er the wave,
An exile, with my griefs for pilgrim-soles,
My fears for burdens, doubts for staff, to roam, —
From the wide world I send you greeting 1iome.

I send you thanks for gifts that help and harden,
Thanks for each hour of purifying pain;

Each plant that springs in my poetic garden
Is rooted where your harshness poured its rain;

Each shoot in which it blooms and burgeons forth

It owes to that gray weather from the North;

The sun relaxes, but the fog secures!

My country, thanks! My life's best gifts were yours.

In spite of these sardonic acknowledgments,
Ibsen's fame in Norway, though still disputed,
was now secure. In Denmark and Sweden it was
almost unchallenged, and he was a name, at least,
in Germany. In England, since 1872, he had not
been without a prophet. But. in Italy, Russia,
France — three countries upon the intelligence of
which he was presently to make a wide and dur-
able impression — he was still quite unknown.

Meanwhile, in glancing over the general litera-
ture of Europe, we see his figure, at the threshold
of his fiftieth year, taking greater and greater
prominence. He had become, in the sudden

1868-75 133

extinction of the illustrious old men of Denmark,
the first living writer of the North. He was to
Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to
Italy, Swinburne or Rossetti to England, and
Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly
lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that
Ibsen, down at least till 1871, was prominently
illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If, in
the second portion of his career, he resolutely
deprived himself of all indulgence in the orna-
ment of verse, it was a voluntary act of austerity.
It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging
the crown of jewels for the coarse brown cowl of
St. Jerome. And now, after a year or two of
prayer and fasting, Ibsen began a new intellectual
career.

CHAPTER VI

1875-82

WHILE Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this
climacteric stage of his career, dreaming of
wonderful things and doing nothing, there came
to him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays
by his chief rival. These were The Editor and
A Bankruptcy, in which Bjornson suddenly
swooped from his sagas and his romances down
into the middle of sordid modern life. This was
his first attempt at that "photography by comedy"
which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not,
I think, recorded what was Ibsen's comment on
these two plays, and particularly on A Bankruptcy,
but it is written broadly over the surface of his own
next work. It is obvious that he perceived that
Bjornson had carried a very spirited raid into his
own particular province, and he was determined
to drive this audacious enemy back by means of
greater audacities.

Not at once, however; for an extraordinary
languor seemed to have fallen upon Ibsen. His

134

1875-82 135

isolation from society became extreme; for nearly
a year he gave no sign of life. In September,
1875, indeed, if not earlier, he was at work on a
five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It
seems to have been in the winter of 1876, after
an unprecedented period of inanimation, that he
started a new comedy, The Pillars of Society,
which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that
summer being unique in the fact that the Ibsens
do not seem to have left town at all.

Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the ex-
teriors of character. With his fiftieth year he
presents himself as no more the Poet, but the
Man of Business. Molbech told me that at this
time the velveteen jacket, symbol of the dear
delays of art, was discarded in favor of a frock-
coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now
beginning, rather shyly, very craftily, to invest
money; he even found himself in frequent straits
for ready coin from his acute impatience to set
every rix-dollar breeding. He cast the suspicion
of poetry from him, and with his gold spectacles,
his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom
and his quick staccato step, he adopted the pose
of a gentleman of affairs, very positive and with
no nonsense about him.

He had long determined on the wilful aban-
donment of poetic form, and the famous state-

136 IBSEN

ment made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874)
must be quoted, although it is well known, since
it contains the clearest of all the explanations by
which Ibsen justified his new departure:—

You are of opinion that the drama [Emperor and Galilaari]
ought to have been written in verse, and that it would have
gained by this. Here I must differ from you. The play is,
as you will have observed, conceived in the most realistic
style: the illusion I wished to produce is that of reality. I
wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he
was reading was something that had really happened. If
I had employed verse, I should have counteracted my own
intention and prevented the accomplishment of the task I
had set myself. The many ordinary insignificant characters
whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would
have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one
another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and
the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in
the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already
talk of painting statues in the natural colors. Much can
be said both for and against this. I have no desire to see the
Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a
negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking
generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality
which pervades the representation. My new drama is no
tragedy in the ancient acceptation; what I desired to depict
were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk
"the language of the Gods."

This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature
of the epoch. In 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to

1875-82 137

write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est
en vers, et 1'ennui s'y promene librement entre
les rimes."

No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held
so rigidly to his intention of reproducing the
exact language of real life, as did Ibsen in the
series of plays which opens with The Pillars of
Society. This drama was published in Copen-
hagen in October, 1877, and was acted almost
immediately in Denmark, Sweden and Norway;
it had the good fortune to be taken up warmly
in Germany. What Ibsen's idea was, in the new
sort of realistic drama which he was inventing,
was, in fact, perceived at once by German audi-
ences, although it was not always approved of.
He was the guest of the theatromaniac Duke of
Saxe-Meiningen, and The Pillars of Society was
played in many parts of Germany. In Scandi-
navia the book of the play sold well, and the piece
had some success on the boards, but it did not
create anything like so much excitement as the
author had hoped that it would. Danish taste
pronounced it ""too German."

For the fact that The Pillars of Society, except
in Scandinavia and Germany, did not then, and
never has since, taken a permanent hold upon the
theatre, Mr. William Archer gives a reason which
cannot be controverted, namely, that by the time

138 IBSEN

the other foreign publics had fully awakened to
the existence of Ibsen,

he himself had so far outgrown the phase of his development
marked by Pillars of Society, that the play already seemed
commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suited the Ger-
man public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with
their theatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical
intelligence of the Anglo-American public, and . . . below
that of the French public. This is of course an exaggeration.
What I mean is that there was no possible reason why the
countrymen of Augier and Dumas should take any special
interest in Pillars of Society. It was not obviously in advance
of these masters in technical skill, and the vein of Teutonic
sentiment running through it could not greatly appeal to the
Parisian public of that period.

The subject of The Pillars of Society was the
hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and
the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen
now adopted was very favorable to its discus-
sion. He was accused, however, of having lived
so long away from home as to have fallen out of
touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied
in the convex mirror of the newspapers. It is
more serious objection to The Pillars of Society
that in it, as little as in The League of Touth, had
Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the
well-made play. Gloomy and homely as are the
earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way out of the

1875-82 139

imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the
masters of the "well-made" play. The social
hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by a sort
of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very
much of the usual " bless-ye-my-children " order.
The loss of the Indian Girl is miraculously pre-
vented, and at the end the characters are solemn-
ized and warned, yet are left essentially none the
worse for their alarm. This, unfortunately, is
not the mode in which the sins of scheming people
find them out in real life. But to the historical
critic it is very interesting to see Bjornson and
Ibsen nearer one another in A Bankruptcy and
The Pillars of Society than they had ever been
before. They now started on a course of eager,
though benevolent, rivalry which was eminently
to the advantage of each of them.

No feature of Ibsen's personal career is more
interesting than his relation to Bjornson. Great
as the genius of Ibsen was, yet, rating it as un-
grudgingly as possible, we have to admit that
Bjornson's character was the more magnetic and
more radiant of the two. Ibsen was a citizen of
the world; he belonged, in a very remarkable
degree, to the small class of men whose intelli-
gence lifts them above the narrowness of local
conditions, who belong to civilization at large,
not to the system of one particular nation. He

i4o IBSEN

was, in consequence, endowed, almost automati-
cally, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a
central point; if he was to be limited at all, he
might be styled European, although, perhaps, few
Western citizens would have had less difficulty
than he in making themselves comprehended by
a Chinese, Japanese or Indian mind of unusual
breadth and cultivation. On the other hand, in
accepting the advantages of this large mental
outlook, he was forced to abandon those of
nationality. No one can say that Ibsen was,
until near the end of his life, a good Norwegian,
and he failed, by his utterances, to vibrate the local
mind. But Bjornson, with less originality, was
the typical patriot in literature, and what he said,
and thought, and wrote was calculated to stir the
local conscience to the depths of its being.

When, therefore, in 1867, Ibsen, who was bound
by all natural obligations and tendencies to remain
on the best terms with Bjornson, allowed the old
friendship between them to lapse into positive
antagonism, he was following the irresistible evo-
lution of his fate, as Bjornson was following his.
It was as inevitable that Ibsen should grow to his
full height in solitude as it was that Bjornson should
pine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of
popular meetings, torchlight processions of stu-
dents and passionate appeals to local sentiment.

1875-82 141

Trivial causes, such as those which we have
chronicled earlier, might seem to lead up to a di-
vision, but that division was really inherent in the
growth of the two men.

Ibsen, however, was not wholly a gainer at
first even in genius, by the separation. It cut him
off from Norway too entirely, and it threw him
into the arms of Germany. There were thirteen
years in which Ibsen and Bjornson were nothing
to one another, and these were not years of un-
mingled mental happiness for either of them.
But during this long period each of these very
remarkable men "came into his kingdom," and
when there was no longer any chance that either
of them could warp the nature of the other, fate
brought them once more together.

The reconciliation began, of course, with a
gracious movement from Bjornson. At the end
of 1880, writing for American readers, Bjornson
had the generous candor to say: "I think I have
a pretty thorough acquaintance with the dramatic
literature of the world, and I have not the slightest
hesitation in saying that Henrik Ibsen possesses
more dramatic power than any other play-writer
of our day." When we remember that, in France
alone, Augier and Dumas fils and Hugo, Halevy
and Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive,
the compliment, though a sound, was a vivid one.

i42 IBSEN

Sooner or later, everything that was said about
Ibsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw be-
hind the altar of a Burmese temple, came round
to Ibsen's ears, and this handsome tribute from
the rival produced its effect. And when, shortly
afterwards, still in America, Bjornson was nearly
killed in a railway accident, Ibsen broke the long
silence by writing to him a most cordial letter of
congratulation.

The next incident was the publication of Ghosts,
when Bjornson, now thoroughly roused, stood
out almost alone, throwing the vast prestige of
his judgment into the empty scale against the other-
wise unanimous black-balling. Then the recon-
cilement was full and fraternal, and Ibsen wrote
from Rome (January 24, 1882), with an emotion
rare indeed for him: "The only man in Norway
who has frankly, boldly and generously taken my
part is Bjornson. It is just like him; he has, in
truth, a great, a kingly soul; and I shall never for-
get what he has done now." Six months later, on
occasion of Bjornson's jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed:
"My thanks for the work done side by side with
me in the service of freedom these twenty-five
years." These words wiped away all unhappy
memories of the past; they gave public recognition
to the fact that, though the two great poets had been
divided for half a generation by the forces of

1875-82 143

circumstance, they had both been fighting at
wings of the same army against the common
enemy.

This, however, takes us For the moment a little
too far ahead. After the publication of The
Pillars of Society, Ibsen remained quiet for some
time; indeed, from this date we find him adopt-
ing the practice which was to be regular with him
henceforth, namely, that of letting his mind lie
fallow for one year after the issue of each of his
works, and then spending another year in the
formation of the new play. Munich gradually
became tedious to him, and he justly observed
that the pressure of German surroundings was
unfavorable to the healthy evolution of his genius.
In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although
it was no longer the quiet and aristocratic Rome
of Papal days, was still immensely attractive to
his temperament. He was now, in some measure,
"a person of means," and he made the habit of
connoisseurship his hobby. He formed a small
collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he
believed, great care. The result could be seen
long afterwards by those who visited him in his
final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of
the sumptuous flat in which he spent his old age
and in which he died. His taste, as far as one re-
members, was for the Italian masters of the decline,

144 IBSEN

and whether he selected pictures with a good judg-
ment must be left for others to decide. Probably
he shared with Shelley a fondness for the Guercinos
and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire
only in defiance of Ruskin.

In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was
told him of an incident in the Danish courts, the
adventure of a young married woman in one of
the small towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts
running on a new dramatic enterprise. He was
still curiously irritated by contemplating, in his
mind's eye, the "respectable, estimable narrow-
mindedness and worldliness" of social conditions
in Norway, where there was no aristocracy, and
where a lower middle-class took the place of a
nobility, with, as he thought, sordid results. -But
he was no longer suffering from what he him-
self had called "the feeling of an insane man
staring at one single, hopelessly black spot." He
went to Amalfi for the summer, and in that de-
lightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with his
present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to
write what is probably the most widely famous of
all his works, A Doll's House. The day before he
started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpub-
lished letter of July 4, 1879): "I have been living
here with my family since September last, and
most of that time I have been occupied with the

1875-82 145

idea of a new dramatic work, which I shall
now soon finish, and which will be published
in October. It is a serious drama, really a
family drama, dealing with modern conditions
and in particular with the problems which
complicate marriage." This play he finished,
lingering at Amalfi, in September, 1879. It was
an engineer's experiment at turning up and drain-
ing a corner of the moral swamp which Nor-
wegian society seemed to be to his violent and
ironic spirit.

A Doll's House was Ibsen's first unqualified
success. Not merely was it the earliest of his
plays which excited universal discussion, but in
its construction and execution it carried out
much further than its immediate precursors
Ibsen's new ideal as an unwavering realist. Mr.
Arthur Symons has well said l that "A Doll's
House is the first of Ibsen's plays in which the
puppets have no visible wires." It may even be
said that it was the first modern drama in which
no wires had been employed. Not that even here
the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made
it. The arm of coincidence is terribly shortened,
and the early acts, clever and entertaining as they
are, are still far from the inevitability of real life.
But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues

1 The Quarterly Review for October, 1906.

146 IBSEN

from her bedroom, dressed to go out, to Hel-
mer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when
the agitated pair sit down to "have it out,"
face to face across the table, then indeed the
spectator feels that a new thing has been born
in drama, and, incidentally, that the "well-
made play" has suddenly become as dead as
Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of
life, are amazing in this final scene, where
the old happy ending is completely abandoned
for the first time, and where the paradox of
life is presented without the least shuffling or
evasion.

It was extraordinary how suddenly it was real-
ized that A Doll's House was a prodigious per-
formance. All Scandinavia rang with Nora's
"declaration of independence." People left the
theatre, night after night, pale with excitement,
arguing, quarrelling, challenging. The inner be-
ing had been unveiled for a moment, and new
catchwords were repeated from mouth to mouth.
The great statement and reply — "No man sac-
rifices his honor, even for one he loves," "Hun-
dreds of thousands of women have done so!"
roused interminable discussion in countless family
circles. The disputes were at one time so vio-
lent as to threaten the peace of households; a
school of imitators at once sprang up to treat the

1875-82 147

situation, from slightly different points of view,
in novel, poem and drama.1

The universal excitement which Ibsen had
vainly hoped would be awakened by The Pillars of
Society came, when he was not expecting it, to
greet A Doll's House. Ibsen was stirred by the
reception of his latest play into a mood rather
different from that which he expressed at any
other period. As has often been said, he did
not pose as a prophet or as a reformer, but it
did occur to him now that he might exercise a
strong moral influence, and in writing to his
German translator, Ludwig Passarge, he said
(June 1 6, 1880):

Everything that I have written has the closest possible con-
nection with what I have lived through, even if it has not
been my own personal experience; in every new poem or
play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation and
purification — for a man shares the responsibility and the
guilt of the society to which he belongs.

It was in this spirit of unusual gravity that he
sat down to the composition of Ghosts. There is
little or no record of how he occupied himself at
Munich and Berchtesgaden in 1880, except that
in March he began to sketch, and then aban-

1 The reader who desires to obtain further light on the technical
quality of A Doll's House can do no better than refer to Mr. William
Archer's elaborate analysis of it (Fortnightly Review, July, 1906)..

148 IBSEN

doned, what afterwards became The Lady from
the Sea. In the autumn of that year, indulging
once more his curious restlessness, he took all his
household gods and goods again to Rome. His
thoughts turned away from dramatic art for a
moment, and he planned an autobiography,
which was to deal with the gradual development
of his mind, and to be called From Skien to Rome.
Whether he actually wrote any of this seems un-
certain; that he should have planned it shows a
certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now
in his fifty-third year, he might be nearly at the
end of his resources. As a matter of fact, he was
just entering upon a new inheritance. In the
summer of 1881 he went, as usual now, to Sor-
rento, and there1 the plot of Ghosts revealed itself
to him. This work was composed with more
than Ibsen's customary care, and was published
at the beginning of December, in an edition of ten
thousand copies.

Before the end of 1881 Ibsen was aware of the
terrific turmoil which Ghosts had begun to oc-
casion. He wrote to Passarge: "My new play

1 Note. — So the authorities state: but in an unpublished letter to
myself, dated Rome, November 26, 1880, I find Ibsen saying, "Just
now I am beginning to exercise my thoughts over a new drama ; I
hope I shall finish it in the course of next summer." It seems to have
been already his habit to meditate long about a subject before it took
any definite literary form in his mind.

1875-82 149

has now appeared, and has occasioned a terrible
uproar in the Scandinavian press. Every day I
receive letters and newspaper articles decrying or
praising it. I consider it absolutely impossible
that any German theatre will accept the play at
present. I hardly believe that they will dare to
play it in any Scandinavian country for some
time to come." It was, in fact, not acted pub-
licly anywhere until 1883, when the Swedes vent-
ured to try it, and the Germans followed in 1887.
The Danes resisted it much longer.

Ibsen declared that he was quite prepared for
the hubbub; he would doubtless have been much
disappointed if it had not taken place; never-
theless, he was disconcerted at the volume and
the violence of the attacks. Yet he must have
known that in the existing condition of society,
and the limited range of what was then thought
a defensible criticism of that condition, Ghosts
must cause a virulent scandal. There has been,
especially in Germany, a great deal of medico-
philosophical exposure of the under-side of life
since 1880. It is hardly possible that, there, or
in any really civilized country, an analysis of the
causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest and
most conventional forms of hereditary disease
could again excite such a startling revulsion of
feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew of investigators,

150 IBSEN

Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of
probing playwrights all over the Continent, have
gone further and often fared much worse than
Ibsen did when he dived into the family history
of Kammerherre Alving. When we read Ghosts
to-day we cannot recapture the "new shudder"
which it gave us a quarter of a century ago. Yet
it must not be forgotten that the publication of
it, in that hide-bound time, was an act of extraor-
dinary courage. Georg Brandes, always clear-
sighted, was alone in being able to perceive at
once that Ghosts was no attack on society, but
an effort to place the responsibilities of men and
women on a wholesomer and surer footing, by
direct reference to the relation of both to the child.
When the same eminent critic, however, went
on to say that Ghosts was "a poetic treatment of
the question of heredity," it was more difficult
to follow him. Now that the flash and shock of
the playwright's audacity are discounted, it is
natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work of
pure art, Ghosts stands high among Ibsen's writ-
ings. I confess, for my own part, that it seems
to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that is
to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an
almost fatal extent. It is extremely original, ex-
tremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as a
foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted

1875-82 151

and uniform, the characters, with certain obvious
exceptions, rather types than persons. In the
old fighting days it was necessary to praise Ghosts
with extravagance, because the vituperation of
the enemy was so stupid and offensive, but now
that there are no serious adversaries left, cooler
judgment admits — not one word that the idiot-
adversary said, but — that there are more con-
vincing plays than Ghosts in Ibsen's repertory.

Up to this time, Ibsen had been looked upon
as the mainstay of the Conservative party in
Norway, in opposition to Bjornson, who led the
Radicals. But the author of Ghosts, who was
accused of disseminating anarchism and nihilism,
was now smartly drummed out of the Tory camp
without being welcomed among the Liberals.
Each party was eager to disown him. He was
like Coriolanus, when he was deserted by nobles
and people alike, and

suffer'd by the voice of slaves to be
Whoop'd out of Rome.

The situation gave Ibsen occasion, from the per-
spective of his exile, to form some impressions of
political life which were at once pungent and
dignified :

"I am more and more confirmed" [he said, Jan, 3, 1882]
"in my belief that there is something demoralizing in politics

152 IBSEN

and parties. I, at any rate, shall never be able to join a
party which has the majority on its side. Bjornson says,
'The majority is always right'; and as a practical politician
he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of
necessity say, 'The minority is always right.'"

In order to place this view clearly before his
countrymen, he set about composing the extremely
vivid and successful play, perhaps the most suc-
cessful pamphlet-play that ever was written,
which was to put forward in the clearest light the
claim of the minority. He was very busy with
preparations for it all through the summer of
1882, which he spent at what was now to be for
many years his favorite summer resort, Gossen-
sass in the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to
the memory of Ibsen in the way that Pornic be-
longs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to
Tyndall, holiday homes in foreign countries, dedi-
cated to blissful work without disturbance. Here,
at a spot now officially named the " Ibsenplatz,"
he composed The Enemy of the People, engrossed
in his invention as was his wont, reading nothing
and thinking of nothing but of the persons whose
history he was weaving. Oddly enough, he
thought that this, too, was to be a "placable"
play, written to amuse and stimulate, but calculated
to wound nobody's feelings. The fact was that
Ibsen, like some ocelot or panther of the rocks, had

1875-82 '53

a paw much heavier than he himself realized,
and his "play," in both senses, was a very serious
affair, when he descended to sport with common
humanity.

Another quotation, this time from a letter to
Brandes, must be given to show what Ibsen's
attitude was at this moment to his fatherland and
to his art:

"When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general
intelligence is at home, when I notice the low standard by
which everything is judged, a deep despondency comes over
me, and it often seems to me that I might just as well end
my literary activity at once. They really do not need 'poetry
at home; they get along so well with the party newspapers
and the Lutheran Weekly.'"

If Ibsen thought that he was offering them
"poetry" in The Enemy of the People, he spoke
in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has never
opened its arms wide enough to embrace all
imaginative literature as poetry, and in the Eng-
lish sense nothing in the world's drama is denser
or more unqualified prose than The Enemy of
the People, without a tinge of romance or rhetoric,
as "unideal" as a blue-book. It is, nevertheless,
one of the most certainly successful of its author's
writings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as
a pamphlet it awakens irresistible sympathy; as
a specimen of dramatic art, its construction and

I54 IBSEN

evolution are almost faultless. Under a trans-
parent allegory, it describes the treatment which
Ibsen himself had received at the hands of the Nor-
wegian public for venturing to tell them that their
spa should be drained before visitors were invited
to flock to it. Nevertheless, the playwright has
not made the mistake of identifying his own
figure with that of Dr. Stockmann, who is an en-
tirely independent creation. Mr. Archer has com-
pared the hero with Colonel Newcombe, whose
loquacious amicability he does share, but Stock-
mann's character has much more energy and initi-
ative than Colonel Newcombe's, whom we could
never fancy rousing himself " to purge society."

Ibsen's practical wisdom in taking the bull by
the horns in his reply to the national reception of
Ghosts was proved by the instant success of The
Enemy of the People. Presented to the public in
this new and audacious form, the problem of a
"moral water-supply" struck sensible Norwegians
as less absurd and less dangerous than they had
conceived it to be. The reproof was mordant,
and the worst offenders crouched under the lash.
Ghosts itself was still, for some time, tabooed,
but The Enemy of the People received a cordial
welcome, and has remained ever since one of the
most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still ex-
tremely effective on the stage, and as it is lightened

1875-82 155

by more humor than the author is commonly will-
ing to employ, it attracts even those who are hos-
tile to the intrusion of anything solemn behind the
footlights.

CHAPTER VII
1883-91

WITH the appearance of An Enemy of the
People, which was published in November, 1882,
Ibsen entered upon a new stage in his career.
He had completely broken with the Conservative
party in Norway, without having gratified or won
the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in
personal relations of friendliness with Bjornson,
whose generous approval of his work as a dram-
atist sustained his spirits, but his own individual-
ism had been intensified by the hostile reception of
Ghosts. His life was now divided between Rome
in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, and
in the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he
wandered solitary, taciturn, absorbed in his own
thoughts. His meditations led him more and more
into a lonely state. He floated, as on a prophet's
carpet, between the political heavens and earth,
capriciously refusing to ascend or to alight. He
had come to a sceptical stage in his mental evolu-
tion, a stage in which he was to remain for a

156

1883-91 i57

considerable time, gradually modifying it in a
Conservative direction. One wonders what the
simple-minded and stalwart Bjornson thought of
being quietly told (March 28, 1884) that the lower
classes are nowhere liberal-minded or self-sacri-
ficing, and that "in the views expressed by our
[Norwegian] peasants there is not an atom more
of real Liberalism than is to be found among the
ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol." In poli-
tics Ibsen had now become a pagan; "I do not
believe," he said, "in the emancipatory power of
political measures, nor have I much confidence
in the altruism and good will of those in power."
This sense of the uselessness of effort is strongly
marked in the course of the next work on which
he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine
and sardonic tragi-comedy of The Wild Duck.
The first sketch of it was made during the spring
of 1884 in Rome, but the dramatist took it to
Gossensass with him for the finishing touches, and
did not perfect it until the autumn. It is remark-
able that Ibsen invariably speaks of The Wild
Ducky when he mentions it in his correspondence,
in terms of irony. He calls it a collection of crazy
tricks or tomfooleries, galskaber, an expression
which carries with it, in this sense, a confession of
wilful paradox. In something of the same spirit,
Robert Browning, in the old days before he was

158 IBSEN

comprehended, used to speak of "the entirely
unintelligible Sordello," as if, sarcastically, to meet
criticism half-way.

When The Wild Duck was first circulated
among Ibsen's admirers, it was received with some
bewilderment. Quite slowly the idea received
acceptance that the hitherto so serious and even
angry satirist was, to put it plainly, laughing at
himself. The faithful were reluctant to concede it.
But one sees now, clearly enough, that in a sense it
was so. I have tried to show, we imagine Ibsen
saying, that your hypocritical sentimentality needs
correction — you live in "A Doll's House." I
have dared to point out to you that your society
is physically and morally rotten and full of
"Ghosts." You have repudiated my honest
efforts as a reformer, and called me "An Enemy
of the People." Very well, then, have it so if
you please. What a fool am I to trouble about
you at all. Go down a steep place in Gadara
and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, it can
amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers
Werle. Vogue la galere. "But as the play is
neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the
right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal
of the sign of the union from the flag," burning
questions then and Afterwards in Norwegian
politics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much

1883-91 159

interest in Norway"; it will, however, amuse me
immensely to point out the absurdity of my caring.
It is in reading The Wild Duck that for the first
time the really astonishing resemblance which
Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes apparent to us.
This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist
now relinquishes any other central object than
the presentation to his audience of the clash of
temperament, and partly because here at last,
and for the future always, he separates himself
from everything that is not catastrophe. More
than any earlier play, more even than Ghosts, The
Wild Duck is an avalanche which has begun to
move, and with a movement unaffected by the
incidents of the plot, long before the curtain
rises. The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all
other modern dramas, depend upon nothing that
happens while they are being exhibited, but rush
downwards to their inevitable close in obedience
to a series of long-precedent impulses. In order
to gain this effect, the dramatist has to be ac-
quainted with everything that has ever happened
to his personages, and we are informed that Ibsen
used to build up in his own mind, for months at
a time, the past history of his puppets. He was
now master of this practice. We are not surprised,
therefore, to find one of the most penetrating of
dramatic critics remarking of The Wild Duck that

160 IBSEN

"never before had the poet displayed such an
amazing power of fascinating and absorbing us
by the gradual withdrawal of veil after veil from
the past."

The result of a searching determination to deal
with personal and not typical forms of tempera-
ment is seen in the firmness of the portraiture in
The Wild Duck, where, I think, less than ever
before, is to be found a trace of that incoherency
which is to be met with occasionally in all the
earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the
effect of a sudden caprice or change of the point
of view. There is, so far as I can judge, no trace
of this in The Wild Duck, where the continuity
of aspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us
that if we tell him our past, he will tell us our
future, and although several of the characters in
The Wild Duck are the most sordid of Ibsen's
creations, the author has made himself so deeply
familiar with them that they are absolutely life-
like. The detestable Hialmar, in whom, by the
looking-glass of a disordered liver, any man may
see a picture of himself; the pitiable Gregers
Werle, perpetually thirteenth at table, with his
genius for making an utter mess of other people's
lives; the vulgar Gina; the beautiful girlish figure
of the little martyred Hedvig — all are wholly real
and living persons.

1883-91 i6i

The subject of the play, of course, is one which
we do not expect, or had not hitherto expected,
from Ibsen. It is the danger of "a sick con-
science" and the value of illusion. Society may
be full of poisonous vapors and be built on a frame-
work of lies; it is nevertheless prudent to consider
whether the ideal advantages of disturbing it
overweigh the practical disadvantages, and above
all to bear in mind that if you rob the average
man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob
him of his happiness. The topsy-turvy nature of
this theme made Ibsen as nearly "rollicking" as
he ever became in his life. We can imagine that
as he wrote the third act of The Wild Duck, where
so horrible a luncheon party — "we'll all keep a
corner" — gloats over the herring salad, he indulged
again and again in those puffs of soundless and
formidable mirth which Mr. Johan Paulsen de-
scribes as so surprising an element of conversa-
tion with Ibsen.

To the gossip of that amiable Boswell, too, we
must turn for a valuable impression of the solidi-
fication of Ibsen's habits which began about this
time, and which marked them even before he left
Munich. He had now successfully separated him-
self from all society, and even his family saw him
only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him,
but, if sufficiently courageous, must hang about

i6z IBSEN

on the staircase, hoping to catch him for a mo-
ment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his
study, into which the daring Paulsen occasion-
ally ventured, Ibsen, we are to believe, did nothing
at all, but "sat bent over the pacific ocean of his
own mind, which mirrored for him a world far
more fascinating, vast and rich than that which
lay spread around him."1

And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafes
had begun. In Rome Ibsen had his favorite
table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirror
in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by
the glitter of his gold spectacles, he could com-
mand a sight of the whole restaurant, and especially
of the door into the street. Every one who entered,
every couple that conversed, every movement of
the scene, gave something to those untiring eyes.
The newspaper and the cafe mirror — these were
the books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost
exclusively to study; and out of the gestures of
a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph
in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an ad-
vertisement, he could build up a drama. Inces-
sant observation of real life, incessant capture
of unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual liv-
ing experience leaping in his hands like a captive
wild animal, this was now the substance from

1 Samliv nied Ibsen, 1906, p. 30.

1883-91 163

which all Ibsen's dreams and dramas were woven.
Concentration of attention on the vital play of
character, this was his one interest.

Out of this he was roused by a sudden deter-
mination to go at last and see for himself what
life in Norway was really like. A New England
wit once denied that a certain brilliant and Eu-
rope-loving American author was a cosmopolitan.
"No," he said, "a cosmopolitan is at home even
in his own country." Ibsen began to doubt
whether he was not too far off to follow events
in Norway — and these were now beginning to be
very exciting — well enough to form an inde-
pendent judgment about them; and after twenty
years of exile there is no doubt that the question
was fairly put. The Wild Duck had been pub-
lished in November, 1884, and had been acted
everywhere in Scandinavia with great success.
The critics and the public were agreed for the
first time that Ibsen was a very great national
genius, and that if Norway was not proud of him
it would make a fool of itself in the eyes of Europe.
Ibsen had said that Norway was a barbarous
country, inhabited by two millions of cats and
dogs, but so many agreeable and highly-civilized
compliments found their way to him in Rome
that he began to fancy that the human element
was beginning to be introduced. At all events,

164 IBSEN

he would see for himself, and in June, 1885, in-
stead of stopping at Gossensass, he pushed bravely
on and landed in Christiania.

At first all went well, but from the very begin-
ning of the visit he observed, or thought he ob-
served, awkward phenomena. The country was
thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated
with rhetorical resolutions which seemed to Ibsen
very empty. He had a constitutional horror of
purely theoretical questions, and these were oc-
cupying Norway from one end to the other. The
King's veto, the consular difficulty, the Swedish
emblem in the national flag, these were the sub-
jects of frenzied discussion, and in none of these
did Ibsen take any sort of pleasure. He was not
politically far-sighted, it must be confessed, nor
did he guess what practical proportions these
"theoretical questions" were to assume in the
immediate future.

That great writer and delightful associate, the
Swedish poet, Count Snoilsky, one of the few
whose company never wearied or irritated Ibsen,
joined him in the far north. They spent a
pleasant, quiet time together at Molde, that en-
chanting little sub-arctic town, where it looks
southward over the shining fjord, with the Roms-
dalhorn forever guarding the mountainous horizon.
Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, when Snoil-

1883-91 165

sky had left him, already thinking of a new drama,
lingered on at Molde, spending hours on hours at
the end of the jetty, gazing into the clear, cold sea.
His passion for the sea had never betrayed him,
and at Rome, where he had long given up going
to any galleries or studios, he still haunted the
house of a Norwegian marine painter, Nils Han-
steen, whose sketches reminded him of old days
and recollected waters.

But the autumn comes on apace in these high
latitudes, and Ibsen had to return to Christiania
with its torchlight processions, and late noisy
feasts, and triumphant revolutionary oratory.
He disliked it extremely, and he made up his
mind to go back to the indifferent South, where
people did not worry about such things. Unfort-
unately, the inhabitants of Christiania did not
leave him alone. They were not content to have
him among them as a retired observer, they
wanted to make him stand out definitely on one
political side or the other. He was urged, at the
end of September, to receive the inevitable torch-
light procession planned in his honor by the
Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute
enough to see that this might compromise his
independence, but he was probably too self-con-
scious in believing that a trap was being laid for
him. He said that, not having observed that his

166 IBSEN

presence gave the Union any great pleasure, he
did not care to have its expression of great joy at
his departure. This was not polite, for it does
not appear that the students had any idea that
he intended to depart. He would not address a
reply to the Union as a body, but to "my friends
among the students."

A committee called upon him to beg him to
reconsider his resolution, but he roundly told
them that he knew that they were reactionaries,
and wanted to annex him to their party, and that
he was not blind to their tricks. They withdrew
in confusion, and Ibsen, in an agony of nervous-
ness, determined to put the sea between himself
and their machinations. Early in October he
retreated, or rather fled, to Copenhagen, and
thence to Munich, where he breathed again.
Meanwhile, the extreme liberal faction among
the students claimed that his action had meant
that he was heart and soul with them, as against
the reactionaries. A young Mr. Ove Rode, who
had interviewed him, took upon himself to say
that these were Ibsen's real sentiments. Ibsen
fairly stamped with rage, and declared, in furious
communications, that all these things were done
on purpose. "It was an opportunity to insult
a poet which it would have been a sad pity to
lose," he remarked, with quivering pen. A re-

1883-91 i6;

verberant controversy sprang up in the Nor-
wegian newspapers, and Ibsen, in his Bavarian
harbor of refuge, continued to vibrate all through
the winter of 1885. The exile's return to his native
country had proved to be far from a success.

Already his new play was taking shape, and the
success of his great personal ambition, namely
that his son, Sigurd, should be taken with honor
into the diplomatic service of his country, did
much to calm his spirits. Ibsen was growing rich
now, as well as famous, and if only the Nor-
wegians would let him alone, he might well be
happy. The new play was Rosmersholm, and it
took its impulse from a speech which Ibsen had
made during his journey, at Trondhjem, where
he expounded the gospel of individualism to a
respectful audience of workingmen, and had laid
down the necessity of introducing an aristocratic
strain, et adeligt element, into the life of a truly
democratic state, a strain which woman and
labor were to unite in developing. He said:
"I am thinking, of course, not of birth, nor of
money, nor even of intellect, but of the nobility
which grows out of character. It is character
alone which can make us free." This nobility of
character must be fostered, mainly, by the united
efforts of motherhood and labor. This was quite
a new creed in Norway, and it bewildered his

168 IBSEN

hearers, but it is remarkable to notice how the
best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded
to the appeal, and how little surprise the present
generation would express at a repetition of such
sentiments. And out of this idea of "nobility"
of public character Rosmersholm directly sprang.
We are not left to conjecture in this respect.
In a letter to Bjorn Kristensen (February 13,
1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, while correct-
ing a misconception of the purpose of Rosmers-
holm, that " the play deals with the struggle which
all serious-minded human beings have to wage
with themselves in order to bring their lives into
harmony with their convictions. . . . Conscience
is very conservative. It has its deep roots in
tradition and the past generally, and hence the
conflict." When we come to read Rosmersholm
it is not difficult to see how this order of ideas
dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The
mansion called by that name is typical of the
ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois aris-
tocracy, which are not to be subservient to such
modern and timid conservatism as is represented
by Rector Kroll, with his horror of all things new
because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in
its inherent nobility, is to be superior to a craven
horror of the democracy, and is to show, by the
courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny,

1883-91 169

that it looks above and beyond all these momen-
tary prejudices, and accepts, from all hands,
whatever is wise and of good report.

The misfortune is that Ibsen, in unconscious
bondage to his ideas, did not construct his drama
sturdily enough on realistic lines. While not one
of his works is more suggestive than Rosmersholm,
there is not one which gives the unbeliever more
opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral house
of a great rich race, which is kept up by the minis-
trations of a single aged female servant, stands in
pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of prac-
tical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set
down to eccentricity, if all the other personages
were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious
heroine according to some admirers, "criminal,
thief and murderess," as another admirer pleonas-
tically describes her, is a sort of troll; nobody can
explain — and yet an explanation seems requisite —
what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his
eagerness to work out a certain sequence of philo-
sophical ideas, the playwright for once neglected
to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature
of Rosmersholm that in it, for the first time, and
almost for the last, Ibsen, in the act of theorizing,
loses his hold upon reality. He places his in-
genious, elaborate and — given the premises — in-
evitable denouement in a scene scarcely more

1 70 IBSEN

credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera,
and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it
does, immediately on the heels of The Wild Duck,
which was as remarkable a slice of real life as was
ever brought before a theatrical audience, the
artificiality of Rosmersholm shows Ibsen as an
artist clearly stepping backward that he may leap
the further forward.

In other words, Rosmersholm is the proof of
Ibsen's desire to conquer another field of drama.
He had now for some years rejected with great
severity all temptations from the poetic spirit,
which was nevertheless ineradicable in him. He
had wished to produce on the mind of the spec-
tator no other impression than that he was ob-
serving something which had actually happened,
exactly in the way and the words in which it
would happen. He had formulated to the actress,
Lucie Wolf, the principle that ideal dramatic
poetry should be considered extinct, "like some
preposterous animal form of prehistoric times."
But the soul of man cannot be fed with a stone,
and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly
prosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valu-
able on occasion, but that sooner or later a poet
asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever there
was one, had grown weary of the self-made law
by which he had shut himself out from Paradise.

1883-91 i;i

He determined, grudgingly, and hardly know-
ing how to set about it, that he would once more
give the spiritual and the imaginative qualities
their place in his work. These had now been
excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publi-
cation of Peer Gynt, and he would not resume
them so far as to write his dramas again in verse.
Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at
least a juvenile and fugitive skill not to be rashly
picked up again by a business-like bard of sixty.
But he would reopen the door to allegory and
symbol, and especially to fantastic beauty of
landscape.

The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at
least much, of the old enchantment. The scene
at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods
and the waters which we had lost sight of since Peer
Gynt. But this element was still more evident
in The Lady from the Sea, which was published
in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long
hours, in the summer of 1885, at the end of the
pier at Molde, gazing down into the waters, or
watching the steamers arriving and departing,
coming from the great sea beyond the fjord or
going towards it. As was his wont, he stored up
these impressions, making no immediate use of
them. He actually prepared The Lady from the
Sea in very different, although still marine sur-

172 IBSEN

roundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for
the summer at the pretty and ancient, but very
mild little town of Saeby, with the sands in front
of him and rolling woods behind. From Saeby
it was a short journey to Frederikshavn, "which
he liked very much — he could knock about all day
among the shipping, talking to the sailors, and so
forth. Besides, he found the neighborhood of
the sea favorable to contemplation and con-
structive thought." So Mr. Archer, who visited
him at Saeby; and I myself, a year or two later,
picked up at Frederikshavn an oral tradition of
Ibsen, with his hands behind his back, and the
frock-coat tightly buttoned, stalking, stalking
alone for hours on the interminable promenade
between the great harbor moles of Frederiks-
havn, no one daring to break in upon his formi-
dable contemplation.

In several respects, though perhaps not in con-
centration of effect, The Lady from the Sea shows a
distinct advance on Rosmersholm. It is never dull,
never didactic, as its predecessor too often was,
and there is thrown over the whole texture of it
a glamour of romance, of mystery, of beauty,
which had not appeared in Ibsen's work since
the completion of Peer Gynt. Again, after the
appearance of so many strenuous tragedies, it was
pleasant to welcome a pure comedy. The Lady

1883-91 173

from the Sea1 is connected with the previous plays
by its emphatic defence of individuality and its
statement of the imperative necessity of develop-
ing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge
of pessimism. It is in some respects the reverse
of Rosmersholm; the bitterness of restrained and
balked individuality, which ends in death, being
contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and
gratified individuality, which leads to health and
peace. To the remarkable estimate of The Lady
from the Sea formed by some critics, and in par-
ticular by M. Jules de Gaultier, we shall return
in a general consideration of the symbolic plays,
of which it is the earliest. Enough to say here
that even those who did not plunge so deeply into
its mysteries found it a remarkably agreeable
spectacle, and that it has continued to be, in
Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popu-
lar of its author's works.

Ibsen left his little tavern at Saeby towards the
end of September, 1887, in consequence of an
invitation to proceed directly to Stockholm, where
his Swedish admirers, now very numerous and
enthusiastic, would no longer be deprived of
the pleasure of entertaining him publicly. He
appeared before them, the breast of his coat

1 In the Neue Rundschau for December, 1906, there was published
a first draft of The Lady jrom the Sea, dating as far back as 1880.

174 IBSEN

sparkling with foreign stars and crosses, the Urim
and Thummim of general European recognition.
He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out-
lived all the obscurity of his youth. In the three
Scandinavian countries — even in recalcitrant Nor-
way— he was universally hailed as the greatest
dramatist of the age. In Germany his fame was
greater than that of any native writer of the same
class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a
career of high and settled popularity. Even in
France and England his work was now discussed
with that passionate interest which shows the
vitality of what is even, for the moment, misin-
terpreted and disliked. His admirers at Stock-
holm told him that he had taken a foremost place
in re-creating their sense of life, that he was a
fashioner and a builder of new social forms, that
he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-
Builder. The reply he made to their enthusiasm
was dignified and reserved, but it revealed a sense
of high gratification. Skule's long doubt was over;
he believed at last in his own kingdom, and that
the world would be ultimately the better for the
stamp of his masterful soul upon its surface.

It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat
dreaming through the early part of the unevent-
ful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melan-
choly when, in the following year, he settled down

1883-91

to the composition of a new play which was to
treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He
told Snoilsky that for several reasons this work
made very slow progress, "and it robbed him of
his summer holidays." From May to November,
1890, he was uninterruptedly in Munich writing
what is known to us now as Hedda Gabler. He
finished it at last, saying as he did so, "It has
not been my desire to deal in this play with so-
called problems. What I principally wanted to
do was to depict human beings, human emotions
and human destinies, upon a groundwork of
certain of the social conditions and principles of
the present day." It was a proof of the immense
growth of Ibsen's celebrity that editions of Hedda
Gabler were called for almost simultaneously, in
the winter of 1890, in London, New York, St.
Petersburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow, as well
as in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Christiania.
There was no other living author in the world at
that moment who excited so much curiosity
among the intellectual classes, and none who
exercised so much influence on the younger
generation of authors and thinkers.

In Hedda Gabler Ibsen returned, for the last
time, but with concentrated vigor, to the pro-
saic ideal of his central period. He never suc-
ceeded in being more objective in drama, he

176 IBSEN

never kept more closely to the bare facts of nature
nor rejected more vigorously the ornaments of
romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play.
There is no poetic suggestion here, no species of
symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, or mon-
ster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement
with Mr. Archer when he says that he finds it
impossible to extract any sort of general idea
from Hedda Gabler, or to accept it as a satire of
any condition of society. Hedda is an individual,
not a type, and it was as an individual that she
interested Ibsen. We have been told, since the
poet's death, that he was greatly struck by the
case, which came under his notice at Munich, of
a German lady who poisoned herself because she
was bored with life, and had strayed into a false
position. Hedda Gabler is the realization of such
an individual case. At first sight, it seemed as
though Ibsen had been influenced by Dumas fils,
which might have been true, in spite of the
marked dislike which each expressed for the
other;1 but closer examination showed that Hedda
Gabler had no sort of relation with the pam-
phlets of the master of Parisian problem-tragedy.
The attempt to show that Hedda Gabler

1 It is said that La Route de Thebes, which Dumas had begun when
he died, was to have been a deliberate attack on the methods and
influence of Ibsen. Ibsen, on his part, loathed Dumas.

1883-91 i?7

"proved" anything was annoying to Ibsen, who
sa*d, with more than his customary firmness, "It
was not my purpose to deal with what people call
problems in this play. What I chiefly tried to
do was to paint human beings, human emotions
and human fate, against a background of some of
the conditions and laws of society as it exists
to-day." The German critics, a little puzzled
to find a longitude and latitude for Tesman's
"tastefully decorated" villa, declared that this
time Ibsen had written an "international," not a
locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further
from the truth. On the contrary, Hedda Gabler
is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian
of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course
the highly-civilized Christiania of to-day, but the
half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of
forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a
lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff
and raw hospitality in several tastefully decorated
villas, which were as like that of the Tesmans as
pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a
"west end of Christiania" of 1860 rather than of
1890 I cannot guess, unless it was that to so per-
sistent an exile the former was far more familiar
than the latter.

A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame
Alia Nazimova, who has had special opportuni-

178 IBSEN

ties of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has
lately (1907) depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-
mated, ambitious and doomed to a repulsive
alliance with a man beneath her station, whom
she had mistakenly hoped would give her posi-
tion and wealth. In other circumstances, Hedda
would have been a power for beauty and good."
If this ingenious theory be correct, Hedda Gabler
must be considered as the leading example of
Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil is
produced by circumstances and not by character.
The portrait becomes thrillingly vital if we realize
that the stains upon it are the impact of acciden-
tal conditions on a nature which might otherwise
have been useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is
painted as Mr. Sargent might paint a lady of the
London fashionable world; his brush would divine
and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder
of her nerves, and the ravaging concentration of
her will in a sort of barren and impotent egotism,
while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness
of her cultivated physical beauty. He would show,
as Ibsen shows, and with an equal lack of malice
prepense, various detestable features which the
mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist
would be called a caricaturist, because his instinc-
tive penetration had taken him into regions where
the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power.

CHAPTER VIII
LAST YEARS

WITH the publication of Hedda Gabler Ibsen
passed into what we may call his final glory.
Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of
his own growls of indignation, he had taken his
place, not merely as the most eminent imaginative
writer of the three Scandinavian countries, but as
the type there of what literature should be and
the prophet of what it would become. In 1880,
Norway, the youngest and long the rawest of the
three civilizations, was now the foremost in ac-
tivity, and though the influence of Bjornson and
Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was not to be
compared for breadth and complexity with that
of Ibsen. The nature of the revolution, exercised
by the subject of this memoir between 1880 and
1890, that is to say from Ghosts to Hedda Gabler,
was destructive before it was constructive. The
poetry, fiction and drama of the three Northern
nations had become stagnant with commonplace
and conventional matter, lumbered with the
recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of

180 IBSEN

composition. This was particularly the case in
Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved
more violent and catastrophic than anywhere else.
Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the old banal
poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in
all its faded elegance it withered up and vanished.

The next event was that the new generation in
the three Northern countries, deprived of its tra-
ditional authorities, looked about for a prophet
and a father, and they found what they wanted
in the exceedingly uncompromising elderly gentle-
man who remained so silent in the cafes of Rome
and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this
unseen and unsympathetic personage was ex-
traordinary, and took forms of amazing extrav-
agance. Ibsen's impassivity merely heightened
the enthusiasm of his countless admirers, who
were found, it should be stated, almost entirely
among persons who were born after his exile from
Norway. His writings supplied a challenge to
character and intelligence which appealed to those
who disliked the earlier system of morals and
aesthetics against which he had so long fought
single-handed.

Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold
very much the position that Whistler was taking
among painters and etchers in this country, that
is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a

LAST YEARS 181

dwindling group of elderly conventional critics
merely stung into more frenzied laudation an ever-
widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen rep-
resented, for a time almost exclusively, "serious"
aims in literature, and with those of Herbert
Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little
later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual
food of all youthful minds of any vigor or elasticity.
In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for
Ibsen took forms of almost preposterous violence.
The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam,
has given a curious and amusing account of the
rage for Ibsen which came to its height about
1880. The question which every student asked
his friend, every lover his mistress, was "What
do you think of Ibsen ? " Not to be a believer
in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which
love or friendship might easily be shipwrecked.
It was quoted gravely as an insufferable incom-
patibility for the state of marriage. There was
a curious and secret symbolism running through
the whole of youthful Swedish society, from
which their elders were cunningly excluded, by
which the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to
hand, presented on solemn occasions, became the
emblems of the problems interesting to generous
youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty
and truth. The three Northern countries, in

i8z IBSEN

their long stagnation, had become clogged and
deadened with spiritual humbug, which had
sealed the sources of emotion. It seemed as
though, after the long frost of the seventies,
spring had come and literature had budded at
last, and that it was Ibsen who had blown the
clarion of the West Wind and heralded the
emancipation.

The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist
was not always according to knowledge, and
sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the
abuse showered in England and France upon
Ibsen at the time we are now describing was due
to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian
and German idolaters. A Swedish satirist1 said
that if Ibsen could have foreseen how many
"misunderstood" women would leave their homes
in imitation of Nora, and how many lovesick
housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca,
he would have thrown ashes on his head and
have retreated into the deserts of Tartary. The
suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the
tragic circumstance where much was so purely
comic. But if there were elements of tragi-
comedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far more
important elements of vigorous and wholesome
intellectual independence; and it was during this

1 "Stella Kleve" (Mathilda Mailing), in Framat (1886).

LAST YEARS 183

period of Ibsen's almost hectic popularity that
the foundations of a new fiction and a new drama
were laid in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. A
whole generation sucked strength and energy
from his early writings, since it is to be remarked
that, from 1880 to 1890, the great prestige of
Ibsen did not depend so much on the dramas he
was then producing, as on the earlier works of his
poetic youth, now reread with an unexampled
fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of
Robert Browning, which faintly resembles that
of Ibsen, did not attract the younger generation
to the volumes which succeeed The Ring and the
Book, but sent them back to the books which their
fathers had despised, to Pippa Passes and Men
and Women. To the generation of 1880, Ibsen
was not so much the author of the realistic social
dramas as of those old but now rediscovered
miracles of poetry and wit, The Pretenders, Brand
and Peer Gynt.

In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly
conscious of this strong personal feeling in his
favor among young men and women. Nor did
he find it confined to Scandinavia. He had trav-
elled about in Germany, and everywhere his plays
were being acted. Berlin was wild about him;
at Weimar he was feted like a conqueror. He
did not settle down at Munich until May, and

184 IBSEN

here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer,
hard at work. After the success of Hedda Gabler,
which overpowered all adverse comment, Ibsen
began to long to be in Norway again, and this
feeling was combined, in a curious way, with a
very powerful emotion which now entered into
his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful
existence, mainly a spectator at the feast, as little
occupied in helping himself to the dishes which
he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the des-
ert in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams.
No adventure, of any prominent kind, had ever
been seen to diversify Ibsen's perfectly decorous
and domestic career. And now he was more than
sixty, and the gray tones were gathering round him
more thickly than ever, when a real ray of ver-
milion descended out of the sky and filled his
horizon with color.

In the season of 1889, among the summer
boarders at Gossensass, there appeared a young
Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach.
She used to sit on a certain bench in the Pferchthal,
and when the poet, whom she adored from afar,
passed by, she had the courage to smile at him.
Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon
Ibsen was on the bench at her side. He readily
discovered where she lived; no less readily he
gained an introduction to the family with whom

LAST YEARS 185

she boarded. There was a window-seat in the
salle a manger; it was deep and shaded by odorous
flowering shrubs; it lent itself to endless conver-
sation. The episode was strange, the passion im-
probable, incomprehensible, profoundly natural
and true. Perhaps, until they parted in the last
days of September, neither the old man nor the
young girl realized what their relations had meant
to each. Youth secured its revenge, however;
Miss Bardach soon wrote from Vienna that she
was now more tranquil, more independent, happy
at last. Ibsen, on the other hand, was heart-
broken, quivering with ecstasy, overwhelmed with
joy and despair.

It was the enigma in his "princess," as he called
her, that completed Miss Bardach's sorcery over
the old poet. She seems to have been no co-
quette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at
his feet; she broke the thread which bound the
charms of her spirit and poured them over him.
He, for his part, remaining discreet and respect-
ful, was shattered with happiness. To a friend
of mine, a young Norwegian man of letters, Ibsen
said about this time: "Oh, you can always love,
but I am happier than the happiest, for I am
beloved." Long afterwards, on his seventieth
birthday, when his own natural force was fail-
ing, he wrote to Miss Bardach, "That summer at

186 IBSEN

Gossensass was the most beautiful and the most
harmonious portion of my whole existence. I
scarcely venture to think of it, and yet I think
of nothing else. Ah! forever!" He did not
dare to send her The Master-Builder, since her
presence interpenetrated every line of it like a
perfume, and when, we are told, she sent him
her photograph, signed "Princess of Orangia,"
her too-bold identification of herself with Hilda
Wangel hurt him as a rough touch, that finer tact
would have avoided. There can be no doubt at
all that while she was now largely absorbed by
the compliment to her own vanity, he was still
absolutely enthralled and bewitched, and that what
was fun to her made life and death to him.

This very curious episode,1 which modifies in
several important respects our conception of the
dramatist's character, is analogous with the
apparent change of disposition which made
Renan surprise his unthinking admirers so sud-
denly at the epoch of L'Eau de Jouvence and
L'Abbesse de 'Jouarre. It was founded, of course,
on that dangerous susceptibility to which an
elderly man of genius, whose life had been spent
in labor and reflection, may be inclined to re-

1 It was quite unknown until the correspondence — which has not
been translated into English — was published by Georg Brandes at
the desire of the lady herself (September, 1906).

LAST YEARS 187

sign himself, as he sees the sands running out of
the hour-glass, and realizes that in analyzing and
dissecting emotion he has never had time to
enjoy it. Time is so short, the nerves so fragile
and so finite, the dreadful illusion, the maia, so
irresistible, that the old man gives way to it, and
would sooner die at once than not make one grasp
at happiness.

It will have been remarked that Ibsen's habit
was to store up an impression, but not to use it
immediately on creative work. We need, there-
fore, feel no surprise that there is not a trace of
the Bardach episode in Hedda GaUer, although
the composition of that play immediately followed
the hohes, schmerzliches Gliick at Gossensass. He
was, too, no moonlight serenader, and his in-
tense emotion is perfectly compatible with the out-
line of some of the gossip which was repeated at
the time of his death; Ibsen being reported to have
said of the Viennese girl: "She did not get hold of
me, but I got hold of her — for my play." These
things are very complex, and not to be hastily dis-
missed, especially on the rough and ready English
system. There would be give and take in such
a complicated situation, when the object was, as
Ibsen himself says, out of reach unversichtbar.
There is no question that for every pang which
Hilda made her ancient lover suffer, he would en-

188 IBSEN

rich his imagination with a dozen points of ex-
perience. There is no paradox in saying that the
poet was overwhelmed with a passion and yet con-
sciously made it serve as material for his plays.
From this time onwards every dramatic work of
his bears the stamp of those hours among the roses
at Gossensass.

To the spring of 1891 belongs Ibsen's some-
what momentous visit to Vienna, where he was
invited by Dr. Max Burckhard, the director of
the Burg Theatre, to superintend the perform-
ance of his Pretenders. Ibsen had already, in
strict privacy, visited Vienna, where his plays
enjoyed an increasing success, but this was his
first public entrance into a city which he admired
on the whole more than any other city of Europe.
"Mein schoner Wien!" he used to murmur, with
quite a elan of affection. In April, 1891, after
the triumph of his tragedy on the stage, Ibsen
was the guest at a public banquet at Vienna, when
the ovations were overwhelming and were ex-
tended until four o'clock next morning. A per-
formance of The Wild Duck produced, what was
almost as dear to Ibsen as praise, a violent polemic,
and he passed on out of a world of storm and
passion to Buda-Pesth, where he saw A Doll's
House acted in Hungarian, amid thunders of
applause, and where he was the guest of Count

LAST YEARS 189

Albert Apponyi. These were the happy and
fruitful years which consoled the heart of the poet
for the bitter time when

"Hate's decree
Dwelt in his thoughts intolerable."

In the ensuing summer, in July, 1891, Ibsen
left Munich with every intention of returning to
it, but with the plan of a long summer trip in
Norway, where the triumphant success of Hedda
Gabler had been very agreeable to his feelings.
Once more he pushed up through the country to
Trondhjem, a city which had always attracted
him and pleased him. Here he presently em-
barked on one of the summer coasting-steamers,
and saw the shores of Nordland and Finmark
for the first time, visiting the North Cape itself.
He came back to Christiania for the rest of the
season, with no prospect of staying. But he en-
joyed a most flattering reception; he was begged
to resume his practical citizenship, and he was
assured that life in Norway would be made very
pleasant to him. In the autumn, therefore, in
his abrupt way, he took an apartment in Viktoria
Terrasse, and sent to Munich for his furniture.
He said to a friend who expressed surprise at this
settlement: "I may just as well make Christiania
my headquarters as Munich. The railway takes

IBSEN

me in a very short time wherever I want to go;
and when I am bored with Norway I can travel
elsewhere." But he never felt the fatigue he
anticipated, and, but for brief visits to Copen-
hagen or Stockholm, he left his native country
no more after 1891, although he changed his
abode in Christiania itself.

For the first twelve months Ibsen enjoyed the
pleasures of the prodigal returned, and fed with
gusto on the fatted calf. Then, when three years
separated him from the illuminating soul-adven-
tures of Gossensass, he began to turn them into
a play. It proved to be The Master-Builder, and
was published before the close of December,
1892, with the date 1893 on the title-page. This
play was running for some time in Germany and
England before it was played in Scandinavia.
But on the evening of March 8, 1893, it was
simultaneously given at the National Theatre in
Christiania and at the Royal Theatre in Copen-
hagen. It was a work which greatly puzzled the
critics, and its meaning was scarcely apparent until
it had been seen on the stage, for which the oddity
of its arrangements are singularly well adapted.
It was, however, almost immediately noticed that
it marked a new departure in Ibsen's writings.
Here was an end of the purely realistic and pro-
saic social dramas, which had reigned from The

Ibsen.

From the painting by Eilif Petetsea.

LAST YEARS 191

League of Youth to Hedda Gabler, and here was
a return to the strange and haunting beauty of the
old imaginative pieces. Mr. Archer was happily
inspired when he spoke of "the pure melody" of
the piece, and the best scenes of The Master-
Builder were heroically and almost recklessly
poetical.

This remarkable composition is full of what, for
want of a better word, we must call "symbolism."
In the conversations between Solness and Hilda
much is introduced which is really almost unin-
telligible unless we take it to be autobiographical.
The Master-Builder is one who constructs, not
houses, but poems and plays. It is the poet him-
self who gives expression, in the pathetic and
erratic confessions of Solness, to his doubts, his
craven timidities, his selfish secrets, and his terror
at the uniformity of his "luck." It is less easy
to see exactly what Ibsen believed himself to
be presenting to us in the enigmatical figure of
Hilda, so attractive and genial, so exquisitely
refreshing, and yet radically so cruel and super-
ficial. She is perhaps conceived as a symbol of
Youth, arriving too late within the circle which
Age has trodden for its steps to walk in, and lur-
ing it too rashly, by the mirage of happiness, into
paths no longer within its physical and moral
capacity. "Hypnotism," Mr. Archer tells us,

192 IBSEN

"is the first and last word of the dramatic action";
perhaps thought-transference more exactly ex-
presses the idea, but I should not have stated
even this quite so strongly. The ground of the
dramatic action seems to me to be the balance
of Nemesis, the fatal necessity that those who
enjoy exceptional advantages in life shall pay for
them by not less exceptional, but perhaps less
obvious, disadvantages. The motto of the piece
— at least of the first two of its acts — might be
the couplet of the French tragedian : —

C'est un ordre des dieux qui jamais ne se rompt

De nous vendre bien cher les grands biens qu'ils nous font.

Beneath this, which we may call the transcen-
dental aspect of the play, we find a solid and
objective study of the self-made man, the head-
strong amateur, who has never submitted to the
wholesome discipline of professional training, but
who has trusted to the help of those trolls or
mascots, his native talent and his unfailing
"luck." Upon such a man descends Hilda, the
disorganizer, who pierces the armor of his con-
ceit by a direct appeal to his passions. Solness
has been the irresistible sorcerer, through his good
fortune, but he is not protected in his climacteric
against this unexpected attack upon the senses.
Samson philanders with Delila, and discovers that

LAST YEARS 193

his strength is shorn from him. There is no
doubt that Ibsen intended in The M aster-Builder
a searching examination of "luck" and the
tyranny of it, the terrible effects of it on the
Broviks and the Kajas whom nobody remembers,
but whose bodies lie under the wheels of its car.
The dramatic situation is here extremely inter-
esting; it consists in the fact that Solness, who
breaks every one else, is broken by Hilda. The
inherent hardness of youth, which makes no al-
lowances, which demands its kingdom here and
now upon the table, was never more powerfully
depicted. Solness is smashed by his impact with
Hilda, as china is against a stone. In all this it
would be a mistake to see anything directly auto-
biographical, although so much in the character
and position of Solness may remind us, legitimately
enough, of Ibsen himself, and his adventures.

The personal record of Ibsen in these years is
almost silent. He was growing old and set in
his habits. He was growing rich, too, and he
surrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His
wealth, it may here be said, was founded entirely
upon the success of his works, but was fostered
by his extreme adroitness as a man of business.
Those who are so fond of saying that any man of
genius might have excelled in some other capacity
are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen as

i94 IBSEN

the model financier. He certainly possessed a
remarkable aptitude for affairs, and we learn
that his speculations were at once daring and
crafty. People who are weary of commiserating
the poverty of poets may be pleased to learn that
when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiest
private citizens of Christiania, and this was
wholly in consequence of the care he had taken
in protecting his copyrights and administering
his receipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct
which tells us that

Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature,
Mais sa bonte s'arrete a la literature,

we must believe, with Ibsen's enemies, that his
fortunes were not under the divine protection.

The actual numbers of each of his works printed
since he first published with Hegel in Copen-
hagen— a connection which he preserved without
a breach until the end — have been stated since
his death. They contain some points of interest.
After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editions of
each new play, but they went off at first slowly.
The Lady from the Sea was the earliest to appear,
at once, in an issue of 10,000 copies, which was
soon exhausted. So great, however, had the public
interest in Ibsen become in 1894 that the edition
of 10,000 copies of Little Eyolf was found quite

LAST YEARS 195

inadequate to meet the first order, and it was
enlarged to 15,000,. all of which were gone in a
fortnight. This circulation in so small a reading
public as that of Denmark and Norway was un-
precedented, and it must be remembered that
the simultaneous translations into most of the
languages of Europe are not included.

Little Eyolf, which was written in Christiania
during the spring and summer of 1894, was issued,
according to Ibsen's cometary custom, as the
second week of December rolled round. The
reception of it was stormy, even in Scandinavia,
and led to violent outbursts of controversy.
No work from the master's pen had roused more
difference of opinion among the critics since the
bluster over Ghosts fourteen years before. Those
who prefer to absolute success in the creation of
a work of art the personal flavor or perfume of
the artist himself were predisposed to place
Little Eyolf very high among his writings. No-
where is he more independent of all other influ-
ences, nowhere more intensely, it may even be
said more distressingly, himself. From many
points of view this play may fairly be considered
in the light of a tour de force. Ibsen — one would
conjecture — is trying to see to what extremities
of agile independence he can force his genius.
The word "force" has escaped me; but it may

196 IBSEN

be retained as reproducing that sense of a diffi-
culty not quite easily or completely overcome
which Little Eyolf produces. To mention but
one technical matter; there are but four char-
acters, properly speaking, in the play — since
Eyolf himself and the Rat- Wife are but illustra-
tions or symbolic properties — and of these four,
one (Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then,
may be said to have challenged imitation by com-
posing a drama of passion with only three charac-
ters in it. By a process of elimination this has been
done by ./Eschylus (in the Agamemnon), by Racine
(in Phedre and Andromaque), and in our own day
by Maeterlinck (in Pelleas et Melisande). But
Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his
experiment seems not wholly successful. Little
Eyolf, at least, is, from all points of view, an
exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazard the
conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satis-
faction to write, but for enjoyment the reader
may prefer less prodigious agility on the trapeze.
If we turn from the technical virtuosity of
Little Eyolf to its moral aspects, we find it a very
dreadful play, set in darkness which nothing
illuminates but the twinkling sweetness of Asta.
The mysterious symbol of the Rat-Wife breaks in
upon the pair whose love is turning to hate, the
man waxing cold as the wife grows hot. The

LAST YEARS 197

Angel of God, in the guise of an old beggar-
woman, descends into their garden, and she drags
away, by an invisible chain, "the little gnawing
thing," the pathetic lame child. The effect on the
pair of Eyolf's death by drowning is the subject
of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is in-
carnate, and she seems the most vigorous, and, it
must be added, the most repulsive, of Ibsen's
feminine creations. The reckless violence of
Rita's energy, indeed, interpreted by a competent
actress — played, for instance, as it was in London
most admirably by Miss Achurch — is almost too
painful for a public exhibition, and to the old
criticism, "nee pueros coram populo Medea tru-
cidet," if a pedant chooses to press it, there
seems no reply. The sex question, as treated in
Little Eyolfy recalls The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask
Ibsen whether there was anything in this, he
was displeased, and stoutly denied it. What an
author denies, however, is not always evidence.

Nothing further of general interest happened
to Ibsen until 1896, when he sat down to com-
pose another drama, John Gabriel Borkman.
This was a study of the mental adventures of
a man of high commercial imagination, who is
artificially parted from all that contact with real
affairs which keeps such energy on the track, and

198 IBSEN

who goes mad with dreams of incalculable power,
a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was
said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to
make this analysis of character from reading in
the Christiania newspapers a report of the failure
and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of
fraud in 1895, and sentenced to a long period of
penal servitude.

Whether this be so or not, we have in the
person of John Gabriel Borkman a prominent
example of the ninteenth-century type of criminous
speculator, in whom the vastness of view and
the splendidly altruistic audacity present them-
selves as elements which render it exceedingly
difficult to say how far the malefactor is morally
responsible for his crime. He has imagined, and
to a certain point has carried out, a monster metal
"trust," for the success of which he lacks neither
courage nor knowledge nor practical administrative
capacity, but only that trifling concomitant, suf-
ficiency of capital. To keep the fires blazing until
his vast model is molten into the mould, he helps
himself to money here, there, and everywhere,
scarcely giving a thought to his responsibilities,
so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph.
He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice
all these his involuntary supporters. Unhappily,
just before his scheme is ready and the metal runs,

LAST YEARS 199

he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, and finds
himself in prison.

Side by side with this study of commercial
madness runs a thread of that new sense of the
preciousness of vital joy which had occupied
Ibsen so much ever since the last of the summers
at Gossensass. The figure of Erhart Borkman
is a very interesting one to the theatrical student.
In the ruin of the family, all hopes concentre in
him. Every one claims him, and in the bosoms
of each of his shattered parents a secret hope is
born, Mrs. Borkman believing that by a bril-
liant career of commercial rectitude her son will
wipe out the memory of his father's crime; Bork-
man, who has never given up the ambition of re-
turning to business, reposing his own hopes on
the co-operation of his son.

But Erhart Borkman disappoints them all.
He will be himself, he will enjoy his life, he will
throw off all the burdens both of responsibility
and of restitution. He has no ambition and little
natural feeling; he simply must be happy, and
he suddenly elopes, leaving all their anticipations
bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who
has nothing but her beauty to recommend her.
Deserted thus by the ignis fatuus of youth, the
collapse of the three old people is complete.
Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way,

200 IBSEN

and he wanders out into the winter's night, full
of vague dreams of what he can still do in the
world, if he can only break from his bondage and
shatter his dream. He dies there in the snow, and
the two old sisters, who have followed him in an
anxiety which overcomes their mutual hatred,
arrive in time to see him pass away. We leave
them in the wood, "a dead man and two shadows"
— so Ella Rentheim puts it — "for that is what the
cold has made of us"; the central moral of the
piece being that all the errors of humanity spring
from cold-heartedness and neglect of the natural
heat of love. That Borkman embezzled money,
and reduced hundreds of innocent people to beg-
gary, might be condoned; but there is no pardon
for his cruel bargaining for wealth with the soul
of Ella Rentheim, since that is the unpardonable
sin against the Holy Spirit. There are points of
obscurity, and one or two of positive and even
regrettable whimsicality, about John Gabriel Bork-
man, but on the whole it is a work of lofty orig-
inality and of poignant human interest.

The veteran was now beginning to be con-
scious of the approaches of old age, but they
were made agreeable to him by many tokens of
national homage.

On his seventieth birthday, March 20, 1898,
Ibsen received the felicitations of the world. It

LAST YEARS 201

is pleasing to relate that a group of admirers
in England, a group which included Mr. Asquith,
Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Henry
Arthur Jones, Mr. Pinero and Mr. Bernard Shaw
took part in these congratulations and sent Ibsen
a handsome set of silver plate, this being an act
which, it had been discovered, he particularly
appreciated. The bearer of this gift was the
earliest of the long stream of visitors to arrive on
the morning of the poet's birthday, and he found
Ibsen in company with his wife, his son, his son's
wife (Bjornson's daughter), and his little grandson,
Tankred. The poet's surprise and pleasure were
emphatic. A deputation from the Storthing,
headed by the Leader of the House, deputations
representing the University, the various Christiania
Theatres, and other official or academic bodies
arrived at intervals during the course of the day;
and all the afternoon Ibsen was occupied in taking
these hundreds of visitors, in parties, up to the case
containing the English tribute, in showing the ob-
jects and in explaining their origin. There could
be no question that the gift gave genuine pleasure
to the recipient; it was the first, as it was to be the
last, occasion on which any public testimony to
English appreciation of his genius found its way
to Ibsen's door.

Immediately after the birthday festivities, which

202 IBSEN

it was observed had fatigued him, Ibsen started
on a visit to Copenhagen, where he was received
by the aged King of Denmark, and to Stockholm,
where he was overpowered with ovations from all
classes. There can be no doubt that this trium-
phal progress, though deeply grateful to the aged
poet's susceptibilities, made a heavy drain upon his
nervous resources. When he returned to Norway,
indeed, he was concealed from all visitors at his
physician's orders, and it is understood that he had
some kind of seizure. It was whispered that he
would write no more, and the biennial drama, due
in December, 1898, did not make its appearance.
His stores of health, however, were not easily ex-
hausted; he rested for several months, and then he
was seen once more in Carl Johans Gade, smiling
in his usual way, and entirely recovered. It was
announced that winter that he was writing his
reminiscences, but nothing more was heard of
any such book.

He was able to take a vivid interest in the
preparations for the National Norwegian Theatre
in Christiania, which was finally opened by the
King of Sweden and Norway on September I,
1899. Early in the morning, colossal bronze
statues of Ibsen and Bjornson were unveiled in
front of the theatre, and the poets, now, unfortu-
nately, again not on the best of terms, were seen

LAST YEARS 203

making vast detours for the purpose of satisfying
their curiosity, and yet not meeting one another
in flesh or in metal. The first night, to prevent
rivalry, was devoted to antiquarianism, and to
the performance of extracts from the plays of
Holberg. Ibsen and Bjornson occupied the centre
of the dress circle, sitting uplifted in two gilded
fauteuils and segregated by a vast garland of red
and white roses. They were the objects of uni-
versal attention, and the King seemed never to
have done smiling and bowing to the two most
famous of his Norwegian subjects.

The next night was Ibsen's fete, and he occu-
pied, alone, the manager's box. A poem in his
honor, by Niels Collett Vogt, was recited by
the leading actor, who retired, and then rushed
down the empty stage, with his arms extended,
shouting "Long live Henrik Ibsen." The im-
mense audience started to its feet and repeated
the words over and over again with deafening
fervor. The poet appeared to be almost over-
whelmed with emotion and pleasure; at length,
with a gesture which was quite pathetic, smiling
through his tears, he seemed to beg his friends
to spare him, and the plaudits slowly ceased.
An Enemy of the People was then admirably
performed. At the close of every act Ibsen was
called to the front of his box, and when the

204 IBSEN

performance was over, and the actors had been
thanked, the audience turned to him again with
a sort of affectionate ferocity. Ibsen was found
to have stolen from his box, but he was waylaid
and forcibly carried back to it. On his reappear-
ance, the whole theatre rose in a roar of welcome,
and it was with difficulty that the aged poet, now
painfully exhausted from the strain of an evening
of such prolonged excitement, could persuade
the public to allow him to withdraw. At length
he left the theatre, walking slowly, bowing and
smiling, down a lane cleared for him, far into the
street, through the dense crowd of his admirers.
This astonishing night, September 2, 1899, was
the climax of Ibsen's career.

During all this time Ibsen was secretly at work
on another drama, which he intended as the epi-
logue to his earlier dramatic work, or at least to
all that he had written since The Pillars of Society.
This play, which was his latest, appeared, under
the title of When We Dead Awaken, in December,
1899 (with 1900 on the title-page). It was simul-
taneously published, in very large editions, in all the
principal languages of Europe, and it was acted
also, but it is impossible to deny that, whether in the
study or on the boards, it proved a disappoint-
ment. It displayed, especially in its later acts, many
obvious signs of the weakness incident on old age.

LAST YEARS 205

When it is said that When We Dead Awaken
was not worthy of its predecessors, it should be
explained that no falling off was visible in the
technical cleverness with which the dialogue
was built up, nor in the wording of particular
sentences. Nothing more natural or amusing,
nothing showing greater command of the re-
sources of the theatre, had ever been published
by Ibsen himself than the opening act of When
We Dead Awaken. But there was certainly in
the whole conception a cloudiness, an ineffectu-
ality, which was very little like anything that
Ibsen had displayed before. The moral of the
piece was vague, the evolution of it incoherent,
and indeed in many places it seemed a parody
of his earlier manner. Not Mr. Anstey Guthrie's
inimitable scenes in Mr. Punch's Ibsen were more
preposterous than almost all the appearances of
Irene after the first act of When We Dead Awaken.

It is Irene who describes herself as dead, but
awakening in the society of Rubek, whilst Maia,
the little gay soulless creature whom the great
sculptor has married, and has got heartily tired
of, goes up to the mountains with Ulpheim the
hunter, in pursuit of the free joy of life. At the
close, the assorted couples are caught on the sum-
mit of an exceeding high mountain by a snow-
storm, which opens to show Rubek and Irene

206 IBSEN

"whirled along with the masses of snow and
buried in them," while Maia and her bear-hunter
escape in safety to the plains. Interminable, and
often very sage and penetrating, but always es-
sentially rather maniacal, conversation fills up the
texture of the play, which is certainly the least
successful of Ibsen's mature compositions. The
boredom of Rubek in the midst of his eminence
and wealth, and his conviction that by working
in such concentration for the purity of art he
merely wasted his physical life, inspire the por-
tions of the play which bring most conviction and
can be read with fullest satisfaction. It is ob-
vious that such thoughts, such faint and unavail-
ing regrets, pursued the old age of Ibsen; and the
profound wound that his heart had received so
long before at Gossensass was unhealed to his
last moments of consciousness. An excellent
French critic, M. P. G. La Chesnais, has ingen-
iously considered the finale of this play as a con-
fession that Ibsen, at this end of his career, was
convinced of the error of his earlier rigor, and,
having ceased to believe in his mission, regret-
ted the complete sacrifice of his life to his work.
But perhaps it is not necessary to go into such
subtleties. When We Dead Awaken is the produc-
tion of a very tired old man, whose physical pow-
ers were declining.

LAST YEARS 207

In the year 1900, during our South African
War, sentiment in the Scandinavian countries
was very generally ranged on the side of the
Boers. Ibsen, however, expressed himself strongly
and publicly in favor of the English position.
In an interview (November 24, 1900), which
produced a considerable sensation, he remarked
that the Boers were but half-cultivated, and had
neither the will nor the power to advance the
cause of civilization. Their sole object had come
to be a jealous exclusion of all the higher forms of
culture. The English were merely taking what
the Boers themselves had stolen from an earlier
race; the Boers had pitilessly hunted their pre-
cursors out of house and home, and now they
were tasting the same cup themselves. These were
considerations which had not occurred to gener-
ous sentimentalists in Norway, and Ibsen's de-
fence of England, which he supported in further
communications with irony and courage, made a
great sensation, and threw cold water on the pro-
Boer sentimentalists. In Holland, where Ibsen
had a wide public, this want of sympathy for Dutch
prejudice raised a good deal of resentment, and
Ibsen's statements were replied to by the fiery
young journalist, Cornelius Karel Elout, who even
published a book on the subject. Ibsen took
dignified notice of Elout's attacks (December 9,

2o8 IBSEN

1900), repeating his defence of English policy,
and this was the latest of his public appearances.

He took an interest, however, in the preparation
of the great edition of his Collected Works, which
appeared in Copenhagen in 1901 and 1902, in
ten volumes. Before the publication of the latest
of these, however, Ibsen had suffered from an
apoplectic stroke, from which he never wholly
recovered. It was believed that any form of
mental fatigue might now be fatal to him, and his
life was prolonged by extreme medical care. He
was contented in spirit and even cheerful, but
from this time forth he was more and more com-
pletely withdrawn from consecutive interest in
what was going on in the world without. The
publication, in succession, of his juvenile works
(K&mpehojeriy Olaf Liljekrans, both edited by
Halvdan Koht, in 1902), of his Correspondence)
edited by Koht and Julius Elias, in 1904, of the
bibliographical edition of his collected works by
Carl Naerup, in 1902, left him indifferent and
scarcely conscious. The gathering darkness was
broken, it is said, by a gleam of light in 1905;
when the freedom of Norway and the accession
of King Hakon were explained to him, he was
able to express his joyful approval before the
cloud finally sank upon his intelligence.

During his long illness Ibsen was troubled by

LAST YEARS 209

aphasia, and he expressed himself painfully, now
in broken Norwegian, now in still more broken
German. His unhappy hero, Oswald Alving, in
Ghosts, had thrilled the world by his cry, "Give
me the sun, Mother!" and now Ibsen, with glassy
eyes, gazed at the dim windows, murmuring
"Keine Sonne, keine Sonne, keine Sonne!" At
the table where all the works of his maturity had
been written the old man sat, persistently learn-
ing and forgetting the alphabet. "Look!" he
said to Julius Elias, pointing to his mournful
pot-hooks, "See what I am doing! I am sitting
here and learning my letters — my letters! I who
was once a Writer!" Over this shattered image
of what Ibsen had been, over this dying lion, who
could not die, Mrs. Ibsen watched with the de-
votion of wife, mother and nurse in one, through
six pathetic years. She was rewarded, in his
happier moments, by the affection and tender
gratitude of her invalid, whose latest articulate
words were addressed to her — " min sode, k]<zrey
snille frue" (my sweet, dear, good wife); and
she taught to adore their grandfather the three
children of a new generation, Tankred, Irene,
Eleonora.

Ibsen preserved the habit of walking about his
room, or standing for hours staring out of window,
until the beginning of May, 1906. Then a more

210 IBSEN

complete decay confined him to his bed. After
several days of unconsciousness, he died very
peacefully in his house on Drammensvej, opposite
the Royal Gardens of Christiania, at half-past two
in the afternoon of May 23, 1906, being in his
seventy-ninth year. By a unanimous vote of the
Storthing he was awarded a public funeral, which
the King of Norway attended in person, while
King Edward VII was represented there by the
British Minister. The event was regarded through-
out Norway as a national ceremony of the highest
solemnity and importance, and the poet who had
suffered such bitter humiliation and neglect in his
youth was carried to his grave in solemn splendor,
to the sound of a people's lamentation.

CHAPTER IX
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

DURING the latest years of his life, which were
spent as a wealthy and prosperous citizen of
Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms of
legendary celebrity which were equalled by no
other living man of letters, not even by Tol-
stoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed,
among the dead, by Victor Hugo. When we
think of the obscurity of his youth and middle
age, and of his consistent refusal to advertise
himself by any of the little vulgar arts of self-
exhibition, this extreme publicity is at first sight
curious, but it can be explained. Norway is a
small and a new country, inordinately, perhaps,
but justly and gracefully proud of those — an Ole
Bull, a Frithjof Nansen, an Edvard Grieg — who
spread through the world evidences of its spiritual
life. But the one who was more original, more
powerful, more interesting than any other of her
sons, had persistently kept aloof from the soil of
Norway, and was at length recaptured and shut
up in a golden cage with more expenditure of

212 IBSEN

delicate labor than any perverse canary or es-
caped macaw had ever needed. Ibsen safely
housed in Christiania! — it was the recovery of an
important national asset, the resumption, after
years of vexation and loss, of the intellectual re-
galia of Norway.

Ibsen, then — recaptured, though still in a frame
of mind which left the captors nervous — was
naturally an object of pride. For the benefit
of the hundreds of tourists who annually pass
through Christiania, it was more than tempting,
it was irresistible to point out, in slow advance
along Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a
table in the Grand Cafe, "our greatest citizen."
To this species of demonstration Ibsen uncon-
sciously lent himself by his immobility, his regu-
larity of habits, his solemn taciturnity. He had
become more like a strange physical object than
like a man among men. He was visible broadly
and quietly, not conversing, rarely moving, quite
isolated and self-contained, a recognized public
spectacle, delivered up, as though bound hand
and foot, to the kodak-hunter and the maker of
"spicy" paragraphs. That Ibsen was never seen
to do anything, or heard to say anything, that
those who boasted of being intimate with him
obviously lied in their teeth — all this prepared
him for sacrifice. Christiania is a hot-bed of gossip,

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 213

and its press one of the most "chatty" in the
world. Our "greatest living author" was offered
up as a wave-offering, and he smoked daily on the
altar of the newspapers.

It will be extremely rash of the biographers
of the future to try to follow Ibsen's life day by
day in the Christiania press from, let us say,
1891 to 1901. During that decade he occupied
the reporters immensely, and he was particularly
useful to the active young men who telegraph
"chat" to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothen-
burg, and Berlin. Snapshots of Ibsen, dangerous
illness of the playwright, quaint habits of the
Norwegian dramatist, a poet's double life, anec-
dotes of Ibsen and Mrs. , rumors of the

King's attitude to Ibsen — this pollenta, dressed
a dozen ways, was the standing dish at every
journalist's table. If a space needed filling, a
very rude reply to some fatuous question might
be fitted in and called "Instance of Ibsen's Wit."
The crop of fable was enormous, and always
seemed to find a gratified public, for whom noth-
ing was too absurd if it was supposed to illustrate
"our great national poet." Ibsen, meanwhile, did
nothing at all. He never refuted a calumny, never
corrected a story, but he threw an ironic glance
through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he strolled
down Carl Johan with his hands behind his back.

214 IBSEN

His personal appearance, it must be admitted,
formed a tempting basis upon which to build a
legend. His force of will had gradually trans-
figured his bodily forms until he thoroughly looked
the part which he was expected to fill. At the
age of thirty, to judge by the early photographs,
he had been a commonplace-looking little man,
with a shock of coal-black hair and a full beard,
one of those hirsute types common in the Teutonic
races, which may prove, on inquiry, to be painter,
musician, or engraver, or possibly engineer, but
less probably poet. Then came the exile from
Norway, and the residence in Rome, marked by
a little bust which stands before me now, where
the beard is cut away into two round whiskers so
as to release the firm round chin, and the long upper
lip is clean-shaved. Here there is more liveliness,
but still no distinction. Then comes a further
advance — a photograph (in which I feel a tender
pride, for it was made to please me) taken in
Dresden (October 15, 1873), where the brow,
perfectly smooth and white, has widened out, the
whiskers have become less chubby, and the small,
scrutinizing eyes absolutely sparkle with malice.
Here, you say at last, is no poet, indeed, but an
unusually cultivated banker or surprisingly adroit
solicitor. Here the hair, retreating from the greit
forehead, begins to curl and roll with a distin-

Bust of Ibsen, about 1865.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 215

guished wildness; here the long mouth, like a slit
in the face, losing itself at each end in whisker, is
a symbol of concentrated will power, a drawer in
some bureau, containing treasures, firmly locked

up-
Then came Munich, where Ibsen's character

underwent very considerable changes, or rather
where its natural features became fixed and
emphasized. We are not left without precious
indication of his gestures and his looks at this time,
when he was a little past the age of fifty. Where
so much has been extravagantly written, or de-
scribed in a journalistic key of false emphasis,
great is the value of a quiet portrait by one of
those who has studied Ibsen most intelligently.
It is perhaps the most careful pen-sketch of him
in any language.

Mr. William Archer, then, has given the follow-
ing account of his first meeting with Ibsen. It
was in the Scandinavia Club, in Rome, at the
close of 1881:—

I had been about a quarter of an hour in the room, and was
standing close to the door, when it opened, and in glided an
undersized man with very broad shoulders and a large,
leonine head, wearing a long black frock-coat with very
broad lapels, on one of which a knot of red ribbon was con-
spicuous. I knew him at once, but was a little taken aback
by his low stature. In spite of all the famous instances to

2i6 IBSEN

the contrary, one instinctively associates greatness with size.
His natural height was even somewhat diminished by a
habit of bending forward slightly from the waist, begotten,
no doubt, of short-sightedness, and the need to peer into
things. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his
hands behind his back — an unobtrusive personality, which
would have been insignificant had the head been strictly
proportionate to the rest of the frame. But there was noth-
ing insignificant about the high and massive forehead,
crowned with a mane of (then) iron-gray hair, the small and
pale but piercing eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles,
or the thin-lipped mouth, depressed at the corners into a
curve indicative of iron will, and set between bushy whiskers
of the same dark gray as the hair. The most cursory ob-
server could not but recognize power and character in the
head; yet one would scarcely have guessed it to be the power
of a poet, the character of a prophet. Misled, perhaps, by
the ribbon at the buttonhole, and by an expression of reserve,
almost of secretiveness, in the lines of the tight-shut mouth,
one would rather have supposed one's self face to face with
an eminent statesman or diplomatist.

With the further advance of years all that was
singular in Ibsen's appearance became accent-
uated. The hair and beard turned snowy white;
the former rose in a fierce sort of Oberland, the
latter was kept square and full, crossing under-
neath the truculent chin that escaped from it.
As Ibsen walked to a banquet in Christiania, he
looked quite small under the blaze of crosses,
stars and belts which he displayed when he un-

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 217

buttoned the long black overcoat which enclosed
him tightly. Never was he seen without his hands
behind him, and the poet Holger Drachmann
started a theory that as Ibsen could do nothing
in the world but write, the Muse tied his wrists
together at the small of his back whenever they
were not actually engaged in composition. His
regularity in all habits, his mechanical ways, were
the subject of much amusement. He must sit
day after day in the same chair, at the same table,
in the same corner of the cafe, and woe to the
ignorant intruder who was accidentally before-
hand with him. No word was spoken, but the
indignant poet stood at a distance, glaring, until
the stranger should be pierced with embarrass-
ment, and should rise and flee away.

Ibsen had the reputation of being dangerous
and difficult of access. But the evidence of those
who knew him best point to his having been
phlegmatic rather than morose. He was "um-
brageous," ready to be discomposed by the action
of others, but, if not vexed or startled, he was
elaborately courteous. He had a great dislike
of any abrupt movement, and if he was startled,
he had the instinct of a wild animal, to bite.
It was a pain to him to have the chain of his
thoughts suddenly broken, and he could not
bear to be addressed by chance acquaintances

2i8 IBSEN

in street or cafe. When he was resident in
Munich and Dresden, the difficulty of obtaining
an interview with Ibsen was notorious. His
wife protected him from strangers, and if her
defences broke down, and the stranger contrived
to penetrate the inner fastness, Ibsen might
suddenly appear in the doorway, half in a rage,
half quivering with distress, and say, in heart-
rending tones, "Bitte um Arbeitsruhe" — "Please
let me work in peace!" They used to tell how
in Munich a rich baron, who was the local Maecenas
of letters, once bored Ibsen with a long recital of
his love affairs, and ended by saying, with a won-
derful air of fatuity, "To you, Master, I come,
because of your unparalleled knowledge of the
female heart. In your hands I place my fate.
Advise me, and I will follow your advice." Ibsen
snapped his mouth and glared through his spec-
tacles; then in a low voice of concentrated fury he
said: "Get home, and — go to bed!" whereat his
noble visitor withdrew, clothed with indignation
as with a garment.

His voice was uniform, soft and quiet. The
bitter things he said seemed the bitterer for his
gentle way of saying them. As his shape grew
burly and his head of hair enormous, the smallness
of his extremities became accentuated. His little
hands were always folded away as he tripped

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 219

upon his tiny feet. His movements were slow
and distrait. He wasted few words on the cur-
rent incidents of life, and I was myself the witness,
in 1899, of his sang-froid under distressing circum-
stances. Ibsen was descending a polished marble
staircase when his feet slipped and he fell swiftly,
precipitately, downward. He must have injured
himself severely, he might have been killed, if two
young gentlemen had not darted forward below
and caught him in their arms. Once more set
the right way up, Ibsen softly thanked his saviours
with much frugality of phrase — " Tak, mine Herr-
er!" — tenderly touched an abraded surface of
his top-hat, and marched forth homeward, un-
perturbed.

His silence had a curious effect on those in
whose company he feasted; it seemed to hypno-
tise them. The great Danish actress, Mrs.
Heiberg, herself the wittiest of talkers, said that
to sit beside Ibsen was to peer into a gold-mine
and not catch a glitter from the hidden treasure.
But his dumbness was not so bitterly ironical as
it was popularly supposed to be. It came largely
from a very strange passivity which made definite
action unwelcome to him. He could never be
induced to pay visits, yet he would urge his wife
and his son to accept invitations, and when they
returned he would insist on being told every par-

220 IBSEN

ticular — who was there, what was said, even what
everybody wore. He never went to a theatre
or concert-room, except on the very rare occasions
when he could be induced to be present at the
performance of his own plays. But he was ex-
tremely fond of hearing about the stage. He had
a memory for little things and an observation of
trifles which was extraordinary. He thought it
amazing that people could go into a room and not
notice the pattern of the carpet, the color of the
curtains, the objects on the walls; these being de-
tails which he could not help observing and re-
taining. This trait comes out in his copious and
minute stage directions.

Ibsen was simplicity itself; no man was ever
less affected. But his character was closed; he
was perpetually on the defensive. He was seldom
confidential, he never "gave way"; his emotions
and his affections were genuine, but his heart was
a fenced city. He had little sense of domestic
comfort; his rooms were bare and neat, with no
personal objects save those which belonged to
his wife. Even in the days of his wealth, in the
fine house on Drammensvej, there was a singular
absence of individuality about his dwelling rooms.
They might have been prepared for a rich Ameri-
can traveller in some hotel. Through a large
portion of his career in Germany he lived in fur-

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 221

nished rooms, not because he did not possess
furniture of his own, which was stored up, but
because he paid no sort of homage to his own
penates. He had friends, but he did not cultivate
them; he rather permitted them, at intervals, to
cultivate him. To Georg Brandes (March 6,
1870) he wrote: "Friends are a costly luxury;
and when one has devoted one's self wholly to a
profession and a mission here in life, there is no
place left for friends." The very charming story
of Ibsen's throwing his arms round old Hans
Christian Andersen's neck, and forcing him to be
genial and amiable,1 is not inconsistent with the
general rule of passivity and shyness which he
preserved in matters of friendship.

Ibsen's reading was singularly limited. In his
fine rooms on Drammensvej I remember being
struck by seeing no books at all, except the large
Bible which always lay at his side, and formed
his constant study. He disliked having his parti-
ality for the Bible commented on, and if, as would
sometimes be the case, religious people expressed
pleasure at finding him deep in the sacred volume,
Ibsen would roughly reply: "It is only for the
sake of the language." He was the enemy of
anything which seemed to approach cant and
pretension, and he concealed his own views as

1 Samliv med Ibsen.

222 IBSEN

closely as he desired to understand the views of
others. He possessed very little knowledge of
literature. The French he despised and repudi-
ated, although he certainly had studied Voltaire
with advantage; of the Italians he knew only
Dante and of the English only Shakespeare, both
of whom he had studied in translations. In
Danish he read and reread Holberg, who
throughout his life unquestionably remained Ib-
sen's favorite author; he preserved a certain ad-
miration for the Danish classics of his youth:
Heiberg, Hertz, Schack-Steffelt. In German, the
foreign language which he read most currently,
he was strangely ignorant of Schiller and Heine,
and hostile to Goethe, although Brand and Peer
Gynt must owe something of their form to Faust.
But the German poets whom he really enjoyed
were two dramatists of the age preceding his own,
Otto Ludwig (1813-65) and Friedrich Hebbel
(1813-63). Each of these playwrights had been
occupied in making certain reforms, of a realis-
tic tendency, in the existing tradition of the
stage, and each of them dealt, before any one
else in Europe did so, with "problems" on the
stage. These two German poets, but Hebbel
particularly, passed from romanticism to real-
ism, and so on to mysticism, in a manner fasci-
nating to Ibsen, whom it is possible that they in-

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 223

fluenced.1 He remained, in later years, persist-
ently ignorant of Zola, and of Tolstoi he had
read, with contemptuous disapproval, only some of
the polemical pamphlets. He said to me, in 1899,
of the great Russian: "Tolstoi? — he is mad!"
with a screwing up of the features such as a child
makes at the thought of a black draught.

If he read at all, it was poetry. His indifference
to music was complete; he had, in fact, no ear
whatever, and could not distinguish one tune
from another. His efforts to appreciate the music
which Grieg made for Peer Gynt were pathetic.
But for verse his sense was exceedingly delicate,
and the sound of poetry gave him acute pleasure.
At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he
was fatigued by the riot of rhymes which pursued
him through his dreams, and which his memory
vainly strove to recapture. For academic phi-
losophy and systems of philosophic thought he
had a great impatience. The vexed question of
what he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher,
Soren Kierkegaard, has never been solved. Brandes
has insisted, again and again, on the close rela-
tion between Brand and other works of Ibsen
and the famous Either-Or of Kierkegaard; "it

' It would be interesting to compare Die Niebelungen, the trilogy
which Hebbel published in 1862, in which the struggle between pagan
and Christian ideals of conduct is analyzed, with Ibsen's Emperor
and Galilean.

224 IBSEN

actually seems," he says, "as though Ibsen had
aspired to the honor of being called Kierke-
gaard's poet." Ibsen, however, aspired to no
such honor, and, while he never actually denied
the influence, the relation between him and the
philosopher seems to be much rather one of paral-
lelism than of imitation. Ibsen was a poetical
psychologist of the first order, but he could not
bring himself to read the prose of the professional
thinkers.

In his attitude both to philosophical and po-
etical literature Ibsen is with such apparently
remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley;
in his realism and his mysticism he is unrelated
to immediate predecessors, and has no wish to
be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest
in the observation of ethical problems is not
identified with any curiosity about what philo-
sophical writers have said on similar subjects.
Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy
is radically the same as that of Kant, yet there
is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or had
even turned over the pages of the Criticism of
Pure Reason. It is not necessary to suppose that
he had done so. The peculiar aspect of the Ego
as the principal and ultimately sole guide to truth
was revealed anew to the Norwegian poet, and
references to Kant, or to Fichte, or to Kierkegaard,

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 225

seem, therefore, to be beside the mark. The
watchword of Brand, with his cry of "All or Noth-
ing," his absolute repudiation of compromise,
was not a literary conception, but was founded,
without the help of books, on a profound con-
templation of human nature, mainly, no doubt,
as Ibsen found it in himself. But in these days
of the tyranny of literature it is curious to meet
with an author of the first rank who worked without
a library.

Ibsen's study of women was evidently so close,
and what he writes about them is usually so
penetrating, that many legends have naturally
sprung up about the manner in which he gained
his experience. Of these, most are pure fiction.
As a matter of fact, Ibsen was shy with women,
and unless they took the initiative, he contented
himself with watching them from a distance and
noting their ways in silence. The early flirtation
with Miss Rikke Hoist at Bergen, which takes so
prominent a place in Ibsen's story mainly because
such incidents were extremely rare in it, is a
typical instance. If this young girl of sixteen
had not taken the matter into her own hands,
running up the steps of the hotel and flinging
her posy of flowers into the face of the young
poet, the incident would have closed in his watch-
ing her down the street, while the fire smouldered

226 IBSEN

in his eyes. It was not until her fresh field-
blossoms had struck him on the cheek that he
was emboldened to follow her and to send her
the lyrical roses and auriculas which live forever
in his poems. If we wish to note the difference
of temperament, we have but to contrast Ibsen's
affair with Rikke Hoist with Goethe's attitude
to Christiana Vulpius; in doing so, we bring the
passive and the active lover face to face.

Ibsen would gladly have married his flower of
the field, a vision of whose bright, untrammelled
adolescence reappears again and again in his
works, and plainly in The M aster-Builder. But
he escaped a great danger in failing to secure her
as his wife, for Rikke Hoist, when she had lost her
girlish freshness, would probably have had little
character and no culture to fall back upon. He
waited, fortunately for his happiness, until he
secured Susannah Thoresen. Mrs. Ibsen, his
faithful guide, guardian and companion for half
a century, will live among the entirely successful
wives of difficult men of genius. In the midst of
the spiteful gossip of Christiania she had to
traverse her via dolorosa, for it was part of the
fun of the journalists to represent this husband
and wife as permanently alienated. That Ibsen
was easy to live with is not probable, but his wife
not merely contrived to do it, but by her watch-

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 227

fulness, her adroitness, and, when necessary, by
her firmness of decision, she smoothed the path
for the great man whom she adored, and who
was to her a great wilful child to be cajoled and
circumvented. He was absolutely dependent on
her, although he affected amusing airs of inde-
pendence; and if she absented herself, there were
soon cries in the house of "My Cat, My Cat!"
the pet name by which he called his wife. Of
their domestic ways little is yet known in detail,
but everything can be imagined.

To the enigma of Ibsen's character it was be-
lieved that his private correspondence might sup-
ply a key. His letters were collected and ar-
ranged while he was still alive, but he was not
any longer in a mental condition which permitted
him to offer any help in comment to his editors.
His son, Mr. Sigurd Ibsen, superintended the
work, and two careful bibliographers, Mr. Halvdan
Koht and Mr. Julius Elias, carried out the scheme
in two volumes,1 with the execution of which no
fault can be suggested. But the enigma remained
unsolved; the sphinx spoke much, but failed to
answer the questions we had been asking. These
letters, in the first place, suffer from the fact that
Ibsen was a relentless destroyer of documents;
they are all written by him; not one single example

i Breve jra Henrik Ibsen, Gyldendalske Boghadel, 1904^

228 IBSEN

had been preserved of the correspondence to which
this is the reply. Then Ibsen's letters, as re-
vealers of the unseen mood, are particularly un-
satisfactory. With rare exceptions, he remains
throughout them tightly buttoned up in his long
and legendary frock-coat. There is no laughter
and no tears in his letters; he is occasionally ex-
tremely angry, and exudes drops of poison, like
the captive scorpion which he caught when he
was in Italy, and loved to watch and tease. But
there is no self-abandonment, and very little
emotion; the letters are principally historical and
critical, "finger-posts for commentators." They
give valuable information about the genius of his
works, but they tell almost less about his inner
moral nature than do his imaginative writings.

In his youth the scorpion in Ibsen's heart
seems to have stung him occasionally to acts which
afterwards filled him with embarrassment. We
hear that in his Bergen days he sent to Lading,
his fellow-teacher at the theatre, a challenge of
which, when the mood was over, he was greatly
ashamed. It is said that on another occasion,
under the pressure of annoyance, maddened with
fear and insomnia, he sprang out of bed in his
shirt and tried to throw himself into the sea off
one of the quays in the harbor. Such perform-
ances were futile and ridiculous, and they belong

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 229

only to his youth. It seems certain that he
schooled himself to the suppression of such evi-
dences of his anger, and that he did so largely
by shutting up within his breast all the fire that
rose there. The Correspondence — dark lantern as
it is — seems to illuminate this condition of things;
we see before us Ibsen with his hands clenched,
his mouth tightly shut, rigid with determination
not to "let himself go," the eyes alone blazing
behind the gleaming spectacles.

An instance of his suppression of personal feel-
ing may be offered. The lengthiest of all Ibsen's
published letters describes to Brandes (April 25,
1866) the suicide, at Rome, of a young Danish
lawyer, Ludvig David, of whom Ibsen had seen a
good deal. The lad threw himself head-foremost
out of window, in a crisis of fever. Ibsen writes
down all the minutest details with feeling and
refinement, but with as little sympathetic emotion
as if he was drawing up a report for the police.
With this trait may be compared his extreme
interest in the detailed accounts of public trials;
he liked to read exactly what the prisoner said,
and all the evidence of the witnesses. In this
Ibsen resembled Robert Browning, whose curi-
osity about the small incidents surrounding a large
event was boundless. When Ibsen, in the course
of such an investigation, found the real purpose

230 IBSEN

of some strange act dawn upon him, he exhibited
an almost childish pleasure; and this was doubled
when the interpretation was one which had not pre-
sented itself to the conventional legal authorities.

In everything connected with the execution of
his own work there was no limit to the pains which
he was willing to take. His handwriting had
always been neat, but it was commonplace in his
early years. The exquisite calligraphy which
he ultimately used on every occasion, and the
beauty of which was famous far and wide, he
adopted deliberately when he was in Rome in
1862. To the end of his life, although in the
latest years the letters lost, from the shakiness of
his hand, some of their almost Chinese perfection,
he wrote his smallest notes in this character.
His zeal for elaboration as an artist led him to
collect a mass of consistent imaginary information
about the personages in his plays, who became to
him absolutely real. It is related how, some one
happening to say that Nora, in A Doll's House,
had a curious name, Ibsen immediately replied,
"Oh! her full name was Leonora; but that was
shortened to Nora when she was quite a little girl.
Of course, you know, she was terribly spoilt by
her parents." Nothing of this is revealed in the
play itself, but Ibsen was familiar with the past
history of all the characters he created. All

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS 231

through his career he seems to have been long
haunted by the central notion of his pieces, and
to have laid it aside, sometimes for many years,
until a set of incidents spontaneously crystallized
around it. When the medium in which he was
going to work became certain he would put
himself through a long course of study in the
technical phraseology appropriate to the subject.
No pains were too great to prepare him for the
final task.

When Mr. Archer visited Ibsen in the Har-
monien Hotel at Saeby in 1887 he extracted
some valuable evidence from him as to his methods
of composition:—

It seems that the idea of a piece generally presents itself
before the characters and incidents, though, when I put this
to him flatly, he denied it. It seems to follow, however,
from his saying that there is a certain stage in the incubation
of a play when it might as easily turn into an essay as into a
drama. He has to incarnate the ideas, as it were, in char-
acter and incident, before the actual work of creation can
be said to have fairly begun. Different plans and ideas, he
admits, often flow together, and the play he ultimately
produces is sometimes very unlike the intention with which
he set out. He writes and re-writes, scribbles and destroys,
an enormous amount before he makes the exquisite fair
copy he sends to Copenhagen.

He altered, as we have said, the printed text
of his earlier works, in order to bring them into

232 IBSEN

harmony with his finished style, but he did not
do this, so far as I remember, after the publication
of Brand. In the case of all the dramas of his
maturity he modified nothing when the work had
once been given to the world.

CHAPTER X
INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS

HAVING accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen
as a disturbing and revolutionizing force, which
met with the utmost resistance at the outset,
and was gradually accepted before the close of
his career, we may try to define what the nature
of his revolt was, and what it was, precisely, that
he attacked. It may be roughly said that what
peculiarly roused the animosity of Ibsen was the
character which has become stereotyped in one
order of ideas, good in themselves but gradually
outworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a
new kind. Ibsen meditated upon the obscurant-
ism of the old regime until he created figures like
Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school
are crystallized. From the point of view which
would enter sympathetically into the soul of
Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes,
there is no one of his plays more valuable in its
purely theoretic way than Rosmersholm. It dis-
sects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it sur-
veys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of

234 IBSEN

heredity lies upon Rosmer, who is highly intelligent
up to a certain point, but who can go no further.
Even if he is persuaded that a new course of
action would be salutary, he cannot move — he is
bound in invisible chains. It is useless to argue
with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic,
but he simply cannot, when it comes to action,
cross the bridge where Beate threw herself into
the torrent.

But Ibsen had not the ardor of the fighting
optimist. He was one who "doubted clouds
would break,'-' who dreamed, since "right was
worsted, wrong would triumph." With Robert
Browning he had but this one thing in common,
that both were fighters, both "held we fall to
rise, are baffled to fight better," but the dark
fatalism of the Norwegian poet was in other things
in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness
of the English one. Browning and Ibsen alike
considered that the race must be reformed peri-
odically or it would die. The former anticipated
reform as cheerily as the sower expects harvest.
Ibsen had no such happy certainty. He was
convinced of the necessity of breaking up the old
illusions, the imaginative call for revolt, but his
faith wavered as to the success of the new move-
ments. The old order, in its resistance to all
change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 235

it is the work of a blind Sampson, and no less, to
bring it rattling to the ground. In Rosmersholm,
all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the lu-
cidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit for-
mulas are stoutly intrenched. In the end it is not
the new idea who conquers; it is the antique house,
with its traditions, its avenging vision of white
horses, which breaks the too-clairvoyant Rebecca.
This doubt of the final success of intelligence,
this obstinate question whether, after all, as we
so glibly intimate, the old order changeth at all,
whether, on the contrary, it has not become a
Juggernaut car that crushes all originality and
independence out of action, this breathes more and
more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen.
Hedda Gabler condemns the old order, in its
dulness, its stifling mediocrity, but she is unable to
adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new
ideas, and she sinks into deeper moral dissolution.
She hates all that has been done, yet can herself
do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that
detestable condition of spirit which cannot create,
though it sees the need of creation, and can only
show the irritation which its own sterility awakens
within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually
do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of
Lovborg, and to kill herself with General Gabler's
pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the

236 IBSEN

Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do
best to die.

We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love
of self is the fundamental principle of all activity.
It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-
amelioration which leads to every manifestation of
revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct.
Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and
the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes
another type, perhaps more sympathetic than
either, the master-builder Solness. He, too, is
led to condemn the old order, but in the act of
improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle,
and swoons to death, "dizzy, lost, yet unupbraid-
ing." Ibsen's exact meaning in the detail of
these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but
they repay the closest and most reiterated study.
Perhaps the most curious of all is The Lady from
the Sea, which has been examined from the
technically psychological view by a learned French
philosopher, M. Jules de Gaultier. For M. de
Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen's
conception of human life, with its conflicting in-
stincts and responsibilities, is more fully centred
in The Lady from the Sea than in any other of his
productions.

The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen's
constant aim is to reconcile and to conciliate the

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 237

two biological hypotheses which have divided
opinion in the nineteenth century, and which
are known respectively by the names of Cuvier
and Lamarck; namely, that of the invariability
of species and that of the mutability of organic
forms. In the reconciliation of these hypotheses
Ibsen finds the only process which is truly encour-
aging to life. According to this theory, all the
trouble, all the weariness, all the waste of moral
existences around us comes from the neglect of
one or other of these principles, and true health,
social or individual, is impossible without the
harmonious application of them both. According
to this view, the apotheosis of Ibsen's genius, or at
least the most successful elucidation of his scheme
of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in
The Lady from the Sea where Wangel succeeds in
winning the heart of Ellida back from the fascina-
tion of the Stranger. It is certainly in this mys-
terious and strangely attractive play that Ibsen
has insisted, more than anywhere else, on the ne-
cessity of taking physiology into consideration
in every discussion of morals. He refers, like a
zoologist, to the laws which regulate the forma-
tion and the evolution of species, and the decision
of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amaz-
ing example of the limitation of the power of
change produced by heredity. The extraordinary

238 IBSEN

ingenuity of M. de Gaultier's analysis of this
play deserves recognition; whether it can quite be
accepted, as embraced by Ibsen's intention, may
be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect
that, however subtle our refinements become, the
instinct of Ibsen was probably subtler still.

In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward, with
the glimmering taper of his Catilina, there was
but one person in the world who fancied that
the light might pass from lamp to lamp and in
half a century form an important part of the intel-
lectual illumination of Europe. The one person
who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself.
Against all probability and common-sense, this
apothecary's assistant, this ill-educated youth
who had just been plucked in his preliminary
examination, who positively was, and remained,
unable to pass the first tests and become a student
at the University, maintained in his inmost soul
the belief that he was born to be "a king of
thought." The impression is perhaps not un-
common among ill-educated lads; what makes
the case unique, and defeats our educational
formulas, is that it happened to be true. But
the impact of Ibsen with the social order of his
age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was
perhaps more unlucky than that of any other
great man of the same class with whose biography

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 239

we have been made acquainted. He was at
daggers drawn with all that was successful and
respectable and "nice" from the outset of his
career until near the end of it.

Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone
of his message to the world there is something
acrimonious, something that tastes in the mouth
like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world,
and he made it as nauseous and astringent as he
could, for he was not inclined to be one of those
physicians who mix jam with their julep. There
was no other writer of genius in the nineteenth
century who was so bitter in dealing with human
frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel
clearness the satire of Carlyle is bluster, the
diatribes of Leopardi shrill and thin. All other
reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns,
Ibsen is uniformly and impartially stern. That
he probed deeper into the problems of life than
any other modern dramatist is acknowledged,
but it was his surgical calmness which enabled
him to do it. The problem-plays of Alexandre
Dumas fils flutter with emotion, with prejudice
and pardon. But Ibsen, without impatience, ex-
amines under his microscope all the protean forms
of organic social life and coldly draws up his diag-
nosis like a report. We have to think of him as
thus ceaselessly occupied. We have seen that,

24o IBSEN

long before a sentence was written, he had in-
vented and studied, in its remotest branches, the
life-history of the characters who were to move in
his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their
experience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-
insect, he was building up the scheme of them
in silence. Odd little objects, fetiches which
represented people to him, stood arranged on
his writing table, and were never to be touched.
He gazed at them until, as if by some feat of black
magic, he turned them into living persons, typical
and yet individual.

We have recorded that the actual writing down
of the dialogue was often swift and easy, when the
period of incubation was complete. Each of
Ibsen's plays presupposes a long history behind it;
each starts like an ancient Greek tragedy, in the
full process of catastrophe. This method of com-
position was extraordinary, was perhaps, in mod-
ern times, unparalleled. It accounted in measure
for the coherency, the inevitability, of all the de-
tail, but it also accounted for some of the difficulties
which meet us in the task of interpretation.
Ibsen calls for an expositor, and will doubtless
give occupation to an endless series of scholiasts.
They will not easily exhaust their theme, and to
the last something will escape, something will defy
their most careful examination. It is not disre-

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 241

spectful to his memory to claim that Ibsen some-
times packed his stuff too closely. Criticism,
when it marvels most at the wonder of his genius,
is constrained to believe that he sometimes threw
too much of his soul into his composition, that he
did not stand far enough away from it always to
command its general effect. The result, especially
in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, and
excites the spectator too much.

One very curious example of Ibsen's minute
care is found in the copiousness of his stage di-
rections. Later playwrights have imitated him
in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty
years ago such minuteness seemed extravagant
and needless. As a fact, it was essential to the
absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired
to produce. The stage directions in his plays
cannot be "skipped" by any reader who desires
to follow the dramatist's thought step by step
without losing the least link. These notes of his
intention will be of ever-increasing value as the
recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In
1899 Ibsen remarked to me that it was almost
useless for actors nowadays to try to perform
the comedies of Holberg, because there were no
stage directions and the tradition was lost. Of
his own work, fortunately, that can never be said.
Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating studies

242 IBSEN

of the Greek Tragecfies, has pointed out more
than once the " undesigned and unforeseen defect
with which, in studying ancient drama, we must
perpetually reckon," namely, the loss of the action
and of the equivalent stage directions. It is easy
to imagine "what problems Shakespeare would
present if he were printed like the Poetce Scenlci
Greed" and not more difficult to realize how many
things there would be to puzzle us in Ghosts and
The Wild Duck if we possessed nothing but the
bare text.

The body of work so carefully conceived, so
long maintained, so passionately executed, was
far too disturbing in its character to be welcome
at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen
was loathed in Norway, and the attacks on him
which filled the press were often of an extrava-
gant character. At the present moment any
one conversant with Norwegian society who will
ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer or a
doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's in-
fluence, will be surprised at the unanimity of the
reply. Opinions may differ as to the attractive-
ness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an
almost universal admission of its beneficial ten-
dency. Scarcely will a voice be found to demur
to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light
into the national life, that he roughly but thor-

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS 243

oughly awakened the national conscience, that
even works like Ghosts, which shocked, and works
like Rosmersholm, which insulted the prejudices
of his countrymen, were excellent in their result.
The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who
reviled and attacked and abandoned his native
land, who railed at every national habit and
showed a worm at the root of every national tra-
dition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived
long enough to be accompanied to his grave "to
the noise of the mourning of a nation," and he
who had almost starved in exile to be conducted
to the last resting-place by a Parliament and a
King.

It must always be borne in mind that, although
Ibsen's appeal is to the whole world — his deter-
mination to use prose aiding him vastly in this
dissemination — yet it is to Norway that he belongs,
and it is at home that he is best understoood. No
matter how acrid his tone, no matter how hard
and savage the voice with which he prophesied,
the accord between his country and himself was
complete long before the prophet died. As he
walked about, the strange, picturesque little old
man, in the streets of Christiania, his fellow-
citizens gazed at him with a little fear, but with
some affection and with unbounded reverence.
They understood at last what the meaning of his

244 IBSEN

message had been, and how closely it applied to
themselves, and how much the richer and healthier
for it their civic atmosphere had become. They
would say, as the soul of Dante said in the New
Life:—

e costui

Che viene a consolar la nostra mente,
Ed e la sua virtdi tanto possente,
Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui.

No words, surely, could better express the inten-
sity with which Ibsen had pressed his moral
quality, his virtu, upon the Norwegian conscience,
not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it
and had banished from it all other ideals of con-
duct. No one who knows will doubt that the
recent events in which Norway has taken so
chivalric, and at the same time so winning and
gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the world, owe
not a little to their being the work of a generation
nurtured in that new temper of mind, that spiritel
nuovo d'amore which was inculcated by the whole
work of Ibsen.

AUG 02 1985

DATE DUE

JUN 1 b

1987

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