HENRIK IBSEN

By Edmund Grosse

CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I: CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH CHAPTER II: EARLY INFLUENCES CHAPTER III: LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) CHAPTER IV: THE SATIRES (1857-67) CHAPTER V: 1868-75 CHAPTER VI: 1875-82 CHAPTER VII: 1883-91 CHAPTER VIII: LAST YEARS CHAPTER IX: PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS CHAPTER X: INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 Henrik Ibsen Ibsen in 1868 Ibsen in Dresden, October, 1873 From a drawing by Gustav Laerum Facsimile of Ibsen's Handwriting Ibsen. From the painting by Eilif Petersen Bust of Ibsen, about 1865

PREFACE

Numerous and varied as have been the analyses of Ibsen's workspublished, in all languages, since the completion of his writings, thereexists no biographical study which brings together, on a general plan, what has been recorded of his adventures as an author. Hitherto the onlyaccepted Life of Ibsen has been _Et literaert Livsbillede_, publishedin 1888 by Henrik Jaeger; of this an English translation was issued in1890. Henrik Jaeger (who must not be confounded with the novelist, HansHenrik Jaeger) was a lecturer and dramatic critic, residing near Bergen, whose book would possess little value had he not succeeded in persuadingIbsen to give him a good deal of valuable information respecting hisearly life in that city. In its own day, principally on this account, Jaeger's volume was useful, supplying a large number of facts which werenew to the public. But the advance of Ibsen's activity, and the increaseof knowledge since his death, have so much extended and modified thepoet's history that _Et literaert Livsbillede_ has become obsolete. 

The principal authorities of which I have made use in the followingpages are the minute bibliographical _Oplysninger_ of J. B. Halvorsen, marvels of ingenious labor, continued after Halvorsen's death by StenKonow (1901); the _Letters of Henrik Ibsen_, published in two volumes, by H. Koht and J. Elias, in 1904, and now issued in an Englishtranslation (Hodder & Stoughton); the recollections and notes of variousfriends, published in the periodicals of Scandinavia and Germanyafter his death; T. Blanc's _Et Bidrag til den Ibsenskte DigtningsScenehistorie_ (1906); and, most of all, the invaluable _Samliv medIbsen_ (1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned writer aspires, inmeasure, to be Ibsen's Boswell, and his book is a series of chaptersreminiscent of the dramatist's talk and manners, chiefly during thosecentral years of his life which he spent in Germany. It is a trivial, naive and rather thin production, but it has something of the trueBoswellian touch, and builds up before us a lifelike portrait. 

From the materials, too, collected for many years past by Mr. WilliamArcher, I have received important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it isdifficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation. It is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metricalwritings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume, andthat I had the privilege, in consequence, of being the first person tointroduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend fora moment that it is not a gratification to me, after so many years andafter such surprising developments, to know that this was the fact. But, save for this accident of time, it was Mr. Archer and no other who wasreally the introducer of Ibsen to English readers. For a quarter of acentury he was the protagonist in the fight against misconstruction andstupidity; with wonderful courage, with not less wonderful good temperand persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place ofthe false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius. Mr. William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attachedto the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in Englandand America. 

In these pages, where the space at my disposal was so small, I have notbeen willing to waste it by repeating the plots of any of those plays ofIbsen which are open to the English reader. It would please me best ifthis book might be read in connection with the final edition of _Ibsen'sComplete Dramatic Works_, now being prepared by Mr. Archer in elevenvolumes (W. Heinemann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole work by thosevolumes of it which have already appeared, I have little hesitation insaying that no other foreign author of the second half of the nineteenthcentury has been so ably and exhaustively edited in English as Ibsen hasbeen in this instance. 

The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further berecommended to the study of Carl Naerup's _Norsk Litteraturhistoriessiste Tidsrum_ (1905), a critical history of Norwegian literature since1890, which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modernideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway, scarcely one ofwhom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the tyrannyof Ibsen's personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen in Englandand France has often missed something of its historical value by nottaking into consideration that movement of intellectual life in Norwaywhich has surrounded him and which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may beallowed to say of my little book that this side of the subject has beenparticularly 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 Danishskipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, made his way over from Stege, the capital of the island of Möen, andbecame a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of thefamily, all following the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorousdisposition, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinisterand taciturn wives, who, by the way, were always, it would seem, Danesor Germans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet had, after ahundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pureNorse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, waswrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost onHesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poemof Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, married in 1825a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same town of Skien;she was one year his senior, and the daughter of a merchant. It was in1771 that the Ibsens, leaving Bergen, had settled in Skien, which was, and still is, an important centre of the timber and shipping trades onthe south-east shore of the country. 

It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort ofPoole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise, and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of awire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strainsof heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more thanto recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all hisforbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and toinsist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense whichmarked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intenselyprovincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to findanywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than theIbsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in thatinability to resist the call of the sea, generation after generation, if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of theconventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect elementsof his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son whowas born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months aftertheir marriage. 

This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, although he never used thesecond name, was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House, in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20, The house stood on oneside of a large, open square; the town pillory was at the right of andthe mad-house, the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to theleft; in front was Latin school and the grammar school, while the churchoccupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospect the touristcan no longer sentimentalize, for the whole of this part of Skienwas burned down in 1886, to the poet's unbridled satisfaction. "Theinhabitants of Skien, " he said with grim humor, "were quite unworthy topossess my birthplace. "

He declared that the harsh elements of landscape, mentioned above, werethose which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added thatthe square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all daylong with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawnto dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound thatwas like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused byhundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of thatforce. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thoughtof those saws, " said the poet, whose earliest flight of fancy seems tohave been this association of womanhood with the shriek of the sawmill. 

In 1888, just before his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen wrote out for HenrikJaeger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It isfrom these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws istaken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories, many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting, however, to findthat his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimisticcharacter. "Skien, " he says, "in my young days, was an exceedinglylively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became. Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itselfor close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or lessclosely related, and dances, dinners and music parties followed eachother, 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 inour large, roomy house, especially at Christmas and Fair-time, when thehouse was full, and we kept open table from morning till night. " Themind reverts to the majestic old wooden mansions which play so prominenta part in Thomas Krag's novels, or to the house of Mrs. Solness'parents, the burning down of which started the Master-Builder'sfortunes. 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 mighthave been, had it lasted, on the genius of the poet. But fortune hadharsher views of what befitted the training of so acrid a nature. WhenIbsen was eight years of age, his father's business was found to be insuch disorder that everything had to be sold to meet his creditors. Theonly piece of property left when this process had been gone throughwas a little broken-down farmhouse called Venstöb, in the outskirts ofSkien. Ibsen afterwards stated that those who had taken most advantageof his parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were preciselythose who now most markedly turned a cold shoulder on them. It is likelyenough that this may have been the case, but one sees how inevitablyIbsen would, in after years, be convinced that it was. He believedhimself to have been, personally, much mortified and humiliated inchildhood by the change in the family status. Already, by all accounts, he had begun to live a life of moral isolation. His excellent sisterlong afterwards described him as an unsociable child, never a pleasantcompanion, and out of sympathy with all the rest of the family. 

We recollect, in _The Wild Duck_, the garret which was the domain ofHedvig and of that symbolic bird. At Venstöb, the infant Ibsen possesseda like retreat, a little room near the back entrance, which was sacredto him and into the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt himself. Here were some dreary old books, among others Harrison's folio _Historyof the City of London_, as well as a paint-box, an hour-glass, anextinct eight-day clock, properties which were faithfully introduced, half a century later, into _The Wild Duck_. His sister says that theonly outdoor amusement he cared for as a boy was building, and shedescribes the prolonged construction of a castle, in the spirit of _TheMaster-Builder_. 

Very soon he began to go to school, but to neither of the publicinstitutions in the town. He attended what is described as a "smallmiddle-class school, " kept by a man called Johan Hansen, who was theonly person connected with his childhood, except his sister, for whomthe poet retained in after life any agreeable sentiment. "Johan Hansen, "he says, "had a mild, amiable temper, like that of a child, " and when hedied, in 1865, Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who helped in thelessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair ofwonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusualgift for drawing. " Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently, perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwardsboasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is initself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, atthe age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic descriptionof a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he musthave copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence ofthe author, "passive at the nadir of dismay. "

No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a moreungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers hasdone its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood withanecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The onlytalent 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 workinghard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works ofthe young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a viewfrom the windows at Venstöb, a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock, the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid, "overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must havebeen, founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, afar-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 considerableintellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood theambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks andmonths. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied, so Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. Inneither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured forthe National Gallery, but it is highly significant that such earneststudents of precise excellence in another art should first of all haveschooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color. 

In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken awayfrom school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with ayoung middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the future proposedno task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the localschoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be a professionalartist, but that was one which could not be indulged. Until a later datethan this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessarytechnical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J. C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Düsseldorf, where the teachingattracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meanta long and serious expenditure of money, together with a very doubtfulprospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who had seemed the verygenius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having scarcely begun tosell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not surprising that KnudIbsen, whose to were in a worse condition than ever, refused even toconsider a course of life which would entail a heavy and long-continuedexpense. 

Ibsen hung about at home for a few months, then, shortly before hissixteenth birthday, he apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of Mann, at the little town of Grimstad, between Arendal and Christianssand, onthe extreme south-east corner of the Norwegian coast. This was his homefor more than five years; here he became a poet, and here the peculiarcolor and tone of his temperament were developed. So far as the geniusof a very great man is influenced by his surroundings, and by hisphysical condition in those surroundings, it was the atmosphere ofGrimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen. Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit ofclothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew, the town whichhe hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surlydunce. We find him next, with an apron round his middle and a pestle inhis hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. WhatBlackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats--"Back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills and ointment-boxes, " inappropriate to theauthor of _Endymion_, was strictly true of the author of _Peer Gynt_. 

Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines toGrimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius. For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the mostimportant of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of themost original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen fora century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters. Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothingat all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and itlooks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with nakedrocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfectuniformity 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 theseapathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, oneof the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in frayingipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter. 

For several years nothing is recorded, and there was probably verylittle that demanded record, of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His owninteresting notes, it is obvious, refer only to the closing months ofthe period. Ten years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets ofEurope had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescencesuch as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the matureimagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way oflife uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishnessand a thousand bitters. "

It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his sixth to his twentiethyear, suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was atwar--the phrase is his own--with the little community in which he lived. And yet it seems to have been, in its tiny way, a tolerant and evenfriendly little community. It is difficult for us to realize what lifein a remote coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connectionwith the capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, thecapital was as yet little more than we should call a village. Therewould, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the bestinhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certaingraceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflectedfrom Copenhagen, would mark the more conservative citizens, male andfemale. A fierier generation--not hot enough, however, to set thefjord on flame--would celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of thecountry in numerous patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy likeIbsen would, on the whole, prefer the former type, but he would despisethem both. 

He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a poverty that excluded allindulgence, beyond the bare necessities, in food and clothes andbooks. We can conceive the meagre advance of his position, first amere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the adviceof friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, somebright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when hecontrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal, "compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a realgrip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes havedreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and strychnine and the best beetle-killer, " which would decimate theadmirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodiesin their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source ofanger, against which all arguments are useless, which bubbles up in theheart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, andknows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage inmanners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told uswith pathetic naïveté, unable to express the real gratitude he felt tothe few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he hadpermitted it. 

As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace. Bythe respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its littleinner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quitenice. " The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man, who did notseem to realize his menial position. He was certainly intelligent, andGrimstad would have overlooked the pills and ointments if his mannershad been engaging, but he was rude, truculent and contradictory. Theyouthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices ofits elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson has, in suchconditions, enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not afavorite even with the girls, whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One ofthe young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe theeffect which the poet made upon them. They had none of them liked him, she said, "because"--she hesitated for the word--"because he was so_spectral_. " This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to us fora moment the distempered youth, almost incorporeal, displayed wanderingabout at twilight and in lonely places, held in common esteem to bemalevolent, and expressing by gestures rather than by words sentimentsof a nature far from complimentary or agreeable. 

Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached histwenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village thepassage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-workedapothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it isunlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature. The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost anaccident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, andsome more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" tothe vexation of various worthy persons. The earliest trace oftalent seems to been in this direction, in the form of lampoonsor "characters, " as people called them in the seventeenth century, sarcastic descriptions of types in which certain individuals could berecognized. No doubt if these could be recovered, we should find themrough and artless, but containing germs of the future keenness ofportraiture. They were keen enough, it seems, to rouse great resentmentin Grimstad. 

There is evidence to show that the lad had docility enough, at allevents, to look about for some aid in the composition of Norwegianprose. We should know nothing of it but for a passage in Ibsen's laterpolemic with Paul Jansenius Stub of Bergen. In 1848 Stub was aninvalid schoolmaster, who, it appears, eked out his income by givinginstruction, by correspondence, in style. How Ibsen heard of him doesnot seem to be known, but when, in 1851, Ibsen entered, with needlessacrimony, into a controversy with his previous teacher about thetheatre, Stub complained of his ingratitude, since he had "taught theboy to write. " Stub's intervention in the matter, doubtless, was limitedto the correction of a few exercises. 

Ibsen's own theory was that his intellect and character were awakenedby the stir of revolution throughout Europe. The first political eventwhich 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. Venicewas proclaimed a republic, the Pope fled to Gaeta, the streets of Berlinran with the blood of the populace. The Magyars rose against Jellalicand his Croat troops; the Czechs demanded their autonomy; in response tothe revolutionary feeling in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein was up in arms. 

Each of these events, and others like them, and all occurring in therapid months of that momentous year, smote like hammers on the door ofIbsen's brain, till it quivered with enthusiasm and excitement. Theold brooding languor was at an end, and with surprising clearness andfirmness he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man. The old clouds vanished, and though the social difficulties which hemmedin his career were as gross as ever, he himself no longer doubtedwhat was to be his aim in life. The cry of revolution came to him, ofrevolution faint indeed and broken, the voice of a minority appealingfrantically and for a moment against the overwhelming forces of arespectable majority, but it came to him just at the moment when hisyoung spirit was prepared to receive it with faith and joy. The effecton 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 maybe, 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 extremeinterest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of hiscommentators, the preface to the second (1876) edition of _Catilina_, he has described what the influences were which roused him out ofthe wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution ofFebruary, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote aseries of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him totake up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, when all his dutieswere over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garretwhere he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world, instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began hisfirst 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 thatclairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year ofmental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series ofhis satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with itsridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, itsintolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expandedsometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent inthe poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which wereburned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again tohis readers. 

But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now presenteditself. He was so busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he says, tosteal his hours for study. He still inhabited the upper room, which hecalls a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his status, assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his socialconveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugswith a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointedout the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of_Catilina_ takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result ofthe fact that all the attention which the future realist could give tothe story had to be given in the night hours. When he emerged from thegarret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in theology, a Mr. Monrad, brother of the afterwards famous professor. By a remarkable chance, thesubject given by the University for examination was the Conspiracy ofCatiline, to be studied in the history of Sallust and the oration ofCicero. 

No theme could have been more singularly well fitted to fire theenthusiasm of Ibsen. At no time of his life a linguist, or muchinterested in history, it is probable that the difficulty ofconcentrating his attention on a Latin text would have beeninsurmountable had the subject been less intimately sympathetic to him. But he tells us that he had no sooner perceived the character of the managainst whom these diatribes are directed than he devoured them greedily(_jeg slugte disse skrifter_). The opening words of Sallust, which everyschoolboy has to read--we can imagine with what an extraordinary forcethey would strike upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen. _Lucius Catilina nobili genere natus, magna vi et animi et corporis, sedingenio malo pravoque_--how does this at once bring up an image of thearch-rebel, of Satan himself, as the poets have conceived him, how doesit attract, with its effects of energy, intelligence and pride, thecuriosity of one whose way of life, as Keats would say, is stillundecided, his ambition still thick-sighted!

It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that absorbed Ibsen. Criticism likes to trace a predecessor behind every genius, a Peruginofor Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the master-mindthat started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers of his ageor of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust. There can beno doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his unflinchingmethod of building up his edifice of invective, stone by stone; hisclose, unidealistic, dry penetration into character; his clinicalattitude, unmoved at the death-bed of a reputation; that all thesequalities were directly operative on the mind and intellectual characterof Ibsen, and went a long way to mould it while moulding was stillpossible. 

There is no evidence to show that the oration of Cicero moved him nearlyso much as the narratives of Sallust. After all, the object of Cicerowas to crush the conspiracy, but what Ibsen was interested in wasthe character of Catiline, and this was placed before him in a morethrilling way by the austere reserve of the historian. No doubt, to ayoung poet, when that poet was Ibsen, there would be something deeplyattractive in the sombre, archaic style, and icy violence of Sallust. How thankful we ought to be that the historian, with his long sonorouswords--_flagitiosorum ac facinorosorum_--did not make of our perfervidapothecary a mere tub-thumper of Corinthian prose!

Ibsen now formed the two earliest friendships of his life. He hadreached the age of twenty without, as it would seem, having been ableto make his inner nature audible to those around him. He had been tothe inhabitants of Grimstad a stranger within their gates, not speakingtheir language; or, rather, wholly "spectral, " speaking no language atall, but indulging in cat-calls and grimaces. He was now discovered likeCaliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the strenuous arts of friendship. One of those who thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due, whoheld a post in the custom-house; the other was Ole Schulerud (1827-59), who deserves a cordial acknowledgment from every admirer of Ibsen. Healso was in the receipt of custom, and a young man of small independentmeans. To Schulerud and to Due, Ibsen revealed his poetic plans, andhe seems to have found in them both sympathizers with his republicanenthusiasms and transcendental schemes for the liberation of thepeoples. It was a stirring time, in 1848, and all generous young bloodwas flowing fast in the same direction. 

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

His daily schedule admitted few intervals for rest or sleep. Yet I neverheard Ibsen complain of being tired. His health was uniformly good. He must have had an exceptionally strong constitution, for when hisfinancial conditions compelled him to practice the most stringenteconomy, he tried to do without underclothing, and finally even withoutstockings. In these experiments he succeeded; and in winter he wentwithout an overcoat; yet without being troubled by colds or other bodilyills. 

We have seen that Ibsen was so busy that he had to steal from his dutiesthe necessary hours for study. But out of these hours, he tells us, hestole moments for the writing of poetry, of the revolutionary poetryof which we have spoken, and for a great quantity of lyrics of asentimental and fanciful kind. Due was the confidant to whom he recitedthe latter, and one at least of these early pieces survives, set tomusic by this friend. But to Schulerud a graver secret was intrusted, noless than that in the night hours of 1848-49 there was being composedin the garret over the apothecary's shop a three-act tragedy in blankverse, on the conspiracy of Catiline. With his own hand, when the firstdraft was completed, Schulerud made a clean copy of the drama, and inthe autumn of 1849 he went to Christiania with the double purpose ofplacing _Catilina_ at the theatre and securing a publisher for it. Aletter (October 15, 1849) from Ibsen, first printed in 1904--the onlydocument we possess of this earliest period--displays to a painfuldegree the torturing anxiety with which the poet awaited news of hisplay, and, incidentally, exposes his poverty. With all Schulerud'senergy, he found it impossible to gain attention for _Catilina_ at thetheatre, and in January, 1850, Ibsen received what he called its "deathwarrant, " but it was presently brought out as a volume, under thepseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme, at Schulerud's expense. Of _Catilina_about thirty copies were sold, and it attracted no notice whatever fromthe press. 

Meanwhile, left alone in Grimstad, since Due was now with Schulerud inChristiania, Ibsen had been busy with many literary projects. He hadbeen writing an abundance of lyrics, he had begun a one-act drama called"The Normans, " afterwards turned into _Kaempehöjen_; he was planning aromance, _The Prisoner at Akershus_ (this was to deal with the story ofChristian Lofthus); and above all he was busy writing a tragedy of_Olaf Trygvesön_. [Note: On the authority of the Breve, pp. 59, 59, where Halvdan Koht prints "Olaf Tr. " and "Olaf T. " expanding these toTr[ygvesön]. But is it quite certain that what Ibsen wrote in theseletters was not "Olaf Li. " and "Olaf L. , " and that the reference is notto Olaf Liljekrans, which was certainly begun at Grimstad? Is there anyother evidence that Ibsen ever started an _Olaf Trygvesön_?]

One of his poems had already been printed in a Christiania newspaper. The call was overwhelming; he could endure Grimstad and the gallipotsno longer. In March, 1850, at the age of twenty-one, Ibsen stuck a fewdollars in his pocket and went off to try his fortune in the capital. 

CHAPTER II

EARLY INFLUENCES

In middle life Ibsen, who suppressed for as long a time as he could mostof his other juvenile works, deliberately lifted _Catilina_ from theoblivion into which it had fallen, and replaced it in the series of hiswritings. This is enough to indicate to us that he regarded it as ofrelative importance, and imperfect as it is, and unlike his later plays, it demands some critical examination. I not know whether any one everhappened to ask Ibsen whether he had been aware that Alexandre Dumasproduced in Paris a five-act drama of _Catiline_ at the very moment(October, 1848) when Ibsen started the composition of his. It is quitepossible that the young Norwegian saw this fact noted in a newspaper, and immediately determined to try what he could make of the samesubject. In Dumas' play Catiline is presented merely as a demagogue; heis the red Flag personified, and the political situation in France isdiscussed under a slight veil of Roman history. Catiline is simply asort of Robespierre brought up to date. There is no trace of all this inIbsen. 

Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much moresimilarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of_Catiline_ which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsenhad never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wagerthat, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of BenJonson. Yet there is an odd sort of resemblance, founded on the factthat each poet keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the Latins. Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of Catilineas if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the narrative, each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of thearch-conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In bothpoems, 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 Norwegiandramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to requirelightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson'scase, of solemn "choruses, " in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instancethe tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to thestage. 

This is a very curious example, among many which might be broughtforward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In allhis early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. Thistendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in _Brand_ and_Peer Gynt_, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adoptedfor his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty hadquitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramaticexpression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tearit altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is initself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements. 

The close of Ibsen's _Catalina_ is, as we have said, composed entirelyin rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poetcould not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged tostart running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here isa fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent fordead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulviahas stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speechwhich ends thus:--

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

 AURELIA (appearing, blood-stained, at the door of 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 full thy sea of sorrows, and may lie With mybosom 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. 

[Note: In 1875 Ibsen practically rewrote the whole of this part of_Catilina_, without, however, improving it. Why will great authorsconfuse the history of literature by tampering with their early texts?]

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 ofGrimstad he had but himself to consult, and the mind of a young poet whohas not yet enjoyed any generous communication with life is invariablysentimental and romantic. The critics of the North have expended agreat deal of ingenuity in trying to prove that Ibsen exposed his owntemperament and character in the course of _Catilina_. No doubt thereis a great temptation to indulge in this species of analysis, but it isamusing to note that some of the soliloquies which have been pointed outas particularly self-revealing are translated almost word for wordout of Sallust. Perhaps the one passage in the play which is reallysignificant is that in which the hero says:--

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

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

Very imperfect as _Catilina_ is in dramatic art, and very primitive asis the development of plot in it, it presents one aspect, as a literarywork, which is notable. That it should exist at all is curious, since, surprising as it seems, it had no precursor. Although, during thethirty-five years of Norwegian independence, various classes ofliterature had been cultivated with extreme diligence, the drama hadhitherto been totally neglected. With the exception of a graceful operaby Bjerregaard, which enjoyed a success sustained over a quarter of acentury, the only writings in dramatic form produced in Norway between1815 and 1850 were the absurd lyrical farces of Wergeland, which weredevoid of all importance. Such a thing as a three-act tragedy in blankverse was unknown in modern Norway, so that the youthful apothecary inGrimstad, whatever he was doing, was not slavishly copying the fashionsof his own countrymen. 

The principal, if not the only influence which acted upon Ibsen at thismoment, was that of the great Danish tragedian, Adam Oehlenschläger. It might be fantastically held that the leading romantic luminaryof Scandinavia withdrew on purpose to make room for his realisticsuccessor, since Oehlenschläger's latest play, _Kiartan and Gudrun_, appeared just when Ibsen was planning _Catilina_, while the death of theDanish poet (January 20, 1850) was practically simultaneous with Ibsen'sarrival in Christiania. In later years, Ibsen thought that Holberg andOehlenschläger were the only dramatists he had read when his ownfirst play was written; he was sure that he knew nothing of Schiller, Shakespeare or the French. Of the rich and varied dramatic literature ofDenmark, in the generation between Oehlenschläger's and his own, he mustalso for the present have known nothing. The influence of Heiberg and ofHertz, presently to be so potent, had evidently not yet begun. But itis important to perceive that already Norway, and Norwegian taste andopinion, were nothing to him in his selection of themes and forms. 

It is not to be supposed that the taste for dramatic performances didnot exist in Norway, because no Norwegian plays were written. On thecontrary, in most of the large towns there were, and had long been, private theatres or rooms which could be fitted up with a stage, atwhich wandering troupes of actors gave performances that were eagerlyattended by "the best people. " These actors, however, were exclusivelyDanes, and there was an accepted tradition that Norwegians couldnot act. If they attempted to do so, their native accents proveddisagreeable to their fellow-citizens, who demanded, as an imperativecondition, the peculiar intonation and pronunciation cultivated atthe Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, as well as an absence of all nativepeculiarities of language. The stage, therefore--and this is veryimportant in a consideration of the career of Ibsen--had come to be thesymbol of a certain bias in political feeling. Society in Norway wasdivided into two classes, the "Danomaniacs" and the "Patriots. " Neitherof these had any desire to alter the constitutional balance of power, but while the latter wished Norway to be intellectually self-productive, and leaned to a further isolation in language, literature, art andmanners, the former thought that danger of barbarism lay in everydirection save that of keeping close to the tradition of Denmark, fromwhich 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 extremelypopular with the conservative class, who thought, by attendance on theseperformances, to preserve the distinction of language and the varnish of"high life" which came, with so much prestige, from Copenhagen. By thepatriotic party, on the other hand, the stage was looked upon with gravesuspicion as likely to undermine the purity of national feeling. 

The earliest attempt at the opening of a National Theatre had been madeat Christiania by the Swede, J. P. Strömberg, in 1827; this was notsuccessful, and his theatre was burned down in 1835. In it some efforthad been made to use the Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, butit had been to no avail. The play-going public liked their plays to beDanish, and even nationalists of a pronounced species could not denythat dramas, like the great historical tragedies of Oehlenschläger, many of which dealt enthusiastically with legends that were peculiarlyNorwegian, were as national as it was possible for poems by a foreignpoet to be. All this time, it must be remembered, Christiania was toCopenhagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as New York washalf a century ago. It is in the arts that the old colonial instinct ofdependence is most loath to disappear. 

The party of the nationalists, however, had been steadily increasing inactivity, and the universal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 hadnot been without its direct action upon Norway. 

Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal policy, there was perhapsno country in Europe where this period of seismic disturbance led toless public turmoil than precisely here in the North. The accession ofa new king, Oscar I, in 1844, had been followed by a sense of renewednational security; the peasants were satisfied that the fresh reignwould be favorable to their rights and liberties; and the monarch showedevery inclination to leave his country of Norway as much as possible toits own devices. The result of all this was that '48 left no mark on theinternal history of the country, and the fever which burned in youthfulbosoms was mainly, if not entirely, intellectual and transcendental. Theyoung Catiline from Grimstad, therefore, met with several sympatheticrebels, but found nobody willing to conspire. But what he did find isso important in the consideration of his future development that it isneedful 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 strugglefor politic existence had fairly exhausted her mental resources, and hadleft her powerless to inaugurate a national literature. Meanwhile, therewas no such discontinuity in the literary and scientific relations ofthe two countries as that which had broken their constitutional union. Atremendous effort was made by certain patriots to discover the basis ofan entirely independent intellectual life, something that should startlike the phoenix from the ashes of the old régime, and should offer nolikeness with what continued to flourish south of the Skagarak. But allthe efforts of the University of Christiania were vain to prevent thecultivated classes from looking to Copenhagen as their centre of light. Such authors as there were, and they were few indeed, followed humbly inthe footsteps of their Danish brethren. 

Patriotic historians of literature are not always to be trusted, andthose who study native handbooks of Norwegian criticism must be on theirguard when these deal with the three poets who "inaugurated in song theyoung liberties of Norway. " The writings of the three celebrated lyricpatriots, Schwach, Bjerregaard and Hansen, will not bear to have theblaze of European experience cast upon them; their tapers dwindle tosparks in the light of day. They gratified the vanity of the firstgeneration after 1815, but they deserve no record in the chronicles ofpoetic art. If Ibsen ever read these rhymes of circumstance, it musthave 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 Norwegianliterature, and the consequences of which were far-reaching. As is oftenthe case in countries where the art of verse is as yet little exercised, there grew up about 1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight inpoetry. This instinct was presently satisfied by the effusion of a vastquantity of metrical writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperatedby a violent personal feud which for a while interested all educatedpersons in Norway to a far greater degree than any other intellectualor, for the time being, even political question. From 1834 to 1838 theinterests of all cultivated people centred around what was calledthe "Twilight Feud" (_Daemringsfejden_), and no record of Ibsen'sintellectual development can be complete without a reference tothis celebrated controversy, the results of which long outlived thepopularity of its skits and pamphlets. 

Modern Norwegian literature began with this great fight. Theprotagonists were two poets of undoubted talent, whose temperamentsand tendencies were so diametrically opposed that it seemed asthough Providence must have set them down in that raw and inflammablecivilization for the express purpose of setting the standing corn ofthought on fire. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was a belated son of theFrench Revolution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusiasms fermentedin his ill-regulated brain, and he poured forth verses in a violentand endless stream. It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavianopinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Wergeland. The critics ofNorway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglectand ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as_himmelstraevende sublim_ ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); theDanes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither viewcommends itself to a foreign reader of the poet. 

The fact, internationally stated, seems rather to be this. In Wergelandwe have a typical example of the effects of excess of fancy in aviolently productive but essential uncritical nature. He was ecstatic, unmeasured, a reckless improvisatore. In his ideas he was preposterouslyhumanitarian; a prodigious worker, his vigor of mind seemed neverexhausted by his labors; in theory an idealist, in his private life hewas charged with being scandalously sensual. He was so much the victimof his inspiration that it would come upon him like a descending wind, and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance ofthe poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through theenormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos. We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, _Creation, Manand the Messiah_ (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, bydescriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roarand turbidity of genius, with none of its purity and calm. The genius isthere; 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 ofWergeland'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 silenceand the hush, and rise at length in open rebellion against Iacchus andhis maenads, who destroy all the quiet of life and who madden innocentblood with their riot. Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) was a studentat the University with Wergeland, and he remained silent while thelatter made the welkin ring louder and louder with his lyric shrieks. Welhaven endured the rationalist and republican rhetoric of Wergelandas long as he could, although with growing exasperation, until therhapsodical author of _Creation_, transgressing all moderation, accusedthose who held reasonable views in literature and politics of beingtraitors. Then it became necessary to deal with this raw and localparody 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 beimagined. He was of the class of Sully Prudhomme, of Matthew Arnold, ofLowell, to name three of his younger contemporaries. In his nature allwas based upon equilibrium; his spirit, though full of graceful andphilosophical intuitions, was critical rather than creative. He wrotelittle, and with difficulty, and in exquisite form. His life was asblamelessly correct as his literary art was harmonious. Wergelandknew nothing of the Danish tradition of his day, which he treated withviolent and bitter contempt. Welhaven, who had moved in the circle ofthe friends of Rahbek, instinctively referred every literary problem tothe tribunal of Danish taste. He saw that with the enthusiasm with whichthe poetry of Wergeland was received in Norway was connected a suspicionof mental discipline, a growing worship of the peasant and a hatred andscorn of Denmark, with all of which he had no sympathy. He thought thetime had come for better things; that the national temper ought to bemollified with the improved economic situation of the country; that thestudents, who were taking a more and more prominent place, ought to beon the side of the angels. It was not unnatural that Welhaven shouldlook upon the corybantic music of Wergeland as the source and originof an evil of which it was really the symptom; he gathered his powerstogether to crush it, and he published a thunderbolt of sonnets. 

The English reader, familiar with the powerlessness of even the bestverse to make any impression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile tothink of a great moral and ethical attack conducted with no betterweapon than a paper of sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small, intensely local, easily agitated society of persons, all keenlythough narrowly educated, and all accustomed to be addressed in verse. Welhaven's pamphlet was entitled _The Twilight of Norway_ (1834), andthe sonnets of which it consisted were highly polished in form, filledwith direct and pointed references to familiar persons and events andabsolutely unshrinking in attack. No poetry of equal excellence hadbeen produced in Norway since the Union. It is not surprising thatthis invective against the tendencies of the youthful bard over whoserhapsodies all Norway was growing crazy with praise should arrestuniversal attention, although in the _Twilight_ Welhaven adroitlyavoided mentioning Wergeland by name. Fanaticism gathered in an angryarmy around the outraged standard of the republican poet, but the loversof order and discipline had found a voice, and they clustered aboutWelhaven with their support. Language was not minced by the assailants, and still less by the defenders. The lovers of Wergeland were told thatpolitics and brandy were their only pleasures, but those of Welhavenwere warned that they were known to be fed with bribes from Copenhagen. Meanwhile Welhaven himself, in successive publications, calmly analyzedthe writings of his antagonist, and proved them to be "in completerebellion against sound thought and the laws of beauty. " The feud ragedfrom 1834 to 1838, and left Norway divided into two rival camps oftaste. 

Although the "Twilight Feud" had passed away before Ibsen ceased to be aboy, the effect of it was too widely spread not to affect him. In pointof fact, we see by the earliest of his lyric poems that while he wasat Grimstad he had fully made up his mind. His early songs andcomplimentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if they showany native influence at all, it is that of Welhaven. The extremesuperficiality of Wergeland would naturally be hateful to so arduous acraftsman as Ibsen, and it is a fact that so far as his writingsreveal his mind to us, the all-popular poet of his youth appears to beabsolutely unknown to him. What this signifies may be realized if we saythat it is as though a great English or French poet of the second halfof the nineteenth century should seem to have never heard of Tennysonor 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 assignificant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style, its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshodviolence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewedwith horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets ofNorway, " only recently printed, dates from his early months inChristiania, and shows that even in 1850 Ibsen was impatient with theconventional literature of his day. "Less about the glaciers and thepine-forests, " he cries, "less about the dusty legends of the past, andmore about what is going on in the silent hearts of your brethren!" Herealready is sounded the note which was ultimately to distinguish him fromall the previous writers of the North. 

No letters have been published which throw light on Ibsen's first twoyears in the capital. We know that he did not communicate with hisparents, whose poverty was equalled by his own. He could receive no helpfrom them, nor offer them any, and he refrained, as they refrained, fromletter writing. This separation from his family, begun in this way, grewinto a habit, so that when his father died in 1877 no word had passedbetween him and his son for nearly thirty years. When Ibsen reachedChristiania, in March, 1850, his first act was to seek out his friendSchulerud, who was already a student. For some time he shared the roomof Schulerud and his thrifty meals; later on the two friends, in companywith Theodor Abildgaard, a young revolutionary journalist, lived inlodgings 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 greatmutual privation. Both young men attended the classes of a celebrated"crammer" of that day, H. A. S. Heltberg, who had opened in 1843 a Latinschool where elder pupils came for a two-years' course to prepare themfor taking their degree. This place, known familiarly as "the StudentFactory, " holds quite a prominent place in Norwegian literary history, Ibsen, Björnson, Vinje and Jonas Lie having attended its classes andpassed from it to the University. 

Between these young men, the leading force of literature in the comingage, a generous friendship sprang up, despite the disparity in theirages. Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-two; he had been avillage schoolmaster and had only now, in 1850, contrived to reachthe University. With Vinje, the founder of the movement for writingexclusively in Norwegian patois, Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy, while he gave no intellectual adherence to his theories. Between thebirths of Vinje and Björnson there stretched a period of fourteen years, yet Björnson was a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That Ibsenimmediately formed Björnson's acquaintance seems to be proved from thefact that they both signed a protest against the deportation of a Danecalled Harring on May 29, 1850. It was a fortunate chance which threwIbsen thus suddenly into the midst of a group of those in whom thehopes of the new generation were centred. But we are left largely toconjecture in what manner their acquaintanceship acted upon his mind. 

His material life during the next year is obscure. Driven by theextremity of need, it is plain that he adopted every means open to himby which he could add a few dollars to Schulerud's little store. Hewrote for the poor and fugitive journals of the day, in prose and verse;but the payment 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 _Kaempehöien_(The Warrior's Barrow), which he had brought unfinished with him fromGrimstad, was completed and put into shape in May, 1850, accepted at theChristiania Theatre, and acted three times during the following autumn. Perhaps the most interesting fact connected with this performancewas that the only female part, that of Blanka, was taken by a youngdébutante, Laura Svendsen; this was the actress afterwards to rise tothe height of eminence as the celebrated Mrs. Gundersen, no doubt themost gifted of all Ibsen's original interpreters. 

It was a matter of course that the poet was greatly cheered by theacceptance of his play, and he immediately set to work on another, _Olaf Liljekrans_; but this he put aside when _Kaempehöien_ practicallyfailed. He wrote a satirical comedy called _Norma_. He endeavored to getcertain of his works, dramatic and lyric, published in Christiania, butall the schemes fell through. It is certain that 1851 began darkly forthe young man, and that his misfortunes encouraged in him a sour andrebellious temper. For the first and only time in his life he meddledwith practical politics. Vinje and he--in company with a charmingperson, Paul Botten-Hansen (1824-69), who flits very pleasantlythrough 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, livedin the same house with Ibsen. He was a wild being, who had adopted therepublican theories of the day in their crudest form. He posed as thehead of a little body whose object was to dethrone the king, and tofound a democracy in Norway. On July 7, 1851, the police made a raidupon these childish conspirators, the leaders being arrested andpunished with a long imprisonment. The poet escaped, as by the skin ofhis teeth, and the warning was a lifelong one. He never meddled withpolitics any more. This was, indeed, as perhaps he felt, no time forrebellion; all over Europe the eruption of socialism had spent itself, and the docility of the populations had become wonderful. 

The discomfort and uncertainty of Ibsen's position in Christiania madehim glad to fill a post which the violinist, Ole Bull, offered himduring autumn. The newly constituted National Theatre in Bergen (openedJan. 2, 1850) had accepted a prologue written for an occasion by theyoung poet, and on November 6, 1851, Ibsen entered into a contract bywhich he bound himself go to Bergen "to assist the theatre as dramaticauthor. " The salary was less than £70 a year, but it was eked out bytravelling grants, and little as it might be, it was substantially morethan the nothing-at-all which Ibsen had been enjoying in Christiania. 

It is difficult to imagine what asset could be bought to the treasuriesof a public theatre by a youth of three and twenty so ill-educated, soempty 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 hisbusiness, the tyro to whom the elements of his occupation are unknown. We have seen that when he wrote _Catilina_ he had neither sat throughnor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. Thepieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation withDanish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschläger and (if we may guesswhat _Norma_ was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one ofthe most far-sighted men of his time, must have perceived the germsof theatrical genius in him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed hisappointment more to what this wise patron felt in his future than whatOle Bull or any one else could possibly point to as yet accomplished. Unquestionably, a rude theatrical penetration could already he divinedin 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 aClaretie or Antoine, to compare a small thing with great ones, and thefact was of inestimable value. It may even be held, without fear ofparadox, that this was the turning-point of Ibsen's life, that thisblind step in the dark, taken in the magnificent freedom of youth, waswhat 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 didwas to force this stubborn genius, which might so easily have slippedinto sinister and abnormal paths, and have missed the real humanity ofthe stage, to take the tastes of the vulgar into due consideration andto acquaint himself with the necessary laws of play-composition. 

Ibsen may seem to have little relation with the drama of the world, butin reality he is linked with it at every step. There is something ofShakespeare in _John Gabriel Borkman_, something Molière in _Ghosts_, something of Goethe in _Peer Gynt_. We may go further and say, thoughit would have made Ibsen wince, that there is something of Scribe in _AnEnemy of the People_. Is very doubtful whether, without the disciplinewhich forced him to put on the stage, at Bergen and in Christiania, plays evidently unsympathetic to his own taste, which obliged him to dohis best for the popular reception of those plays, and which forcedhim minutely to analyze their effects, he would ever have been theworld-moving dramatist which, as all sane critics must admit, he atlength became. 

He made some mistakes at first; how could he fail to do so? It was therecognition of these blunders, and perhaps the rough censure of them thelocal press, which induced the Bergen theatre to scrape a few dollarstogether and send him, in charge of some of the leading actors andactresses, to Copenhagen and Dresden for instruction. To go from Bergento Copenhagen was like travelling from Abdera to Athens, and to finda species of Sophocles in J. A. Heiberg, who had since 1849 been solemanager of the Royal Theatre. Here the drama of the world, all thesalutary names, all the fine traditions, burst upon the pilgrims fromthe North. Heiberg, the gracious and many-sided, was the centre of lightin those days; no one knew the stage as he knew no one interpreted itwith such splendid intelligence, and he received the crude Norwegian"dramatist-manager" with the utmost elegance of cordiality. Among theteachers of Ibsen, Heiberg ranks as the foremost. We may farther and saythat he was the last. When Ibsen had learned the lesson of Heiberg, only nature and his own genius had anything more to teach him. [See Notebelow] In August, 1852, rich with the spoils of time, but otherwise poorindeed, Ibsen made his way back to his duties in Bergen. 

[Note: Perhaps no author, during the whole of his career, more deeplyimpressed Ibsen with reverence and affection than Johan Ludvig Heibergdid. 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 expressed thefaintest appreciation of those who lavished posthumous honor on Heibergin 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 lessthat deserves to recorded, about his life during the next five years. Heremained in Bergen, cramped by want of means in his material condition, and much harassed and worried by the little pressing requirements of thetheatre. It seems that every responsibility fell upon his shoulders, andthat there was no part of stage-life that it was not his duty to lookafter. The dresses of the actresses, the furniture, the scene-painting, the instruction of raw Norwegian actors and actresses, the selection ofplays, now to please himself, now to please the bourgeois of Bergen, allthis must be done by the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundredyears earlier, we may imagine Molière, at Carcassonne or Albi, bearingup in his arms, a weary Titan, all the frivolities and anxieties andmisdeeds of a whole company of comedians. 

So far as our very scanty evidence goes, we find the poet isolated fromhis fellows, so far as isolation was possible, during his long stay atBergen. He was not accused, and if there had been a chance he would havebeen accused, of dereliction. No doubt he pushed through the work ofthe theatre doggedly, but certainly not in a convivial spirit. TheNorwegians are a hospitable and festal people, and there is no questionthat the manager of the theatre would have unusual opportunities ofbeing jolly with his friends. But it does not appear that Ibsen madefriends; if so, they were few, and they were as quiet as himself. Evenin these early years he did not invite confidences, and no one foundhim wearing his heart upon his sleeve. He went through his work withouteffusion, and there is no doubt that what leisure he enjoyed he spent instudy, mainly of dramatic literature. 

His reading must have been limited by his insensibility to foreignlanguages. All through his life he forgot the tongues of other countriesalmost faster than he gained them. Probably, at this time, he had begunto know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluencywhich was, it appears, always ungrammatical. But, as is not unfrequentwith a man who is fond of reading but no linguist, Ibsen's French andEnglish came and went in a trembling uncertainty. As time passed on, hegave up the effort to read, even a newspaper, in either language. 

The mile-stones in this otherwise blank time are the original playswhich, perhaps in accordance with some clause in his agreement, heproduced at his theatre in the first week of January in each year. Alist of them cannot be spared in this place to the most indolent ofreaders, since it offers, in a nutshell, a résumé of what the busyimagination of Ibsen was at work upon up to his thirtieth year. Hisearliest new-year's gift to the play-goers of Bergen was _St. John'sNight_, 1853, a piece which has not been printed; in 1854 he revived_The Warrior's Barrow_; in 1855 he made an immense although irregularadvance with _Lady Inger at Östraat_; in 1856 he produced _The Feast atSolhoug_; in 1857 a rewritten version of the early _Olaf Liljekrans_. These are the juvenile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted inthe recognized canon of his writings. None of them is completelyrepresentative of his genius, and several are not yet within reach ofthe English reader. Yet they have a considerable importance, and mustdetain us for a while. They are remarkable as showing the vigor of theeffort by which he attempted to create an independent style for himself, no less than the great difficulties which he encountered in followingthis admirable aim. 

_Lady Inger at Östraat_, written in the winter of 1854 but not publisheduntil 1857, is unique among Ibsen's works as a romantic exercise inthe manner of Scribe. It is the sole example of a theme taken by himdirectly from comparatively modern history, and treated purely for itsvalue as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this point of view itcuriously exemplifies a remark of Hazlitt: "The progress of mannersand knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhapsdestroy 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 Gyldenlöve, he was but littleacquainted with the particulars of her history. He conceived her, as hefound her in the incomplete chronicles he consulted, as a Matriarch, a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of anembittered patriotism were legitimately centred. Unfortunately, "theprogress of knowledge, " as Hazlitt would say, exposed the falsity ofthis conception. A closer inspection of the documents, and furtheranalysis of the condition of Norway in 1528, destroyed the fairillusion, and showed Ibsen in the light of an indulgent idealist. 

Here is what Jaeger [Note: In _En literaert Livsbillede_] has to give usof the disconcerting results of research:

In real life Lady Inger was not a woman formed upon so grand a plan. Shewas the descendant of an old and noble family which had preservedits dignity, and she consequently was the wealthiest landowner in thecountry. 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 patrioticconsiderations ever affected her conduct. The motive power of heractions was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly inan amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and her status. We find her, for instance, on one occasion seizing the estates of aneighbor, and holding them till she was actually forced to resign them. When she gave her daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it wasto secure direct advantage from alliance with the most high-bornsons-in-law procurable. When she took a convent under her protection, she contrived to extort a rent which well repaid her. Even for agood action she exacted a return, and when she offered harbor to thepersecuted Chancellor, she had the adroitness to be well rewarded by alarge sum in rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden. 

All this could not fail to be highly exasperating to Ibsen, who had setout to be a realist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of historyof having been an idealist of the rose-water class. No wonder that henever touched the sequence of modern events any more. 

There is some slight, but of course unconscious, resemblance to_Macbeth_ in the external character of _Lady Inger_. This play hassomething of the roughness of a mediaeval record, and it depicts acondition of life where barbarism uncouthly mingles with a certainluxury of condition. There is, however, this radical difference that in_Lady Inger_ there is nothing preternatural, and it is, indeed, in thisplay that Ibsen seems first to appreciate the value of a stiff attentionto realism. The romantic elements of the story, however, completelydominate his imagination, and when we have read the play carefully whatremains with us most vividly is the picturesqueness and unity ofthe scene. The action, vehement and tumultuous as it is, takes placeentirely within the walls of Östraat 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 takenby huge and portable candlesticks that it might be called the Tragedy ofthe Candelabra. Through the windows, on the landward side, a processionof mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each fraughtwith 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 thecharacters, and particularly of that of the Matriarch herself. Ingeris described to us as the Mother of the Norwegian People, as the onestrong, inflexible and implacable brain moving in a world of depressedand 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 IngerGyldenlöve. We have approached the moment of crisis when the fortunesand the fates of Norway rest upon the firmness of this majestic woman. Inger is driven forward on the tide of circumstance, and, however shemay ultimately fail, we demand evidence of her inherent greatness. This, however, we fail to receive, and partly, no doubt, because Ibsen wasstill distracted at the division of the ways. 

Oehlenschläger, if he had attempted this theme, would have made noattempt after subtlety of character painting and still less aftercorrectness of historic color. He would have given small shrift to OlafSkaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, theMother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had agreat simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen, already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is everything, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon andthe finished work. 

Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress us with greatness. "Thedeed no less than the attempt confounds" her. She displays, from theopening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but excludes all evidenceof her energy. The ascendency of Nils Lykke, over herself and over hersingularly and unconvincingly modern daughter, Elima, in what does itconsist? In a presentation of a purely physical attractiveness; NilsLykke is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fortunes, with impudentease, in the home of his ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in hisonly, 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 iscleared where a heroine like Inger, not young and a victim to herpassions, nor old and delivered to decrepit fears, may show us how awoman of intellect and force can take the place of man. Instead of this, one disguised and anonymous adventurer after another comes forth out ofthe night, and confuses her with pretensions and traps her with deceitsagainst which her intellect protests but her will is powerless tocontend. 

Another feature in the conduct of _Lady Inger_ portrays the ambitiousbut the inexperienced dramatist. No doubt a pious commentator cansuccessfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but the spectatordemands that a play should be clearly and easily intelligible. Theaudience, however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this awful thirdnight after Martinmas, and resents the obscurity of all this intrigue bycandlelight. Why do the various persons meet at Östraat? Who sendsthem? 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 veryawkwardly, by the incessant introduction of narrative. The confused andmelodramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils Lykke and Skaktavlis of central importance, but what is it about? The business withLucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Webster orof Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings are slurred over by theenthusiastic critics of Scandinavia, yet they call for indulgence. Thefact is that _Lady Inger_ is a brilliant piece of romantic extravagance, which is extremely interesting in illuminating the evolution of Ibsen'sgenius, and particularly as showing him in the act of emancipatinghimself from Danish traditions, but which has little positive value as adrama. 

The direct result of the failure of _Lady Inger_--for it did not pleasethe play-goers of Bergen and but partly satisfied its author--was, however, to send him back, for the moment, more violently than ever tothe Danish tradition. Any record of this interesting phase in Ibsen'scareer is, however, complicated by the fact that late in his life (in1883) he did what was very unusual with him: he wrote a detailed accountof the circumstances of his poetical work in 1855 and 1856. He denied, in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poetwhom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced themovement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainderof his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism, and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted forgospel. However, literary history must be built on the evidencebefore it, and the actual text of _The Feast at Solhoug_, and of _OlafLiljekrans_ must be taken in spite of anything their author chose to saynearly thirty years afterwards. Great poets, without the least wish tomystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover their tracks. " Tennyson, inadvanced years, denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley orKeats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his style of the lyricaldramas of Hertz. But we must appeal from the arrogance of old age to theactual works of youth. 

Henrik Hertz (1798-1870) was the most exquisite, the most delicate, of the Danish writers of his age. He was deeply impressed with theimportance of form in drama, and at the height of his powers he began tocompose rhymed plays which were like old ballads put into dialogue. His comedy of _Cupid's Strokes of Genius_ (1830) began a series oftragi-comedies which gradually deepened in passion and melody, till theyculminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage, _Svend Dyring's House_ (1837) and _King René's Daughter_ (1845). Thegenius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in allEurope there were not two authors less alike. Hertz would have pleasedKenelm Digby, and if that romantic being had read Danish, the poet ofchivalry must have had a niche in _The Broad Stone of Honour_. Hertz'sstyle is delicate to the verge of sweetness; his choice of words isfantastically exquisite, yet so apposite as to give an impression of theinevitable. He cares very little for psychological exactitude or truthof observation; but he is the very type of what we mean by a verbalartist. 

Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and possibly with the person, ofHertz, when he was in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt whateverthat, while he was anxiously questioning his own future, and consciousof crude faults in _Lady Inger_, he set himself, as a task, to write inthe manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt that it was a deliberateexercise, and we see the results in _The Feast at Solhoug_ and in _OlafLiljekrans_. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and prose, likeHertz's romantic dramas; there is the same determination to achieve thechivalric ideal; but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master. Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering about him, dances withoutan ungraceful gesture through the elaborate and yet simple masque thathe has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high and sudden flights ofmetrical writing, but breaks down surprisingly at awkward intervals, anddisplays a hopeless inconsistency between his own nature and the mediumin which he is forcing himself to write. As a proof that the similaritybetween _The Feast at Solhoug_ and _Svend Dyring's House_ is accidental, it has been pointed out that Ibsen produced his own play on the Bergenstage in January, 1856, and revived Hertz's a month later. It might, surely, be more sensibly urged that this fact shows how much he wascaptivated by the charm of the Danish dramatist. 

The sensible thing, in spite of Ibsen's late disclaimer, is to supposethat, 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 hadmost to teach him. On the boards at Bergen, _The Feast at Solhoug_ wasa success, while _Olaf Liljekrans_ was a failure; but neither incidentcould have meant very much to Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet wholived in the future, was waiting and watching for the development of hisown genius. Slowly, without precocity, without even that joy in strengthof maturity which comes to most great writers before 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 remoteand imperfectly civilized country to contend against, but because hiscritical sense was acute enough to teach him that he himself was stillunripe, still unworthy of the fame that he thirsted for. He had noteven the consolation which a proud confidence in themselves gives to theunappreciated young, for in his heart of hearts he knew that he had asyet done nothing which deserved the highest praise. But his imaginationwas expanding with a steady sureness, and the long years of hisapprenticeship were drawing to a close. 

Ibsen was now, like other young Norwegian poets, and particularlyBjörnson, coming into the range of that wind of nationalisticinspiration which had begun to blow down from the mountains and tofill every valley with music. The Norwegians were discovering that theypossessed a wonderful hidden treasure in their own ancient poetry andlegend. It was a gentle, clerically minded poet--himself the son of apeasant--Jörgen Moe (1813-82), long afterwards Bishop of Christianssand, who, as far back as 1834, began to collect from peasants the folk-talesof Norway. The childlike innocence and playful humor of these storieswere charming to the mind of Moe, who was fortunately joined by astronger though less delicate spirit in the person of Peter ChristianAsbjörnsen. Their earliest collection of folk-lore in collaborationappeared in 1841, but it was the full edition of 1856 which produced anational sensation, and doubtless awakened Ibsen in Bergen. Meanwhile, in 1853, M. B. Landstad had published the earliest of his collectionsof the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M. Lindeman in the sameyears (1853-59) was publishing, in installments, the peasant melodies ofNorway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Icelandic, was studying the ancientsagas in the faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and allcombined to determine him to make an experiment in a purely national andarchaistic direction. 

Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his theory, has given rathera confused account of the circumstances that led to the compositionof his next play, _The Vikings at Helgeland_. But it is clear that inlooking through Petersen for a subject which would display, in broad andprimitive forms, the clash of character in an ancient Norwegian family, he fell upon "Volsungasaga, " and somewhat rashly responded to itsvigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "thetitanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and otherpro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions. " Hebelieved that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "ournational epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase in hisessay which is very interesting, in the light it throws upon the objectwhich the author had before him in writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_. He says clearly--and this was intended as a revolt against the traditionof Oehlenschläger--"it was not my aim to present our mythic world, butsimply our life in primitive times. " Brandes says of this departure thatit is "indeed a new conquest, but, like so many conquests, associatedwith very extensive plundering. "

In turning to an examination of _The Vikings_, the first point whichdemands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over thearts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothingof the lyrical triviality of the verse in _The Feast at Solhoug_ aboutthe trenchant prose of _The Vikings_, and the crepuscular dimnessof _Lady Inger_ is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductorof the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do andmean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucentpresentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of theirvalue. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of _The Vikings atHelgeland_, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in ourcriticism of the author's choice of a subject. It is valuable to compareIbsen's treatment of Icelandic family-saga with that of William Morris;let us say, in _The Lovers of Gudrun_. That enchanting little epic dealswith an episode from one of the great Iceland narratives, and followsit much more closely than Ibsen's does. But we are conscious of a lesspainful effort and of a more human result. Morris does successfullywhat Ibsen unsuccessfully aimed at doing: he translates the heroic andhalf-fabulous action into terms that are human and credible. 

It was, moreover, an error of judgment on the part of the Norwegianplaywright to make his tragedy a mosaic of effective bits borrowedhither and thither from the Sagas. Scandinavian bibliography has toiledto show his indebtedness to this tale and to that, and he has beenaccused of concealing his plagiarisms. But to say this is to miss themark. A poet is at liberty to steal what he will, if only he builds histhefts up into a living structure of his own. For this purpose, however, it is practically found that, owing perhaps to the elastic consistencyof 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 Hiördis on the stage, in the opening act, marks, perhaps, the first occasion on which Ibsen had put forth his fullstrength as a playwright. This entrance of Hiördis ought to be extremelyeffective; in fact, we understand, it rarely is. The cause of thisdisappointment can easily be discovered. It is the misfortune of TheVikings that it is hardly to be acted by mortal men. Hiördis herself issuperhuman; she has eaten the heart of a wolf, she claims direct descentfrom a race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur about the conceptionof her form and character, but it is a grandeur which might well daunta human actress. One can faintly imagine the part being played by Mrs. Siddons, with such an extremity of fierceness and terror that ladies andgentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in hysterics, as in thedays of Byron. Where Hiördis insults her guests, and contrivesthe horrid murder of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have astage-dilemma presented to us-either the actress must treat the sceneinadequately, or else intolerably. _Ne pueros coram populo Medeatrucidet_, and we shrink from Hiördis with a physical disgust. Her greathands and shrieking mouth are like Bellona's, and they smell of blood. 

What is true of Hiördis is true in less degree of all the charactersin _The Vikings_. They are "great beautiful half-witted men, " as Mr. Chesterton 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 Örnulf and his seventerrible sons must have appeared to Kaare the peasant, and this is how, to tell the truth, they would in real life appear to us. The persons in_The Vikings at Helgeland_ are so primitive that they scarcely appeal toour sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color that the poethas lavished upon them, and the majestic sentiments which he has putinto their mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helgeland must haveregarded them as those of Surbiton regarded the beings who were shotdown from Mars in Mr. Wells' blood-curdling story. 

_The Vikings at Helgeland_ is a work of extraordinary violence andagitation. The personages bark at one another like seals and roar likesea-lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night. " Örnulf, the agedfather of a grim and speechless clan, is sorely wounded at the beginningof 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 foreshadowedvarious features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here is his favoriteconventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnarwhimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequitedself-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mysticalwhite bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fairto say that there is more than this to applaud in _The Vikings atHelgeland_; it moves on a consistent and high level of austereromantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more than anyScandinavian critic has done, justly draws attention to the nobility ofÖrnulf's entrance in the third act. Yet, on the whole, I confess myselfunable to be surprised at the severity with which Heiberg judged _TheVikings_ at its first appearance, a severity which must have woundedIbsen to the quick. 

The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in Ibsen's condition. The periodfor which he had undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had now cometo a close, and he was not anxious to prolong it. He had had enoughof Bergen, to which only one chain now bound him. Those who read theincidents of a poet's life into the pages of his works may gratify theirtendency by seeing in the discussions between Dagny and Hiördis someecho of the thoughts which were occupying Ibsen's mind in relationto the married state. Since his death, the story has been told of hislove-affair with a very young girl, Rikke Holst, who had attracted hisnotice by throwing a bunch of wild flowers in his face, and whom hefollowed and desired to marry. Her father had rejected the proposal withindignation. Ibsen had suffered considerably, but this was, after all, an early and a very fugitive sentiment, which made no deep impression onhis heart, although it seems to have always lingered in his memory. 

There had followed a sentiment much deeper and much more emphatic. Acharming, though fragmentary, set of verses, addressed in January, 1856, to Miss Susannah Thoresen, show that already for a long while he hadcome to regard this girl of twenty as "the young dreaming enigma, " thepossible solution of which interested him more than that of any otherliving problem. It was more than the conversation of a versifying loverwhich made Ibsen speak of Miss Thoresen's "blossoming child-soul" as thebourne of his ambitions. In his dark way, he was already violently inlove with her. 

The household of her father, Hans Conrad Thoresen, was the mostcultivated in Bergen. He himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was abookish, meditative man of no particular initiative, but he had married, as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh, a Dane by birth, and for a longtime, with the possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland'ssister, the most active woman of letters in Norway. Mrs. Thoresen wasthe step-mother of Susannah, the only child of her husband's secondmarriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and Ibsen a strong friendship hadsprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen'sbest letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She workedhard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French, and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of herown pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with whichher name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long asIbsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on thestage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine yearshis senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must havebeen a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet. Andnow the wise Magdalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating tohim the best treasure of the family circle, the gay and yet mysteriousSusannah. 

While he was writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_, and courting SusannahThoresen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settlein Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned, thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence ofsix years. Now began another period of six years more, these the mostpainful in Ibsen's life, when, as Halvorsen has said, he had to fightnot merely for the existence of himself and his family, but for the veryexistence of Norwegian poetry and the Norwegian stage. This struggle wasan excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled withdebts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with furtherresponsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondaryhouse, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink ofbankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in thecountry that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to courtstarvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. Theonly 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 pointof view, the labors of the nationalists had made themselves felt;the folk-lore of Landstad, Moe and Asbjörnsen had impressed youngimaginations. In some of its forms the development was unpleasing anddiscouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies ofAndreas Munch (_Salomon de Caus_, 1855; _Lord William Russell_, 1857)was, for instance, an irritating step in the wrong direction. Thenew-born school of prose fiction, with Björnson as its head (_SynnöveSolbakken_, 1857; _Arne_, 1858), with Camilla Collett's _Prefect'sDaughters_, 1855, as its herald; with Östgaard's sketches of peasantlife and humors in the mountains (1852)--all this was a direct menaceto the popularity of the national stage, offering an easy and alluringalternative for home-loving citizens. Was it certain that the classicDanish, which alone Ibsen cared to write, would continue to be thelanguage of the cultivated classes in Norway? Here was Ivar Aasen (in1853) showing that the irritating landsmaal could be used for prose andverse. 

Wherever he turned Ibsen saw increased vitality, but in shapes that wereeither useless or antagonistic to himself, and all that was harsh andsaturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of hislife, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortuneand men's eyes, " unappreciated and ready to doubt the reality of his owngenius; 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 literarycoteries may be gathered from the little fact that the species ofofficial anthology of _Modern Norwegian Poets_, published in 1859, though it netted the shallows of national song very closely, containednot 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 suddenlytook wings; he conceived, in the summer of 1858, what finally became, five years later, his first acknowledged masterpiece, and perhapsthe most finished of all his writings, the sculptural tragedy of _ThePretenders_. 

_The Pretenders_ (_Kongsemnerne_, properly stuff from which Kings can bemade) is the earliest of the plays of Ibsen in which the psychologicalinterest is predominant, and in which there is no attempt to disguisethe fact. Nothing that has since been written about this drama, thevery perfection of which is baffling to criticism, has improved upon theimpression which Georg Brandes received from it when he first read itforty years ago. The passage is classic, and deserves to be cited, ifonly as perhaps the very earliest instance in which the genius ofIbsen was rewarded by the analysis of a great critic. Brandes wrote (in1867):--

What is it that The Pretenders treats of? Looked at simply, it is an oldstory. We all know the tale of Aladdin and Nureddin, the simplelegend in the Arabian Nights, and our great poet's [Oehlenschläger's]incomparable poem. In _The Pretenders_ two figures again stand opposedto one another as the superior and the inferior being, an Aladdin anda Nureddin nature. It is towards this contrast that Ibsen has hithertounconsciously directed his endeavors, just as Nature feels her way inher blind preliminary attempts to form her types. Håkon and Skule arepretenders to the same throne, scions of royalty out of whom a king maybe made. But the first is the incarnation of fortune, victory, right andconfidence; the second--the principal figure in the play, masterly inits truth and originality--is the brooder, a prey to inward struggle andendless distrust, brave and ambitious, with perhaps every qualificationand claim to be king, but lacking the inexpressible, impalpable somewhatthat would give a value to all the rest--the wonderful Lamp. "I am aking's arm, " he says, "mayhap a king's brain as well; but Håkon is thewhole king. " "You have wisdom and courage, and all noble gifts of themind, " says Håkon to him; "you are born to stand nearest a king, but notto be a king yourself. "

To a poet the achievements of his greatest contemporaries in theircommon art have all the importance of high deeds in statesmanship andwar. It is, therefore, by no means extravagant to see in the nobleemulation of the two dukes in _The Pretenders_ some reflection ofIbsen's attitude to the youthful and brilliant Björnson. Theluminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence and good fortune ofBjörnson-Håkon could not but offer a violent contrast with the gloom andhesitation, the sick revulsions of hope and final lack of conviction, of Ibsen-Skule. It was Björnson's "belt of strength, " as it was Håkon's, that he had utter belief in himself, and with this his rival could notyet girdle himself. "The luckiest man is the greatest man, " says BishopNicholas in the play, and Björnson seemed in these melancholy years aslucky as Ibsen was unlucky. 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 reachedto turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm undDrang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature wereawakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of hisage. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase meltedaway, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but nolonger the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, awork of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental sectionof Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex ofhis national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _TheVikings 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 sectionwhich overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramaticrhyme. 

With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a greatdifference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this mustbe borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing thesharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_, was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had beenrampant 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 handsenjoyed. Polemical literature, if seldom of a high class, was abundantand was much appreciated. The masterpiece of modern Norwegian poetrywas, still, the satiric cycle of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, thetone was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled more violently, thanEnglish taste at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed tocrush 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 manner of reproaches, " asDryden said. 

Yet it was not an age of gross and open vices; manners were notflagitious, they were merely of a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown withanger as with wine, could find no outrageous offences to lash, and allhe could invite the age to do was to laugh at certain conventions and toreconsider some prejudicated opinions. He had to be pungent, not openlyferocious; he had to be sarcastic and to treat the current codeof morals as a jest. He found the society around him excessivelydistasteful to him, but there were no crying evils of a political orethical kind to be stigmatized. What was open to him was what an oldwriter of our own defined as "a sharp, well-mannered way of laughing afolly out of countenance. "

Unfortunately, the people laughed at will never consent to think the waywell mannered, and Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste, " thatvaguest and most insidious of accusations. We are told that he began hisenterprise in prose [Note: "_Svanhild_: a Comedy in three acts and inprose: 1860, " is understood to exist still in manuscript], but foundthat too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity ofNorway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form shouldbe adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccableperfection of his later colloquial prose. He started _Love's Comedy_, therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is notcertain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attackshould take. He was very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he waseasily convinced that the times were out of joint. Then he observed thatif there was anything that the Norwegian upper classes prided themselvesupon it was their conduct of betrothal and marriage. Plato had said thatthe familiarity of young persons before marriage prevented enmityand disappointment in later years, that it was useful to know thepeculiarities of temperament beforehand, and so, being accustomed tothem, to discount them. But Ibsen was not of this opinion, or rather, perhaps, he did not choose to be. The extremely slow and public methodof betrothal in the North gave him his first opportunity. 

It is with a song, in the original one of the most delicious ofhis lyrics, that he opens the campaign. To a miscellaneous party ofPhilistines circled around the tea table, "all sober and all ----" therebellious 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. 

In the sexual struggle, that is to say, the lovers should not pause toconsider the worldly advantages of their match, but should fly insecret to each other's arms. By the law of battle, the female should besnatched to the conqueror's saddle-bow, and ridden away with intothe night, not subjected to the jokes and the good advice and theimpertinent congratulations of the clan. Young Lochinvar does not waitto ask the counsel of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of heraunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where ford there is none. Ibsenis in favor of the _mariage de convenance_, which suppresses, withoutfavor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above all, anything is better thanthe publicity, the meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal, whichkills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are apt to break their owneggs if intruding hands have touched them. 

This is the central point in _Love's Comedy_, but there is much besidethis in its reckless satire on the "sanctities" of domestic life. Theburden of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the impertinent poettouches with levity upon the question of the duration of marriage:

 With my living, with my singing, I will tear the hedges down! 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 iscertainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegiansociety which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. Aprominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert bodythe arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long wasunforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsendefinitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portraitof Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks foran audience, was not less deeply outraged by the want of indulgencewhich he had shown for all forms of amorous sentiment, although Ibsenhad really, through his satire on the methods of betrothal, risento something like a philosophical examination of the essence of loveitself. 

To Brandes, who reproached him for not recording the history of idealengagements, and who remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes androtten potatoes in this world, " Ibsen cynically replied, "I am afraidnone of the sound ones have come under my notice"; and when Guldstadproves to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount importance of creaturecomforts, the last word of distrust in the sustaining power of love hadbeen said. The popular impression of Ibsen as an "immoral" writer seemsto 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 hismisfortunes. These now gathered over his head and threatened to submergehim altogether. He was perhaps momentarily saved by the publication of_Terje Vigen_, which enjoyed a solid popularity. This is the principaland, indeed, almost the only instance in Ibsen's works of what theNorthern critics call "epic, " but what we less ambitiously know as thetale in verse. _Terje Figen_ will never be translated successfully intoEnglish, for it is written, with brilliant lightness and skill, in anadaptation of the Norwegian ballad-measure which it is impossible toreproduce with felicity in our language. 

Among Ibsen's writings _Terje Vigen_ is unique as a piece of puresentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony orpungency. 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 masterpiece of what we may define as the"dash-away-a-manly-tear" class of narrative. It is extremely wellwritten and picturesque, but the wonder is that, of all people in theworld, Ibsen should have written it. 

His short lyric poems of this period betray much more clearly the realtemper of the man. They are filled full and brimming over with longingand impatience, with painful passion and with hope deferred. It is inthe strident lyrics Ibsen wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can bestread the record of his mind, and share its exasperations, and wonderat its elasticity. The series of sonnets _In a Picture Gallery_ is astrangely violent confession of distrust in his own genius; the _Epistleto H. O. Blom_ a candid admission of his more than distrust in thetalent and honesty of others. It was the peculiarity and danger ofIbsen's position that he represented no one but himself. For instance, the liberty of many of the expressions in _Love's Comedy_ led thosewho were beginning a movement in favor of the emancipation of womento believe that Ibsen was in sympathy with them, but he was not. Allthrough his life, although his luminous penetration into character ledhim to be scrupulously fair in his analysis of female character, he wasnever a genuine supporter of the extension of public responsibility tothe sex. A little later (in 1869), when John Stuart Mill's _Subjectionof Women_ produced a sensation in Scandinavia, and met with manyenthusiastic supporters, Ibsen coldly reserved his opinion. He wasalways 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'sComedy_, and it would not even have been printed but for the zeal of theyoung novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great honor, bought for about£35 the right to publish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he wasediting. Then the storm broke out; the press was unanimously adverse, and in private circles abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In 1862the second theatre became bankrupt, and Ibsen was thrown on the world, the most unpopular man of his day, and crippled with debts. It is truethat he was engaged at the Christiania Theatre at a nominal salary ofabout a pound a week, but he could not live on that. In August, 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 Northerncountries. Sums were voted to Björnson and Vinje, but to Ibsen not apenny. By some influence, however, for he was not without friends, he was granted in March, 1862, a travelling grant of less than £20to enable him to wander for two months in western Hardanger and thedistricts around the Sognefjord for the purpose of collecting folk-songsand legends. The results of this journey were prepared for publication, but never appeared. This interesting excursion, however, has left itsmark stamped broadly upon _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. 

All through 1863 his condition was critical. He determined that his onlyhope was to exile himself definitely from Norway, which had become toohot to hold him. Various private friends generously helped him over thisdreadful time of adversity, earning a gratitude which, if it was notexpansive, was lifelong. Very grudging recognition of his gifts wasat length made by the Government in the shape of another triflingtravelling grant (March, 1863), again a handsome sum being awarded toBjörnson, his popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair, to theKing himself, who conferred upon him a small pension of £90 a year, which for the immediate future stood between this great poet andstarvation. The news of it was received in Christiania by the press interms of despicable insult. 

But in June of this _année 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, he found his brilliant antagonist, Björnson, at Bergen on alike errand, and renewed an old friendship with this warm-hearted andpowerful man of genius, destined to play through life the part of Håkonto Ibsen's Skule. They spent much of the subsequent winter together. As Halvdan Koht has excellently said: "Their intercourse brought themcloser to each other than they had ever been before. They felt that theywere inspired by the same ideas and the same hopes, and they sufferedthe same bitter disappointments. With anguish they watched the Danishbrother-nation's desperate struggle against the superior power ofGermany, and save a province with a population of Scandinavian race andspeech taken from Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom, whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in spite of solemn promises, refrained from yielding any assistance. " An attack on Holstein (December22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish War, to which a disastrousand humiliating termination was brought in the following August. 

In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his nativecountry. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as wellas Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Düpper alonestood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in theindignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Lübeckand Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reachedthat city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into thearms of its antique repose. "Here at last, " he wrote to Björnson, "there is blessed peace, " and he settled himself down to the closecontemplation of poetry. 

The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter tothe glow and splendor of Italy acted on the poet's spirit like anenchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome's "azuresky, flowers, ruins, statues, music, " and at first the contrastbetween the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almostintolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed airand become as a little child. There has scarcely been another exampleof a writer of the first class who, deeply solicitous about beauty, butdebarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, hasbeen suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart ofunclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Shelley andKeats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen brokefree from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of hislife, was closing his romantic career. 

Ibsen's earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomedto at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The passionof pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered amongthe vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modernlife, or their original significance. He missed the impress of theindividual on classic sculpture, as he had missed it--the parallel isstrange, but his own--on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He likeda lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt moreat home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architectsthan with artists of a more archaic type. Shelley, we may remember, labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets theattractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavorof the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen's admiration of acertain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worthrecording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who madethat might have made the moon in his leisure moments. 

During the first few months of Ibsen's life in Rome all was chaos inhis mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, theamenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such anart as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend. In September, 1864, he tells Björnson that he is at work on a poem ofconsiderable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_, which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns callit, an "epic" poem; although a sketch for the _Julianus Apostata_ wasalready forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would, sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife andlittle son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joinedhim in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incrediblysmall, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to behungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sortof blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. Hewould loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, orwould loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeksto summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew thatMichelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longingto see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. Hissoul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from theaching maladies of its youth. 

He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, paintersand sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress. But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyricalpoet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory ofhis country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude andgloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded, sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, andalready as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. Buttwo things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a passionate enthusiasm fortheir art, and a rebellious attitude towards their immediate precursorsin it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. Thefriendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the restof their lives, for it was founded on a common basis. 

A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusingimpression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, ChristianMolbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wanderingsilently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets ofhis invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation byhis sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shatteringthe ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries bya running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhatunsympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a moreagreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills, planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemedever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under thevines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would dulybe discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient andself-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thinwine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one ofthese periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly tookfinal shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. InJuly the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the endof September he had completed it. 

_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of hisage. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ andthe graceful wit of _Love's Comedy_ was so great as to be startling. Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translationsare powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery frombeing 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. Björnson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862)was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart inScotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had oncemore shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want ofclearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and someshifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency anda 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 asmanifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as itis surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures ofScandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed, but in its own peculiarprovince it has not been approached. It bears some remote likenessto _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in theliterature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, ofcourse, _Peer Gynt_. 

For a long while it was supposed that the difficulties in the way ofperforming _Brand_ on the public stage were too great to be overcome. But the task was attempted at length, first in Stockholm in 1895; andwithin the last few years this majestic spectacle has been drawn in fullbefore the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscowand elsewhere. In spite of the timid reluctance of managers, whereverthis play is adequately presented, it captures an emotional public at arun. It is an appeal against moral apathy which arouses the languid. Itis a clear and full embodiment of the gospel of energy which awakens andupbraids the weak. In the original, its rush of rhymes produces on thenerves an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as an oration, itis responded to as a great civic appeal; if as a sermon, it is sternlyreligious, and fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain air, with vague bells ringing high up among the glaciers, no one asks exactlywhat _Brand_ expounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent. Witnessedon the living stage, it takes the citadel of the soul by storm. When itis read, the critical judgment becomes cooler. 

Carefully examined, _Brand_ is found to present a disconcerting mixtureof realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, andtheir effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is _Brand_ the expression of Ibsen's ownnature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yethe 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 saidabout them is often dangerously mystifying. He told Georg Brandes thatthe religious vocation of Brand was not essential. "I could have appliedthe whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a politician, as toa priest. " (He was to deal with each of these alternations later on, butwith what a difference!) "I could quite as well, " he persisted, "haveworked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, forinstance, as my hero--assuming, of course, that Galileo should standfirm and never concede the fixity of the earth--or you yourself in yourstruggle with the Danish reactionaries. " This is not to the point, sincein fact neither Georg Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama, could have produced such a capacity for evolution as is presented by thestern priest whose absolute certitude, although founded, one admits, onno rational theory of theology, is yet of the very essence of religion. 

Brand becomes intelligible when we regard him as a character of thetwelfth century transferred to the nineteenth. He has something of Peterthe Hermit in him. He ought to have been a crusading Christian king, fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city ofGod. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord, like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey inthe desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any referenceto accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religiousconventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violentand incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants, but it mustbe an upheaval of all that exists, and it must bring Man into closercontact with God. Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity ismarred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, bythe prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; heis liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and itis by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he isfinally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church. 

The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand withthat extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbé Jules_ of OctaveMirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession ofcrises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weaknessis the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developedwhat the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception ofsuch a rebel's ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammersor Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest ofinsurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track ofhis colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to thecommentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, andendless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and analyzeits forms. 

There is, however, another than the priestly side. The poem contains agreat deal of superficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporaryScandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing in Christiania, of acrafty court in Stockholm, and of Denmark stretching her bleeding handsto her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter localstrain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsencomes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhaustedage, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfinlaughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alonethat matters, " and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridiculeand six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from herrude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up hismotto "All or Nothing, " persistently, almost tiresomely, like amodern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea. More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, notwhite-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutherantheologians, a prototype of violent strength. 

Yet Brand's own mission remains undefined to him--if it ever takes exactshape--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 lovefor the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patienceendures all the cruelties of her husband's fanaticism--it is in Agnesthat Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembitterednote of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is anursling 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, arethe delicate offspring of Italy. 

Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, whichsaw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at oncewelcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen, and the poet's audience was thus very considerably widened. The satireof the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexelspreached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _TheDaughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were analyzed. Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light andshade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of_Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it tookits place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few bookswhich continued, and still continue, steadily to sell. It has alwaysbeen, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the mostpopular of all Ibsen's writings. 

This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniaryfortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like _Brand_, inthe conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not muchexceed £100. Hardly had Ibsen become the object of universal discussionthan he found himself assailed, as never before, by the paralysis ofpoverty. He could not breathe, he could not move; he could not afford tobuy postage stamps to stick upon his business letters. He was threatenedwith the absolute extinction of his resources. At the very time whenCopenhagen was ringing with his praise Ibsen was borrowing money for hismodest food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome. 

In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly nervous condition, in themidst of which he was assailed by a malarious fever which brought himwithin sight of the grave. To the agony of his devoted wife, he lay forsome time between life and death, and the extreme poverty from whichthey suffered made it difficult, and even impossible, for her toprovide for him the alleviations which his state demanded. He graduallyrecovered, however, thanks to his wife's care and to his own magnificentconstitution, but the springs of courage seemed to have snapped withinhis breast. 

In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote aletter to Björnson, "my one and only friend, " which is one of the mostheart-rending documents in the history of literature. Few great spiritshave been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in histhirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits' end to know what toadvise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway, describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously camethe manifest success of _Brand_, and, for the first time, the Norwegianpress recognized the poet's merit. There was a general movement in hisfavor; King Carl graciously received his petition of April 15, andon May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a "poet'spension, " restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs. 

The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where hefound it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills. He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo Gratiosi, two thousandfeet 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 awindow that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracté closingthe horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this timethere are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which areelements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; thedreadful 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 awaylike a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati heknew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for theheavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in theautumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him. He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devotedhimself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which hedescribed as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure oneof 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 wasa whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habituallycomposed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothlyuntil the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on theisland of Ischia. His own account was: "After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_, as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and atSorrento. So far away from one's readers one becomes reckless. This poemcontains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth. My own mother--with the necessary exaggeration--served as the model forAse. " _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end ofthe autumn, and the MS. Was immediately posted to Copenhagen. Noneof the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ nowafflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published inNovember, 1867. 

In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _PeerGynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it madeno direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the laterpoem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educationalpedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. "They havediscovered, " he said, "much more satire in _Peer Gynt_ than was intendedby me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such Iwrote it. " It has been, however, the misfortune of Ibsen that he hasparticularly attracted the attention of those who prefer to see anythingin a poem except its poetry, and who treat all tulips and roses asif they were cabbages for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it issurprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovelypoem shaking the bauble of its fool's cap at them, there can still becommentators who see nothing in _Peer Gynt_ but the "awful interestof the universal problems with which it deals. " This obsession of thecritic to discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has been one of themain causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with whichhis writings have been received by a large section of those readers whoshould naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit andoften reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a longblack coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of theNonconformist conscience. 

Casting aside, therefore, the spurious "lessons" and supposititious"problems" of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize amongits irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Aboveeverything else which we see in _Peer Gynt_ we see its fun and itspicturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-heartedadmirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst oflyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carriedalong its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliantsuccess than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ridealong the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire andfantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dancesunder him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderlessand the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, inthis act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gownride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Böig, giganticgelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anythingelse 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 rankof creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt andgrotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I think, a lower order ofimagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in thepoem, often seems divided from it in tone, style and direction, and ismore like a symbolic or mythical gloss upon the first three acts than acontribution to the growth of the general story. 

Throughout this tangled and variegated scene the spirits of the authorremain almost preposterously high. If it were all hilarity and sardoniclaughter, we should weary of the strain. But physical beauty of the mostenchanting order is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony. It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere to the dramaticliterature of the world, not by Shakespeare himself, is there introducedinto a play so much loveliness of scenery, and such varied and exquisiteappeal to the eyes, as there is in _Peer Gynt_. The fifth act containsmuch which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene sofull of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing elsein drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finestshipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays thecold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush hascontrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girlsthere is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegianpaintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm. " Pages might be filled withpraise of the picturesqueness 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 ownlife's design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or evena successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrotethe first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical classof peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention; he found it inthose rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjörnson and Moe, in whichhe shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Böig, a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception thatthis horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfishnational instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_, which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach toa justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen's graverprophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act, where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songsand tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with theirreproaches. 

_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 itdid not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules mustbe altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book, " he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and ifit is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetryis shall be made to fit my book. " There was a struggle at first againstthis assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is nowgenerally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough toinclude _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be madewide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majesticintellectual caprices. 

[Note. --By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which hashitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send thesepages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in hisposthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary youngman, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna whereBeethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violentlydeprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promisingand remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But inIbsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has inShakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do afterthe 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 otherillustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims fromStendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had broughtwith them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude hadroused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomniadreaming of Italian liberty. _Casa Guidi Windows_ may be taken as theextreme type of the way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He soughtthere, and found, under the transparent azure of the Alban sky, in theharmonious murmurs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the mountains, above all in the gray streets of Rome, that rest of the brain, thatripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after hisrough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his attitude of passiveappreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like any other ofthe illustrious exiles--Landor, who died in Florence a few days afterIbsen settled in Rome. There was a side of character, too, on which theyoung Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius. 

When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Garibaldi, at Genoa, announcedhis intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet'sheart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill, " but left Ibsen simplydisconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would nolonger be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness whichthe Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moralhypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papalfrontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the Frenchwho entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbedsojourn--for he soon determined that if there was going to be civilwar in Italy that country was no home for him--we hear but little. Thisautumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career ofGeorg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whomhe was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we noticethe beginnings of a difference with Björnson, lamentable and hardlyexplicable, starting, it would vaguely seem, out of a sense thatBjörnson did not appreciate the poetry of _Peer Gynt_ at its due value. Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Heiberg, had been lookedupon as the _doyen_ of Danish critics--had pronounced against the poetryof _Peer Gynt_, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods, in a bearishletter, had thrown the blame of this judgment upon Björnson. 

All through these last months in Rome we find Ibsen in the worst ofhumors. If it be admissible to compare him with an animal, he seems thebadger among the writers of his time, nocturnal, inoffensive, solitary, but at the rumor of disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and bitewith terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen was no joke, and in momentsof exasperation he bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Amongother snaps of the pen, he told Björnson that if he was not takenseriously as a poet, he should try his "fate as a photographer. "Björnson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him toput his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsenhimself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and allthe benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidlyforgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorationsfrom kings and ministers; Björnson having determined to reject all suchgewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of accepting (and wearing) everycross and star that was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, thetemptation was wholly problematical in both cases, yet each poet actedon his determination to the end. But Björnson's hint about the comedyseems to have been, for some years, the last flicker of friendshipbetween the two. On this Ibsen presently acted in a manner veryoffensive to Björnson. 

In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be very much indeed incensedwith things in general. "What Norway wants is a national disaster, " heamiably snarled. It was high time that the badger should seek shelter ina new burrow, and in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There was afarewell banquet, at which Julius Lange, who was present, remarks thatIbsen showed a spice of the devil, but "was very witty and amiable. " Hewent to Florence for June, then quitted Italy altogether, settling forthree months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath" in theSalzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he startedhis five-act comedy, _The League of Youth_. All September he spent inMunich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden, which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at oncehe sank down again into his brooding mood of isolation and quietism, roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he hail haunted those of Rome, by night or at unfrequented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors, writing few letters, slowly finishing his "photographic" comedy, whichhe did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although he was stillvery poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write forjournals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at longintervals, with finished works of importance. 

It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closelyinstructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take muchinterest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of allIbsen's mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course ofit, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the localconditions" or "situation. " The play is all concerned with _de lokaleforhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington aboutthe intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being, as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance inNorwegian literature, " [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archerdeliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Björnson's _The NewlyMarried Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a moreamusing comedy. ] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddlyenough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League ofYouth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyanceto the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his ownlanguage; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catchingbut faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did notrealize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "delokale forhold. " When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry, Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and themanners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique. " He was alwayssomething 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 Iread it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of thestilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemnsociety of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim inthe early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all thesensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication withthe excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficultfor an outsider--so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshlyfrom the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth ofCopenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of _TheLeague of Youth_ are old history now. There was the "liberal" element inNorwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and morehampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence ofSören Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views, who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of anypensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen. 

Now Björnson, in the development of his career as a political publicist, had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideasand this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense beforeJaabaek, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective ofDresden, genuinely believed that Björnson, with his ardor and his energyand his eloquence, war, becoming a national danger. We have seen thatBjörnson had piqued Ibsen's vanity about _Peer Gynt_, and nothingexasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted ona private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Björnson was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Björnson must always be leading the majority, Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. Theywere doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships bycreating the figure of Stensgaard, in _The League of Youth_, a frothyand mischievous demagogue whose rhetoric irresistibly reminded everyone of Björnson's rolling oratory. What Björnson, not without dignity, objected to was not so much the personal attack, as that the whole playattempted "to paint our young party of liberty as a troop of pushing, phrase-mongering adventurers, whose patriotism lay solely in theirwords. " Ibsen acknowledged that that was exactly his opinion of them, and what could follow for such a disjointed friendship but anger andsilence?

The year 1869, which we now enter, is remarkable in the career of Ibsenas being that in which he travelled most, and appeared on the surface ofsociety in the greatest number of capacities. He was enabled to do thisby a considerable increase in his pension. First of all, he was inducedto pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being seized with a suddenstrong desire to study conditions in Sweden, a country which he hadhitherto 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 acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere withthe highest distinction. Ibsen and Björnson were how beginning to berecognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balanceas the Mr. And Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined. It was doubtless Björnson's emphatic attacks on Sweden that at thismoment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in suchclover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest atthe opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden incursion of an Orientalpotentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect thatillustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony. The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to benaturally 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 onOctober 18; Ibsen, therefore, just missed the scandal and uproar causedby the play in Norway. In company with eighty-five other people, allillustrious guests of the Khedive, and under the care of Mariette Bey, Ibsen made a twenty-four days' expedition up the Nile into Nubia, andthen back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on November 17, in the companyof an empress and several princes of the blood, he saw the Canalformally opened and graced a grand processional fleet that sailed outfrom Port Said towards Ismaila. But on the quay at Port Said Ibsen'sNorwegian mail was handed to him, and letters and newspapers alike werefull of the violent scenes in the course of which _The League of Youth_had been hissed down at Christiania. Then and there he sent his defianceback to Norway in _At Port Saïd_, one of the most pointed and effectiveof 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. 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 byAlexandria and Paris, and was in Dresden again in December. 

The year of 1870 drove him out of Dresden, as the French occupation haddriven him out of Rome. It was essential for him to be at rest in themidst of a quiet and alien population. He was drawn towards Denmark, partly for the sake of talk with Brandes, who had now become a factorin his life, partly to arrange about the performance of one of his earlyworks, and in particular of _The Pretenders_. No definite plan, however, had been formed, when, in the middle of June, war was declared betweenGermany and France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony, and settled for three months in Copenhagen, where his reception wascharmingly sympathetic. By the beginning of October, after the fall ofStrasburg and the hemming in of Metz, however, it was plain on whichside the fortunes of the war would lie, and Ibsen returned "as froma rejuvenating bath" of Danish society to a Dresden full of Frenchprisoners, a Dresden, too, suffering terribly from the paralysis oftrade, and showing a plentiful lack of enthusiasm for Prussia. 

Ibsen turned his back on all such vexatious themes, and set himself tothe collecting and polishing of a series of lyrical poems, the _Digte_of 1871, the earliest, and, indeed, the only such collection that hepublished. We may recollect that, at the very same moment, with far lesscause to isolate himself from the horrors of war, Théophile Gautier wasgiving the last touches to _Emaux et Camées_. In December, 1870, Ibsenaddressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his "Balloon-Letter, " aHudibrastic rhymed epistle in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a gooddeal that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminiscences of his tripthrough Egypt, and some powerful ironic references to the caravan ofGerman invaders, with its Hathor and its Horus, which was then rushingto the assault of Paris under the doleful colors of the Prussian flag. Ibsen's sarcasms are all at the ugliness and prosaic utilitarianism ofthe Germans; "Moltke, " he says, "has killed the poetry of battles. "

Ibsen was now greatly developing and expanding his views, and forminga world-policy of his own. The success of German discipline deeplyimpressed him, and he thought that the day had probably dawned whichwould be fatal to all revolt and "liberal rebellion" for the future. More than ever he dreaded the revolutionary doctrines of men likeJaabaek and Björnson, which would lead, he thought, to bloodshed andnational disaster. The very same events were impressing Goldwin Smith atthe very same moment with his famous prophecy that the abolition of alldynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquilinauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world. So history moves doggedly on, _propheten rechts, propheten links_, aperfectly impassive _welt-kind_ in the middle of them. In CopenhagenIbsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long anddangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with thisstill unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. ToBrandes Ibsen wrote more freely than to any one else about the greatevents which were shaking the face of Europe and occupying so much ofboth their thoughts:--

The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as thenew, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a newage. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is hightime they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbsfrom the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which allnutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a newmeaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are nolonger the things they were in the days of the late-lamented Guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand, and therefore, I hatethem. They want their own special revolutions--revolutions in externals, in politics and so forth. But all this is mere trifling. What isall-important is the revolution of the Spirit of Man. 

This revolution, as exemplified by the Commune in Paris, did not satisfythe anticipations which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took advantage ofthis to tell him that he had not yet studied politics minutely enoughfrom the scientific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did notpossess as knowledge came to him, to a certain degree, as intuition orinstinct. "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 muchreflection. " Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame ofmind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of whichhis imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; atanother time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, andto represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presentsthem to him. In neither attitude, however, is there discernible anytrace of the moral physician, and this is the central distinctionbetween Tolstoi and Ibsen, whose methods, at first sight, sometimesappear so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition, but alwayswith the purpose, if he can, of curing it; Ibsen gives it even closerclinical attention, but he leaves to others the care of removing adisease which his business is solely to diagnose. 

The _Poems_, after infinite revision, were published at length, in avery large edition, on May 3, 1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad toget this book off his hands was that it enabled him to concentrate histhoughts on the great drama he had been projecting, at intervals, forseven years past, the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story ofJulian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) andfound the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss, Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through theautumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability bythe intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened toreprint, for his own profit, Ibsen's early and insufficiently protectedwritings. This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own country, wherethe very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subjecthe used language of tiresome over-emphasis. "From Sweden, from Denmark, from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is fromNorway that everything bad comes upon me. " It was indicated to would-beNorwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegianfriends, he said, were "a costly luxury" which he was obliged to denyhimself. 

The First Part of _Julian_ was finished on Christmas Day, but it tookover a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, wascompleted. "A Herculean labor, " the author called it, when he finallylaid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been veryquietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tempered by genial visitsfrom some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularlyHans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formalintercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; allthis time, let us remember, no Norwegians--"by request. " The summer wasspent in long rambles over the mountains of Austria, ending up with amonth of deep repose in Berchtesgaden. The next year was like unto this, except that its roaming, restless summer closed with several months inVienna; and on October 17, 1873, _nonum in annum_, after the Horatiancounsel, the prodigious masterpiece, _Emperor and Galilean_, waspublished in Copenhagen at last. 

Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise andfall of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is notdifficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the mostspeculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquitythat fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians havecelebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose whichwere combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beautyand an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship. There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purpleconvention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended himto Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity heoffered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modernworld all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas ofcharacter 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 andmelancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of thedifficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forminga concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn tothe theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself baffledby the paradoxes which he encountered, and by the contradictions of afigure seen darkly through a mist of historical detraction. 

He met these difficulties as well as he could, and as a prudent dramaticpoet should, by close and observant study of the document. He endeavoredto reconcile the evident superiority of Julian with the absurdeccentricities of his private manners and with the futility of hispublic acts. He noted all the Apostate's foibles by the side of hisvirtues and his magnanimities. He traced without hesitation the courseof that strange insurrection which hurled a coarse fanatic from thethrone, only to place in his room a literary pedant with inked fingersand populous beard. He accepted everything, from the parasites to thepurple slippers. The dangers of so humble an attendance upon historywere escaped with success in the first instalment of his "world drama. "In the strong and mounting scenes of _Caesar's Apostacy_, therapidity with which the incidents succeed one another, their inherentsignificance, the innocent splendor of Julian's mind in its firstemancipation from the chains of false faith, combine to produce aneffect of high dramatic beauty. Georg Brandes, whose instinct in suchmatters was almost infallible, when he read the First Part shortlyafter its composition, entreated Ibsen to give this, as it stood, to thepublic, and to let _The Emperor Julian's End_ follow independently. Had Ibsen consented to do this, _Caesar's Fall_ would certainly take ahigher place among his works than it does at present, when its effectis somewhat amputated and its meaning threatened with incoherence by theauthor's apparent _volteface_ in the Second Part. 

It was a lifelong disappointment to Ibsen that _Emperor and Galilean_, on which he expended far more consideration and labor than on any otherof his works, was never a favorite either with the public or among thecritics. With the best will in the world, however, it is not easy tofind full enjoyment in this gigantic work, which by some capriceof style defiant of analysis, lacks the vitality which is usuallycharacteristic of Ibsen's least production. The speeches put into themouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid;as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "Youfeel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with somedreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk. " The scheme of Ibsen's drama wastoo vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt. What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted hereand there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramaticrepresentation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius farbetter to have abandoned any attempt to write a conclusive history, and have selected some critical moment in the life of Julian. He shouldrather have concentrated his energies, independent of the chroniclers, on the resuscitation of that episode, and in the course of it havetrembled less humbly under the uplifted finger of Ammianus. 

Of _Emperor and Galilean_ Ibsen afterwards said: "It was the first" (buthe might have added "the only") "poem which I have written under theinfluence of German ideas. " He was aware of the danger of living toolong away from his own order of thought and language. But it was alwaysdifficult for him, once planted in a place, to pull up his roots. Aweariness took possession of him after the publication of his doubledrama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks acentral joint in the structure of his career, what the architects calla "channel" in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen's work anaspect of solidity and resource. During these years he revised some ofhis early writings, made a closer study of the arts of sculpture andpainting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a very brief sojourn inNorway. In the spring of 1875 he definitely moved with his family fromDresden to Munich. 

The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved very unfortunate. Ibsenwas suspicious, the Norwegians of that generation were constitutionallystiff and reserved; long years among Southern races had accustomed himto a plenitude in gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief timehe was in Norway, from an intolerable _malaise_. Ten years afterwards, in writing to Björnson, the discomfort of that experience was stillunallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly enough, " he said, "to supportmyself 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 weightsettling down on my breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression. Andthis feeling lasted all the time I was at home; I was not myself underthe stare of all those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at thewindows and in the streets. "

Ibsen had now been more than ten years am exile from Norway, and hissentiments with regard 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 lyricalperformances, had opened in the key of unmitigated defiance to popularopinion at home. It was intended to show Norwegians that they mustalter their attitude towards him, as he would never change his behaviortowards them. "My countrymen, " he said:--

 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 home. 

 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 wasalmost unchallenged, and he was a name, at least, in Germany. InEngland, since 1872, he had not been without a prophet. But in Italy, Russia, France--three countries upon the intelligence of which he waspresently to make a wide and durable impression--he was still quiteunknown. 

Meanwhile, in glancing over the general literature of Europe, we seehis figure, at the threshold of his fiftieth year, taking greaterand greater prominence. He had become, in the sudden exinction of theillustrious old men of Denmark, the first living writer of the North. Hewas to Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne orRossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainlylyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at leasttill 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If, in the second portion of his career, he resolutely deprived himselfof all indulgence in the ornament of verse, it was a voluntary act ofausterity. It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging the crown ofjewels for the coarse brown cowl of St. Jerome. And now, after a yearor 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 hiscareer, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came tohim, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Björnson suddenlyswooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordidmodern life. This was his first attempt at that "photography by comedy"which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recordedwhat was Ibsen's comment on these two plays, and particularly on _ABankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own nextwork. It is obvious that he perceived that Björnson had carried a veryspirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined todrive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities. 

Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallenupon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a yearhe gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, hewas at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seemsto have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period ofinanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_, which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique inthe fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all. 

Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the exteriors of character. Withhis fiftieth year he presents himself as no more the Poet, but the Manof Business. Molbech told me that at this time the velveteen jacket, symbol of the dear delays of art, was discarded in favor of afrock-coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rathershyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself in frequentstraits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollarbreeding. He cast the suspicion of poetry from him, and with his goldspectacles, his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom and his quickstaccato step, he adopted the pose of a gentleman of affairs, verypositive and with no nonsense about him. 

He had long determined on the wilful abandonment of poetic form, and thefamous statement made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must bequoted, although it is well known, since it contains the clearest of allthe explanations by which Ibsen justified his new departure:--

You are of opinion that the drama [_Emperor and Galilean_] ought to havebeen written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here Imust differ from you. The play is, as you will have observed, conceivedin the most realistic style: the illusion I wished to produce is that ofreality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what hewas reading was something that had really happened. If I had employedverse, I should have counteracted my own intention and preventedthe accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinaryinsignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced intothe play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from oneanother, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the samerhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the naturalcolors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desireto see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of anegro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades therepresentation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation;what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would notlet them talk "the language of the Gods. "

This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, hélas! cette pièce esten vers, et l'ennui s'y promène librement entre les rimes. "

No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held so rigidly to hisintention of reproducing the exact language of real life, as did Ibsenin the series of plays which opens with _The Pillars of Society_. Thisdrama was published in Copenhagen in October, 1877, and was acted almostimmediately in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; it had the good fortune tobe taken up warmly in Germany. What Ibsen's idea was, in the new sort ofrealistic drama which he was inventing, was, in fact, perceived at onceby German audiences, although it was not always approved of. He was theguest of the theatromaniac Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and _The Pillars ofSociety_ was played in many parts of Germany. In Scandinavia the book ofthe play sold well, and the piece had some success on the boards, but itdid not create anything like so much excitement as the author had hopedthat it would. Danish taste pronounced it "too German. "

For the fact that _The Pillars of Society_, except in Scandinavia andGermany, did not then, and never has since, taken a permanent holdupon the theatre, Mr. William Archer gives a reason which cannot becontroverted, namely, that by the time the other foreign publics hadfully awakened to the existence of Ibsen, he himself had so far outgrownthe phase of his development marked by _Pillars of Society_, that theplay already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suitedthe German public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with theirtheatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical intelligence ofthe Anglo-American public, and. .. Below that of the French public. Thisis of course an exaggeration. What I mean is that there was no possiblereason why the countrymen of Augier and Dumas should take any specialinterest in _Pillars of Society_. It was not obviously in advance ofthese masters in technical skill, and the vein of Teutonic sentimentrunning through it could not greatly appeal to the Parisian public ofthat period. 

The subject of _The Pillars of Society_ was the hollowness androttenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prosewhich Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He wasaccused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to havefallen out of touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied in theconvex mirror of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to _ThePillars of Society_ that in it, as little as in _The League of Youth_, 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 wayout of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the"well-made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned bya sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very much ofthe usual "bless-ye-my-children" order. The loss of the Indian Girl ismiraculously prevented, and at the end the characters are solemnized andwarned, yet are left essentially none the worse for their alarm. This, unfortunately, is not the mode in which the sins of scheming peoplefind them out in real life. But to the historical critic it isvery interesting to see Björnson and Ibsen nearer one another in _ABankruptcy_ and _The Pillars of Society_ than they had ever been before. They now started on a course of eager, though benevolent, rivalry whichwas eminently to the advantage of each of them. 

No feature of Ibsen's personal career is more interesting than hisrelation to Björnson. Great as the genius of Ibsen was, yet, rating itas ungrudgingly as possible, we have to admit that Björnson's characterwas the more magnetic and more radiant of the two. Ibsen was a citizenof the world; he belonged, in a very remarkable degree, to the smallclass of men whose intelligence lifts them above the narrowness of localconditions, who belong to civilization at large, not to the systemof one particular nation. He was, in consequence, endowed, almostautomatically, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a centralpoint; if he was to be limited at all, he might be styled European, although, perhaps, few Western citizens would have had less difficultythan he in making themselves comprehended by a Chinese, Japanese orIndian mind of unusual breadth and cultivation. On the other hand, inaccepting the advantages of this large mental outlook, he was forced toabandon those of nationality. No one can say that Ibsen was, until nearthe end of his life, a good Norwegian, and he failed, by his utterances, to vibrate the local mind. But Björnson, with less originality, was thetypical patriot in literature, and what he said, and thought, and wrotewas calculated to stir the local conscience to the depths of its being. 

When, therefore, in 1867, Ibsen, who was bound by all naturalobligations and tendencies to remain on the best terms with Björnson, allowed the old friendship between them to lapse into positiveantagonism, he was following the irresistible evolution of his fate, asBjörnson was following his. It was as inevitable that Ibsen shouldgrow to his full height in solitude as it was that Björnson shouldpine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of popular meetings, torchlight processions of students and passionate appeals to localsentiment. Trivial causes, such as those which we have chronicledearlier, might seem to lead up to a division, but that division wasreally inherent in the growth of the two men. 

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

The reconciliation began, of course, with a gracious movement fromBjörnson. At the end of 1880, writing for American readers, Björnsonhad the generous candor to say: "I think I have a pretty thoroughacquaintance with the dramatic literature of the world, and I have notthe slightest hesitation in saying that Henrik Ibsen possesses moredramatic power than any other play-writer of our day. " When we rememberthat, in France alone, Augier and Dumas _fils_ and Hugo, Halévy andMeilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though asound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said aboutIbsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw behind the altar of a Burmesetemple, came round to Ibsen's ears, and this handsome tribute fromthe rival produced its effect. And when, shortly afterwards, still inAmerica, Björnson was nearly killed in a railway accident, Ibsenbroke the long silence by writing to him a most cordial letter ofcongratulation. 

The next incident was the publication of _Ghosts_, when Björnson, nowthoroughly roused, stood out almost alone, throwing the vast prestigeof his judgment into the empty scale against the otherwise unanimousblack-balling. Then the reconcilement was full and fraternal, and Ibsenwrote from Rome (January 24, 1882), with an emotion rare indeed for him:"The only man in Norway who has frankly, boldly and generously takenmy part is Björnson. It is just like him; he has, in truth, a great, akingly soul; and I shall never forget what he has done now. " Six monthslater, on occasion of Björnson's jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed: "My thanksfor the work done side by side with me in the service of freedom thesetwenty-five years. " These words wiped away all unhappy memories of thepast; they gave public recognition to the fact that, though the twogreat poets had been divided for half a generation by the forces ofcircumstance, they had both been fighting at wings of the same armyagainst the common enemy. 

This, however, takes us for the moment a little too far ahead. After thepublication of _The Pillars of Society_, Ibsen remained quiet for sometime; indeed, from this date we find him adopting the practice which wasto be regular with him henceforth, namely, that of letting his mindlie fallow for one year after the issue of each of his works, and thenspending another year in the formation of the new play. Munich graduallybecame tedious to him, and he justly observed that the pressure ofGerman surroundings was unfavorable to the healthy evolution of hisgenius. In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although it was no longerthe quiet and aristocratic Rome of Papal days, was still immenselyattractive to his temperament. He was now, in some measure, "a person ofmeans, " and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formeda small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed, great care. The result could be seen long afterwards by those whovisited him in his final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of thesumptuous flat in which he spent his old age and in which he died. His taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of thedecline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must beleft for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondnessfor the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only indefiance of Ruskin. 

In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was told him of an incident inthe Danish courts, the adventure of a young married woman in one of thesmall towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts running on a new dramaticenterprise. He was still curiously irritated by contemplating, inhis mind's eye, the "respectable, estimable narrowmindedness andworldliness" of social conditions in Norway, where there was noaristocracy, and where a lower middle-class took the place of anobility, with, as he thought, sordid results. But he was no longersuffering from what he himself had called "the feeling of an insane manstaring at one single, hopelessly black spot. " He went to Amalfi for thesummer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping withhis present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what isprobably the most widely famous of all his works, _A Doll's House_. Theday before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublishedletter of July 4, 1879): "I have been living here with my family sinceSeptember last, and most of that time I have been occupied with the ideaof a new dramatic work, which I shall now soon finish, and which willbe published in October. It is a serious drama, really a family drama, dealing with modern conditions and in particular with the problems whichcomplicate marriage. " This play he finished, lingering at Amalfi, inSeptember, 1879. It was an engineer's experiment at turning up anddraining a corner of the moral swamp which Norwegian society seemed tobe to his violent and ironic spirit. 

_A Doll's House_ was Ibsen's first unqualified success. Not merely wasit the earliest of his plays which excited universal discussion, butin its construction and execution it carried out much further than itsimmediate precursors Ibsen's new ideal as an unwavering realist. Mr. Arthur Symons has well said [Note: The _Quarterly Review_ for October, 1906. ] that "_A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in whichthe puppets have no visible wires. " It may even be said that it was thefirst modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that evenhere the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The armof coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever andentertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of reallife. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, dressed to go out, to Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and whenthe agitated pair sit down to "have it out, " face to face across thetable, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born indrama, and, incidentally, that the "well-made play" has suddenly becomeas dead as Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of life, are amazingin this final scene, where the old happy ending is completely abandonedfor the first time, and where the paradox of life is presented withoutthe least shuffling or evasion. 

It was extraordinary how suddenly it was realized that _A Doll'sHouse_ was a prodigious performance. All Scandinavia rang with Nora's"declaration of independence. " People left the theatre, night afternight, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging. Theinner being had been unveiled for a moment, and new catchwords wererepeated from mouth to mouth. The great statement and reply--"No mansacrifices his honor, even for one he loves, " "Hundreds of thousands ofwomen have done so!"--roused interminable discussion in countless familycircles. The disputes were at one time so violent as to threaten thepeace of households; a school of imitators at once sprang up to treatthe situation, from slightly different points of view, in novel, poemand drama. [Note: The reader who desires to obtain further light on thetechnical 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. )]

The universal excitement which Ibsen had vainly hoped would be awakenedby _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 playinto a mood rather different from that which he expressed at any otherperiod. As has often been said, he did not pose as a prophet or as areformer, but it did occur to him now that he might exercise a strongmoral influence, and in writing to his German translator, LudwigPassarge, he said (June 16, 1880):

Everything that I have written has the closest possible connectionwith what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personalexperience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritualemancipation and purification--for a man shares the responsibility andthe guilt of the society to which he belongs. 

It was in this spirit of unusual gravity that he sat down to thecomposition of _Ghosts_. There is little or no record of how he occupiedhimself at Munich and Berchtesgaden in 1880, except that in March hebegan to sketch, and then abandoned, what afterwards became _The Ladyfrom the Sea_. In the autumn of that year, indulging once more hiscurious restlessness, he took all his household gods and goods again toRome. His thoughts turned away from dramatic art for a moment, and heplanned an autobiography, which was to deal with the gradual developmentof his mind, and to be called _From Skien to Rome_. Whether he actuallywrote any of this seems uncertain; that he should have planned it showsa certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now in his fifty-thirdyear, he might be nearly at the end of his resources. As a matter offact, he was just entering upon a new inheritance. In the summer of 1881he went, as usual now, to Sorrento, and there [Note: So the authoritiesstate: but in an unpublished letter to myself, dated Rome, November26, 1880, I find Ibsen saying, "Just now I am beginning to exercise mythoughts over a new drama; I hope I shall finish it in the course ofnext summer. " It seems to have been already his habit to meditate longabout a subject before it took any definite literary form in his mind. ]the plot of _Ghosts_ revealed itself to him. This work was composed withmore than Ibsen's customary care, and was published at the beginning ofDecember, in an edition of ten thousand copies. 

Before the end of 1881 Ibsen was aware of the terrific turmoil which_Ghosts_ had begun to occasion. He wrote to Passarge: "My new play hasnow appeared, and has occasioned a terrible uproar in the Scandinavianpress. Every day I receive letters and newspaper articles decrying orpraising it. I consider it absolutely impossible that any German theatrewill accept the play at present. I hardly believe that they will dare toplay it in any Scandinavian country for some time to come. " It was, infact, not acted publicly anywhere until 1883, when the Swedes venturedto try it, and the Germans followed in 1887. The Danes resisted it muchlonger. 

Ibsen declared that he was quite prepared for the hubbub; he woulddoubtless have been much disappointed if it had not taken place;nevertheless, he was disconcerted at the volume and the violence ofthe attacks. Yet he must have known that in the existing condition ofsociety, and the limited range of what was then thought a defensiblecriticism of that condition, _Ghosts_ must cause a virulentscandal. There has been, especially in Germany, a great deal ofmedico-philosophical exposure of the under-side of life since 1880. Itis hardly possible that, there, or in any really civilized country, ananalysis of the causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest andmost conventional forms of hereditary disease could again excite sucha startling revulsion of feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew ofinvestigators, Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of probingplaywrights all over the Continent, have gone further and often faredmuch worse than Ibsen did when he dived into the family history ofKammerherre 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 mustnot be forgotten that the publication of it, in that hide-bound time, was an act of extraordinary courage. Georg Brandes, always clearsighted, was alone in being able to perceive at once that _Ghosts_ was no attackon society, but an effort to place the responsibilities of men and womenon a wholesomer and surer footing, by direct reference to the relationof 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 difficultto follow him. Now that the flash and shock of the playwright's audacityare discounted, it is natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work ofpure art, _Ghosts_ stands high among Ibsen's writings. I confess, for myown part, that it seems to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that isto say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. Itis extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far asa foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, thecharacters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types than persons. In the old fighting days it was necessary to praise _Ghosts_ withextravagance, because the vituperation of the enemy was so stupid andoffensive, but now that there are no serious adversaries left, coolerjudgment admits--not one word that the idiot-adversary said, but--thatthere are more convincing plays than _Ghosts_ in Ibsen's repertory. 

Up to this time, Ibsen had been looked upon as the mainstay of theConservative party in Norway, in opposition to Björnson, who led theRadicals. But the author of _Ghosts_, who was accused of disseminatinganarchism and nihilism, was now smartly drummed out of the Tory campwithout being welcomed among the Liberals. Each party was eager todisown him. He was like Coriolanus, when he was deserted by nobles andpeople alike, and

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

The situation gave Ibsen occasion, from the perspective of his exile, toform some impressions of political life which were at once pungent anddignified:

"I am more and more confirmed" [he said, Jan, 3, 1882] "in my beliefthat there is something demoralizing in politics and parties. I, at anyrate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on itsside. Björnson says, 'The majority is always right'; and as a practicalpolitician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, ofnecessity say, 'The minority is always right. '"

In order to place this view clearly before his countrymen, he set aboutcomposing the extremely vivid and successful play, perhaps the mostsuccessful pamphlet-play that ever was written, which was to put forwardin the clearest light the claim of the minority. He was very busy withpreparations for it all through the summer of 1882, which he spent atwhat was now to be for many years his favorite summer resort, Gossensassin the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to the memory of Ibsen in theway that Pornic belongs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to Tyndall, holiday homes in foreign countries, dedicated to blissful work withoutdisturbance. Here, at a spot now officially named the "Ibsenplatz, " hecomposed _The Enemy of the People_, engrossed in his invention as washis wont, reading nothing and thinking of nothing but of the personswhose history he was weaving. Oddly enough, he thought that this, too, was to be a "placable" play, written to amuse and stimulate, butcalculated to wound nobody's feelings. The fact was that Ibsen, likesome ocelot or panther of the rocks, had a paw much heavier than hehimself realized, and his "play, " in both senses, was a very seriousaffair, when he descended to sport with common humanity. 

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

"When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence isat 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 mightjust as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not needpoetry 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 ofthe People_, he spoke in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has neveropened its arms wide enough to embrace all imaginative literature aspoetry, and in the English sense nothing in the world's drama is denseror more unqualified prose than _The Enemy of the People_, withouta tinge of romance or rhetoric, as "unideal" as a blue-book. It is, nevertheless, one of the most certainly successful of its author'swritings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as a pamphlet itawakens irresistible sympathy; as a specimen of dramatic art, itsconstruction and evolution are almost faultless. Under a transparentallegory, it describes the treatment which Ibsen himself had received atthe hands of the Norwegian public for venturing to tell them that theirspa should be drained before visitors were invited to flock to it. Nevertheless, the playwright has not made the mistake of identifying hisown figure with that of Dr. Stockmann, who is an entirely independentcreation. Mr. Archer has compared the hero with Colonel Newcome, whoseloquacious amicability he does share, but Stockmann's character has muchmore energy and initiative than Colonel Newcome's, whom we could neverfancy rousing himself "to purge society. "

Ibsen's practical wisdom in taking the bull by the horns in his reply tothe national reception of _Ghosts_ was proved by the instant successof _The Enemy of the People_. Presented to the public in this new andaudacious form, the problem of a "moral water-supply" struck sensibleNorwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived itto be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched underthe lash. _Ghosts_ itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but _TheEnemy of the People_ received a cordial welcome, and has remained eversince one of the most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still extremelyeffective on the stage, and as it is lightened by more humor than theauthor is commonly willing to employ, it attracts even those who arehostile to the intrusion of anything solemn behind the footlights. CHAPTER VII

1883-91

With the appearance of _An Enemy of the People_, which was publishedin November, 1882, Ibsen entered upon a new stage in his career. He hadcompletely broken with the Conservative party in Norway, without havinggratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personalrelations of friendliness with Björnson, whose generous approval of hiswork as a dramatist sustained his spirits, but his own individualism hadbeen intensified by the hostile reception of _Ghosts_. His life was nowdivided between Rome in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, andin the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he wandered solitary, taciturn, absorbed in his own thoughts. His meditations led him more andmore into a lonely state. He floated, as on a prophet's carpet, betweenthe political heavens and earth, capriciously refusing to ascend orto alight. He had come to a sceptical stage in his mental evolution, a stage in which he was to remain for a considerable time, graduallymodifying it in a conservative direction. One wonders what thesimple-minded and stalwart Björnson thought of being quietly told(March 28, 1884) that the lower classes are nowhere liberal-minded orself-sacrificing, and that "in the views expressed by our [Norwegian]peasants there is not an atom more of real Liberalism than is to befound among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol. " In politicsIbsen had now become a pagan; "I do not believe, " he said, "in theemancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidencein the altruism and good will of those in power. " This sense of theuselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next workon which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonictragi-comedy of _The Wild Duck_. The first sketch of it was made duringthe spring of 1884 in Rome, but the dramatist took it to Gossensass withhim for the finishing touches, and did not perfect it until the autumn. It is remarkable that Ibsen invariably speaks of _The Wild Duck_, whenhe mentions it in his correspondence, in terms of irony. He calls it acollection of crazy tricks or tomfooleries, _galskaber_, an expressionwhich carries with it, in this sense, a confession of wilful paradox. Insomething of the same spirit, Robert Browning, in the old days beforehe was 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, itwas received with some bewilderment. Quite slowly the idea receivedacceptance that the hitherto so serious and even angry satirist was, to put it plainly, laughing at himself. The faithful were reluctant toconcede 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 hypocriticalsentimentality needs correction--you live in "A Doll's House. " I havedared to point out to you that your society is physically and morallyrotten and full of "Ghosts. " You have repudiated my honest efforts as areformer, and called me "An Enemy of the People. " Very well, then, haveit so if you please. What a fool am I to trouble about you at all. Godown a steep place in Gadara and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, itcan amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers Werle. _Vogue la galère_. "But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor theright of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of theunion from the flag, " burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegianpolitics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway";it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of mycaring. It is in reading _The Wild Duck_ that for the first time thereally astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomesapparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist nowrelinquishes any other central object than the presentation to hisaudience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last, and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that isnot catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than _Ghosts_, _The Wild Duck_ is an avalanche which has begun to move, and witha movement unaffected by the incidents of the plot, long before thecurtain rises. The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all other moderndramas, depend upon nothing that happens while they are being exhibited, but rush downwards to their inevitable close in obedience to a series oflong-precedent impulses. In order to gain this effect, the dramatisthas to be acquainted with everything that has ever happened to hispersonages, and we are informed that Ibsen used to build up in his ownmind, for months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was nowmaster of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find oneof the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of _The WildDuck_ that "never before had the poet displayed such an amazing powerof fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil afterveil from the past. "

The result of a searching determination to deal with personal and nottypical forms of temperament is seen in the firmness of the portraiturein _The Wild Duck_, where, I think, less than ever before, is to befound a trace of that incoherency which is to be met with occasionallyin all the earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the effect of asudden caprice or change of the point of view. There is, so far as Ican judge, no trace of this in _The Wild Duck_, where the continuity ofaspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us that if we tell him ourpast, he will tell us our future, and although several of the charactersin _The Wild Duck_ are the most sordid of Ibsen's creations, the authorhas made himself so deeply familiar with them that they are absolutelylifelike. The detestable Hialmar, in whom, by the looking-glass of adisordered liver, any man may see a picture of himself; the pitiableGregers Werle, perpetually thirteenth at table, with his genius formaking an utter mess of other people's lives; the vulgar Gina; thebeautiful girlish figure of the little martyred Hedvig--all are whollyreal and living persons. 

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 sickconscience" and the value of illusion. Society may be full of poisonousvapors and be built on a framework of lies; it is nevertheless prudentto consider whether the ideal advantages of disturbing it overweigh thepractical disadvantages, and above all to bear in mind that if you robthe average man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob him of hishappiness. The topsy-turvy nature of a this theme made Ibsen as nearly"rollicking" as he ever became in his life. We can imagine than as hewrote the third act of _The Wild Duck_, where so horrible a luncheonparty--"we'll all keep a corner"--gloats over the herring salad, heindulged again and again in those puffs of soundless and formidablemirth which Mr. Johan Paulsen describes as so surprising an element ofconversation with Ibsen. 

To the gossip of that amiable Boswell, too, we must turn for a valuableimpression of the solidification of Ibsen's habits which began aboutthis time, and which marked then even before he left Munich. He had nowsuccessfully separated himself from all society, and even his familysaw him only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him, but, ifsufficiently courageous, must hang about on the staircase, hoping tocatch him for a moment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his study, into which the daring Paulsen occasionally ventured, Ibsen, we are tobelieve, did nothing at all, but "sat bent over the pacific ocean of hisown mind, which mirrored for him a world far more fascinating, vast andrich than that which lay spread around him. " [Note: _Samliv med Ibsen_, 1906, p. 30. ]

And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafes had begun. In Rome Ibsenhad his favorite table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirrorin which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his goldspectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, andespecially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, everycouple that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something tothose untiring eyes. The newspaper and the cafe mirror--these were thebooks which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; andout of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraphin a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he couldbuild up a drama. Incessant observation of real life, incessant captureof unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual living experience leapingin his hands like a captive wild animal, this was now the substancefrom which all Ibsen's dreams and dramas were woven. Concentration ofattention on the vital play of character, this was his one interest. 

Out of this he was roused by a sudden determination to go at last andsee for himself what life in Norway was really like. A New England witonce denied that a certain brilliant and Europe-loving American authorwas a cosmopolitan. "No, " he said, "a cosmopolitan is at home even inhis own country. " Ibsen began to doubt whether he was not too far offto follow events in Norway--and these were now beginning to be veryexciting--well enough to form an independent judgment about them; andafter twenty years of exile there is no doubt that the question wasfairly put. _The Wild Duck_ had been published in November, 1884, andhad been acted everywhere in Scandinavia with great success. The criticsand the public were agreed for the first time that Ibsen was a verygreat national genius, and that if Norway was not proud of him it wouldmake a fool of itself in the eyes of Europe. 

Ibsen had said that Norway was a barbarous country, inhabited by twomillions of cats and dogs, but so many agreeable and highly-civilizedcompliments found their way to him in Rome that he began to fancy thatthe human element was beginning to be introduced. At all events, he would see for himself, and in June, 1885, instead of stopping atGossensass, he pushed bravely on and landed in Christiania. 

At first all went well, but from the very beginning of the visit heobserved, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country wasthrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetoricalresolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutionalhorror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norwayfrom one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, theSwedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of frenzieddiscussion, and in none of these did Ibsen take any sort of pleasure. Hewas not politically far-sighted, it must be confessed, nor did he guesswhat practical proportions these "theoretical questions" were to assumein the immediate future. 

That great writer and delightful associate, the Swedish poet, CountSnoilsky, one of the few whose company never wearied or irritated Ibsen, joined him in the far north. They spent a pleasant, quiet time togetherat Molde, that enchanting little sub-arctic town, where it lookssouthward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever guardingthe mountainous horizon. Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, whenSnoilsky had left him, already thinking of a new drama, lingered on atMolde, spending hours on hours at the end of the jetty, gazing into theclear, cold sea. His passion for the sea had never betrayed him, and atRome, where he had long given up going to any galleries or studios, hestill haunted the house of a Norwegian marine painter, Nils Hansteen, whose sketches reminded him of old days and recollected waters. 

But the autumn comes on apace in these high latitudes, and Ibsen had toreturn to Christiania with its torchlight processions, and late noisyfeasts, and triumphant revolutionary oratory. He disliked it extremely, and he made up his mind to go back to the indifferent South, wherepeople did not worry about such things. Unfortunately, the inhabitantsof Christiania did not leave him alone. They were not content to havehim among them as a retired observer, they wanted to make him stand outdefinitely on one political side or the other. He was urged, at the endof September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession plannedin his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough tosee that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably tooself-conscious in believing that a trap was being laid for him. He saidthat, not having observed that his presence gave the Union any greatpleasure, he did not care to have its expression of great joy at t hisdeparture. This was not polite, for it does not appear that the studentshad any idea that he intended to depart. He would not address a reply tothe 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, andwanted to annex him to their party, and that he was not blind to theirtricks. They withdrew in confusion, and Ibsen, in an agony of nervousness, determined to put the sea between himself and their machinations. Early in October he retreated, or rather fled, to Copenhagen, and thenceto Munich, where he breathed again. Meanwhile, the extreme liberalfaction among the students claimed that his action had meant that he washeart and soul with them, as against the reactionaries. A young Mr. OveRode, who had interviewed him, took upon himself to say that these wereIbsen'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 asad pity to lose, " he remarked, with quivering pen. A reverberantcontroversy sprang up in the Norwegian newspapers, and Ibsen, in hisBavarian harbor of refuge, continued to vibrate all through the winterof 1885. The exile's return to his native country had proved to be farfrom a success. 

Already his new play was taking shape, and the success of his greatpersonal ambition, namely that his son, Sigurd, should be taken withhonor into the diplomatic service of his country, did such to calm hisspirits. Ibsen was growing rich now, as well as famous, and if only theNorwegians would let him alone, he might well be happy. The new playwas _Rosmersholm_, and it took its impulse from a speech which Ibsen hadmade during his journey, at Trondhjem, where he expounded the gospel ofindividualism to a respectful audience of workingmen, and had laiddown the necessity of introducing an aristocratic strain, _et adeligtelement_, into the life of a truly democratic state, a strain whichwoman 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 thenobility which grows out of character. It is _character_ alone which canmake us free. " This nobility of character must be fostered, mainly, bythe united efforts of motherhood and labor. This was quite a new creedin Norway, and it bewildered his hearers, but it is remarkable to noticehow the best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded to the appeal, and how little surprise the present generation would express at arepetition of such sentiments. And out of this idea of "nobility" ofpublic character _Rosmersholm_ directly sprang. 

We are not left to conjecture in this respect. In a letter to BjörnKristensen (February 13, 1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, whilecorrecting a misconception of the purpose of _Rosmersholm_, that "theplay deals with the struggle which all serious-minded human beings haveto wage with themselves in order to bring their lives into harmony withtheir convictions. .. . Conscience is very conservative. It has its deeproots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict. " Whenwe come to read _Rosmersholm_ it is not difficult to see how this orderof ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The mansion called bythat name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeoisaristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timidconservatism as is represented by Rector Kroll, with his horror of allthings new because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in its inherentnobility, is to be superior to a craven horror of the democracy, and isto show, by the courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny, thatit looks above and beyond all these momentary prejudices, and accepts, from all hands, whatever is wise and of good report. 

The misfortune is that Ibsen, in unconscious bondage to his ideas, didnot construct his drama sturdily enough on realistic lines. While notone of his works is more suggestive than _Rosmersholm_, there is not onewhich gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestralhouse of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations ofa single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Theabsence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down toeccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thiefand murderess, " as another admirer pleonastically describes her, isa sort of troll; nobody can explain--and yet an explanation seemsrequisite--what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness towork out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwrightfor 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 placeshis ingenious, elaborate and--given the premises--inevitable dénouementin a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivanopera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediatelyon the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of reallife as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificialityof _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward thathe may leap the further forward. 

In other words, _Rosmersholm_ is the proof of Ibsen's desire to conqueranother field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with greatseverity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was neverthelessineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of thespectator no other impression than that he was observing something whichhad actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in whichit would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, theprinciple that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, "likesome preposterous animal form of prehistoric times. " But the soul of mancannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectlyprosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valuable on occasion, butthat sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if everthere was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shuthimself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowinghow to set about it, that he would once more give the spiritual andthe imaginative qualities their place in his work. These had now beenexcluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of _Peer Gynt_, and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again inverse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenileand fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-likebard of sixty. But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, andespecially to fantastic beauty of landscape. 

The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the oldenchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woodsand the waters which we had lost sight of since _Peer Gynt_. But thiselement was still more evident in _The Lady from the Sea_, which was. Published in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long hours, in thesummer of 1885, at the end of the pier at Molde, gazing down into thewaters, or watching the steamers arriving and departing, coming fromthe great sea beyond the fjord or going towards it. As was his wont, he stored up these impressions, making no immediate use of them. Heactually prepared _The Lady from the Sea_ in very different, althoughstill marine surroundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for thesummer at the pretty and ancient, but very mild little town of Saeby, with the sands in front of him and rolling woods behind. From Saebyit was a short journey to Frederikshavn, "which he liked very much--hecould knock about all day among the shipping, talking to the sailors, and so forth. Besides, he found the neighborhood of the sea favorable tocontemplation and constructive thought. " So Mr. Archer, who visited himat Saeby; and I myself, a year or two later, picked up at Frederikshavnan oral tradition of Ibsen, with his hands behind his back, and thefrock-coat tightly buttoned, stalking, stalking alone for hours on theinterminable promenade between the great harbor moles of Frederikshaven, no one daring to break in upon his formidable contemplation. 

In several respects, though perhaps not in concentration of effect, _The Lady from the Sea_ shows a distinct advance on _Rosmersholm_. It isnever dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and thereis 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 completionof _Peer Gynt_. Again, after the appearance of so many strenuoustragedies, it was pleasant to welcome a pure comedy. _The Lady fromthe Sea_ [Note: In the _Neue Rundschau_ for December, 1906, there waspublished a first draft of _The Lady from the Sea_, dating as far backas 1800. ] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defenceof individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity ofdeveloping it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism. It is in some respects the reverse of _Rosmersholm_; the bitternessof restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death, being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and gratifiedindividuality, which leads to health and peace. To the remarkableestimate of _The Lady from the Sea_ formed by some critics, and inparticular by M. Jules de Gaultier, we shall return in a generalconsideration of the symbolic plays, of which it is the earliest. Enough to say here that even those who did not plunge so deeply intoits mysteries found it a remarkably agreeable spectacle, and that it hascontinued to be, in Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popular ofits 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, wouldno longer be deprived of the pleasure of entertaining him publicly. He appeared before them, the breast of his coat sparkling with foreignstars and crosses, the Urim and Thummim of general European recognition. He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out lived all the obscurityof his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries--even in recalcitrantNorway--he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age. In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of thesang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of highand settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was nowdiscussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of whatis even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers atStockholm told him that he had taken a foremost place in re-creatingtheir sense of life, that he was a fashioner and a builder of new socialforms, that he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-Builder. The reply he made to their enthusiasm was dignified and reserved, but itrevealed a sense of high gratification. Skule's long doubt was over;he believed at last in his own kingdom, and that the world would beultimately the better for the stamp of his masterful soul upon itssurface. 

It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat dreaming through the earlypart of the uneventful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melancholywhen, in the following year, he settled down to the composition of anew play which was to treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He toldSnoilsky 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 hasnot been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What Iprincipally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions andhuman destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditionsand principles of the present day. " It was a proof of the immense growthof Ibsen's celebrity that editions of _Hedda Gabler_ were called foralmost 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 worldat that moment who excited so much curiosity among the intellectualclasses, and none who exercised so much influence on the youngergeneration of authors and thinkers. 

In _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen returned, for the last time, but withconcentrated vigor, to the prosaic ideal of his central period. He neversucceeded in being more objective in drama, he never kept more closelyto the bare facts of nature nor rejected more vigorously the ornamentsof romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play. There is no poeticsuggestion here, no species of symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, ormonster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Archer when hesays that he finds it impossible to extract any sort of general ideafrom _Hedda Gabler_, or to accept it as a satire of any condition ofsociety. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individualthat 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 atMunich, of a German lady who poisoned herself because she was boredwith life, and had strayed into a false position. _Hedda Gabler_ is therealization of such an individual case. At first sight, it seemed asthough Ibsen had been influenced by Dumas _fils_, which might have beentrue, in spite of the marked dislike which each expressed for the other;[Note: It is said that _La Route de Thebes_, which Dumas had begunwhen he died, was to have been a deliberate attack on the methods andinfluence of Ibsen. Ibsen, on his part, loathed Dumas. ] but closerexamination showed that Hedda Gabler had no sort of relation with thepamphlets of the master of Parisian problem-tragedy. 

The attempt to show that _Hedda Gabler_ "proved" anything was annoyingto Ibsen, who said, with more than his customary firmness, "It was notmy purpose to deal with what people call problems in this play. What Ichiefly tried to do was to paint human beings, human emotions and humanfate, against a background of some of the conditions and laws of societyas it exists to-day. " The German critics, a little puzzled to finda longitude and latitude for Tesman's "tastefully decorated" villa, declared that this time Ibsen had written an "international, " not alocally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On thecontrary, _Hedda Gabler_ is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegianof all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highlycivilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rurallittle straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as alad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitalityin several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of theTesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a "west end ofChristiania" of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it wasthat to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than thelatter. 

A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has hadspecial opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately(1907) depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomedto a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom shehad mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth. In othercircumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good. " Ifthis ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered asthe leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evilis produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomesthrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impactof accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have beenuseful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent mightpaint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divineand emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, andthe ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotentegotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of hercultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with anequal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which themask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called acaricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him intoregions 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 maycall his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of hisown growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as themost eminent imaginative writer of the three Scandinavian countries, butas the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of whatit would become. In 1880, Norway, the youngest and long the rawest ofthe three civilizations, was now the foremost in activity, and thoughthe influence of Björnson and Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was notto be compared for breadth and complexity with that of Ibsen. The natureof the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between1880 and 1890, that is to say from _Ghosts_ to _Hedda Gabler_, wasdestructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and dramaof the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplaceand conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable andsacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case inSweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent andcatastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of theold banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all itsfaded elegance it withered up and vanished. 

The next event was that the new generation in the three Northerncountries, deprived of its traditional authorities, looked about for aprophet and a father, and they found what they wanted in the exceedinglyuncompromising elderly gentleman who remained so silent in the cafesof Rome and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this unseen andunsympathetic personage was extraordinary, and took forms of amazingextravagance. Ibsen's impassivity merely heightened the enthusiasm ofhis countless admirers, who were found, it should be stated, almostentirely among persons who were born after his exile from Norway. His writings supplied a challenge to character and intelligencewhich appealed to those who disliked the earlier system of morals andaesthetics against which he had so long fought single-handed. 

Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the positionthat Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindlinggroup of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenziedlaudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and withthose of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a littlelater of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthfulminds of any vigor or elasticity. 

In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for Ibsen took forms of almostpreposterous violence. The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam, has given a curious and amusing account of the rage for Ibsen which cameto its height about 1880. The question which every student asked hisfriend, every lover his mistress, was "What do you think of Ibsen?" Notto be a believer in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which loveor friendship might easily be shipwrecked. It was quoted gravely asan insufferable incompatibility for the state of marriage. There wasa curious and secret symbolism running through the whole of youthfulSwedish society, from which their elders were cunningly excluded, bywhich the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to hand, presented onsolemn occasions, became the emblems of the problems interesting togenerous youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty and truth. The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had becomeclogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sourcesof emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies, spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it wasIbsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded theemancipation. 

The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always accordingto knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of theabuse showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are nowdescribing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavianand German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: "Stella Kleve" (MathildaMalling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen howmany "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 thedeserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was thetragic circumstance where much was so purely comic. But if there wereelements of tragicomedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far moreimportant elements of vigorous and wholesome intellectual independence;and it was during this period of Ibsen's almost hectic popularity thatthe foundations of a new fiction and a new drama were laid in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. A whole generation sucked strength and energy fromhis 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 wasthen producing, as on the earlier works of his poetic youth, now rereadwith an unexampled fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of RobertBrowning, which faintly resembles that of Ibsen, did not attract theyounger generation to the volumes which succeed _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 wasnot so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those oldbut now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, _The Pretenders_, _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. 

In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strongpersonal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did hefind it confined to Scandinavia. He had travelled about in Germany, andeverywhere his plays were being acted. Berlin was wild about him; atWeimar he was fêted like a conqueror. He did not settle down at Munichuntil May, and here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer, hard atwork. After the success of _Hedda Gabler_, which overpowered all adversecomment, Ibsen began to long to be in Norway again, and this feelingwas combined, in a curious way, with a very powerful emotion which nowentered into his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful existence, mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himselfto the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desertin plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams. No adventure, of anyprominent kind, had ever been seen to diversify Ibsen's perfectlydecorous and domestic career. And now he was more than sixty, and thegray tones were gathering round him more thickly than ever, when a realray of vermilion descended out of the sky and filled his horizon withcolor. 

In the season of 1889, among the summer boarders at Gossensass, thereappeared a young Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach. Sheused 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 athim. Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon Ibsen was onthe bench at her side. He readily discovered where she lived; no lessreadily he gained an introduction to the family with whom she boarded. There was a window-seat in the _salle à manger_; it was deep and shadedby odorous flowering shrubs; it lent itself to endless conversation. The episode was strange, the passion improbable, incomprehensible, profoundly natural and true. Perhaps, until they parted in the last daysof September, neither the old man nor the young girl realized what theirrelations had meant to each. Youth secured its revenge, however; MissBardach soon wrote from Vienna that she was now more tranquil, moreindependent, 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 completedMiss Bardach's sorcery over the old poet. She seems to have been nocoquette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at his feet; she brokethe thread which bound the charms of her spirit and poured them overhim. He, for his part, remaining discreet and respectful, was shatteredwith 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 happierthan the happiest, for I am beloved. " Long afterwards, on his seventiethbirthday, when his own natural force was failing, he wrote to MissBardach, "That summer at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the mostharmonious portion of my whole existence. I scarcely venture to thinkof it, and yet I think of nothing else. Ah! forever!" He did not dare tosend her _The Master-Builder_, since her presence interpenetrated everyline of it like a perfume, and when, we are told, she sent him herphotograph, signed "Princess of Orangia, " her too-bold identificationof herself with Hilda Wangel hurt him as a rough touch, that finer tactwould have avoided. There can be no doubt at all that while she wasnow largely absorbed by the compliment to her own vanity, he was stillabsolutely enthralled and bewitched, and that what was fun to her madelife and death to him. 

This very curious episode [Note: It was quite unknown until thecorrespondence--which has not been translated into English--waspublished by Georg Brandes at the desire of the lady herself (September, 1906). ], which modifies in several important respects our conceptionof the dramatist's character, is analogous with the apparent changeof disposition which made Renan surprise his unthinking admirers sosuddenly at the epoch of _L'Eau de Jouvence_ and _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_. It was founded, of course, on that dangerous susceptibility to whichan elderly man of genius, whose life had been spent in labor andreflection, may be inclined to resign himself, as he sees the sandsrunning out of the hour-glass, and realizes that in analyzing anddissecting 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 dieat once than not make one grasp at happiness. 

It will have been remarked that Ibsen's habit was to store up animpression, but not to use it immediately on creative work. We need, therefore, feel no surprise that there is not a trace of the Bardachepisode in _Hedda Gabler_, although the composition of that playimmediately followed the _hohes, schmerzliches Glück_ at Gossensass. Hewas, too, no moonlight serenader, and his intense emotion is perfectlycompatible with the outline of some of the gossip which was repeated atthe time of his death; Ibsen being reported to have said of the Viennesegirl: "She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her--for myplay. " These things are very complex, and not to be hastily dismissed, especially on the rough and ready English system. There would be giveand take in such a complicated situation, when the object was, as Ibsenhimself says, out of reach _unversichtbar_. There is no question thatfor every pang which Hilda made her ancient lover suffer, he wouldenrich his imagination with a dozen points of experience. There is noparadox in saying that the poet was overwhelmed with a passion and yetconsciously made it serve as material for his plays. From this timeonwards every dramatic work of his bears the stamp of those hours amongthe roses at Gossensass. 

To the spring of 1891 belongs Ibsen's somewhat momentous visit toVienna, where he was invited by Dr. Max Burckhard, the director of theBurg Theatre, to superintend the performance of his _Pretenders_. Ibsenhad already, in strict privacy, visited Vienna, where his plays enjoyedan increasing success, but this was his first public entrance into acity which he admired on the whole more than any other city of Europe. "Mein schöner Wien!" he used to murmur, with quite a clan of affection. In April, 1891, after the triumph of his tragedy on the stage, Ibsenwas the guest at a public banquet at Vienna, when the ovations wereoverwhelming and were extended until four o'clock next morning. Aperformance of _The Wild Duck_ produced, what was almost as dear toIbsen as praise, a violent polemic, and he passed on out of a world ofstorm and passion to Buda-Pesth, where he saw _A Doll's House_ actedin Hungarian, amid thunders of applause, and where he was the guestof Count Albert Apponyi. These were the happy and fruitful years whichconsoled 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 everyintention of returning to it, but with the plan of a long summer tripin Norway, where the triumphant success of _Hedda Gabler_ had been veryagreeable to his feelings. Once more he pushed up through the country toTrondhjem, a city which had always attracted him and pleased him. Herehe presently embarked on one of the summer coasting-steamers, and sawthe shores of Nordland and Finmark for the first time, visiting theNorth Cape itself. He came back to Christiania for the rest of theseason, with no prospect of staying. But he enjoyed a most flatteringreception; he was begged to resume his practical citizenship, and he wasassured that life in Norway would be made very pleasant to him. In theautumn, therefore, in his abrupt way, he took an apartment in ViktoriaTerrasse, and sent to Munich for his furniture. He said to a friendwho expressed surprise at this settlement: "I may just as well makeChristiania my headquarters as Munich. The railway takes me in a veryshort time wherever I want to go; and when I am bored with Norway I cantravel elsewhere. " But he never felt the fatigue he anticipated, and, but for brief visits to Copenhagen or Stockholm, he left his nativecountry no more after 1891, although he changed his abode in Christianiaitself. 

For the first twelve months Ibsen enjoyed the pleasures of the prodigalreturned, and fed with gusto on the fatted calf. Then, when three yearsseparated him from the illuminating soul-adventures of Gossensass, hebegan 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 1893on the title-page. This play was running for some time in Germany andEngland before it was played in Scandinavia. But on the evening ofMarch 8, 1893, it was simultaneously given at the National Theatre inChristiania and at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. It was a work whichgreatly puzzled the critics, and its meaning was scarcely apparent untilit had been seen on the stage, for which the oddity of its arrangementsare singularly well adapted. It was, however, almost immediately noticedthat it marked a new departure in Ibsen's writings. Here was an end ofthe purely realistic and prosaic social dramas, which had reigned from_The League of Youth_ to _Hedda Gabler_, and here was a return to thestrange and haunting beauty of the old imaginative pieces. Mr. Archerwas happily inspired when he spoke of "the pure melody" of the piece, and the best scenes of _The Master-Builder_ were heroically and almostrecklessly poetical. 

This remarkable composition is full of what, for want of a better word, we must call "symbolism. " In the conversations between Solness and Hildamuch is introduced which is really almost unintelligible unless we takeit to be autobiographical. The Master-Builder is one who constructs, not houses, but poems and plays. It is the poet himself who givesexpression, in the pathetic and erratic confessions of Solness, to hisdoubts, his craven timidities, his selfish secrets, and his terror atthe uniformity of his "luck. " It is less easy to see exactly what Ibsenbelieved himself to be presenting to us in the enigmatical figure ofHilda, so attractive and genial, so exquisitely refreshing, and yetradically so cruel and superficial. She is perhaps conceived as a symbolof Youth, arriving too late within the circle which Age has troddenfor its steps to walk in, and luring it too rashly, by the mirage ofhappiness, into paths no longer within its physical and moral capacity. "Hypnotism, " Mr. Archer tells us, "is the first and last word of thedramatic action"; perhaps thought-transference more exactly expressesthe idea, but I should not have stated even this quite so strongly. Theground of the dramatic action seems to me to be the balance of Nemesis, the fatal necessity that those who enjoy exceptional advantages in lifeshall pay for them by not less exceptional, but perhaps less obvious, disadvantages. The motto of the piece--at least of the first two of itsacts--might be the couplet of the French tragedian:--

C'est un ordre des dieux qui jamais ne se rompt De nous vendre bien cherles grands biens qu'ils nous font. 

Beneath this, which we may call the transcendental aspect of the play, we find a solid and objective study of the self-made man, the headstrongamateur, who has never submitted to the wholesome discipline ofprofessional training, but who has trusted to the help of those trollsor mascots, his native talent and his unfailing "luck. " Upon such a mandescends Hilda, the disorganizer, who pierces the armor of his conceitby a direct appeal to his passions. Solness has been the irresistiblesorcerer, through his good fortune, but he is not protected in hisclimacteric against this unexpected attack upon the senses. Samsonphilanders with Delila, and discovers that his strength is shorn fromhim. There is no doubt that Ibsen intended in _The Master-Builder_ asearching examination of "luck" and the tyranny of it, the terribleeffects of it on the Broviks and the Kajas whom nobody remembers, butwhose bodies lie under the wheels of its car. The dramatic situation ishere extremely interesting; it consists in the fact that Solness, whobreaks every one else, is broken by Hilda. The inherent hardness ofyouth, which makes no allowances, which demands its kingdom here and nowupon the table, was never more powerfully depicted. Solness is smashedby his impact with Hilda, as china is against a stone. In all this itwould be a mistake to see anything directly autobiographical, althoughso 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 wasgrowing old and set in his habits. He was growing rich, too, and hesurrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His wealth, it may herebe said, was founded entirely upon the success of his works, but wasfostered by his extreme adroitness as a man of business. Those who areso fond of saying that any man of genius might have excelled in someother capacity are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen asthe model financier. He certainly possessed a remarkable aptitude foraffairs, and we learn that his speculations were at once daring andcrafty. People who are weary of commiserating the poverty of poets maybe pleased to learn that when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiestprivate citizens of Christiania, and this was wholly in consequence ofthe care he had taken in protecting his copyrights and administering hisreceipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct which tells us that

 Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature, Mais sa bonte s'arrkete a la litterature, we must believe, with Ibsen's enemies, that his fortunes were not underthe divine protection. 

The actual numbers of each of his works printed since he first publishedwith Hegel in Copenhagen--a connection which he preserved without abreach until the end--have been stated since his death. They containsome points of interest. After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editionsof each new play, but they went off at first slowly. _The Lady from theSea_ 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 inIbsen become in 1894 that the edition of 10, 000 copies of _Little Eyolf_was found quite inadequate to meet the first order, and it was enlargedto 15, 000, all of which were gone in a fortnight. This circulation in sosmall a reading public as that of Denmark and Norway was unprecedented, and it must be remembered that the simultaneous translations into mostof the languages of Europe are not included. 

_Little Eyolf_, which was written in Christiania during the spring andsummer of 1894, was issued, according to Ibsen's cometary custom, as thesecond week of December rolled round. The reception of it was stormy, even in Scandinavia, and led to violent outbursts of controversy. Nowork from the master's pen had roused more difference of opinion amongthe critics since the bluster over _Ghosts_ fourteen years before. Thosewho prefer to absolute success in the creation of a work of art thepersonal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed toplace _Little Eyolf_ very high among his writings. Nowhere is he moreindependent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may evenbe said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this playmay fairly be considered in the light of a _tour de force_. Ibsen--onewould conjecture--is trying to see to what extremities of agileindependence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped me;but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty notquite easily or completely overcome which _Little Eyolf_ produces. To mention but one technical matter; there are but four characters, properly speaking, in the play--since Eyolf himself and the Rat-Wifeare but illustrations or symbolic properties--and of these four, one(Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to havechallenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only threecharacters in it. By a process of elimination this has been doneby Aeschylus (in the _Agamemnon_), by Racine (in _Phe*dre_ and_Andromaque_), and in our own day by Maeterlinck (in _Pelle*as etMe*lisande_). But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and hisexperiment seems not wholly successful. _Little Eyolf_, at least, is, from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazardthe conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satisfaction to write, but for enjoyment the reader may prefer less prodigious agility on thetrapeze. 

If we turn from the technical virtuosity of _Little Eyolf_ to its moralaspects, we find it a very dreadful play, set in darkness which nothingilluminates but the twinkling sweetness of Asta. The mysterious symbolof the Rat-Wife breaks in upon the pair whose love is turning to hate, the man waxing cold as the wife grows hot. The Angel of God, in theguise of an old beggar-woman, descends into their garden, and she dragsaway, by an invisible chain, "the little gnawing thing, " the patheticlame child. The effect on the pair of Eyolf's death by drowning is thesubject of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is incarnate, and sheseems 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 itwas in London most admirably by Miss Achurch--is almost too painful fora public exhibition, and to the old criticism, "nec pueros coram populoMedea trucidet, " if a pedant chooses to press it, there teems no reply. The sex question, as treated in _Little Eyolf_, recalls _The KreutzerSonata_ (1889) of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask Ibsenwhether there was anything in this, he was displeased, and stoutlydenied it. What, an author denies, however, is not always evidence. 

Nothing further of general interest happened to Ibsen until 1896, whenhe sat down to compose another drama, _John Gabriel Borkman_. This was astudy of the mental adventures of a man of high commercial imagination, who is artificially parted from all that contact with real affairswhich keeps such energy on the track, and who goes mad with dreams ofincalculable power, a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It wassaid, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysisof character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of thefailure 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 GabrielBorkman a prominent example of the ninteenth century type of criminousspeculator, in whom the vastness of view and the splendidly altruisticaudacity present themselves as elements which render it exceedinglydifficult to say how far the malefactor is morally responsible forhis crime. He has imagined, and to a certain point has carried out, amonster metal "trust, " for the success of which he lacks neither couragenor knowledge nor practical administrative capacity, but only thattrifling concomitant, sufficiency of capital. To keep the fires blazinguntil his vast model is molten into the mould, he helps himself tomoney here, there, and everywhere, scarcely giving a thought to hisresponsibilities, so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph. He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice all these his involuntarysupporters. Unhappily, just before his scheme is ready and the metalruns, he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, and finds himself inprison. 

Side by side with this study of commercial madness runs a thread of thatnew sense of the preciousness of vital joy which had occupied Ibsen somuch ever since the last of the summers at Gossensass. The figure ofErhart Borkman is a very interesting one to the theatrical student. Inthe ruin of the family, all hopes concentre in him. Every one claimshim, and in the bosoms of each of his shattered parents a secret hopeis born, Mrs. Borkman believing that by a brilliant career of commercialrectitude her son will wipe out the memory of his father's crime;Borkman, who has never given up the ambition of returning to business, reposing his own hopes on the co-operation of his son. 

But Erhart Borkman disappoints them all. He will be himself, he willenjoy his life, he will throw off all the burdens both of responsibilityand of restitution. He has no ambition and little natural feeling;he simply must be happy, and he suddenly elopes, leaving all theiranticipations bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who hasnothing but her beauty to recommend her. Deserted thus by the _ignisfatuus_ of youth, the collapse of the three old people is complete. Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way, and he wanders out intothe winter's night, full of vague dreams of what he can still do in theworld, if he can only break from his bondage and shatter his dream. Hedies there in the snow, and the two old sisters, who have followed himin an anxiety which overcomes their mutual hatred, arrive in time tosee him pass away. We leave them in the wood, "a dead man and twoshadows"--so Ella Rentheim puts it--"for _that_ is what the cold hasmade of us"; the central moral of the piece being that all the errors ofhumanity spring from cold-heartedness and neglect of the natural heatof love. That Borkman embezzled money, and reduced hundreds of innocentpeople to beggary, might be condoned; but there is no pardon for hiscruel bargaining for wealth with the soul of Ella Rentheim, since thatis the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. There are points ofobscurity, and one or two of positive and even regrettable whimsicality, about _John Gabriel Borkman_, but on the whole it is a work of loftyoriginality and of poignant human interest. 

The veteran was now beginning to be conscious of the approaches of oldage, but they were made agreeable to him by many tokens of nationalhomage. 

On his seventieth birthday, March 20, 1898, Ibsen received thefelicitations of the world. It is pleasing to relate that a group ofadmirers in England, a group which included Mr. Asquith, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Pinero andMr. Bernard Shaw took part in these congratulations and sent Ibsena handsome set of silver plate, this being an act which, it had beendiscovered, he particularly appreciated. The bearer of this gift was theearliest of the long stream of visitors to arrive on the morning of thepoet's birthday, and he found Ibsen in company with his wife, his son, his son's wife (Björnson's daughter), and his little grandson, Tankred. The poet's surprise and pleasure were emphatic. A deputation from theStorthing, headed by the Leader of the House, deputations representingthe University, the various Christiania Theatres, and other official oracademic bodies arrived at intervals during the course of the day;and all the afternoon Ibsen was occupied in taking these hundreds ofvisitors, in parties, up to the case containing the English tribute, inshowing the objects and in explaining their origin. There could be noquestion that the gift gave genuine pleasure to the recipient; itwas the first, as it was to be the last, occasion on which any publictestimony to English appreciation of his genius found its way to Ibsen'sdoor. 

Immediately after the birthday festivities, which it was observed hadfatigued him, Ibsen started on a visit to Copenhagen, where he wasreceived by the aged King of Denmark, and to Stockholm, where he wasoverpowered with ovations from all classes. There can be no doubt thatthis triumphal progress, though deeply grateful to the aged poet'ssusceptibilities, made a heavy drain upon his nervous resources. Whenhe returned to Norway, indeed, he was concealed from all visitors athis physician's orders, and it is understood that he had some kind ofseizure. It was whispered that he would write no more, and the biennialdrama, due in December, 1898, did not make its appearance. His storesof health, however, were not easily exhausted; he rested for severalmonths, and then he was seen once more in Carl Johans Gade, smiling; inhis usual way, and entirely recovered. It was announced that winter thathe was writing his reminiscences, but nothing more was heard of any suchbook. 

He was able to take a vivid interest in the preparations for theNational Norwegian Theatre in Christiania, which was finally openedby the King of Sweden and Norway on September 1, 1899. Early in themorning, colossal bronze statues of Ibsen and Björnson were unveiled infront of the theatre, and the poets, now, unfortunately, again not onthe best of terms, were seen making vast de*tours for the purpose ofsatisfying their curiosity, and yet not meeting one another in fleshor in metal. The first night, to prevent rivalry, was devoted toantiquarianism, and to the performance of extracts from the plays ofHolberg. Ibsen and Björnson occupied the centre of the dress circle, sitting uplifted in two gilded fauteuils and segregated by a vastgarland of red and white roses. They were the objects of universalattention, and the King seemed never to have done smiling and bowing tothe two most famous of his Norwegian subjects. 

The next night was Ibsen's fete, and he occupied, alone, the manager'sbox. A poem in his honor, by Niels Collet Vogt, was recited by theleading actor, who retired, and then rushed down the empty stage, with his arms extended, shouting "Long live Henrik Ibsen. " The immenseaudience started to its feet and repeated the words over and over againwith deafening fervor. The poet appeared to be almost overwhelmedwith emotion and pleasure; at length, with a gesture which was quitepathetic, smiling through his tears, he seemed to beg his friends tospare him, and the plaudits slowly ceased. _An Enemy of the People_ wasthen admirably performed. At the close of every act Ibsen was called tothe front of his box, and when the performance was over, and the actorshad been thanked, the audience turned to him again with a sort ofaffectionate ferocity. Ibsen was found to have stolen from his box, buthe was waylaid and forcibly carried back to it. On his reappearance, thewhole theatre rose in a roar of welcome, and it was with difficulty thatthe aged poet, now painfully exhausted from the strain of an eveningof such prolonged excitement, could persuade the public to allow himto withdraw. At length he left the theatre, walking slowly, bowing andsmiling, down a lane cleared for him, far into the street, through thedense 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, whichhe intended as the epilogue to his earlier dramatic work, or at least toall that he had written since _The Pillars of Society_. This play, whichwas his latest, appeared, under the title of _When We Dead Awaken_, in December, 1899 (with 1900 on the title-page). It was simultaneouslypublished, in very large editions, in all the principal languagesof Europe, and it was acted also, but it is impossible to deny that, whether in the study or on the boards, it proved a disappointment. It displayed, especially in its later acts, many obvious signs of theweakness incident on old age. 

When it is said that _When We Dead Awaken_ was not worthy of itspredecessors, it should be explained that no falling off was visible inthe technical cleverness with which the dialogue was built up, nor inthe wording of particular sentences. Nothing more natural or amusing, nothing showing greater, command of the resources of the theatre, hadever been published by Ibsen himself than the opening act of _WhenWe Dead Awaken_. But there was certainly in the whole conception acloudiness, an ineffectuality, which was very little like anythingthat Ibsen had displayed before. The moral of the piece was vague, theevolution of it incoherent, and indeed in many places it seemed a parodyof his earlier manner. Not Mr. Anstey Guthrie's inimitable scenesin _Mr. Punch's Ibsen_ were more preposterous than almost all theappearances of Irene after the first act of _When We Dead Awaken_. 

It is Irene who describes herself as dead, but awakening in the societyof Rubek, whilst Maia, the little gay soulless creature whom the greatsculptor has married, and has got heartily tired of, goes up to themountains with Ulpheim the hunter, in pursuit of the free joy of life. At the close, the assorted couples are caught on the summit of anexceeding high mountain by a snowstorm, which opens to show Rubek andIrene "whirled along with the masses of snow, and buried in them, " whileMaia and her bear-hunter escape in safety to the plains. Interminable, and often very sage and penetrating, but always essentially rathermaniacal, conversation fills up the texture of the play, which iscertainly the least successful of Ibsen's mature compositions. Theboredom of Rubek in the midst of his eminence and wealth, and hisconviction that by working in such concentration for the purity of arthe merely wasted his physical life, inspire the portions of the playwhich bring most conviction and can be read with fullest satisfaction. It is obvious that such thoughts, such faint and unavailing regrets, pursued the old age of Ibsen; and the profound wound that his heart hadreceived so long before at Gossensass was unhealed to his last momentsof consciousness. An excellent French critic, M. P. G. La Chesnais, has ingeniously considered the finale of this play as a confession thatIbsen, at this end of his career, was convinced of the error of hisearlier rigor, and, having ceased to believe in his mission, regrettedthe complete sacrifice of his life to his work. But perhaps it is notnecessary to go into such subtleties. _When We Dead Awaken_ isthe production of a very tired old man, whose physical powers weredeclining. 

In the year 1900, during our South African War, sentiment in theScandinavian countries was very generally ranged on the side of theBoers. Ibsen, however, expressed himself strongly and publicly in favorof the English position. In an interview (November 24, 1900), whichproduced a considerable sensation, he remarked that the Boers were buthalf-cultivated, and had neither the will nor the power to advancethe cause of civilization. Their sole object had come to be a jealousexclusion of all the higher forms of culture. The English were merelytaking what the Boers themselves had stolen from an earlier race; theBoers had pitilessly hunted their precursors out of house and home, andnow they were tasting the same cup themselves. These were considerationswhich had not occurred to generous sentimentalists in Norway, andIbsen's defence of England, which he supported in further communicationswith irony and courage, made a great sensation, and threw cold water onthe pro-Boer sentimentalists. In Holland, where Ibsen had a widepublic, this want of sympathy for Dutch prejudice raised a good deal ofresentment, and Ibsen's statements were replied to by the fiery youngjournalist, Cornelius Karel Elout, who even published a book on thesubject. Ibsen took dignified notice of Elout's attacks (December 9, 1900), repeating his defence of English policy, and this was the latestof his public appearances. 

He took an interest, however, in the preparation of the great edition ofhis _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 whollyrecovered. It was believed that any form of mental fatigue might now befatal to him, and his life was prolonged by extreme medical care. He wascontented in spirit and even cheerful, but from this time forth he wasmore and more completely withdrawn from consecutive interest in what wasgoing on in the world without. The publication, in succession, of hisjuvenile works (_Kaempehöjen_, _Olaf Liljekrans_, both edited by HalvdanKoht, in 1902), of his _Correspondence_, edited by Koht and JuliusElias, in 1904, of the bibliographical edition of his collected works byCarl Naerup, in 1902, left him indifferent and scarcely conscious. Thegathering darkness was broken, it is said, by a gleam of light in1905; when the freedom of Norway and the accession of King Håkon wereexplained to him, he was able to express his joyful approval before thecloud finally sank upon his intelligence. 

During his long illness Ibsen was troubled by aphasia, and he expressedhimself painfully, now in broken Norwegian, now in still more brokenGerman. His unhappy hero, Oswald Alving, in _Ghosts_, had thrilled theworld by his cry, "Give me the sun, Mother!" and now Ibsen, with glassyeyes, gazed at the dim windows, murmuring "Keine Sonne, keine Sonne, keine Sonne!" At the table where all the works of his maturity hadbeen written the old man sat, persistently learning and forgetting thealphabet. "Look!" he said to Julius Elias, pointing to his mournfulpothooks, "See what I am doing! I am sitting here and learning myletters--my _letters_! I who was once a Writer!" Over this shatteredimage of what Ibsen had been, over this dying lion, who could not die, Mrs. Ibsen watched with the devotion 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 latestarticulate words were addressed to her--"_min söde, kjaere, snillefrue_" (my sweet, dear, good wife); and she taught to adore theirgrandfather the three children of a new generation, Tankred, Irene, Eleonora. 

Ibsen preserved the habit of walking about his room, or standing forhours staring out of window, until the beginning of May, 1906. Thena more complete decay confined him to his bed. After several days ofunconsciousness, he died very peacefully in his house on Drammensvej, opposite the Royal Gardens of Christiania, at half-past two in theafternoon of May 23, 1906, being in his seventy-ninth year. By aunanimous vote of the he was awarded a public funeral, which the King ofNorway attended in person, while King Edward VII was represented thereby the British Minister. The event was regarded through out Norway as anational ceremony of the highest solemnity and importance, and the poetwho had suffered such bitter humiliation and neglect in his youth wascarried to his grave in solemn splendor, to the sound of a people'slamentation. 

CHAPTER IX

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

During the latest years of his life, which were spent as a wealthy andprosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took formsof legendary celebrity which were equalled by no other living man ofletters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed, among the dead, by Victor Hugo. When we think of the obscurity of hisyouth and middle age, and of his consistent refusal to advertise himselfby any of the little vulgar arts of self-exhibition, this extremepublicity is at first sight curious, but it can be explained. Norwayis a small and a new country, inordinately, perhaps, but justly andgracefully proud of those--an Ole Bull, a Frithjof Nansen, an EdvardGrieg--who spread through the world evidences of its spiritual life. Butthe one who was more original, more powerful, more interesting than anyother 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 moreexpenditure of delicate labor than any perverse canary or escapedmacaw had ever needed. Ibsen safely housed in Christiania!--it was therecovery of an important national asset, the resumption, after years ofvexation and loss, of the intellectual regalia of Norway. 

Ibsen, then--recaptured, though still in a frame of mind which left thecaptors nervous--was naturally an object of pride. For the benefit ofthe hundreds of tourists who annually pass through Christiania, it wasmore than tempting, it was irresistible to point out, in slow advancealong Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a table in the GrandCafe, "our greatest citizen. " To this species of demonstration Ibsenunconsciously lent himself by his immobility, his regularity of habits, his solemn taciturnity. He had become more like a strange physicalobject than like a man among men. He was visible broadly and quietly, not conversing, rarely moving, quite isolated and self-contained, arecognized public spectacle, delivered up, as though bound hand andfoot, to the kodak-hunter and the maker of "spicy" paragraphs. ThatIbsen was never seen to do anything, or heard to say anything, thatthose who boasted of being intimate with him obviously lied in theirteeth--all this prepared him for sacrifice. Christiania is a hot-bedof gossip, and its press one of the most "chatty" in the world. Our"greatest living author" was offered up as a wave-offering, and hesmoked daily on the altar of the newspapers. 

It will be extremely rash of the biographers of the future to try tofollow Ibsen's life day by day in the Christiania press from, letus say, 1891 to 1901. During that decade he occupied the reportersimmensely, and he was particularly useful to the active young men whotelegraph "chat" to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Berlin. Snapshots of Ibsen, dangerous illness of the playwright, quaint habitsof the Norwegian dramatist, a poet's double life, anecdotes of Ibsen andMrs. ----, rumors of the King's attitude to Ibsen--this pollenta, dresseda dozen ways, was the standing dish at every journalist's table. If aspace needed filling, a very rude reply to some fatuous question mightbe fitted in and called "Instance of Ibsen's Wit. " The crop of fable wasenormous, and always seemed to find a gratified public, for whom nothingwas too absurd if it was supposed to illustrate "our great nationalpoet. " Ibsen, meanwhile, did nothing at all. He never refuted a calumny, never corrected a story, but he threw an ironic glance through hisgold-rimmed spectacles as he strolled down Carl Johan with his handsbehind his back. 

His personal appearance, it must be admitted, formed a temptingbasis upon which to build a legend. His force of will had graduallytransfigured his bodily forms until he thoroughly looked the part whichhe was expected to fill. At the age of thirty, to judge by the earlyphotographs, he had been a commonplace-looking little man, with a shockof coal-black hair and a full beard, one of those hirsute types commonin 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 alittle bust which stands before me now, where the beard is cut away intotwo round whiskers so as to release the firm round chin, and the longupper lip is clean-shaved. Here there is more liveliness, but still nodistinction. Then comes a further advance--a photograph (in which I feela tender pride, for it was made to please me) taken in Dresden (October15, 1873), where the brow, perfectly smooth and white, has widened out, the whiskers have become less chubby, and the small, scrutinizing eyesabsolutely sparkle with malice. Here, you say at last, is no poet, indeed, but an unusually cultivated banker or surprisingly adroitsolicitor. Here the hair, retreating from the great forehead, begins tocurl and roll with a distinguished wildness; here the long mouth, likea slit in the face, losing itself at each end in whisker, is a symbol ofconcentrated will power, a drawer in some bureau, containing treasures, firmly locked up. 

Then came Munich, where Ibsen's character underwent very considerablechanges, or rather where its natural features became fixed andemphasized. We are not left without precious indication of his gesturesand his looks at this time, when he was a little past the age offifty. Where so much has been extravagantly written, or described ina journalistic key of false emphasis, great is the value of a quietportrait by one of those who has studied Ibsen most intelligently. It isperhaps the most careful pen-sketch of him in any language. 

Mr. William Archer, then, has given the following account of his firstmeeting with Ibsen. It was in the Scandinavia Club, in Rome, at theclose of 1881:--

I had been about a quarter of an hour in the room, and was standingclose to the door, when it opened, and in glided an undersized man withvery broad shoulders and a large, leonine head, wearing a long blackfrock-coat with very broad lapels, on one of which a knot of red ribbonwas conspicuous. I knew him at once, but was a little taken aback by hislow stature. In spite of all the famous instances to the contrary, oneinstinctively associates greatness with size. His natural height waseven somewhat diminished by a habit of bending forward slightly from thewaist, begotten, no doubt, of short-sightedness, and the need to peerinto things. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his handsbehind his back--an unobtrusive personality, which would have beeninsignificant had the head been strictly proportionate to the restof the frame. But there was nothing insignificant about the high andmassive forehead, crowned with a mane of (then) iron-gray hair, thesmall and pale but piercing eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, orthe thin lipped mouth, depressed at the corners into a curve indicativeof iron will, and set between bushy whiskers of the same dark gray asthe hair. The most cursory observer could not but recognize power andcharacter in the head; yet one would scarcely have guessed it to be thepower of a poet, the character of a prophet. Misled, perhaps, by theribbon at the buttonhole, and by an expression of reserve, almost ofsecretiveness, in the lines of the tight-shut mouth, one would ratherhave supposed one's self face to face with an eminent statesman ordiplomatist. 

With the further advance of years all that was singular in Ibsen'sappearance became accentuated. The hair and beard turned snowy white;the former rose in a fierce sort of Oberland, the latter was kept squareand full, crossing underneath the truculent chin that escaped from it. As Ibsen walked to a banquet in Christiania, he looked quite smallunder the blaze of crosses, stars and belts which he displayed when heunbuttoned the long black overcoat which enclosed him tightly. Neverwas he seen without his hands behind him, and the poet Holger Drachmannstarted 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 theywere not actually engaged in composition. His regularity in all habits, his mechanical ways, were the subject of much amusement. He must sit dayafter day in the same chair, at the same table, in the same cornerof the cafe, and woe to the ignorant intruder who was accidentallybeforehand with him. No word was spoken, but the indignant poet stoodat a distance, glaring, until the stranger should be pierced withembarrassment, 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 havingbeen phlegmatic rather than morose. He was "umbrageous, " ready to bediscomposed by the action of others, but, if not vexed or startled, he was elaborately courteous. He had a great dislike of any abruptmovement, 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 suddenlybroken, and he could not bear to be addressed by chance acquaintancesin street or café. When he was resident in Munich and Dresden, thedifficulty of obtaining an interview with Ibsen was notorious. His wifeprotected him from strangers, and if her defences broke down, and thestranger contrived to penetrate the inner fastness, Ibsen might suddenlyappear in the doorway, half in a rage, half quivering with distress, andsay, in heartrending tones, "Bitte um Arbeitsruhe"--"Please let me workin peace!" They used to tell how in Munich a rich baron, who was thelocal Maecenas of letters, once bored Ibsen with a long recital of hislove affairs, and ended by saying, with a wonderful air of fatuity, "To you, Master, I come, because of your unparalleled knowledge ofthe female heart. In your hands I place my fate. Advise me, and I willfollow your advice. " Ibsen snapped his mouth and glared through hisspectacles; then in a low voice of concentrated fury he said: "Gethome, and--go to bed!" whereat his noble visitor withdrew, clothed withindignation as with a garment. 

His voice was uniform, soft and quiet. The bitter things he said seemedthe bitterer for his gentle way of saying them. As his shape grew burlyand his head of hair enormous, the smallness of his extremities becameaccentuated. His little hands were always folded away as he tripped uponhis tiny feet. His movements were slow and distrait. He wasted few wordson the current incidents of life, and I was myself the witness, in1899, of his _sang-froid_ under distressing circumstances. Ibsen wasdescending a polished marble staircase when his feet slipped and he fellswiftly, precipitately, downward. He must have injured himself severely, he might have been killed, if two young gentlemen had not darted forwardbelow 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 Herrer!"--tenderly touched an abraded surface of his top-hat, andmarched forth homeward, unperturbed. 

His silence had a curious effect on those in whose company he feasted;it seemed to hypnotise them. The great Danish actress, Mrs. Heiberg, herself the wittiest of talkers, said that to sit beside Ibsen was topeer into a gold-mine and not catch a glitter from the hidden treasure. But his dumbness was not so bitterly ironical as it was popularlysupposed to be. It came largely from a very strange passivity whichmade definite action unwelcome to him. He could never be induced to payvisits, yet he would urge his wife and his son to accept invitations, and when they returned he would insist on being told everyparticular--who was there, what was said, even what everybody wore. He never went to a theatre or concert-room, except on the very rareoccasions when he could be induced to be present at the performance ofhis own plays. But he was extremely fond of hearing about the stage. Hehad a memory for little things and an observation of trifles which wasextraordinary. He thought it amazing that people could go into a roomand not notice the pattern of the carpet, the color of the curtains, the objects on the walls; these being details which he could not helpobserving and retaining. This trait comes out in his copious and minutestage directions. 

Ibsen was simplicity itself; no man was ever less affected. But hischaracter was closed; he was perpetually on the defensive. He was seldomconfidential, he never "gave way"; his emotions and his affectionswere genuine, but his heart was a fenced city. He had little sense ofdomestic comfort; his rooms were bare and neat, with no personal objectssave those which belonged to his wife. Even in the days of his wealth, in the fine house on Drammensvej, there was a singular absence ofindividuality about his dwelling rooms. They might have been preparedfor a rich American traveller in some hotel. Through a large portion ofhis career in Germany he lived in furnished rooms, not because he didnot possess furniture of his own, which was stored up, but because hepaid no sort of homage to his own penates. He had friends, but he didnot cultivate them; he rather permitted them, at intervals, to cultivatehim. To Georg Brandes (March 6, 1870) he wrote: "Friends are a costlyluxury; and when one has devoted one's self wholly to a profession anda mission here in life, there is no place left for friends. " The verycharming story of Ibsen's throwing his arms round old Hans ChristianAndersen's neck, and forcing him to be genial and amiable, [Note:_Samliv med Ibsen. _] is not inconsistent with the general rule ofpassivity and shyness which he preserved in matters of friendship. 

Ibsen's reading was singularly limited. In his fine rooms on DrammensvejI remember being struck by seeing no books at all, except the largeBible which always lay at his side, and formed his constant study. Hedisliked having his partiality for the Bible commented on, and if, aswould sometimes be the case, religious people expressed pleasure atfinding him deep in the sacred volume, Ibsen would roughly reply: "It isonly for the sake of the language. " He was the enemy of anything whichseemed to approach cant and pretension, and he concealed his own viewsas closely as he desired to understand the views of others. He possessedvery little knowledge of literature. The French he despised andrepudiated, 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 andreread Holberg, who throughout his life unquestionably remained Ibsen'sfavorite author; he preserved a certain admiration for the Danishclassics of his youth: Heiberg, Hertz, Schack-Steffelt. In German, theforeign language which he read most currently, he was strangely ignorantof Schiller and Heine, and hostile to Goethe, although _Brand_ and _PeerGynt_ must owe something of their form to _Faust_. But the German poetswhom he really enjoyed were two dramatists of the age preceding hisown, Otto Ludwig (1813-65) and Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). Each of theseplaywrights had been occupied in making certain reforms, of a realistictendency, in the existing tradition of the stage, and each of themdealt, before any one else in Europe did so, with "problems" on thestage. These two German poets, but Hebbel particularly, passed fromromanticism to realism, and so on to mysticism, in a manner fascinatingto Ibsen, whom it is possible that they influenced. [Note: It wouldbe interesting to compare _Die Niebelungen_, the trilogy which Hebbelpublished in 1862, in which the struggle between pagan and Christianideals of conduct is analyzed, with Ibsen's _Emperor and Galilean_. ] Heremained, in later years, persistently ignorant of Zola, and of Tolstoihe had read, with contemptuous disapproval, only some of the polemicalpamphlets. He said to me, in 1899, of the great Russian: "Tolstoi?--heis mad!" with a screwing up of the features such as a child makes at thethought of a black draught. 

If he read at all, it was poetry. His indifference to music wascomplete; he had, in fact, no ear whatever, and could not distinguishone tune from another. His efforts to appreciate the music whichGrieg made for _Peer Gynt_ were pathetic. But for verse his sense wasexceedingly delicate, and the sound of poetry gave him acute pleasure. At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he was fatigued by the riotof rhymes which pursued him through his dreams, and which his memoryvainly strove to recapture. For academic philosophy and systems ofphilosophic thought he had a great impatience. The vexed question ofwhat he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, hasnever been solved. Brandes has insisted, again and again, on theclose relation between _Brand_ and other works of Ibsen and the famous_Either-Or_ of Kierkegaard; "it actually seems, " he says, "as thoughIbsen had aspired to the honor of being called Kierkegaard's poet. "Ibsen, however, aspired to no such honor, and, while he never actuallydenied the influence, the relation between him and the philosopher seemsto be much rather one of parallelism than of imitation. Ibsen was apoetical psychologist of the first order, but he could not bring himselfto read the prose of the professional thinkers. 

In his attitude both to philosophical and poetical literature Ibsen iswith such apparently remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley; inhis realism and his mysticism he is unrelated to immediate predecessors, and has no wish to be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest inthe observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosityabout what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects. Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the sameas that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied orhad even turned over the pages of the _Criticism of Pure Reason_. It isnot necessary to suppose that he had done so. The peculiar aspect ofthe Ego as the principal and ultimately sole guide to truth was revealedanew to the Norwegian poet, and references to Kant, or to Fichte, or toKierkegaard, seem, therefore, to be beside the mark. The watchword of_Brand_, with his cry of "All or Nothing, " his absolute repudiation ofcompromise, was not a literary conception, but was founded, without thehelp of books, on a profound contemplation of human nature, mainly, nodoubt, as Ibsen found it in himself. But in these days of the tyrannyof literature it is curious to meet with an author of the first rank whoworked without a library. 

Ibsen's study of women was evidently so close, and what he writes aboutthem is usually so penetrating, that many legends have naturally sprungup about the manner in which he gained his experience. Of these, mostare pure fiction. As a matter of fact, Ibsen was shy with women, andunless they took the initiative, he contented himself with watching themfrom a distance: and noting their ways in silence. The early flirtationwith Miss Rikke Hoist at Bergen, which takes so prominent a place inIbsen's story mainly because such incidents were extremely rare in it, is a typical instance. If this young girl of sixteen had not takenthe matter into her own hands, running up the steps of the hotel andflinging her posy of flowers into the face of the young poet, theincident would have closed in his watching her down the street, while the fire smouldered in his eyes. It was not until her freshfield-blossoms had struck him on the cheek that he was emboldened tofollow her and to send her the lyrical roses and auriculas which liveforever in his poems. If we wish to note the difference of temperament, we have but to contrast Ibsen's affair with Rikke Holst with Goethe'sattitude to Christiana Vulpius; in doing so, we bring the passive andthe active lover face to face. 

Ibsen would gladly have married his flower of the field, a vision ofwhose bright, untrammelled adolescence reappears again and again inhis works, and plainly in _The Master-Builder_. But he escaped a greatdanger in failing to secure her as his wife, for Rikke Holst, when shehad lost her girlish freshness, would probably have had little characterand no culture to fall back upon. He waited, fortunately for hishappiness, until he secured Susannah Thoresen. Mrs. Ibsen, his faithfulguide, guardian and companion for half a century, will live among theentirely successful wives of difficult men of genius. In the midstof the spiteful gossip of Christiania she had to traverse her _viadolorosa_, for it was part of the fun of the journalists to representthis husband and wife as permanently alienated. That Ibsen was easy tolive with is not probable, but his wife not merely contrived to do it, but by her watchfulness, her adroitness, and, when necessary, by herfirmness of decision, she smoothed the path for the great man whomshe adored, and who was to her a great wilful child to be cajoled andcircumvented. He was absolutely dependent on her, although he affectedamusing airs of independence; and if she absented herself, there weresoon cries in the house of "My Cat, My Cat!" the pet name by which hecalled 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 believed that his privatecorrespondence might supply a key. His letters were collected andarranged while he was still alive, but he was not any longer in amental condition which permitted him to offer any help in comment tohis editors. His son, Mr. Sigurd Ibsen, superintended the work, and twocareful bibliographers, Mr. Halvdan Koht and Mr. Julius Elias, carried out the scheme in two volumes [Note: _Breve fra Henrik Ibsen_, Gyldendalske Boghadel, 1904. ], with the execution of which no fault canbe 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 relentlessdestroyer of documents; they are all written by him; not one singleexample had been preserved of the correspondence to which this isthe reply. Then Ibsen's letters, as revealers of the unseen mood, areparticularly unsatisfactory. With rare exceptions, he remains throughoutthem tightly buttoned up in his long and legendary frock-coat. There isno laughter and no tears in his letters; he is occasionally extremelyangry, and exudes drops of poison, like the captive scorpion which hecaught when he was in Italy, and loved to watch and tease. But thereis no self-abandonment, and very little emotion; the letters areprincipally historical and critical, "finger-posts for commentators. "They give valuable information about the genius of his works, but theytell almost less about his inner moral nature than do his imaginativewritings. 

In his youth the scorpion in Ibsen's heart seems to have stung himoccasionally to acts which afterwards filled him with embarrassment. Wehear that in his Bergen days he sent to Lading, his fellow-teacherat the theatre, a challenge of which, when the mood was over, he wasgreatly ashamed. It is said that on another occasion, under the pressureof annoyance, maddened with fear and insomnia, he sprang out of bed inhis shirt and tried to throw himself into the sea off one of the quaysin the harbor. Such performances were futile and ridiculous, and theybelong only to his youth. It seems certain that he schooled himselfto the suppression of such evidences of his anger, and that he did solargely by shutting up within his breast all the fire that rose there. The _Correspondence_--dark lantern as it is--seems to illuminate thiscondition of things; we see before us Ibsen with his hands clenched, hismouth 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 feeling may be offered. Thelengthiest of all Ibsen's published letters describes to Brandes (April25, 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-foremostout of window, in a crisis of fever. Ibsen writes down all the minutestdetails with feeling and refinement, but with as little sympatheticemotion as if he was drawing up a report for the police. With this traitmay be compared his extreme interest in the detailed accounts of publictrials; he liked to read exactly what the prisoner said, and all theevidence of the witnesses. In this Ibsen resembled Robert Browning, whose curiosity about the small incidents surrounding a large event wasboundless. When Ibsen, in the course of such an investigation, found thereal purpose of some strange act dawn upon him, he exhibited an almostchildish pleasure; and this was doubled when the interpretation was onewhich had not presented itself to the conventional legal authorities. 

In everything connected with the execution of his own work there wasno limit to the pains which he was willing to take. His handwritinghad always been neat, but it was commonplace in his early years. Theexquisite calligraphy which he ultimately used on every occasion, andthe beauty of which was famous far and wide, he adopted deliberatelywhen he was in Rome in 1862. To the end of his life, although in thelatest years the letters lost, from the shakiness of his hand, some oftheir almost Chinese perfection, he wrote his smallest notes in thischaracter. His zeal for elaboration as an artist led him to collect amass of consistent imaginary information about the personages in hisplays, who became to him absolutely real. It is related how, some onehappening to say that Nora, in _A Doll's House_, had a curious name, Ibsen immediately replied, "Oh! her full name was Leonora; but that wasshortened 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 inthe play itself, but Ibsen was familiar with the past history of all thecharacters he created. All through his career he seems to have been longhaunted by the central notion of his pieces, and to have laid itaside, sometimes for many years, until a set of incidents spontaneouslycrystallized around it. When the medium in which he was going to workbecame certain he would put himself through a long course of study inthe technical phraseology appropriate to the subject. No pains were toogreat to prepare him for the final task. 

When Mr. Archer visited Ibsen in the Harmonien Hotel at Saeby in 1887he extracted some valuable evidence from him as to his methods ofcomposition:--

It seems that the _idea_ of a piece generally presents itself beforethe characters and incidents, though, when I put this to him flatly, hedenied it. It seems to follow, however, from his saying that there is acertain stage in the incubation of a play when it might as easily turninto all essay as into a drama. He has to incarnate the ideas, as itwere, in character and incident, before the actual work of creationcan be said to have fairly begun. Different plans and ideas, he admits, often flow together, and the play he ultimately produces is sometimesvery unlike the intention with which he set out. He writes and rewrites, scribbles and destroys, an enormous amount before he makes the exquisitefair copy he sends to Copenhagen. 

He altered, as we have said, the printed text of his earlier works, inorder to bring them into harmony with his finished style, but he did notdo this, so far as I remember, after the publication of _Brand_. In thecase of all the dramas of his maturity he modified nothing when the workhad once been given to the world. 

CHAPTER X

INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS

Having accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen as a disturbing andrevolutionizing force, which met with the utmost resistance at theoutset, and was gradually accepted before the close of his career, wemay 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 peculiarlyroused the animosity of Ibsen was the character which has becomestereotyped in one order of ideas, good in themselves but graduallyoutworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a new kind. Ibsenmeditated upon the obscurantism of the old régime until he createdfigures like Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school arecrystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympatheticallyinto the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, thereis no one of his plays more valuable in its purely theoretic way than_Rosmersholm_. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, itsurveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies uponRosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can gono further. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would besalutary, he cannot move--he is bound in invisible chains. It is uselessto argue with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic, but hesimply cannot, when it comes to action, cross the bridge where Beatethrew 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 incommon, that both were fighters, both "held we fall to rise, are baffledto fight better, " but the dark fatalism of the Norwegian poet was inother things in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness of theEnglish one. Browning and Ibsen alike considered that the race must bereformed periodically or it would die. The former anticipated reformas cheerily as the sower expects harvest. Ibsen had no such happycertainty. He was convinced of the necessity of breaking up the oldillusions, the imaginative call for revolt, but his faith wavered as tothe success of the new movements. The old order, in its resistance toall change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but it is the work ofa blind Sampson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground. In _Rosmersholm_, all the modern thought, all the vitality, all thelucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutlyintrenched. In the end it is not the new idea who conquers; it is theantique 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 questionwhether, after all, as we so glibly intimate, the old order changeth atall, whether, on the contrary, it has not become a Juggernaut car thatcrushes all originality and independence out of action, this breathesmore and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gablercondemns the old order, in its dulness, its stifling mediocrity, but sheis unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, andshe sinks into deeper moral dissolution. She hates all that has beendone, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, thatdetestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it seesthe need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its ownsterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. Of Lövborg, and to kill herselfwith General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; theHedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do best to die. 

We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love of self is thefundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct ofself-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to everymanifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Betweenthe excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of HeddaGabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, themaster-builder Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but inthe act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoonsto death, "dizzy, lost, yet unupbraiding. " Ibsen's exact meaning in thedetail of these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but they repaythe closest and most reiterated study. Perhaps the most curious of allis _The Lady from the Sea_, which has been examined from the technicallypsychological view by a learned French philosopher, M. Jules deGaultier. For M. De Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen'sconception of human life, with its conflicting instincts andresponsibilities, is more fully centred in _The Lady from the Sea_ thanin any other of his productions. 

The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen's constant aim is toreconcile and to conciliate the two biological hypotheses whichhave divided opinion in the nineteenth century, and which are knownrespectively by the names of Cuvier and Lamarck; namely, that of theinvariability of species and that of the mutability of organic forms. In the reconciliation of these hypotheses Ibsen finds the only processwhich is truly encouraging to life. According to this theory, all thetrouble, all the weariness, all the waste of moral existences aroundus comes from the neglect of one or other of these principles, andtrue health, social or individual, is impossible without the harmoniousapplication of them both. According to this view, the apotheosis ofIbsen's genius, or at least the most successful elucidation of hisscheme of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in _The Lady fromthe Sea_ where Wangel succeeds in winning the heart of Ellida back fromthe fascination of the Stranger. It is certainly in this mysterious andstrangely attractive play that Ibsen has insisted, more than anywhereelse, on the necessity of taking physiology into consideration in everydiscussion of morals. He refers, like a zoölogist, to the laws whichregulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decisionof Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example ofthe limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. Theextraordinary ingenuity of M. De Gaultier's analysis of this playdeserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted, as embraced byIbsen's intention, may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollectthat, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct of Ibsen wasprobably subtler still. 

In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward, with the glimmering taper ofhis Catilina, there was but one person in the world who fancied thatthe light might pass from lamp to lamp and in half a century form animportant part of the intellectual illumination of Europe. The oneperson who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself. Againstall probability and common-sense, this apothecary's assistant, thisill-educated youth who had just been plucked in his preliminaryexamination, who positively was, and remained, unable to pass the firsttests and become a student at the University, maintained in hisinmost soul the belief that he was born to be "a king of thought. " Theimpression is perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makesthe case unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that ithappened to be true. But the impact of Ibsen with the social order ofhis age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unluckythan that of any other great man of the same class with whose biographywe have been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all thatwas successful and respectable and "nice" from the outset of his careeruntil near the end of it. 

Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to theworld there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in themouth like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it asnauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be oneof those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no otherwriter of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealingwith human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness thesatire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill andthin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns, Ibsen isuniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problemsof life than any other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but it washis surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays ofAlexandre Dumas _fils_ flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon. But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all theprotean forms of organic social life and coldly draws up his diagnosislike a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. Wehave seen that, long before a sentence was written, he had invented andstudied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characterswho were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of theirexperience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he wasbuilding up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, feticheswhich represented people to him, stood arranged on his writing table, and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by somefeat of black magic, he turned them into living persons, typical and yetindividual. 

We have recorded that the actual writing down of the dialogue was oftenswift and easy, when the period of incubation was complete. Each ofIbsen's plays presupposes a long history behind it; each starts like anancient Greek tragedy, in the full process of catastrophe. Thismethod of composition was extraordinary, was perhaps, in moderntimes, unparalleled. It accounted in measure for the coherency, theinevitability, of all the detail, but it also accounted for some of thedifficulties which meet us in the task of interpretation. Ibsen callsfor an expositor, and will doubtless give occupation to an endlessseries of scholiasts. They will not easily exhaust their theme, and tothe last something will escape, something will defy their most carefulexamination. It is not disrespectful to his memory to claim that Ibsensometimes packed his stuff too closely. Criticism, when it marvels mostat the wonder of his genius, is constrained to believe that he sometimesthrew too much of his soul into his composition, that he did not standfar enough away from it always to command its general effect. Theresult, especially in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, andexcites the spectator too much. 

One very curious example of Ibsen's minute care is found in thecopiousness of his stage directions. Later playwrights have imitatedhim in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago suchminuteness seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essentialto the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. Thestage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader whodesires to follow the dramatist's thought step by step without losingthe least link. These notes of his intention will be of ever-increasingvalue as the recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In 1899 Ibsenremarked to me that it was almost useless for actors nowadays to try toperform the comedies of Holberg, because there were no stage directionsand the tradition was lost. Of his own work, fortunately, that can neverbe said. Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating studies of theGreek Tragedies, has pointed out more than once the "undesigned andunforeseen defect with which, in studying ancient drama, we mustperpetually reckon, " namely, the loss of the action and of theequivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine "what problemsShakespeare would present if he were printed like the _Poetae SceniciGraeci_, " and not more difficult to realize how many things there wouldbe to puzzle us in _Ghosts_ and _The Wild Duck_ if we possessed nothingbut the bare text. 

The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, sopassionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to bewelcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed inNorway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of anextravagant character. At the present moment any one conversant withNorwegian society who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officeror a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will besurprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to theattractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almostuniversal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice befound to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light intothe national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the nationalconscience, that even works like _Ghosts_, which shocked, and works like_Rosmersholm_, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, wereexcellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, whoreviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed atevery national habit and showed a worm at the root of every nationaltradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to beaccompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation, " andhe who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last restingplace by a Parliament and a King. 

It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to thewhole world--his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in thisdissemination--yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at homethat he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter howhard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord betweenhis country and himself was complete long before the prophet died. As hewalked about, the strange, picturesque little old man, in the streetsof Christiania, his fellow-citizens gazed at him with a little fear, but with some affection and with unbounded reverence. They understoodat last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely itapplied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for ittheir civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dantesaid in the _New Life_:--

è costui Che viene a consolar la nostra mente, Ed è la sua tantopossente, Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui. 

No words, surely, could better express the intensity with whichIbsen had pressed his moral quality, his _virtù_, upon the Norwegianconscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it and hadbanished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows willdoubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, andat the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of theworld, owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurturedin that new temper of mind, that _spiritel nuovo d'amore_ which wasinculcated by the whole work of Ibsen.