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diff --git a/8152.txt b/8152.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e48003f --- /dev/null +++ b/8152.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5573 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henrik Ibsen, by Edmund Gosse + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Henrik Ibsen + +Author: Edmund Gosse + +Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8152] +Posting Date: August 6, 2009 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRIK IBSEN *** + + + + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Nicole Apostola and David Widger + + + + + +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 works +published, in all languages, since the completion of his writings, there +exists no biographical study which brings together, on a general plan, +what has been recorded of his adventures as an author. Hitherto the only +accepted Life of Ibsen has been _Et literaert Livsbillede_, published +in 1888 by Henrik Jaeger; of this an English translation was issued in +1890. Henrik Jaeger (who must not be confounded with the novelist, Hans +Henrik Jaeger) was a lecturer and dramatic critic, residing near Bergen, +whose book would possess little value had he not succeeded in persuading +Ibsen to give him a good deal of valuable information respecting his +early life in that city. In its own day, principally on this account, +Jaeger's volume was useful, supplying a large number of facts which were +new to the public. But the advance of Ibsen's activity, and the increase +of knowledge since his death, have so much extended and modified the +poet's history that _Et literaert Livsbillede_ has become obsolete. + +The principal authorities of which I have made use in the following +pages are the minute bibliographical _Oplysninger_ of J. B. Halvorsen, +marvels of ingenious labor, continued after Halvorsen's death by Sten +Konow (1901); the _Letters of Henrik Ibsen_, published in two volumes, +by H. Koht and J. Elias, in 1904, and now issued in an English +translation (Hodder & Stoughton); the recollections and notes of various +friends, published in the periodicals of Scandinavia and Germany +after his death; T. Blanc's _Et Bidrag til den Ibsenskte Digtnings +Scenehistorie_ (1906); and, most of all, the invaluable _Samliv med +Ibsen_ (1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned writer aspires, in +measure, to be Ibsen's Boswell, and his book is a series of chapters +reminiscent of the dramatist's talk and manners, chiefly during those +central years of his life which he spent in Germany. It is a trivial, +naive and rather thin production, but it has something of the true +Boswellian touch, and builds up before us a lifelike portrait. + +From the materials, too, collected for many years past by Mr. William +Archer, I have received important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it is +difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation. +It is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metrical +writings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume, and +that I had the privilege, in consequence, of being the first person to +introduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend for +a moment that it is not a gratification to me, after so many years and +after such surprising developments, to know that this was the fact. But, +save for this accident of time, it was Mr. Archer and no other who was +really the introducer of Ibsen to English readers. For a quarter of a +century he was the protagonist in the fight against misconstruction and +stupidity; with wonderful courage, with not less wonderful good temper +and persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place of +the false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius. +Mr. William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attached +to the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in England +and America. + +In these pages, where the space at my disposal was so small, I have not +been willing to waste it by repeating the plots of any of those plays of +Ibsen which are open to the English reader. It would please me best if +this book might be read in connection with the final edition of _Ibsen's +Complete Dramatic Works_, now being prepared by Mr. Archer in eleven +volumes (W. Heinemann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole work by those +volumes of it which have already appeared, I have little hesitation in +saying that no other foreign author of the second half of the nineteenth +century has been so ably and exhaustively edited in English as Ibsen has +been in this instance. + +The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further be +recommended to the study of Carl Naerup's _Norsk Litteraturhistories +siste Tidsrum_ (1905), a critical history of Norwegian literature since +1890, which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modern +ideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway, scarcely one of +whom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the tyranny +of Ibsen's personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen in England +and France has often missed something of its historical value by not +taking into consideration that movement of intellectual life in Norway +which has surrounded him and which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may be +allowed to say of my little book that this side of the subject has been +particularly borne in mind in the course of its composition. + +E. G. + +KLOBENSTEIN. + + + +CHAPTER I + +CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH + +The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish +skipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, +made his way over from Stege, the capital of the island of Moeen, and +became a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the +family, all following the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorous +disposition, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinister +and taciturn wives, who, by the way, were always, it would seem, Danes +or Germans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet had, after a +hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pure +Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, was +wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost on +Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem +of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, married in 1825 +a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same town of Skien; +she was one year his senior, and the daughter of a merchant. It was in +1771 that the Ibsens, leaving Bergen, had settled in Skien, which was, +and still is, an important centre of the timber and shipping trades on +the south-east shore of the country. + +It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort of +Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise, +and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of a +wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains +of heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than +to recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all his +forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to +insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which +marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely +provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find +anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the +Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in that +inability to resist the call of the sea, generation after generation, +if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of the +conventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect elements +of his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son who +was born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months after +their marriage. + +This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, although he never used the +second name, was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House, +in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20, The house stood on one +side of a large, open square; the town pillory was at the right of and +the mad-house, the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to the +left; in front was Latin school and the grammar school, while the church +occupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospect the tourist +can no longer sentimentalize, for the whole of this part of Skien +was burned down in 1886, to the poet's unbridled satisfaction. "The +inhabitants of Skien," he said with grim humor, "were quite unworthy to +possess my birthplace." + +He declared that the harsh elements of landscape, mentioned above, were +those which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that +the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day +long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn +to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that +was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by +hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of that +force. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought +of those saws," said the poet, whose earliest flight of fancy seems to +have been this association of womanhood with the shriek of the sawmill. + +In 1888, just before his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen wrote out for Henrik +Jaeger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It is +from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is +taken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories, +many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting, however, to find +that his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimistic +character. "Skien," he says, "in my young days, was an exceedingly +lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became. +Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself +or close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or less +closely related, and dances, dinners and music parties followed each +other, winter and summer, in almost unbroken sequence. Many travellers, +too, passed through the town, and, as there were as yet no regular inns, +they lodged with friends or connections. We almost always had guests in +our large, roomy house, especially at Christmas and Fair-time, when the +house was full, and we kept open table from morning till night." The +mind reverts to the majestic old wooden mansions which play so prominent +a part in Thomas Krag's novels, or to the house of Mrs. Solness' +parents, the burning down of which started the Master-Builder's +fortunes. Most of these grand old timber houses in Norway have indeed, +by this time, been so burned down. + +We may speculate on what the effect of this genial open-handedness might +have been, had it lasted, on the genius of the poet. But fortune had +harsher views of what befitted the training of so acrid a nature. When +Ibsen was eight years of age, his father's business was found to be in +such disorder that everything had to be sold to meet his creditors. The +only piece of property left when this process had been gone through +was a little broken-down farmhouse called Venstoeb, in the outskirts of +Skien. Ibsen afterwards stated that those who had taken most advantage +of his parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were precisely +those who now most markedly turned a cold shoulder on them. It is likely +enough that this may have been the case, but one sees how inevitably +Ibsen would, in after years, be convinced that it was. He believed +himself to have been, personally, much mortified and humiliated in +childhood by the change in the family status. Already, by all accounts, +he had begun to live a life of moral isolation. His excellent sister +long afterwards described him as an unsociable child, never a pleasant +companion, and out of sympathy with all the rest of the family. + +We recollect, in _The Wild Duck_, the garret which was the domain of +Hedvig and of that symbolic bird. At Venstoeb, the infant Ibsen possessed +a like retreat, a little room near the back entrance, which was sacred +to him and into the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt himself. +Here were some dreary old books, among others Harrison's folio _History +of the City of London_, as well as a paint-box, an hour-glass, an +extinct eight-day clock, properties which were faithfully introduced, +half a century later, into _The Wild Duck_. His sister says that the +only outdoor amusement he cared for as a boy was building, and she +describes the prolonged construction of a castle, in the spirit of _The +Master-Builder_. + +Very soon he began to go to school, but to neither of the public +institutions in the town. He attended what is described as a "small +middle-class school," kept by a man called Johan Hansen, who was the +only person connected with his childhood, except his sister, for whom +the poet retained in after life any agreeable sentiment. "Johan Hansen," +he says, "had a mild, amiable temper, like that of a child," and when he +died, in 1865, Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who helped in the +lessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of +wonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual +gift for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently, +perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards +boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in +itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, at +the age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic description +of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he must +have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence of +the author, "passive at the nadir of dismay." + +No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more +ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has +done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with +anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only +talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. +A little while before he left school, he was found to have been working +hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of +the young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view +from the windows at Venstoeb, 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 have +been, founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, a +far-away following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy +"patriot-painters" of the school of Dahl. + +It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had considerable +intellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood the +ambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks and +months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied, +so Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In +neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for +the National Gallery, but it is highly significant that such earnest +students of precise excellence in another art should first of all have +schooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color. + +In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken away +from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with a +young middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the future proposed +no task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the local +schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be a professional +artist, but that was one which could not be indulged. Until a later date +than this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary +technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J. +C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Duesseldorf, where the teaching +attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meant +a long and serious expenditure of money, together with a very doubtful +prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who had seemed the very +genius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having scarcely begun to +sell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not surprising that Knud +Ibsen, whose to were in a worse condition than ever, refused even to +consider a course of life which would entail a heavy and long-continued +expense. + +Ibsen hung about at home for a few months, then, shortly before his +sixteenth birthday, he apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of Mann, +at the little town of Grimstad, between Arendal and Christianssand, on +the extreme south-east corner of the Norwegian coast. This was his home +for more than five years; here he became a poet, and here the peculiar +color and tone of his temperament were developed. So far as the genius +of a very great man is influenced by his surroundings, and by his +physical condition in those surroundings, it was the atmosphere of +Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen. +Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit of +clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew, the town which +he hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly +dunce. We find him next, with an apron round his middle and a pestle in +his hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. What +Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats--"Back to the shop, Mr. John, +stick to plasters, pills and ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the +author of _Endymion_, was strictly true of the author of _Peer Gynt_. + +Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to +Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius. +For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the most +important of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of the +most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for +a century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters. +Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing +at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it +looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked +rocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect +uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything; +in Ibsen's time there are said to have been about five hundred of these +apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one +of the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in fraying +ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter. + +For several years nothing is recorded, and there was probably very +little that demanded record, of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own +interesting notes, it is obvious, refer only to the closing months of +the period. Ten years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of +Europe had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence +such as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature +imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, +in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of +life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness +and a thousand bitters." + +It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his sixth to his twentieth +year, suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was at +war--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 even +friendly little community. It is difficult for us to realize what life +in a remote coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection +with the capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the +capital was as yet little more than we should call a village. There +would, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the best +inhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain +graceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected +from Copenhagen, would mark the more conservative citizens, male and +female. A fierier generation--not hot enough, however, to set the +fjord on flame--would celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the +country in numerous patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy like +Ibsen would, on the whole, prefer the former type, but he would despise +them both. + +He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a poverty that excluded all +indulgence, beyond the bare necessities, in food and clothes and +books. We can conceive the meagre advance of his position, first a +mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice +of friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some +bright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr. +Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he +contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal," +compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real +grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have +dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, +and strychnine and the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the +admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies +in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of +anger, against which all arguments are useless, which bubbles up in the +heart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, and +knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in +manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us +with pathetic naivete, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to +the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had +permitted it. + +As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace. By +the respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its little +inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quite +nice." The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man, who did not +seem to realize his menial position. He was certainly intelligent, and +Grimstad would have overlooked the pills and ointments if his manners +had been engaging, but he was rude, truculent and contradictory. The +youthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of +its elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson has, in such +conditions, enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not a +favorite even with the girls, whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One of +the young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe the +effect which the poet made upon them. They had none of them liked him, +she said, "because"--she hesitated for the word--"because he was so +_spectral_." This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to us for +a moment the distempered youth, almost incorporeal, displayed wandering +about at twilight and in lonely places, held in common esteem to be +malevolent, and expressing by gestures rather than by words sentiments +of a nature far from complimentary or agreeable. + +Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his +twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the +passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked +apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, +and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is +unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature. +The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost an +accident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, and +some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" to +the vexation of various worthy persons. The earliest trace of +talent seems to been in this direction, in the form of lampoons +or "characters," as people called them in the seventeenth century, +sarcastic descriptions of types in which certain individuals could be +recognized. No doubt if these could be recovered, we should find them +rough and artless, but containing germs of the future keenness of +portraiture. They were keen enough, it seems, to rouse great resentment +in Grimstad. + +There is evidence to show that the lad had docility enough, at all +events, to look about for some aid in the composition of Norwegian +prose. We should know nothing of it but for a passage in Ibsen's later +polemic with Paul Jansenius Stub of Bergen. In 1848 Stub was an +invalid schoolmaster, who, it appears, eked out his income by giving +instruction, by correspondence, in style. How Ibsen heard of him does +not seem to be known, but when, in 1851, Ibsen entered, with needless +acrimony, into a controversy with his previous teacher about the +theatre, Stub complained of his ingratitude, since he had "taught the +boy to write." Stub's intervention in the matter, doubtless, was limited +to the correction of a few exercises. + +Ibsen's own theory was that his intellect and character were awakened +by the stir of revolution throughout Europe. The first political event +which really interested him was the proclamation of the French Republic, +which almost coincided with his twentieth birthday. He was born again, +a child of '48. There were risings in Vienna, in Milan, in Rome. Venice +was proclaimed a republic, the Pope fled to Gaeta, the streets of Berlin +ran with the blood of the populace. The Magyars rose against Jellalic +and his Croat troops; the Czechs demanded their autonomy; in response to +the revolutionary feeling in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein was up in arms. + +Each of these events, and others like them, and all occurring in the +rapid months of that momentous year, smote like hammers on the door of +Ibsen's brain, till it quivered with enthusiasm and excitement. The +old brooding languor was at an end, and with surprising clearness and +firmness he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man. +The old clouds vanished, and though the social difficulties which hemmed +in his career were as gross as ever, he himself no longer doubted +what was to be his aim in life. The cry of revolution came to him, of +revolution faint indeed and broken, the voice of a minority appealing +frantically and for a moment against the overwhelming forces of a +respectable majority, but it came to him just at the moment when his +young spirit was prepared to receive it with faith and joy. The effect +on Ibsen's character was sudden and it was final: + + Then he stood up, and trod to dust + Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, + And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, + And bound for sandals on his feet + Knowledge and patience of what must + And what things 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 extreme +interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his +commentators, the preface to the second (1876) edition of _Catilina_, +he has described what the influences were which roused him out of +the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution of +February, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a +series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to +take up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, when all his duties +were over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret +where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world, +instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his +first drama, the opening lines of which, + + "I must, I must; a voice is crying to me + From my soul's depth, and I will follow it," + +might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole life's work. + +In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has noted, with that +clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the +"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of +mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of +his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its +ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its +intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded +sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent in +the poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were +burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to +his readers. + +But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now presented +itself. He was so busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he says, to +steal his hours for study. He still inhabited the upper room, which he +calls a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his status, +assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his social +conveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugs +with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointed +out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of +_Catilina_ takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of +the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to +the story had to be given in the night hours. When he emerged from the +garret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in theology, a Mr. Monrad, +brother of the afterwards famous professor. By a remarkable chance, the +subject given by the University for examination was the Conspiracy of +Catiline, to be studied in the history of Sallust and the oration of +Cicero. + +No theme could have been more singularly well fitted to fire the +enthusiasm of Ibsen. At no time of his life a linguist, or much +interested in history, it is probable that the difficulty of +concentrating his attention on a Latin text would have been +insurmountable had the subject been less intimately sympathetic to him. +But he tells us that he had no sooner perceived the character of the man +against whom these diatribes are directed than he devoured them greedily +(_jeg slugte disse skrifter_). The opening words of Sallust, which every +schoolboy has to read--we can imagine with what an extraordinary force +they would strike upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen. +_Lucius Catilina nobili genere natus, magna vi et animi et corporis, sed +ingenio malo pravoque_--how does this at once bring up an image of the +arch-rebel, of Satan himself, as the poets have conceived him, how does +it attract, with its effects of energy, intelligence and pride, the +curiosity of one whose way of life, as Keats would say, is still +undecided, 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 Perugino +for Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the master-mind +that started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers of his age +or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust. There can be +no doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his unflinching +method of building up his edifice of invective, stone by stone; his +close, unidealistic, dry penetration into character; his clinical +attitude, unmoved at the death-bed of a reputation; that all these +qualities were directly operative on the mind and intellectual character +of Ibsen, and went a long way to mould it while moulding was still +possible. + +There is no evidence to show that the oration of Cicero moved him nearly +so much as the narratives of Sallust. After all, the object of Cicero +was to crush the conspiracy, but what Ibsen was interested in was +the character of Catiline, and this was placed before him in a more +thrilling way by the austere reserve of the historian. No doubt, to a +young poet, when that poet was Ibsen, there would be something deeply +attractive in the sombre, archaic style, and icy violence of Sallust. +How thankful we ought to be that the historian, with his long sonorous +words--_flagitiosorum ac facinorosorum_--did not make of our perfervid +apothecary a mere tub-thumper of Corinthian prose! + +Ibsen now formed the two earliest friendships of his life. He had +reached the age of twenty without, as it would seem, having been able +to make his inner nature audible to those around him. He had been to +the inhabitants of Grimstad a stranger within their gates, not speaking +their language; or, rather, wholly "spectral," speaking no language at +all, but indulging in cat-calls and grimaces. He was now discovered like +Caliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the strenuous arts of friendship. +One of those who thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due, who +held a post in the custom-house; the other was Ole Schulerud (1827-59), +who deserves a cordial acknowledgment from every admirer of Ibsen. He +also was in the receipt of custom, and a young man of small independent +means. To Schulerud and to Due, Ibsen revealed his poetic plans, and +he seems to have found in them both sympathizers with his republican +enthusiasms and transcendental schemes for the liberation of the +peoples. It was a stirring time, in 1848, and all generous young blood +was flowing fast in the same direction. + +Since Ibsen's death, Due has published a very lively paper of +recollections of the old Grimstad days. He says: + +His daily schedule admitted few intervals for rest or sleep. Yet I never +heard Ibsen complain of being tired. His health was uniformly good. +He must have had an exceptionally strong constitution, for when his +financial conditions compelled him to practice the most stringent +economy, he tried to do without underclothing, and finally even without +stockings. In these experiments he succeeded; and in winter he went +without an overcoat; yet without being troubled by colds or other bodily +ills. + +We have seen that Ibsen was so busy that he had to steal from his duties +the necessary hours for study. But out of these hours, he tells us, he +stole moments for the writing of poetry, of the revolutionary poetry +of which we have spoken, and for a great quantity of lyrics of a +sentimental and fanciful kind. Due was the confidant to whom he recited +the latter, and one at least of these early pieces survives, set to +music by this friend. But to Schulerud a graver secret was intrusted, no +less than that in the night hours of 1848-49 there was being composed +in the garret over the apothecary's shop a three-act tragedy in blank +verse, on the conspiracy of Catiline. With his own hand, when the first +draft was completed, Schulerud made a clean copy of the drama, and in +the autumn of 1849 he went to Christiania with the double purpose of +placing _Catilina_ at the theatre and securing a publisher for it. A +letter (October 15, 1849) from Ibsen, first printed in 1904--the only +document we possess of this earliest period--displays to a painful +degree the torturing anxiety with which the poet awaited news of his +play, and, incidentally, exposes his poverty. With all Schulerud's +energy, he found it impossible to gain attention for _Catilina_ at the +theatre, and in January, 1850, Ibsen received what he called its "death +warrant," but it was presently brought out as a volume, under the +pseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme, at Schulerud's expense. Of _Catilina_ +about thirty copies were sold, and it attracted no notice whatever from +the press. + +Meanwhile, left alone in Grimstad, since Due was now with Schulerud in +Christiania, Ibsen had been busy with many literary projects. He had +been writing an abundance of lyrics, he had begun a one-act drama called +"The Normans," afterwards turned into _Kaempehoejen_; he was planning a +romance, _The Prisoner at Akershus_ (this was to deal with the story of +Christian Lofthus); and above all he was busy writing a tragedy of +_Olaf Trygvesoen_. [Note: On the authority of the Breve, pp. 59, 59, +where Halvdan Koht prints "Olaf Tr." and "Olaf T." expanding these to +Tr[ygvesoen]. But is it quite certain that what Ibsen wrote in these +letters was not "Olaf Li." and "Olaf L.," and that the reference is not +to Olaf Liljekrans, which was certainly begun at Grimstad? Is there any +other evidence that Ibsen ever started an _Olaf Trygvesoen_?] + +One of his poems had already been printed in a Christiania newspaper. +The call was overwhelming; he could endure Grimstad and the gallipots +no longer. In March, 1850, at the age of twenty-one, Ibsen stuck a few +dollars in his pocket and went off to try his fortune in the capital. + + + +CHAPTER II + +EARLY INFLUENCES + +In middle life Ibsen, who suppressed for as long a time as he could most +of his other juvenile works, deliberately lifted _Catilina_ from the +oblivion into which it had fallen, and replaced it in the series of his +writings. This is enough to indicate to us that he regarded it as of +relative importance, and imperfect as it is, and unlike his later plays, +it demands some critical examination. I not know whether any one ever +happened to ask Ibsen whether he had been aware that Alexandre Dumas +produced in Paris a five-act drama of _Catiline_ at the very moment +(October, 1848) when Ibsen started the composition of his. It is quite +possible that the young Norwegian saw this fact noted in a newspaper, +and immediately determined to try what he could make of the same +subject. In Dumas' play Catiline is presented merely as a demagogue; he +is the red Flag personified, and the political situation in France is +discussed under a slight veil of Roman history. Catiline is simply a +sort of Robespierre brought up to date. There is no trace of all this in +Ibsen. + +Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much more +similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of +_Catiline_ which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsen +had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wager +that, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of Ben +Jonson. Yet there is an odd sort of resemblance, founded on the fact +that each poet keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the Latins. +Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of Catiline +as if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the narrative, +each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of the +arch-conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In both +poems, Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is-- + +Armed with a glory high as his despair. + +Another resemblance between the old English and the modern Norwegian +dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require +lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson's +case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance +the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to the +stage. + +This is a very curious example, among many which might be brought +forward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all +his early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. This +tendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in _Brand_ and +_Peer Gynt_, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted +for his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had +quitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic +expression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear +it altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in +itself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements. + +The close of Ibsen's _Catalina_ is, as we have said, composed entirely +in rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poet +could not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged to +start running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here is +a fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent for +dead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia +has stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speech +which ends thus:-- + +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 my +bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then die. + + CATILINE + (bewildered). +What? thou livest? + + AURELIA. + + Death's pale herald o'er my senses threw a pall, + But my dulled eye tracked thy footsteps, and I saw, I saw it all, + And my passion a wife's forces to my wounded body gave; + Breast to breast, my Catiline, let us sink into our grave. + +[Note: In 1875 Ibsen practically rewrote the whole of this part of +_Catilina_, without, however, improving it. Why will great authors +confuse the history of literature by tampering with their early texts?] + +He had slipped far out of the sobriety of Sallust when he floundered, +in this way, in the deep waters of romanticism. In the isolation of +Grimstad he had but himself to consult, and the mind of a young poet who +has not yet enjoyed any generous communication with life is invariably +sentimental and romantic. The critics of the North have expended a +great deal of ingenuity in trying to prove that Ibsen exposed his own +temperament and character in the course of _Catilina_. No doubt there +is a great temptation to indulge in this species of analysis, but it is +amusing to note that some of the soliloquies which have been pointed out +as particularly self-revealing are translated almost word for word +out of Sallust. Perhaps the one passage in the play which is really +significant is that in which the hero says:-- + +If but for one brief moment I could flame And blaze through space, and +be a falling star; If only once, and by one glorious deed, I could +but knit the name of Catiline With glory and with deathless high +renown,--Then should I blithely, in the hour of conquest, Leave all, and +hie me to an alien shore, Press the keen dagger gayly to my heart, And +die; for then I should have lived indeed. + +This has its personal interest, since we know, on the evidence of his +sister, that such was the tenor of Ibsen's private talk about himself at +that precise time. + +Very imperfect as _Catilina_ is in dramatic art, and very primitive as +is the development of plot in it, it presents one aspect, as a literary +work, which is notable. That it should exist at all is curious, since, +surprising as it seems, it had no precursor. Although, during the +thirty-five years of Norwegian independence, various classes of +literature had been cultivated with extreme diligence, the drama had +hitherto been totally neglected. With the exception of a graceful opera +by Bjerregaard, which enjoyed a success sustained over a quarter of a +century, the only writings in dramatic form produced in Norway between +1815 and 1850 were the absurd lyrical farces of Wergeland, which were +devoid of all importance. Such a thing as a three-act tragedy in blank +verse was unknown in modern Norway, so that the youthful apothecary in +Grimstad, whatever he was doing, was not slavishly copying the fashions +of his own countrymen. + +The principal, if not the only influence which acted upon Ibsen at this +moment, was that of the great Danish tragedian, Adam Oehlenschlaeger. +It might be fantastically held that the leading romantic luminary +of Scandinavia withdrew on purpose to make room for his realistic +successor, since Oehlenschlaeger's latest play, _Kiartan and Gudrun_, +appeared just when Ibsen was planning _Catilina_, while the death of the +Danish poet (January 20, 1850) was practically simultaneous with Ibsen's +arrival in Christiania. In later years, Ibsen thought that Holberg and +Oehlenschlaeger were the only dramatists he had read when his own +first play was written; he was sure that he knew nothing of Schiller, +Shakespeare or the French. Of the rich and varied dramatic literature of +Denmark, in the generation between Oehlenschlaeger's and his own, he must +also for the present have known nothing. The influence of Heiberg and of +Hertz, presently to be so potent, had evidently not yet begun. But it +is important to perceive that already Norway, and Norwegian taste and +opinion, were nothing to him in his selection of themes and forms. + +It is not to be supposed that the taste for dramatic performances did +not exist in Norway, because no Norwegian plays were written. On the +contrary, in most of the large towns there were, and had long been, +private theatres or rooms which could be fitted up with a stage, at +which wandering troupes of actors gave performances that were eagerly +attended by "the best people." These actors, however, were exclusively +Danes, and there was an accepted tradition that Norwegians could +not act. If they attempted to do so, their native accents proved +disagreeable to their fellow-citizens, who demanded, as an imperative +condition, the peculiar intonation and pronunciation cultivated at +the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, as well as an absence of all native +peculiarities of language. The stage, therefore--and this is very +important in a consideration of the career of Ibsen--had come to be the +symbol of a certain bias in political feeling. Society in Norway was +divided into two classes, the "Danomaniacs" and the "Patriots." Neither +of these had any desire to alter the 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 and +manners, the former thought that danger of barbarism lay in every +direction save that of keeping close to the tradition of Denmark, from +which all that was witty, graceful and civilized had proceeded. + +Accordingly the theatre, at which exclusively Danish plays were acted, +in the Danish style, by Danish actors and actresses, was extremely +popular with the conservative class, who thought, by attendance on these +performances, to preserve the distinction of language and the varnish of +"high life" which came, with so much prestige, from Copenhagen. By the +patriotic party, on the other hand, the stage was looked upon with grave +suspicion as likely to undermine the purity of national feeling. + +The earliest attempt at the opening of a National Theatre had been made +at Christiania by the Swede, J. P. Stroemberg, in 1827; this was not +successful, and his theatre was burned down in 1835. In it some effort +had been made to use the Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, but +it had been to no avail. The play-going public liked their plays to be +Danish, and even nationalists of a pronounced species could not deny +that dramas, like the great historical tragedies of Oehlenschlaeger, +many of which dealt enthusiastically with legends that were peculiarly +Norwegian, were as national as it was possible for poems by a foreign +poet to be. All this time, it must be remembered, Christiania was to +Copenhagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as New York was +half a century ago. It is in the arts that the old colonial instinct of +dependence is most loath to disappear. + +The party of the nationalists, however, had been steadily increasing in +activity, and the universal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 had +not been without its direct action upon Norway. + +Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal policy, there was perhaps +no country in Europe where this period of seismic disturbance led to +less public turmoil than precisely here in the North. The accession of +a new king, Oscar I, in 1844, had been followed by a sense of renewed +national security; the peasants were satisfied that the fresh reign +would be favorable to their rights and liberties; and the monarch showed +every inclination to leave his country of Norway as much as possible to +its own devices. The result of all this was that '48 left no mark on the +internal history of the country, and the fever which burned in youthful +bosoms was mainly, if not entirely, intellectual and transcendental. The +young Catiline from Grimstad, therefore, met with several sympathetic +rebels, but found nobody willing to conspire. But what he did find is +so important in the consideration of his future development that it is +needful briefly to examine it. + +Norway had, in 1850, been independent of Denmark for thirty-six years. +During the greater part of that time the fiery excitements of a struggle +for politic existence had fairly exhausted her mental resources, and had +left her powerless to inaugurate a national literature. Meanwhile, there +was no such discontinuity in the literary and scientific relations of +the two countries as that which had broken their constitutional union. A +tremendous effort was made by certain patriots to discover the basis of +an entirely independent intellectual life, something that should start +like the phoenix from the ashes of the old regime, and should offer no +likeness with what continued to flourish south of the Skagarak. But all +the efforts of the University of Christiania were vain to prevent the +cultivated classes from looking to Copenhagen as their centre of light. +Such authors as there were, and they were few indeed, followed humbly in +the footsteps of their Danish brethren. + +Patriotic historians of literature are not always to be trusted, and +those who study native handbooks of Norwegian criticism must be on their +guard when these deal with the three poets who "inaugurated in song the +young liberties of Norway." The writings of the three celebrated lyric +patriots, Schwach, Bjerregaard and Hansen, will not bear to have the +blaze of European experience cast upon them; their tapers dwindle to +sparks in the light of day. They gratified the vanity of the first +generation after 1815, but they deserve no record in the chronicles of +poetic art. If Ibsen ever read these rhymes of circumstance, it must +have been to treat them with contempt. + +Twenty years after the Union, however, and in Ibsen's early childhood, +an event occurred which was unique in the history of Norwegian +literature, and the consequences of which were far-reaching. As is often +the case in countries where the art of verse is as yet little exercised, +there grew up about 1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight in +poetry. This instinct was presently satisfied by the effusion of a vast +quantity of metrical writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperated +by a violent personal feud which for a while interested all educated +persons in Norway to a far greater degree than any other intellectual +or, for the time being, even political question. From 1834 to 1838 the +interests of all cultivated people centred around what was called +the "Twilight Feud" (_Daemringsfejden_), and no record of Ibsen's +intellectual development can be complete without a reference to +this celebrated controversy, the results of which long outlived the +popularity of its skits and pamphlets. + +Modern Norwegian literature began with this great fight. The +protagonists were two poets of undoubted talent, whose temperaments +and tendencies were so diametrically opposed that it seemed as +though Providence must have set them down in that raw and inflammable +civilization for the express purpose of setting the standing corn of +thought on fire. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was a belated son of the +French Revolution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusiasms fermented +in his ill-regulated brain, and he poured forth verses in a violent +and endless stream. It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavian +opinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Wergeland. The critics of +Norway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglect +and ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as +_himmelstraevende sublim_ ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); the +Danes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither view +commends itself to a foreign reader of the poet. + +The fact, internationally stated, seems rather to be this. In Wergeland +we have a typical example of the effects of excess of fancy in a +violently productive but essential uncritical nature. He was ecstatic, +unmeasured, a reckless improvisatore. In his ideas he was preposterously +humanitarian; a prodigious worker, his vigor of mind seemed never +exhausted by his labors; in theory an idealist, in his private life he +was charged with being scandalously sensual. He was so much the victim +of his inspiration that it would come upon him like a descending wind, +and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of +the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the +enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos. +We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, _Creation, Man +and the Messiah_ (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by +descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar +and turbidity of genius, with none of its purity and calm. The genius is +there; it is idle to deny it; but it is in a state of violent turmoil. + +It is when the ruling talent of an age is of the character of +Wergeland's-- + + Thundering and bursting, + In torrents, in waves, + Carolling and shouting + Over tombs, over graves-- + +that delicate spirits, as in Matthew Arnold's poem, sigh for the silence +and the hush, and rise at length in open rebellion against Iacchus and +his maenads, who destroy all the quiet of life and who madden innocent +blood with their riot. Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) was a student +at the University with Wergeland, and he remained silent while the +latter made the welkin ring louder and louder with his lyric shrieks. +Welhaven endured the rationalist and republican rhetoric of Wergeland +as long as he could, although with growing exasperation, until the +rhapsodical author of _Creation_, transgressing all moderation, accused +those who held reasonable views in literature and politics of being +traitors. Then it became necessary to deal with this raw and local +parody of Victor Hugo. When, in the words of _The Cask of Amontillado_, +Wergeland "ventured upon insult," Welhaven "vowed he would be avenged." + +Welhaven formed as complete a contrast to his antagonist as could be +imagined. He was of the class of Sully Prudhomme, of Matthew Arnold, of +Lowell, to name three of his younger contemporaries. In his nature all +was based upon equilibrium; his spirit, though full of graceful and +philosophical intuitions, was critical rather than creative. He wrote +little, and with difficulty, and in exquisite form. His life was as +blamelessly correct as his literary art was harmonious. Wergeland +knew nothing of the Danish tradition of his day, which he treated with +violent and bitter contempt. Welhaven, who had moved in the circle of +the friends of Rahbek, instinctively referred every literary problem to +the tribunal of Danish taste. He saw that with the enthusiasm with which +the poetry of Wergeland was received in Norway was connected a suspicion +of mental discipline, a growing worship of the peasant and a hatred and +scorn of Denmark, with all of which he had no sympathy. He thought the +time had come for better things; that the national temper ought to be +mollified with the improved economic situation of the country; that the +students, who were taking a more and more prominent place, ought to be +on the side of the angels. It was not unnatural that Welhaven should +look upon the corybantic music of Wergeland as the source and origin +of an evil of which it was really the symptom; he gathered his powers +together to crush it, and he published a thunderbolt of sonnets. + +The English reader, familiar with the powerlessness of even the best +verse to make any impression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile to +think of a great moral and ethical attack conducted with no better +weapon than a paper of sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small, +intensely local, easily agitated society of persons, all keenly +though narrowly educated, and all accustomed to be addressed in verse. +Welhaven's pamphlet was entitled _The Twilight of Norway_ (1834), and +the sonnets of which it consisted were highly polished in form, filled +with direct and pointed references to familiar persons and events and +absolutely unshrinking in attack. No poetry of equal excellence had +been produced in Norway since the Union. It is not surprising that +this invective against the tendencies of the youthful bard over whose +rhapsodies all Norway was growing crazy with praise should arrest +universal attention, although in the _Twilight_ Welhaven adroitly +avoided mentioning Wergeland by name. Fanaticism gathered in an angry +army around the outraged standard of the republican poet, but the lovers +of order and discipline had found a voice, and they clustered about +Welhaven with their support. Language was not minced by the assailants, +and still less by the defenders. The lovers of Wergeland were told that +politics and brandy were their only pleasures, but those of Welhaven +were warned that they were known to be fed with bribes from Copenhagen. +Meanwhile Welhaven himself, in successive publications, calmly analyzed +the writings of his antagonist, and proved them to be "in complete +rebellion against sound thought and the laws of beauty." The feud raged +from 1834 to 1838, and left Norway divided into two rival camps of +taste. + +Although the "Twilight Feud" had passed away before Ibsen ceased to be a +boy, the effect of it was too widely spread not to affect him. In point +of fact, we see by the earliest of his lyric poems that while he was +at Grimstad he had fully made up his mind. His early songs and +complimentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if they show +any native influence at all, it is that of Welhaven. The extreme +superficiality of Wergeland would naturally be hateful to so arduous a +craftsman as Ibsen, and it is a fact that so far as his writings +reveal his mind to us, the all-popular poet of his youth appears to be +absolutely unknown to him. What this signifies may be realized if we say +that it is as though a great English or French poet of the second half +of the nineteenth century should seem to have never heard of Tennyson +or Victor Hugo. On the other hand, at one crucial point of a late play, +_Little Eyolf_, Ibsen actually pauses to quote Welhaven. + +In critical history the absence of an influence is sometimes as +significant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style, +its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshod +violence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewed +with horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets of +Norway," only recently printed, dates from his early months in +Christiania, and shows that even in 1850 Ibsen was impatient with the +conventional literature of his day. "Less about the glaciers and the +pine-forests," he cries, "less about the dusty legends of the past, and +more about what is going on in the silent hearts of your brethren!" Here +already is sounded the note which was ultimately to distinguish him from +all the previous writers of the North. + +No letters have been published which throw light on Ibsen's first two +years in the capital. We know that he did not communicate with his +parents, whose poverty was equalled by his own. He could receive no help +from them, nor offer them any, and he refrained, as they refrained, from +letter writing. This separation from his family, begun in this way, grew +into a habit, so that when his father died in 1877 no word had passed +between him and his son for nearly thirty years. When Ibsen reached +Christiania, in March, 1850, his first act was to seek out his friend +Schulerud, who was already a student. For some time he shared the room +of Schulerud and his thrifty meals; later on the two friends, in company +with Theodor Abildgaard, a young revolutionary journalist, lived in +lodgings kept by a certain Mother Saether. + +Schulerud received a monthly allowance which was "not enough for one, +and starvation for two"; but Ibsen's few dollars soon came to an end, +and he seems to have lived on the kindness of Schulerud to their great +mutual privation. Both young men attended the classes of a celebrated +"crammer" of that day, H. A. S. Heltberg, who had opened in 1843 a Latin +school where elder pupils came for a two-years' course to prepare them +for taking their degree. This place, known familiarly as "the Student +Factory," holds quite a prominent place in Norwegian literary history, +Ibsen, Bjoernson, Vinje and Jonas Lie having attended its classes and +passed from it to the University. + +Between these young men, the leading force of literature in the coming +age, a generous friendship sprang up, despite the disparity in their +ages. Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-two; he had been a +village schoolmaster and had only now, in 1850, contrived to reach +the University. With Vinje, the founder of the movement for writing +exclusively in Norwegian patois, Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy, +while he gave no intellectual adherence to his theories. Between the +births of Vinje and Bjoernson there stretched a period of fourteen years, +yet Bjoernson was a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That Ibsen +immediately formed Bjoernson's acquaintance seems to be proved from the +fact that they both signed a protest against the deportation of a Dane +called Harring on May 29, 1850. It was a fortunate chance which threw +Ibsen thus suddenly into the midst of a group of those in whom the +hopes of the new generation were centred. But we are left largely to +conjecture in what manner their acquaintanceship acted upon his mind. + +His material life during the next year is obscure. Driven by the +extremity of need, it is plain that he adopted every means open to him +by which he could add a few dollars to Schulerud's little store. He +wrote for the poor and fugitive 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 _Kaempehoeien_ +(The Warrior's Barrow), which he had brought unfinished with him from +Grimstad, was completed and put into shape in May, 1850, accepted at the +Christiania Theatre, and acted three times during the following autumn. +Perhaps the most interesting fact connected with this performance +was that the only female part, that of Blanka, was taken by a young +debutante, Laura Svendsen; this was the actress afterwards to rise to +the height of eminence as the celebrated Mrs. Gundersen, no doubt the +most gifted of all Ibsen's original interpreters. + +It was a matter of course that the poet was greatly cheered by the +acceptance of his play, and he immediately set to work on another, +_Olaf Liljekrans_; but this he put aside when _Kaempehoeien_ practically +failed. He wrote a satirical comedy called _Norma_. He endeavored to get +certain of his works, dramatic and lyric, published in Christiania, but +all the schemes fell through. It is certain that 1851 began darkly for +the young man, and that his misfortunes encouraged in him a sour and +rebellious temper. For the first and only time in his life he meddled +with practical politics. Vinje and he--in company with a charming +person, Paul Botten-Hansen (1824-69), who flits very pleasantly +through the literary history of this time--founded a newspaper called +_Andhrimner_, which lasted for nine months. + +One of the contributors was Abildgaard, who, as we have seen, lived +in the same house with Ibsen. He was a wild being, who had adopted the +republican theories of the day in their crudest form. He posed as the +head of a little body whose object was to dethrone the king, and to +found a democracy in Norway. On July 7, 1851, the police made a raid +upon these childish conspirators, the leaders being arrested and +punished with a long imprisonment. The poet escaped, as by the skin of +his teeth, and the warning was a lifelong one. He never meddled with +politics any more. This was, indeed, as perhaps he felt, no time for +rebellion; 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 made +him glad to fill a post which the violinist, Ole Bull, offered him +during autumn. The newly constituted National Theatre in Bergen (opened +Jan. 2, 1850) had accepted a prologue written for an occasion by the +young poet, and on November 6, 1851, Ibsen entered into a contract by +which he bound himself go to Bergen "to assist the theatre as dramatic +author." The salary was less than L70 a year, but it was eked out by +travelling grants, and little as it might be, it was substantially more +than the nothing-at-all which Ibsen had been enjoying in Christiania. + +It is difficult to imagine what asset could be bought to the treasuries +of a public theatre by a youth of three and twenty so ill-educated, so +empty of experience and so ill-read as Ibsen was in 1851. His crudity, +we may be sure, passed belief. He was the novice who has not learned his +business, the tyro to whom the elements of his occupation are unknown. +We have seen that when he wrote _Catilina_ he had neither sat through +nor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. The +pieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation with +Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschlaeger and (if we may guess +what _Norma_ was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one of +the most far-sighted men of his time, must have perceived the germs +of theatrical genius in him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed his +appointment more to what this wise patron felt in his future than what +Ole Bull or any one else could possibly point to as yet accomplished. +Unquestionably, a rude theatrical penetration could already he divined +in his talk about the stage, vague and empirical as that must have been. + +At all events, to Bergen he went, as a sort of literary manager, as a +Claretie or Antoine, to compare a small thing with great ones, and the +fact was of inestimable value. It may even be held, without fear of +paradox, that this was the turning-point of Ibsen's life, that this +blind step in the dark, taken in the magnificent freedom of youth, was +what made him what he became. No Bergen in 1851, we may say, and no +_Doll's House_ or _Hedda Gabler_ ultimately to follow. For what it did +was to force this stubborn genius, which might so easily have slipped +into sinister and abnormal paths, and have missed the real humanity of +the stage, to take the tastes of the vulgar into due consideration and +to acquaint himself with the necessary laws of play-composition. + +Ibsen may seem to have little relation with the drama of the world, but +in reality he is linked with it at every step. There is something of +Shakespeare in _John Gabriel Borkman_, something Moliere in _Ghosts_, +something of Goethe in _Peer Gynt_. We may go further and say, though +it would have made Ibsen wince, that there is something of Scribe in _An +Enemy of the People_. Is very doubtful whether, without the discipline +which forced him to put on the stage, at Bergen and in Christiania, +plays evidently unsympathetic to his own taste, which obliged him to do +his best for the popular reception of those plays, and which forced +him minutely to analyze their effects, he would ever have been the +world-moving dramatist which, as all sane critics must admit, he at +length became. + +He made some mistakes at first; how could he fail to do so? It was the +recognition of these blunders, and perhaps the rough censure of them the +local press, which induced the Bergen theatre to scrape a few dollars +together and send him, in charge of some of the leading actors and +actresses, to Copenhagen and Dresden for instruction. To go from Bergen +to Copenhagen was like travelling from Abdera to Athens, and to find +a species of Sophocles in J. A. Heiberg, who had since 1849 been sole +manager of the Royal Theatre. Here the drama of the world, all the +salutary names, all the fine traditions, burst upon the pilgrims from +the North. Heiberg, the gracious and many-sided, was the centre of light +in those days; no one knew the stage as he knew no one interpreted it +with such splendid intelligence, and he received the crude Norwegian +"dramatist-manager" with the utmost elegance of cordiality. Among the +teachers of Ibsen, Heiberg ranks as the foremost. We may farther and say +that he was the last. When Ibsen had learned the lesson of Heiberg, +only nature and his own genius had anything more to teach him. [See Note +below] In August, 1852, rich with the spoils of time, but otherwise poor +indeed, Ibsen made his way back to his duties in Bergen. + +[Note: Perhaps no author, during the whole of his career, more deeply +impressed Ibsen with reverence and affection than Johan Ludvig Heiberg +did. When the great Danish poet died (at Bonderup, August 25, 1860), +Ibsen threw on his tomb the characteristic bunch of bitter herbs called +_Til de genlevende_--"To the Survivors," in which he expressed the +faintest appreciation of those who lavished posthumous honor on Heiberg +in Denmark: + + In your land a torch he lifted; + With its flame ye scorched his forehead. + + How to swing the sword he taught you, + And,--ye plunged it in his bosom. + + While he routed trolls of darkness,-- + With your shields you tripped and bruised him. + + But his glittering star of conquest + Ye must guard, since he has left you: + + Try, at least, to keep it shining, + While the thorn-crowned conqueror slumbers.] + + + +CHAPTER III + +LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57) + +Ibsen's native biographers have not found much to record, and still less +that deserves to recorded, about his life during the next five years. He +remained in Bergen, cramped by want of means in his material condition, +and much harassed and worried by the little pressing requirements of the +theatre. It seems that every responsibility fell upon his shoulders, and +that there was no part of stage-life that it was not his duty to look +after. The dresses of the actresses, the furniture, the scene-painting, +the instruction of raw Norwegian actors and actresses, the selection of +plays, now to please himself, now to please the bourgeois of Bergen, all +this must be done by the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundred +years earlier, we may imagine Moliere, at Carcassonne or Albi, bearing +up in his arms, a weary Titan, all the frivolities and anxieties and +misdeeds of a whole company of comedians. + +So far as our very scanty evidence goes, we find the poet isolated from +his fellows, so far as isolation was possible, during his long stay at +Bergen. He was not accused, and if there had been a chance he would have +been accused, of dereliction. No doubt he pushed through the work of +the theatre doggedly, but certainly not in a convivial spirit. The +Norwegians are a hospitable and festal people, and there is no question +that the manager of the theatre would have unusual opportunities of +being jolly with his friends. But it does not appear that Ibsen made +friends; if so, they were few, and they were as quiet as himself. Even +in these early years he did not invite confidences, and no one found +him wearing his heart upon his sleeve. He went through his work without +effusion, and there is no doubt that what leisure he enjoyed he spent in +study, mainly of dramatic literature. + +His reading must have been limited by his insensibility to foreign +languages. All through his life he forgot the tongues of other countries +almost faster than he gained them. Probably, at this time, he had begun +to know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluency +which was, it appears, always ungrammatical. But, as is not unfrequent +with a man who is fond of reading but no linguist, Ibsen's French and +English came and went in a trembling uncertainty. As time passed on, he +gave up the effort to read, even a newspaper, in either language. + +The mile-stones in this otherwise blank time are the original plays +which, perhaps in accordance with some clause in his agreement, he +produced at his theatre in the first week of January in each year. A +list of them cannot be spared in this place to the most indolent of +readers, since it offers, in a nutshell, a resume of what the busy +imagination of Ibsen was at work upon up to his thirtieth year. His +earliest new-year's gift to the play-goers of Bergen was _St. John's +Night_, 1853, a piece which has not been printed; in 1854 he revived +_The Warrior's Barrow_; in 1855 he made an immense although irregular +advance with _Lady Inger at Oestraat_; in 1856 he produced _The Feast at +Solhoug_; in 1857 a rewritten version of the early _Olaf Liljekrans_. +These are the juvenile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted in +the recognized canon of his writings. None of them is completely +representative of his genius, and several are not yet within reach of +the English reader. Yet they have a considerable importance, and must +detain us for a while. They are remarkable as showing the vigor of the +effort by which he attempted to create an independent style for himself, +no less than the great difficulties which he encountered in following +this admirable aim. + +_Lady Inger at Oestraat_, written in the winter of 1854 but not published +until 1857, is unique among Ibsen's works as a romantic exercise in +the manner of Scribe. It is the sole example of a theme taken by him +directly from comparatively modern history, and treated purely for its +value as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this point of view it +curiously exemplifies a remark of Hazlitt: "The progress of manners +and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps +destroy both tragedy and comedy.... At last, there will be nothing left, +good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or in real life." + +When Ibsen undertook to write about Inger Gyldenloeve, he was but little +acquainted with the particulars of her history. He conceived her, as he +found her in the incomplete chronicles he consulted, as a Matriarch, +a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an +embittered patriotism were legitimately centred. Unfortunately, "the +progress of knowledge," as Hazlitt would say, exposed the falsity of +this conception. A closer inspection of the documents, and further +analysis of the condition of Norway in 1528, destroyed the fair +illusion, and showed Ibsen in the light of an indulgent idealist. + +Here is what Jaeger [Note: In _En literaert Livsbillede_] has to give us +of the disconcerting results of research: + +In real life Lady Inger was not a woman formed upon so grand a plan. She +was the descendant of an old and noble family which had preserved +its dignity, and she consequently was the wealthiest landowner in the +country. This, and this alone, gives her a right to a place in history. +If we study her life, we find no reason to suppose that patriotic +considerations ever affected her conduct. The motive power of her +actions was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly in +an amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and her status. +We find her, for instance, on one occasion seizing the estates of a +neighbor, and holding them till she was actually forced to resign them. +When she gave her daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it was +to secure direct advantage from alliance with the most high-born +sons-in-law procurable. When she took a convent under her protection, +she contrived to extort a rent which well repaid her. Even for a +good action she exacted a return, and when she offered harbor to the +persecuted Chancellor, she had the adroitness to be well rewarded by a +large sum in rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden. + +All this could not fail to be highly exasperating to Ibsen, who had set +out to be a realist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of history +of having been an idealist of the rose-water class. No wonder that he +never 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 has +something of the roughness of a mediaeval record, and it depicts a +condition of life where barbarism uncouthly mingles with a certain +luxury of condition. There is, however, this radical difference that in +_Lady Inger_ there is nothing preternatural, and it is, indeed, in this +play that Ibsen seems first to appreciate the value of a stiff attention +to realism. The romantic elements of the story, however, completely +dominate his imagination, and when we have read the play carefully what +remains with us most vividly is the picturesqueness and unity of +the scene. The action, vehement and tumultuous as it is, takes place +entirely within the walls of Oestraat castle, a mysterious edifice, +sombre and ancient, built on a crag over the ocean, and dimly lighted by + + Magic casements opening on the foam + Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. + +The action is exclusively nocturnal, and so large a place in it is taken +by huge and portable candlesticks that it might be called the Tragedy of +the Candelabra. Through the windows, on the landward side, a procession +of mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each fraught +with the solemnity of fate. The play is full of striking pictures, +groups in light and shade, pictorial appeals to terror and pity. + +The fault of the drama lies in the uncertain conception of the +characters, and particularly of that of the Matriarch herself. Inger +is described to us as the Mother of the Norwegian People, as the one +strong, inflexible and implacable brain moving in a world of depressed +and irritated men. "Now there is no knight left in our land," says Finn, +but--and this is the point from which the play starts--there is Inger +Gyldenloeve. We have approached the moment of crisis when the fortunes +and the fates of Norway rest upon the firmness of this majestic woman. +Inger is driven forward on the tide of circumstance, and, however she +may ultimately fail, we demand evidence of her inherent greatness. This, +however, we fail to receive, and partly, no doubt, because Ibsen was +still distracted at the division of the ways. + +Oehlenschlaeger, if he had attempted this theme, would have made no +attempt after subtlety of character painting and still less after +correctness of historic color. He would have given small shrift to Olaf +Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, the +Mother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had a +great simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen, +already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every +thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon and +the finished work. + +Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress us with greatness. "The +deed no less than the attempt confounds" her. She displays, from the +opening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but excludes all evidence +of her energy. The ascendency of Nils Lykke, over herself and over her +singularly and unconvincingly modern daughter, Elima, in what does it +consist? In a presentation of a purely physical attractiveness; Nils +Lykke is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fortunes, with impudent +ease, in the home of his ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in his +only, the majestic Inger is reduced from a queen to a pawn. All manhood, +we are told, is dead in Norway; if this be so, then what a field is +cleared where a heroine like Inger, not young and a victim to her +passions, nor old and delivered to decrepit fears, may show us how a +woman of intellect and force can take the place of man. Instead of this, +one disguised and anonymous adventurer after another comes forth out of +the night, and confuses her with pretensions and traps her with deceits +against which her intellect protests but her will is powerless to +contend. + +Another feature in the conduct of _Lady Inger_ portrays the ambitious +but the inexperienced dramatist. No doubt a pious commentator can +successfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but the spectator +demands that a play should be clearly and easily intelligible. The +audience, however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this awful third +night after Martinmas, and resents the obscurity of all this intrigue by +candlelight. Why do the various persons meet at Oestraat? Who sends +them? Whence do they come and whither do they go? To these questions, +no doubt, an answer can be found, and it is partly given, and very +awkwardly, by the incessant introduction of narrative. The confused and +melodramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils Lykke and Skaktavl +is of central importance, but what is it about? The business with +Lucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Webster or +of Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings are slurred over by the +enthusiastic critics of Scandinavia, yet they call for indulgence. The +fact is that _Lady Inger_ is a brilliant piece of romantic extravagance, +which is extremely interesting in illuminating the evolution of Ibsen's +genius, and particularly as showing him in the act of emancipating +himself from Danish traditions, but which has little positive value as a +drama. + +The direct result of the failure of _Lady Inger_--for it did not please +the play-goers of Bergen and but partly satisfied its author--was, +however, to send him back, for the moment, more violently than ever to +the Danish tradition. Any record of this interesting phase in Ibsen's +career is, however, complicated by the fact that late in his life (in +1883) he did what was very unusual with him: he wrote a detailed account +of the circumstances of his poetical work in 1855 and 1856. He denied, +in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poet +whom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced the +movement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainder +of his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism, +and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted for +gospel. However, literary history must be built on the evidence +before it, and the actual text of _The Feast at Solhoug_, and of _Olaf +Liljekrans_ must be taken in spite of anything their author chose to say +nearly thirty years afterwards. Great poets, without the least wish to +mystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover their tracks." Tennyson, in +advanced years, denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley or +Keats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his style of the lyrical +dramas of Hertz. But we must appeal from the arrogance of old age to the +actual 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 the +importance of form in drama, and at the height of his powers he began to +compose rhymed plays which were like old ballads put into dialogue. +His comedy of _Cupid's Strokes of Genius_ (1830) began a series of +tragi-comedies which gradually deepened in passion and melody, till they +culminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage, +_Svend Dyring's House_ (1837) and _King Rene's Daughter_ (1845). The +genius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in all +Europe there were not two authors less alike. Hertz would have pleased +Kenelm Digby, and if that romantic being had read Danish, the poet of +chivalry must have had a niche in _The Broad Stone of Honour_. Hertz's +style is delicate to the verge of sweetness; his choice of words is +fantastically exquisite, yet so apposite as to give an impression of the +inevitable. He cares very little for psychological exactitude or truth +of observation; but he is the very type of what we mean by a verbal +artist. + +Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and possibly with the person, of +Hertz, when he was in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt whatever +that, while he was anxiously questioning his own future, and conscious +of crude faults in _Lady Inger_, he set himself, as a task, to write in +the manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt that it was a deliberate +exercise, and we see the results in _The Feast at Solhoug_ and in _Olaf +Liljekrans_. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and prose, like +Hertz's romantic dramas; there is the same determination to achieve the +chivalric ideal; but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master. +Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering about him, dances without +an ungraceful gesture through the elaborate and yet simple masque that +he has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high and sudden flights of +metrical writing, but breaks down surprisingly at awkward intervals, and +displays a hopeless inconsistency between his own nature and the medium +in which he is forcing himself to write. As a proof that the similarity +between _The Feast at Solhoug_ and _Svend Dyring's House_ is accidental, +it has been pointed out that Ibsen produced his own play on the Bergen +stage in January, 1856, and revived Hertz's a month later. It might, +surely, be more sensibly urged that this fact shows how much he was +captivated by the charm of the Danish dramatist. + +The sensible thing, in spite of Ibsen's late disclaimer, is to suppose +that, in the consciousness of his crudity and inexperience as a writer, +he voluntarily sat at the feet of the one great poet whom he felt had +most to teach him. On the boards at Bergen, _The Feast at Solhoug_ was +a success, while _Olaf Liljekrans_ was a failure; but neither incident +could have meant very much to Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet who +lived in the future, was waiting and watching for the development of his +own genius. Slowly, without precocity, without even that joy in strength +of maturity which comes to most great writers 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 remote +and imperfectly civilized country to contend against, but because his +critical sense was acute enough to teach him that he himself was still +unripe, still unworthy of the fame that he thirsted for. He had not +even the consolation which a proud confidence in themselves gives to the +unappreciated young, for in his heart of hearts he knew that he had as +yet done nothing which deserved the highest praise. But his imagination +was expanding with a steady sureness, and the long years of his +apprenticeship were drawing to a close. + +Ibsen was now, like other young Norwegian poets, and particularly +Bjoernson, coming into the range of that wind of nationalistic +inspiration which had begun to blow down from the mountains and to +fill every valley with music. The Norwegians were discovering that they +possessed a wonderful hidden treasure in their own ancient poetry and +legend. It was a gentle, clerically minded poet--himself the son of a +peasant--Joergen Moe (1813-82), long afterwards Bishop of Christianssand, +who, as far back as 1834, began to collect from peasants the folk-tales +of Norway. The childlike innocence and playful humor of these stories +were charming to the mind of Moe, who was fortunately joined by a +stronger though less delicate spirit in the person of Peter Christian +Asbjoernsen. Their earliest collection of folk-lore in collaboration +appeared in 1841, but it was the full edition of 1856 which produced a +national sensation, and doubtless awakened Ibsen in Bergen. Meanwhile, +in 1853, M. B. Landstad had published the earliest of his collections +of the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M. Lindeman in the same +years (1853-59) was publishing, in installments, the peasant melodies of +Norway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Icelandic, was studying the ancient +sagas in the faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and all +combined to determine him to make an experiment in a purely national and +archaistic direction. + +Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his theory, has given rather +a confused account of the circumstances that led to the composition +of his next play, _The Vikings at Helgeland_. But it is clear that in +looking through Petersen for a subject which would display, in broad and +primitive forms, the clash of character in an ancient Norwegian family, +he fell upon "Volsungasaga," and somewhat rashly responded to its +vigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "the +titanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other +pro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions." He +believed that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "our +national epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase in his +essay which is very interesting, in the light it throws upon the object +which the author had before him in writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_. +He says clearly--and this was intended as a revolt against the tradition +of Oehlenschlaeger--"it was not my aim to present our mythic world, but +simply our life in primitive times." Brandes says of this departure that +it is "indeed a new conquest, but, like so many conquests, associated +with very extensive plundering." + +In turning to an examination of _The Vikings_, the first point which +demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the +arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing +of the lyrical triviality of the verse in _The Feast at Solhoug_ about +the trenchant prose of _The Vikings_, and the crepuscular dimness +of _Lady Inger_ is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. +Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor +of the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do and +mean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent +presentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of their +value. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of _The Vikings at +Helgeland_, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in our +criticism of the author's choice of a subject. It is valuable to compare +Ibsen's treatment of Icelandic family-saga with that of William Morris; +let us say, in _The Lovers of Gudrun_. That enchanting little epic deals +with an episode from one of the great Iceland narratives, and follows +it much more closely than Ibsen's does. But we are conscious of a less +painful effort and of a more human result. Morris does successfully +what Ibsen unsuccessfully aimed at doing: he translates the heroic and +half-fabulous action into terms that are human and credible. + +It was, moreover, an error of judgment on the part of the Norwegian +playwright to make his tragedy a mosaic of effective bits borrowed +hither and thither from the Sagas. Scandinavian bibliography has toiled +to show his indebtedness to this tale and to that, and he has been +accused of concealing his plagiarisms. But to say this is to miss the +mark. A poet is at liberty to steal what he will, if only he builds his +thefts up into a living structure of his own. For this purpose, however, +it is practically found that, owing perhaps to the elastic consistency +of individual human nature, it is safest to stick to one story, +embroidering and developing it along its own essential lines. + +There is great vigor, however, in many of the scenes in _The Vikings_. +The appearance of Hioerdis on the stage, in the opening act, marks, +perhaps, the first occasion on which Ibsen had put forth his full +strength as a playwright. This entrance of Hioerdis ought to be extremely +effective; in fact, we understand, it rarely is. The cause of this +disappointment can easily be discovered. It is the misfortune of The +Vikings that it is hardly to be acted by mortal men. Hioerdis herself is +superhuman; she has eaten the heart of a wolf, she claims direct descent +from a race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur about the conception +of her form and character, but it is a grandeur which might well daunt +a human actress. One can faintly imagine the part being played by Mrs. +Siddons, with such an extremity of fierceness and terror that ladies and +gentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in hysterics, as in the +days of Byron. Where Hioerdis insults her guests, and contrives +the horrid murder of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have a +stage-dilemma presented to us-either the actress must treat the scene +inadequately, or else intolerably. _Ne pueros coram populo Medea +trucidet_, and we shrink from Hioerdis with a physical disgust. Her great +hands and shrieking mouth are like Bellona's, and they smell of blood. + +What is true of Hioerdis is true in less degree of all the characters +in _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 Oernulf and his seven +terrible 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 to +our sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color that the poet +has lavished upon them, and the majestic sentiments which he has put +into their mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helgeland must have +regarded them as those of Surbiton regarded the beings who were shot +down from Mars in Mr. Wells' blood-curdling story. + +_The Vikings at Helgeland_ is a work of extraordinary violence and +agitation. The personages bark at one another like seals and roar like +sea-lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night." Oernulf, the aged +father of a grim and speechless clan, is sorely wounded at the beginning +of the play, but it makes no difference to him; no one binds up his arm, +but he talks, fights, travels as before. We may see here foreshadowed +various features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here is his favorite +conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar +whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited +self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical +white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair +to say that there is more than this to applaud in _The Vikings at +Helgeland_; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere +romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more than any +Scandinavian critic has done, justly draws attention to the nobility of +Oernulf's entrance in the third act. Yet, on the whole, I confess myself +unable to be surprised at the severity with which Heiberg judged _The +Vikings_ at its first appearance, a severity which must have wounded +Ibsen to the quick. + +The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in Ibsen's condition. The period +for which he had undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had now come +to a close, and he was not anxious to prolong it. He had had enough +of Bergen, to which only one chain now bound him. Those who read the +incidents of a poet's life into the pages of his works may gratify their +tendency by seeing in the discussions between Dagny and Hioerdis some +echo of the thoughts which were occupying Ibsen's mind in relation +to the married state. Since his death, the story has been told of his +love-affair with a very young girl, Rikke Holst, who had attracted his +notice by throwing a bunch of wild flowers in his face, and whom he +followed and desired to marry. Her father had rejected the proposal with +indignation. Ibsen had suffered considerably, but this was, after all, +an early and a very fugitive sentiment, which made no deep impression on +his heart, although it seems to have always lingered in his memory. + +There had followed a sentiment much deeper and much more emphatic. A +charming, though fragmentary, set of verses, addressed in January, 1856, +to Miss Susannah Thoresen, show that already for a long while he had +come to regard this girl of twenty as "the young dreaming enigma," the +possible solution of which interested him more than that of any other +living problem. It was more than the conversation of a versifying lover +which made Ibsen speak of Miss Thoresen's "blossoming child-soul" as the +bourne of his ambitions. In his dark way, he was already violently in +love with her. + +The household of her father, Hans Conrad Thoresen, was the most +cultivated in Bergen. He himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was a +bookish, meditative man of no particular initiative, but he had married, +as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh, a Dane by birth, and for a long +time, with the possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland's +sister, the most active woman of letters in Norway. Mrs. Thoresen was +the step-mother of Susannah, the only child of her husband's second +marriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and Ibsen a strong friendship had +sprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's +best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked +hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French, +and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her +own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which +her name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long as +Ibsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on the +stage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine years +his senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must have +been a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet. And +now the wise Magdalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating to +him the best treasure of the family circle, the gay and yet mysterious +Susannah. + +While he was writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_, and courting Susannah +Thoresen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settle +in Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned, +thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence of +six years. Now began another period of six years more, these the most +painful in Ibsen's life, when, as Halvorsen has said, he had to fight +not merely for the existence of himself and his family, but for the very +existence of Norwegian poetry and the Norwegian stage. This struggle was +an excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled with +debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with further +responsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondary +house, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink of +bankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in the +country that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to court +starvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The +only published volume of Ibsen's which had (up to 1863) sold at all was +_The Warriors_, by which he had made in all 227 specie dollars (or about +L25). + +The Christiania he had come to, however, was not that which he had left. +In many directions it had developed rapidly. From an intellectual point +of view, the labors of the nationalists had made themselves felt; +the folk-lore of Landstad, Moe and Asbjoernsen had impressed young +imaginations. In some of its forms the development was unpleasing and +discouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies of +Andreas Munch (_Salomon de Caus_, 1855; _Lord William Russell_, 1857) +was, for instance, an irritating step in the wrong direction. The +new-born school of prose fiction, with Bjoernson as its head (_Synnoeve +Solbakken_, 1857; _Arne_, 1858), with Camilla Collett's _Prefect's +Daughters_, 1855, as its herald; with Oestgaard's sketches of peasant +life and humors in the mountains (1852)--all this was a direct menace +to the popularity of the national stage, offering an easy and alluring +alternative for home-loving citizens. Was it certain that the classic +Danish, which alone Ibsen cared to write, would continue to be the +language of the cultivated classes in Norway? Here was Ivar Aasen (in +1853) showing that the irritating landsmaal could be used for prose and +verse. + +Wherever he turned Ibsen saw increased vitality, but in shapes that were +either useless or antagonistic to himself, and all that was harsh and +saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of his +life, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortune +and men's eyes," unappreciated and ready to doubt the reality of his own +genius; and murmuring to himself:-- + + Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, + Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, + Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. + With what I most enjoy contented least. + +How little his greatness was perceived in the Christiania literary +coteries may be gathered from the little fact that the species of +official anthology of _Modern Norwegian Poets_, published in 1859, +though it netted the shallows of national song very closely, contained +not a line by the author of the lovely lyrics in _The Feast at Solhoug_. +It was at this low and miserable moment that Ibsen's talent suddenly +took wings; he conceived, in the summer of 1858, what finally became, +five years later, his first acknowledged masterpiece, and perhaps +the most finished of all his writings, the sculptural tragedy of _The +Pretenders_. + +_The Pretenders_ (_Kongsemnerne_, properly stuff from which Kings can be +made) is the earliest of the plays of Ibsen in which the psychological +interest is predominant, and in which there is no attempt to disguise +the fact. Nothing that has since been written about this drama, the +very perfection of which is baffling to criticism, has improved upon the +impression which Georg Brandes received from it when he first read it +forty years ago. The passage is classic, and deserves to be cited, if +only as perhaps the very earliest instance in which the genius of +Ibsen was rewarded by the analysis of a great critic. Brandes wrote (in +1867):-- + +What is it that The Pretenders treats of? Looked at simply, it is an old +story. We all know the tale of Aladdin and Nureddin, the simple +legend in the Arabian Nights, and our great poet's [Oehlenschlaeger's] +incomparable poem. In _The Pretenders_ two figures again stand opposed +to one another as the superior and the inferior being, an Aladdin and +a Nureddin nature. It is towards this contrast that Ibsen has hitherto +unconsciously directed his endeavors, just as Nature feels her way in +her blind preliminary attempts to form her types. Hakon and Skule are +pretenders to the same throne, scions of royalty out of whom a king may +be made. But the first is the incarnation of fortune, victory, right and +confidence; the second--the principal figure in the play, masterly in +its truth and originality--is the brooder, a prey to inward struggle and +endless distrust, brave and ambitious, with perhaps every qualification +and claim to be king, but lacking the inexpressible, impalpable somewhat +that would give a value to all the rest--the wonderful Lamp. "I am a +king's arm," he says, "mayhap a king's brain as well; but Hakon is the +whole king." "You have wisdom and courage, and all noble gifts of the +mind," says Hakon to him; "you are born to stand nearest a king, but not +to be a king yourself." + +To a poet the achievements of his greatest contemporaries in their +common art have all the importance of high deeds in statesmanship and +war. It is, therefore, by no means extravagant to see in the noble +emulation of the two dukes in _The Pretenders_ some reflection of +Ibsen's attitude to the youthful and brilliant Bjoernson. The +luminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence and good fortune of +Bjoernson-Hakon could not but offer a violent contrast with the gloom and +hesitation, the sick revulsions of hope and final lack of conviction, +of Ibsen-Skule. It was Bjoernson's "belt of strength," as it was Hakon's, +that he had utter belief in himself, and with this his rival could not +yet girdle himself. "The luckiest man is the greatest man," says Bishop +Nicholas in the play, and Bjoernson seemed in these melancholy years as +lucky 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 reached +to turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm und +Drang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature were +awakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of his +age. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted +away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no +longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a +work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until +1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section +of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of +his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The +Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama. +But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section +which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic +rhyme. + +With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great +difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must +be borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the +sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_, +was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had been +rampant in the generation of Byron--in the famous words:-- + + I loathe it: he had never kindly heart, + Nor ever cared to better his own kind, + Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it. + +What England repudiated, Norway comprehended, and in certain hands +enjoyed. Polemical literature, if seldom of a high class, was abundant +and was much appreciated. The masterpiece of modern Norwegian poetry +was, still, the satiric cycle of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, the +tone was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled more violently, than +English taste at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to +crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself, +and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw +"afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches," as +Dryden said. + +Yet it was not an age of gross and open vices; manners were not +flagitious, they were merely of a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown with +anger as with wine, could find no outrageous offences to lash, and all +he could invite the age to do was to laugh at certain conventions and to +reconsider some prejudicated opinions. He had to be pungent, not openly +ferocious; he had to be sarcastic and to treat the current code +of morals as a jest. He found the society around him excessively +distasteful to him, but there were no crying evils of a political or +ethical kind to be stigmatized. What was open to him was what an old +writer of our own defined as "a sharp, well-mannered way of laughing a +folly out of countenance." + +Unfortunately, the people laughed at will never consent to think the way +well mannered, and Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste," that +vaguest and most insidious of accusations. We are told that he began his +enterprise in prose [Note: "_Svanhild_: a Comedy in three acts and in +prose: 1860," is understood to exist still in manuscript], but found +that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity of +Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should +be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable +perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started _Love's Comedy_, +therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not +certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack +should take. He was very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he was +easily convinced that the times were out of joint. Then he observed that +if there was anything that the Norwegian upper classes prided themselves +upon it was their conduct of betrothal and marriage. Plato had said that +the familiarity of young persons before marriage prevented enmity +and disappointment in later years, that it was useful to know the +peculiarities of temperament beforehand, and so, being accustomed to +them, to discount them. But Ibsen was not of this opinion, or rather, +perhaps, he did not choose to be. The extremely slow and public method +of betrothal in the North gave him his first opportunity. + +It is with a song, in the original one of the most delicious of +his lyrics, that he opens the campaign. To a miscellaneous party of +Philistines circled around the tea table, "all sober and all ----" the +rebellious hero sings:-- + + + In the sunny orchard-closes, + While the warblers sing and swing, + Care not whether blustering Autumn + Break the promises of Spring; + Rose and white the apple-blossom + Hides you from the sultry sky; + Let it flutter, blown and scattered, + On the meadow by and by. + +In the sexual struggle, that is to say, the lovers should not pause to +consider the worldly advantages of their match, but should fly in +secret to each other's arms. By the law of battle, the female should be +snatched to the conqueror's saddle-bow, and ridden away with into +the night, not subjected to the jokes and the good advice and the +impertinent congratulations of the clan. Young Lochinvar does not wait +to ask the counsel of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of her +aunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where ford there is none. Ibsen +is in favor of the _mariage de convenance_, which suppresses, without +favor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above all, anything is better than +the publicity, the meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal, which +kills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are apt to break their own +eggs if intruding hands have touched them. + +This is the central point in _Love's Comedy_, but there is much beside +this in its reckless satire on the "sanctities" of domestic life. The +burden of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the impertinent poet +touches with levity upon the question of the duration of marriage: + + With my living, with my singing, + I will tear the hedges down! + Sweep the grass and heap the blossom! + Let it shrivel, pale and blown! + Throw the wicket wide! Sheep, cattle, + Let them browse among the best! + _I_ broke off the flowers; what matter + Who may graze among the rest! + +_Love's Comedy_ is perhaps the most diverting of Ibsen's works; it is +certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian +society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A +prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, +unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body +the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was +unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen +definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait +of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks for +an audience, was not less deeply outraged by the want of indulgence +which he had shown for all forms of amorous sentiment, although Ibsen +had really, through his satire on the methods of betrothal, risen +to something like a philosophical examination of the essence of love +itself. + +To Brandes, who reproached him for not recording the history of ideal +engagements, and who remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes and +rotten potatoes in this world," Ibsen cynically replied, "I am afraid +none of the sound ones have come under my notice"; and when Guldstad +proves to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount importance of creature +comforts, the last word of distrust in the sustaining power of love had +been said. The popular impression of Ibsen as an "immoral" writer seems +to be primarily founded on the paradox and fireworks of _Love's Comedy_. + +Much might be forgiven to a man so wretched as Ibsen was in 1862, +and more to a poet so lively, brilliant and audacious in spite of his +misfortunes. These now gathered over his head and threatened to submerge +him altogether. He was perhaps momentarily saved by the publication of +_Terje Vigen_, which enjoyed a solid popularity. This is the principal +and, indeed, almost the only instance in Ibsen's works of what the +Northern critics call "epic," but what we less ambitiously know as the +tale in verse. _Terje Figen_ will never be translated successfully into +English, for it is written, with brilliant lightness and skill, in an +adaptation of the Norwegian ballad-measure which it is impossible to +reproduce with felicity in our language. + +Among Ibsen's writings _Terje Vigen_ is unique as a piece of pure +sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or +pungency. It is the story of a much-injured and revengeful Norse pilot, +who, having the chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and Milady, +saves them at the mute appeal of their blue-eyed English baby. +_Terje Vigen_ is a masterpiece of what we may define as the +"dash-away-a-manly-tear" class of narrative. It is extremely well +written and picturesque, but the wonder is that, of all people in the +world, Ibsen should have written it. + +His short lyric poems of this period betray much more clearly the real +temper of the man. They are filled full and brimming over with longing +and impatience, with painful passion and with hope deferred. It is in +the strident lyrics Ibsen wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can best +read the record of his mind, and share its exasperations, and wonder +at its elasticity. The series of sonnets _In a Picture Gallery_ is a +strangely violent confession of distrust in his own genius; the _Epistle +to H. O. Blom_ a candid admission of his more than distrust in the +talent and honesty of others. It was the peculiarity and danger of +Ibsen's position that he represented no one but himself. For instance, +the liberty of many of the expressions in _Love's Comedy_ led those +who were beginning a movement in favor of the emancipation of women +to believe that Ibsen was in sympathy with them, but he was not. All +through his life, although his luminous penetration into character led +him to be scrupulously fair in his analysis of female character, he was +never a genuine supporter of the extension of public responsibility to +the sex. A little later (in 1869), when John Stuart Mill's _Subjection +of Women_ produced a sensation in Scandinavia, and met with many +enthusiastic supporters, Ibsen coldly reserved his opinion. He was +always an observer, always a clinical analyst at the bedside of society, +never a prophet, never a propagandist. + +His troubles gathered upon him. Neither theatre consented to act _Love's +Comedy_, and it would not even have been printed but for the zeal of the +young novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great honor, bought for about +L35 the right to publish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he was +editing. Then the storm broke out; the press was unanimously adverse, +and in private circles abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In 1862 +the second theatre became bankrupt, and Ibsen was thrown on the world, +the most unpopular man of his day, and crippled with debts. It is true +that he was engaged at the Christiania Theatre at a nominal salary of +about a pound a week, but he could not live on that. In August, 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 Northern +countries. Sums were voted to Bjoernson and Vinje, but to Ibsen not a +penny. By some influence, however, for he was not without friends, +he was granted in March, 1862, a travelling grant of less than L20 +to enable him to wander for two months in western Hardanger and the +districts around the Sognefjord for the purpose of collecting folk-songs +and legends. The results of this journey were prepared for publication, +but never appeared. This interesting excursion, however, has left its +mark stamped broadly upon _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. + +All through 1863 his condition was critical. He determined that his only +hope was to exile himself definitely from Norway, which had become too +hot to hold him. Various private friends generously helped him over this +dreadful time of adversity, earning a gratitude which, if it was not +expansive, was lifelong. Very grudging recognition of his gifts was +at length made by the Government in the shape of another trifling +travelling grant (March, 1863), again a handsome sum being awarded to +Bjoernson, his popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair, to the +King himself, who conferred upon him a small pension of L90 a year, +which for the immediate future stood between this great poet and +starvation. The news of it was received in Christiania by the press in +terms of despicable insult. + +But in June of this _annee terrible_ Ibsen had a flash of happiness. +He was invited down to Bergen to the fifth great "Festival of Song," +a national occurrence, and he and his poems met with a warm reception. +Moreover, he found his brilliant antagonist, Bjoernson, at Bergen on a +like errand, and renewed an old friendship with this warm-hearted and +powerful man of genius, destined to play through life the part of Hakon +to Ibsen's Skule. They spent much of the subsequent winter together. +As Halvdan Koht has excellently said: "Their intercourse brought them +closer to each other than they had ever been before. They felt that they +were inspired by the same ideas and the same hopes, and they suffered +the same bitter disappointments. With anguish they watched the Danish +brother-nation's desperate struggle against the superior power of +Germany, and save a province with a population of Scandinavian race and +speech taken from Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom, +whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in spite of solemn promises, +refrained from yielding any assistance." An attack on Holstein (December +22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish War, to which a disastrous +and humiliating termination was brought in the following August. + +In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his native +country. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well +as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Duepper alone +stood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the +indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Luebeck +and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached +that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the +arms of its antique repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjoernson, +"there is blessed peace," and he settled himself down to the close +contemplation of poetry. + +The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter to +the glow and splendor of Italy acted on the poet's spirit like an +enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome's "azure +sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music," and at first the contrast +between the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almost +intolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air +and become as a little child. There has scarcely been another example +of a writer of the first class who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but +debarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, has +been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart of +unclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Shelley and +Keats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen broke +free from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his +life, was closing his romantic career. + +Ibsen's earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomed +to at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The passion +of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered among +the vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modern +life, or their original significance. He missed the impress of the +individual on classic sculpture, as he had missed it--the parallel is +strange, but his own--on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He liked +a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt more +at home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architects +than with artists of a more archaic type. Shelley, we may remember, +labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets the +attractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavor +of the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen's admiration of a +certain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worth +recording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who made +that might have made the moon in his leisure moments. + +During the first few months of Ibsen's life in Rome all was chaos in +his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the +amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an +art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend. +In September, 1864, he tells Bjoernson that he is at work on a poem of +considerable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_, +which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns call +it, an "epic" poem; although a sketch for the _Julianus Apostata_ was +already forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would, +sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife and +little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined +him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly +small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be +hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort +of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He +would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or +would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks +to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that +Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing +to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His +soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the +aching maladies of its youth. + +He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters +and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress. +But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical +poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of +his country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude and +gloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded, +sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, and +already as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. But +two things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a passionate enthusiasm for +their art, and a rebellious attitude towards their immediate precursors +in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. The +friendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest +of their lives, for it was founded on a common basis. + +A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusing +impression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, Christian +Molbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wandering +silently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets of +his invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation by +his sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering +the ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries by +a running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhat +unsympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a more +agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills, +planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed +ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the +vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly +be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and +self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin +wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of +these periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865, +that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took +final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In +July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end +of September he had completed it. + +_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his +age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and +the graceful wit of _Love's Comedy_ was so great as to be startling. +Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations +are powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery from +being perceived at once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not exist, +for those who had eyes to see, and who were not blinded by prejudice, +it was plain that a very great writer had arisen in Norway at last. +Bjoernson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862) +was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart in +Scotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once +more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of +clearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and some +shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and +a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme, +there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as +manifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as it +is surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of +Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed, but in its own peculiar +province it has not been approached. It bears some remote likeness +to _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in the +literature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, of +course, _Peer Gynt_. + +For a long while it was supposed that the difficulties in the way of +performing _Brand_ on the public stage were too great to be overcome. +But the task was attempted at length, first in Stockholm in 1895; and +within the last few years this majestic spectacle has been drawn in full +before the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow +and elsewhere. In spite of the timid reluctance of managers, wherever +this play is adequately presented, it captures an emotional public at a +run. It is an appeal against moral apathy which arouses the languid. It +is a clear and full embodiment of the gospel of energy which awakens and +upbraids the weak. In the original, its rush of rhymes produces on the +nerves an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as an oration, it +is responded to as a great civic appeal; if as a sermon, it is sternly +religious, and fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain air, +with vague bells ringing high up among the glaciers, no one asks exactly +what _Brand_ expounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent. Witnessed +on the living stage, it takes the citadel of the soul by storm. When it +is read, the critical judgment becomes cooler. + +Carefully examined, _Brand_ is found to present a disconcerting mixture +of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and +their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, +and it was asked at one, "Is _Brand_ the expression of Ibsen's own +nature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yet +he was careful to remain outside. Ibsen, as we have already pointed out, +was ready in later life to discuss his own writings, and what he said +about them is often dangerously mystifying. He told Georg Brandes that +the religious vocation of Brand was not essential. "I could have applied +the whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a politician, as to +a priest." (He was to deal with each of these alternations later on, but +with what a difference!) "I could quite as well," he persisted, "have +worked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for +instance, as my hero--assuming, of course, that Galileo should stand +firm and never concede the fixity of the earth--or you yourself in your +struggle with the Danish reactionaries." This is not to the point, since +in fact neither Georg Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama, +could have produced such a capacity for evolution as is presented by the +stern priest whose absolute certitude, although founded, one admits, on +no rational theory of theology, is yet of the very essence of religion. + +Brand becomes intelligible when we regard him as a character of the +twelfth century transferred to the nineteenth. He has something of Peter +the Hermit in him. He ought to have been a crusading Christian king, +fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city of +God. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord, +like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey in +the desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any reference +to accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religious +conventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violent +and incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants, but it must +be an upheaval of all that exists, and it must bring Man into closer +contact with God. Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is +marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by +the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he +is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it +is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is +finally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church. + +The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand with +that extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbe Jules_ of Octave +Mirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession of +crises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weakness +is the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developed +what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception of +such a rebel's ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers +or Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest of +insurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track of +his colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to the +commentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, and +endless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and analyze +its forms. + +There is, however, another than the priestly side. The poem contains a +great deal of superficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporary +Scandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing in Christiania, of a +crafty court in Stockholm, and of Denmark stretching her bleeding hands +to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local +strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen +comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted +age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin +laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone +that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule +and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her +rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his +motto "All or Nothing," persistently, almost tiresomely, like a +modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea. +More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not +white-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran +theologians, a prototype of violent strength. + +Yet Brand's own mission remains undefined to him--if it ever takes exact +shape--until Agnes reveals it to him:-- + + Choose thy endless loss or gain! + Do thy work and bear thy pain.... + Now (he answers) I see my way aright. + In _ourselves_ is that young Earth, + Ripe for the divine new-birth. + +And it is in Agnes--as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love +for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience +endures all the cruelties of her husband's fanaticism--it is in Agnes +that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered +note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a +nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure, +Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are +the delicate offspring of Italy. + +Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which +saw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once +welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen, +and the poet's audience was thus very considerably widened. The satire +of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexels +preached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _The +Daughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were analyzed. +Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light and +shade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of +_Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it took +its place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few books +which continued, and still continue, steadily to sell. It has always +been, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the most +popular of all Ibsen's writings. + +This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniary +fortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like _Brand_, in +the conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not much +exceed L100. Hardly had Ibsen become the object of universal discussion +than he found himself assailed, as never before, by the paralysis of +poverty. He could not breathe, he could not move; he could not afford to +buy postage stamps to stick upon his business letters. He was threatened +with the absolute extinction of his resources. At the very time when +Copenhagen was ringing with his praise Ibsen was borrowing money for his +modest food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome. + +In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly nervous condition, in the +midst of which he was assailed by a malarious fever which brought him +within sight of the grave. To the agony of his devoted wife, he lay for +some time between life and death, and the extreme poverty from which +they suffered made it difficult, and even impossible, for her to +provide for him the alleviations which his state demanded. He gradually +recovered, however, thanks to his wife's care and to his own magnificent +constitution, but the springs of courage seemed to have snapped within +his breast. + +In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote a +letter to Bjoernson, "my one and only friend," which is one of the most +heart-rending documents in the history of literature. Few great spirits +have been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his +thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits' end to know what to +advise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway, +describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously came +the manifest success of _Brand_, and, for the first time, the Norwegian +press recognized the poet's merit. There was a general movement in his +favor; King Carl graciously received his petition of April 15, and +on May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a "poet's +pension," restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs. + +The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where he +found it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills. +He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo Gratiosi, two thousand +feet above the sea. Thither he came, with his wife and his little son, +and there he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a +window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing +the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time +there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are +elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the +dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, +the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away +like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he +knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the +heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the +autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him. +He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted +himself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which he +described as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one +of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of +_modern_ Norway." + +He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was +a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually +composed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothly +until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the +island of Ischia. His own account was: "After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_, +as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at +Sorrento. So far away from one's readers one becomes reckless. This poem +contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth. +My own mother--with the necessary exaggeration--served as the model for +Ase." _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of +the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen. None +of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ now +afflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published in +November, 1867. + +In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _Peer +Gynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it made +no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later +poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational +pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. "They have +discovered," he said, "much more satire in _Peer Gynt_ than was intended +by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I +wrote it." It has been, however, the misfortune of Ibsen that he has +particularly attracted the attention of those who prefer to see anything +in a poem except its poetry, and who treat all tulips and roses as +if they were cabbages for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it is +surprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovely +poem shaking the bauble of its fool's cap at them, there can still be +commentators who see nothing in _Peer Gynt_ but the "awful interest +of the universal problems with which it deals." This obsession of the +critic to discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has been one of the +main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which +his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who +should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and +often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long +black coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of the +Nonconformist conscience. + +Casting aside, therefore, the spurious "lessons" and supposititious +"problems" of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among +its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above +everything else which we see in _Peer Gynt_ we see its fun and its +picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, +there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted +admirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst of +lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carried +along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant +success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride +along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and +fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances +under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless +and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in +this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown +ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boeig, gigantic +gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anything +else written since the second part of _Faust_. The third act, +culminating with the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of Ase, +is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts Ibsen in the first rank +of creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt and +grotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I think, a lower order of +imagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in the +poem, often seems divided from it in tone, style and direction, and is +more like a symbolic or mythical gloss upon the first three acts than a +contribution to the growth of the general story. + +Throughout this tangled and variegated scene the spirits of the author +remain almost preposterously high. If it were all hilarity and sardonic +laughter, we should weary of the strain. But physical beauty of the most +enchanting order is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony. +It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere to the dramatic +literature of the world, not by Shakespeare himself, is there introduced +into a play so much loveliness of scenery, and such varied and exquisite +appeal to the eyes, as there is in _Peer Gynt_. The fifth act contains +much which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene so +full of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing else +in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest +shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the +cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush has +contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls +there is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian +paintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm." Pages might be filled with +praise of the 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 own +life's design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or even +a successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote +the first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study, +full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical class +of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention; he found it in +those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjoernson and Moe, in which +he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Boeig, +a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, +capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that +this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish +national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_, +which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to +a justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen's graver +prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act, +where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs +and tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their +reproaches. + +_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment, +and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as +_Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it +did not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules must +be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book," he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and if +it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry +is shall be made to fit my book." There was a struggle at first against +this assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is now +generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to +include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made +wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic +intellectual caprices. + +[Note.--By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has +hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these +pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his +posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young +man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where +Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently +deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising +and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_ +all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in +Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in +Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after +the death of the mortal men who planted them.] + +CHAPTER V + +1868-75 + +Ibsen's four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. +The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other +illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from +Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought +with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had +roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia +dreaming of Italian liberty. _Casa Guidi Windows_ may be taken as the +extreme type of the way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He sought +there, and found, under the transparent azure of the Alban sky, in the +harmonious murmurs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the mountains, +above all in the gray streets of Rome, that rest of the brain, that +ripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after his +rough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his attitude of passive +appreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like any other of +the illustrious exiles--Landor, who died in Florence a few days after +Ibsen settled in Rome. There was a side of character, too, on which the +young Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius. + +When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Garibaldi, at Genoa, announced +his intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet's +heart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill," but left Ibsen simply +disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no +longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which +the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral +hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal +frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the French +who entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed +sojourn--for he soon determined that if there was going to be civil +war in Italy that country was no home for him--we hear but little. This +autumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career of +Georg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whom +he was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we notice +the beginnings of a difference with Bjoernson, lamentable and hardly +explicable, starting, it would vaguely seem, out of a sense that +Bjoernson did not appreciate the poetry of _Peer Gynt_ at its due value. +Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Heiberg, had been looked +upon as the _doyen_ of Danish critics--had pronounced against the poetry +of _Peer Gynt_, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods, in a bearish +letter, had thrown the blame of this judgment upon Bjoernson. + +All through these last months in Rome we find Ibsen in the worst of +humors. If it be admissible to compare him with an animal, he seems the +badger among the writers of his time, nocturnal, inoffensive, solitary, +but at the rumor of disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and bite +with terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen was no joke, and in moments +of exasperation he bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Among +other snaps of the pen, he told Bjoernson that if he was not taken +seriously as a poet, he should try his "fate as a photographer." +Bjoernson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him to +put his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsen +himself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and all +the benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidly +forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorations +from kings and ministers; Bjoernson having determined to reject all such +gewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of accepting (and wearing) every +cross and star that was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, the +temptation was wholly problematical in both cases, yet each poet acted +on his determination to the end. But Bjoernson's hint about the comedy +seems to have been, for some years, the last flicker of friendship +between the two. On this Ibsen presently acted in a manner very +offensive to Bjoernson. + +In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be very much indeed incensed +with things in general. "What Norway wants is a national disaster," he +amiably snarled. It was high time that the badger should seek shelter in +a new burrow, and in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There was a +farewell banquet, at which Julius Lange, who was present, remarks that +Ibsen showed a spice of the devil, but "was very witty and amiable." He +went to Florence for June, then quitted Italy altogether, settling for +three months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath" in the +Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he started +his five-act comedy, _The League of Youth_. All September he spent in +Munich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden, +which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at once +he 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, which +he did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although he was still +very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write for +journals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at long +intervals, with finished works of importance. + +It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely +instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much +interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all +Ibsen's mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of +it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the local +conditions" or "situation." The play is all concerned with _de lokale +forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about +the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being, +as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in +Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer +deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Bjoernson's _The Newly +Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more +amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly +enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of +Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance +to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, +like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own +language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching +but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not +realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de +lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry, +Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the +manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always +something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims. + +Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, +does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I +read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the +stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn +society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in +the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the +sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with +the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult +for an outsider--so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly +from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of +Copenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of _The +League of Youth_ are old history now. There was the "liberal" element in +Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and more +hampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence of +Soeren Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views, +who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any +pensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen. + +Now Bjoernson, in the development of his career as a political publicist, +had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideas +and this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense before +Jaabaek, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of +Dresden, genuinely believed that Bjoernson, with his ardor and his energy +and his eloquence, war, becoming a national danger. We have seen that +Bjoernson had piqued Ibsen's vanity about _Peer Gynt_, and nothing +exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on +a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bjoernson was gregarious, +that of Ibsen solitary; Bjoernson must always be leading the majority, +Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. They +were doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by +creating the figure of Stensgaard, in _The League of Youth_, a frothy +and mischievous demagogue whose rhetoric irresistibly reminded every +one of Bjoernson's rolling oratory. What Bjoernson, not without dignity, +objected to was not so much the personal attack, as that the whole play +attempted "to paint our young party of liberty as a troop of pushing, +phrase-mongering adventurers, whose patriotism lay solely in their +words." Ibsen acknowledged that that was exactly his opinion of them, +and what could follow for such a disjointed friendship but anger and +silence? + +The year 1869, which we now enter, is remarkable in the career of Ibsen +as being that in which he travelled most, and appeared on the surface of +society in the greatest number of capacities. He was enabled to do this +by a considerable increase in his pension. First of all, he was induced +to pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being seized with a sudden +strong desire to study conditions in Sweden, a country which he had +hitherto professed to dislike. He had a delightful stay of two months, +received from King Carl the order of the Wasa, was feted at banquets, +renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with +the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bjoernson were how beginning to be +recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance +as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined. +It was doubtless Bjoernson's emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this +moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such +clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, +if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest at +the opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden incursion of an Oriental +potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that +illustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony. +The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be +naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian guest being Professor J. +D. C. Lieblein, the Egyptologist. + +The poet started for Egypt, by Dresden and Paris, on September 28. +_The League of Youth_ was published on the 29th, and first performed on +October 18; Ibsen, therefore, just missed the scandal and uproar caused +by the play in Norway. In company with eighty-five other people, all +illustrious guests of the Khedive, and under the care of Mariette Bey, +Ibsen made a twenty-four days' expedition up the Nile into Nubia, and +then back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on November 17, in the company +of an empress and several princes of the blood, he saw the Canal +formally opened and graced a grand processional fleet that sailed out +from Port Said towards Ismaila. But on the quay at Port Said Ibsen's +Norwegian mail was handed to him, and letters and newspapers alike were +full of the violent scenes in the course of which _The League of Youth_ +had been hissed down at Christiania. Then and there he sent his defiance +back to Norway in _At Port Said_, one of the most pointed and effective +of all his polemical lyrics. A version in literal prose must suffice, +though it does cruel injustice to the venomous melody of the original: + + The dawn of the Eastern Land + Over the haven glittered; + Flags from all corners of the globe + Quivered from the masts. + Voices in music + Bore onward the cantata; + A thousand cannon + Christened the Canal. + + The steamers passed on + By the obelisk. + In the language of my home + Came to me the chatter of news. + The mirror-poem which I had polished + For masculine minxes + Had been smeared at home + By splutterings from penny whistles. + + The poison-fly stung; + It made my memories loathsome. + Stars, be thanked!-- + My home is what is ancient! + We hailed the frigate + From the roof of the river-boat; + I waved my hat + And saluted the flag. + + To the feast, to the feast, + In spite of the fangs of venomous reptiles! + A selected guest + Across the Lakes of Bitterness! + At the close of day + Dreaming, I shall slumber + Where Pharaoh was drowned-- + And when Moses passed over. + +In this mood of defiance, with rage unabated, Ibsen returned home by +Alexandria and Paris, and was in Dresden again in December. + +The year of 1870 drove him out of Dresden, as the French occupation had +driven him out of Rome. It was essential for him to be at rest in the +midst of a quiet and alien population. He was drawn towards Denmark, +partly for the sake of talk with Brandes, who had now become a factor +in his life, partly to arrange about the performance of one of his early +works, and in particular of _The Pretenders_. No definite plan, however, +had been formed, when, in the middle of June, war was declared between +Germany and France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony, +and settled for three months in Copenhagen, where his reception was +charmingly sympathetic. By the beginning of October, after the fall of +Strasburg and the hemming in of Metz, however, it was plain on which +side the fortunes of the war would lie, and Ibsen returned "as from +a rejuvenating bath" of Danish society to a Dresden full of French +prisoners, a Dresden, too, suffering terribly from the paralysis of +trade, and showing a plentiful lack of enthusiasm for Prussia. + +Ibsen turned his back on all such vexatious themes, and set himself to +the collecting and polishing of a series of lyrical poems, the _Digte_ +of 1871, the earliest, and, indeed, the only such collection that he +published. We may recollect that, at the very same moment, with far less +cause to isolate himself from the horrors of war, Theophile Gautier was +giving the last touches to _Emaux et Camees_. In December, 1870, Ibsen +addressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his "Balloon-Letter," a +Hudibrastic rhymed epistle in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a good +deal that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminiscences of his trip +through Egypt, and some powerful ironic references to the caravan of +German invaders, with its Hathor and its Horus, which was then rushing +to the assault of Paris under the doleful colors of the Prussian flag. +Ibsen's sarcasms are all at the ugliness and prosaic utilitarianism of +the Germans; "Moltke," he says, "has killed the poetry of battles." + +Ibsen was now greatly developing and expanding his views, and forming +a world-policy of his own. The success of German discipline deeply +impressed him, and he thought that the day had probably dawned which +would be fatal to all revolt and "liberal rebellion" for the future. +More than ever he dreaded the revolutionary doctrines of men like +Jaabaek and Bjoernson, which would lead, he thought, to bloodshed and +national disaster. The very same events were impressing Goldwin Smith at +the very same moment with his famous prophecy that the abolition of all +dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquil +inauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world. +So history moves doggedly on, _propheten rechts, propheten links_, a +perfectly impassive _welt-kind_ in the middle of them. In Copenhagen +Ibsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long and +dangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with this +still unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. To +Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely than to any one else about the great +events which were shaking the face of Europe and occupying so much of +both their thoughts:-- + +The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December +20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as the +new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new +age. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high +time they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs +from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all +nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new +meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no +longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented Guillotine. +This is what the politicians will not understand, and therefore, I hate +them. They want their own special revolutions--revolutions in externals, +in politics and so forth. But all this is mere trifling. What is +all-important is the revolution of the Spirit of Man. + +This revolution, as exemplified by the Commune in Paris, did not satisfy +the anticipations which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took advantage of +this to tell him that he had not yet studied politics minutely enough +from the scientific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did not +possess as knowledge came to him, to a certain degree, as intuition or +instinct. "Let this be as it may, the poet's essential task is to see, +not to reflect. For me in particular there would be danger in too much +reflection." Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame of +mind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of which +his imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; at +another time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, and +to represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presents +them to him. In neither attitude, however, is there discernible any +trace of the moral physician, and this is the central distinction +between Tolstoi and Ibsen, whose methods, at first sight, sometimes +appear so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition, but always +with the purpose, if he can, of curing it; Ibsen gives it even closer +clinical attention, but he leaves to others the care of removing a +disease which his business is solely to diagnose. + +The _Poems_, after infinite revision, were published at length, in a +very large edition, on May 3, 1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad to +get this book off his hands was that it enabled him to concentrate his +thoughts on the great drama he had been projecting, at intervals, for +seven years past, the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story of +Julian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) and +found the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss, +Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the +autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by +the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to +reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen's early and insufficiently protected +writings. This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own country, where +the very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subject +he used language of tiresome over-emphasis. "From Sweden, from Denmark, +from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is from +Norway that everything bad comes upon me." It was indicated to would-be +Norwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegian +friends, he said, were "a costly luxury" which he was obliged to deny +himself. + +The First Part of _Julian_ was finished on Christmas Day, but it took +over a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, was +completed. "A Herculean labor," the author called it, when he finally +laid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very +quietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tempered by genial visits +from some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularly +Hans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formal +intercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; all +this time, let us remember, no Norwegians--"by request." The summer was +spent in long rambles over the mountains of Austria, ending up with a +month of deep repose in Berchtesgaden. The next year was like unto this, +except that its roaming, restless summer closed with several months in +Vienna; and on October 17, 1873, _nonum in annum_, after the Horatian +counsel, the prodigious masterpiece, _Emperor and Galilean_, was +published in Copenhagen at last. + +Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise and +fall of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is not +difficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the most +speculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquity +that fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians have +celebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose which +were combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty +and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship. +There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple +convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him +to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he +offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern +world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of +character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet. +His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, +in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and +melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. +But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the +difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming +a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to +the theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself baffled +by the paradoxes which he encountered, and by the contradictions of a +figure seen darkly through a mist of historical detraction. + +He met these difficulties as well as he could, and as a prudent dramatic +poet should, by close and observant study of the document. He endeavored +to reconcile the evident superiority of Julian with the absurd +eccentricities of his private manners and with the futility of his +public acts. He noted all the Apostate's foibles by the side of his +virtues and his magnanimities. He traced without hesitation the course +of that strange insurrection which hurled a coarse fanatic from the +throne, only to place in his room a literary pedant with inked fingers +and populous beard. He accepted everything, from the parasites to the +purple slippers. The dangers of so humble an attendance upon history +were escaped with success in the first instalment of his "world drama." +In the strong and mounting scenes of _Caesar's Apostacy_, the +rapidity with which the incidents succeed one another, their inherent +significance, the innocent splendor of Julian's mind in its first +emancipation from the chains of false faith, combine to produce an +effect of high dramatic beauty. Georg Brandes, whose instinct in such +matters was almost infallible, when he read the First Part shortly +after its composition, entreated Ibsen to give this, as it stood, to the +public, and to let _The Emperor Julian's End_ follow independently. +Had Ibsen consented to do this, _Caesar's Fall_ would certainly take a +higher place among his works than it does at present, when its effect +is somewhat amputated and its meaning threatened with incoherence by the +author's apparent _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 other +of his works, was never a favorite either with the public or among the +critics. With the best will in the world, however, it is not easy to +find full enjoyment in this gigantic work, which by some caprice +of style defiant of analysis, lacks the vitality which is usually +characteristic of Ibsen's least production. The speeches put into the +mouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid; +as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You +feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some +dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's drama was +too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt. +What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here +and there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramatic +representation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius far +better to have abandoned any attempt to write a conclusive history, +and have selected some critical moment in the life of Julian. He should +rather have concentrated his energies, independent of the chroniclers, +on the resuscitation of that episode, and in the course of it have +trembled less humbly under the uplifted finger of Ammianus. + +Of _Emperor and Galilean_ Ibsen afterwards said: "It was the first" (but +he might have added "the only") "poem which I have written under the +influence of German ideas." He was aware of the danger of living too +long away from his own order of thought and language. But it was always +difficult for him, once planted in a place, to pull up his roots. A +weariness took possession of him after the publication of his double +drama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks a +central joint in the structure of his career, what the architects call +a "channel" in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen's work an +aspect of solidity and resource. During these years he revised some of +his early writings, made a closer study of the arts of sculpture and +painting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a very brief sojourn in +Norway. In the spring of 1875 he definitely moved with his family from +Dresden to Munich. + +The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved very unfortunate. Ibsen +was suspicious, the Norwegians of that generation were constitutionally +stiff and reserved; long years among Southern races had accustomed him +to a plenitude in gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief time +he was in Norway, from an intolerable _malaise_. Ten years afterwards, +in writing to Bjoernson, the discomfort of that experience was still +unallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly enough," he said, "to support +myself and my family in the case of my discontinuing my literary work. +And I should be obliged to discontinue it if I lived in Christiania.... +This simply means that I should not write at all. When, ten years ago, +after an absence of ten years, I sailed up the fjord, I felt a weight +settling down on my breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression. And +this feeling lasted all the time I was at home; I was not myself under +the stare of all those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the +windows and in the streets." + +Ibsen had now been more than ten years am exile from Norway, and his +sentiments 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 lyrical +performances, had opened in the key of unmitigated defiance to popular +opinion at home. It was intended to show Norwegians that they must +alter their attitude towards him, as he would never change his behavior +towards 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 was +almost unchallenged, and he was a name, at least, in Germany. In +England, since 1872, he had not been without a prophet. But in Italy, +Russia, France--three countries upon the intelligence of which he was +presently to make a wide and durable impression--he was still quite +unknown. + +Meanwhile, in glancing over the general literature of Europe, we see +his figure, at the threshold of his fiftieth year, taking greater +and greater prominence. He had become, in the sudden exinction of the +illustrious old men of Denmark, the first living writer of the North. He +was to Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne or +Rossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly +lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at least +till 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If, +in the second portion of his career, he resolutely deprived himself +of all indulgence in the ornament of verse, it was a voluntary act of +austerity. It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging the crown of +jewels for the coarse brown cowl of St. Jerome. And now, after a year +or two of prayer and fasting, Ibsen began a new intellectual career. +CHAPTER VI + +1875-82 + +While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his +career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to +him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. +These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Bjoernson suddenly +swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid +modern life. This was his first attempt at that "photography by comedy" +which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded +what was Ibsen's comment on these two plays, and particularly on _A +Bankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next +work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bjoernson had carried a very +spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to +drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities. + +Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen +upon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a year +he gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, he +was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems +to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of +inanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_, +which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique in +the fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all. + +Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the exteriors of character. With +his fiftieth year he presents himself as no more the Poet, but the Man +of Business. Molbech told me that at this time the velveteen jacket, +symbol of the dear delays of art, was discarded in favor of a +frock-coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rather +shyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself in frequent +straits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollar +breeding. He cast the suspicion of poetry from him, and with his gold +spectacles, his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom and his quick +staccato step, he adopted the pose of a gentleman of affairs, very +positive and with no nonsense about him. + +He had long determined on the wilful abandonment of poetic form, and the +famous statement made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must be +quoted, although it is well known, since it contains the clearest of all +the explanations by which Ibsen justified his new departure:-- + +You are of opinion that the drama [_Emperor and Galilean_] ought to have +been written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here I +must differ from you. The play is, as you will have observed, conceived +in the most realistic style: the illusion I wished to produce is that of +reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he +was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed +verse, I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented +the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary +insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into +the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one +another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same +rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. +Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural +colors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desire +to see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a +negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally, +the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the +representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation; +what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not +let them talk "the language of the Gods." + +This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877 +Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est +en vers, et l'ennui s'y promene librement entre les rimes." + +No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held so rigidly to his +intention of reproducing the exact language of real life, as did Ibsen +in the series of plays which opens with _The Pillars of Society_. This +drama was published in Copenhagen in October, 1877, and was acted almost +immediately in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; it had the good fortune to +be taken up warmly in Germany. What Ibsen's idea was, in the new sort of +realistic drama which he was inventing, was, in fact, perceived at once +by German audiences, although it was not always approved of. He was the +guest of the theatromaniac Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and _The Pillars of +Society_ was played in many parts of Germany. In Scandinavia the book of +the play sold well, and the piece had some success on the boards, but it +did not create anything like so much excitement as the author had hoped +that it would. Danish taste pronounced it "too German." + +For the fact that _The Pillars of Society_, except in Scandinavia and +Germany, did not then, and never has since, taken a permanent hold +upon the theatre, Mr. William Archer gives a reason which cannot be +controverted, namely, that by the time the other foreign publics had +fully awakened to the existence of Ibsen, he himself had so far outgrown +the phase of his development marked by _Pillars of Society_, that the +play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suited +the German public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with their +theatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical intelligence of +the Anglo-American public, and... below that of the French public. This +is of course an exaggeration. What I mean is that there was no possible +reason why the countrymen of Augier and Dumas should take any special +interest in _Pillars of Society_. It was not obviously in advance of +these masters in technical skill, and the vein of Teutonic sentiment +running through it could not greatly appeal to the Parisian public of +that period. + +The subject of _The Pillars of Society_ was the hollowness and +rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose +which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was +accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have +fallen out of touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied in the +convex mirror of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to _The +Pillars of Society_ that in it, as little as in _The League of 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 way +out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the +"well-made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by +a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very much of +the usual "bless-ye-my-children" order. The loss of the Indian Girl is +miraculously prevented, and at the end the characters are solemnized and +warned, yet are left essentially none the worse for their alarm. This, +unfortunately, is not the mode in which the sins of scheming people +find them out in real life. But to the historical critic it is +very interesting to see Bjoernson and Ibsen nearer one another in _A +Bankruptcy_ and _The Pillars of Society_ than they had ever been before. +They now started on a course of eager, though benevolent, rivalry which +was eminently to the advantage of each of them. + +No feature of Ibsen's personal career is more interesting than his +relation to Bjoernson. Great as the genius of Ibsen was, yet, rating it +as ungrudgingly as possible, we have to admit that Bjoernson's character +was the more magnetic and more radiant of the two. Ibsen was a citizen +of the world; he belonged, in a very remarkable degree, to the small +class of men whose intelligence lifts them above the narrowness of local +conditions, who belong to civilization at large, not to the system +of one particular nation. He was, in consequence, endowed, almost +automatically, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a central +point; if he was to be limited at all, he might be styled European, +although, perhaps, few Western citizens would have had less difficulty +than he in making themselves comprehended by a Chinese, Japanese or +Indian mind of unusual breadth and cultivation. On the other hand, in +accepting the advantages of this large mental outlook, he was forced to +abandon those of nationality. No one can say that Ibsen was, until near +the end of his life, a good Norwegian, and he failed, by his utterances, +to vibrate the local mind. But Bjoernson, with less originality, was the +typical patriot in literature, and what he said, and thought, and wrote +was calculated to stir the local conscience to the depths of its being. + +When, therefore, in 1867, Ibsen, who was bound by all natural +obligations and tendencies to remain on the best terms with Bjoernson, +allowed the old friendship between them to lapse into positive +antagonism, he was following the irresistible evolution of his fate, as +Bjoernson was following his. It was as inevitable that Ibsen should +grow to his full height in solitude as it was that Bjoernson should +pine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of popular meetings, +torchlight processions of students and passionate appeals to local +sentiment. Trivial causes, such as those which we have chronicled +earlier, might seem to lead up to a division, but that division was +really inherent in the growth of the two men. + +Ibsen, however, was not wholly a gainer at first even in genius, by the +separation. It cut him off from Norway too entirely, and it threw him +into the arms of Germany. There were thirteen years in which Ibsen +and Bjoernson were nothing to one another, and these were not years of +unmingled mental happiness for either of them. But during this long +period each of these very remarkable men "came into his kingdom," and +when there was no longer any chance that either of there could warp the +nature of the other, fate brought them once more together. + +The reconciliation began, of course, with a gracious movement from +Bjoernson. At the end of 1880, writing for American readers, Bjoernson +had the generous candor to say: "I think I have a pretty thorough +acquaintance with the dramatic literature of the world, and I have not +the slightest hesitation in saying that Henrik Ibsen possesses more +dramatic power than any other play-writer of our day." When we remember +that, in France alone, Augier and Dumas _fils_ and Hugo, Halevy and +Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though a +sound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said about +Ibsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw behind the altar of a Burmese +temple, came round to Ibsen's ears, and this handsome tribute from +the rival produced its effect. And when, shortly afterwards, still in +America, Bjoernson was nearly killed in a railway accident, Ibsen +broke the long silence by writing to him a most cordial letter of +congratulation. + +The next incident was the publication of _Ghosts_, when Bjoernson, now +thoroughly roused, stood out almost alone, throwing the vast prestige +of his judgment into the empty scale against the otherwise unanimous +black-balling. Then the reconcilement was full and fraternal, and Ibsen +wrote from Rome (January 24, 1882), with an emotion rare indeed for him: +"The only man in Norway who has frankly, boldly and generously taken +my part is Bjoernson. It is just like him; he has, in truth, a great, a +kingly soul; and I shall never forget what he has done now." Six months +later, on occasion of Bjoernson's jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed: "My thanks +for the work done side by side with me in the service of freedom these +twenty-five years." These words wiped away all unhappy memories of the +past; they gave public recognition to the fact that, though the two +great poets had been divided for half a generation by the forces of +circumstance, they had both been fighting at wings of the same army +against the common enemy. + +This, however, takes us for the moment a little too far ahead. After the +publication of _The Pillars of Society_, Ibsen remained quiet for some +time; indeed, from this date we find him adopting the practice which was +to be regular with him henceforth, namely, that of letting his mind +lie fallow for one year after the issue of each of his works, and then +spending another year in the formation of the new play. Munich gradually +became tedious to him, and he justly observed that the pressure of +German surroundings was unfavorable to the healthy evolution of his +genius. In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although it was no longer +the quiet and aristocratic Rome of Papal days, was still immensely +attractive to his temperament. He was now, in some measure, "a person of +means," and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formed +a small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed, +great care. The result could be seen long afterwards by those who +visited him in his final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of the +sumptuous flat in which he spent his old age and in which he died. +His taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of the +decline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must be +left for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondness +for the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only in +defiance of Ruskin. + +In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was told him of an incident in +the Danish courts, the adventure of a young married woman in one of the +small towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts running on a new dramatic +enterprise. He was still curiously irritated by contemplating, in +his mind's eye, the "respectable, estimable narrowmindedness and +worldliness" of social conditions in Norway, where there was no +aristocracy, and where a lower middle-class took the place of a +nobility, with, as he thought, sordid results. But he was no longer +suffering from what he himself had called "the feeling of an insane man +staring at one single, hopelessly black spot." He went to Amalfi for the +summer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with +his present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what is +probably the most widely famous of all his works, _A Doll's House_. The +day before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublished +letter of July 4, 1879): "I have been living here with my family since +September last, and most of that time I have been occupied with the idea +of a new dramatic work, which I shall now soon finish, and which will +be published in October. It is a serious drama, really a family drama, +dealing with modern conditions and in particular with the problems which +complicate marriage." This play he finished, lingering at Amalfi, in +September, 1879. It was an engineer's experiment at turning up and +draining a corner of the moral swamp which Norwegian society seemed to +be to his violent and ironic spirit. + +_A Doll's House_ was Ibsen's first unqualified success. Not merely was +it the earliest of his plays which excited universal discussion, but +in its construction and execution it carried out much further than its +immediate precursors Ibsen's new ideal as an unwavering realist. Mr. +Arthur Symons has well said [Note: The _Quarterly Review_ for October, +1906.] that "_A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in which +the puppets have no visible wires." It may even be said that it was the +first modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that even +here the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The arm +of coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever and +entertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of real +life. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, +dressed to go out, to Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when +the agitated pair sit down to "have it out," face to face across the +table, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born in +drama, and, incidentally, that the "well-made play" has suddenly become +as dead as Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of life, are amazing +in this final scene, where the old happy ending is completely abandoned +for the first time, and where the paradox of life is presented without +the least shuffling or evasion. + +It was extraordinary how suddenly it was realized that _A Doll's +House_ was a prodigious performance. All Scandinavia rang with Nora's +"declaration of independence." People left the theatre, night after +night, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging. The +inner being had been unveiled for a moment, and new catchwords were +repeated from mouth to mouth. The great statement and reply--"No man +sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves," "Hundreds of thousands of +women have done so!"--roused interminable discussion in countless family +circles. The disputes were at one time so violent as to threaten the +peace of households; a school of imitators at once sprang up to treat +the situation, from slightly different points of view, in novel, poem +and drama. [Note: The reader who desires to obtain further light on the +technical quality of _A Doll's House_ can do no better than refer to Mr. +William Archer's elaborate analysis of it (_Fortnightly Review_, July, +1906.)] + +The universal excitement which Ibsen had vainly hoped would be awakened +by _The Pillars of Society_ came, when he was not expecting it, to greet +_A Doll's House_. Ibsen was stirred by the reception of his latest play +into a mood rather different from that which he expressed at any other +period. As has often been said, he did not pose as a prophet or as a +reformer, but it did occur to him now that he might exercise a strong +moral influence, and in writing to his German translator, Ludwig +Passarge, he said (June 16, 1880): + +Everything that I have written has the closest possible connection +with what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personal +experience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual +emancipation and purification--for a man shares the responsibility and +the guilt of the society to which he belongs. + +It was in this spirit of unusual gravity that he sat down to the +composition of _Ghosts_. There is little or no record of how he occupied +himself at Munich and Berchtesgaden in 1880, except that in March he +began to sketch, and then abandoned, what afterwards became _The Lady +from the Sea_. In the autumn of that year, indulging once more his +curious restlessness, he took all his household gods and goods again to +Rome. His thoughts turned away from dramatic art for a moment, and he +planned an autobiography, which was to deal with the gradual development +of his mind, and to be called _From Skien to Rome_. Whether he actually +wrote any of this seems uncertain; that he should have planned it shows +a certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now in his fifty-third +year, he might be nearly at the end of his resources. As a matter of +fact, he was just entering upon a new inheritance. In the summer of 1881 +he went, as usual now, to Sorrento, and there [Note: So the authorities +state: but in an unpublished letter to myself, dated Rome, November +26, 1880, I find Ibsen saying, "Just now I am beginning to exercise my +thoughts over a new drama; I hope I shall finish it in the course of +next summer." It seems to have been already his habit to meditate long +about a subject before it took any definite literary form in his mind.] +the plot of _Ghosts_ revealed itself to him. This work was composed with +more than Ibsen's customary care, and was published at the beginning of +December, in an edition of ten thousand copies. + +Before the end of 1881 Ibsen was aware of the terrific turmoil which +_Ghosts_ had begun to occasion. He wrote to Passarge: "My new play has +now appeared, and has occasioned a terrible uproar in the Scandinavian +press. Every day I receive letters and newspaper articles decrying or +praising it. I consider it absolutely impossible that any German theatre +will accept the play at present. I hardly believe that they will dare to +play it in any Scandinavian country for some time to come." It was, in +fact, not acted publicly anywhere until 1883, when the Swedes ventured +to try it, and the Germans followed in 1887. The Danes resisted it much +longer. + +Ibsen declared that he was quite prepared for the hubbub; he would +doubtless have been much disappointed if it had not taken place; +nevertheless, he was disconcerted at the volume and the violence of +the attacks. Yet he must have known that in the existing condition of +society, and the limited range of what was then thought a defensible +criticism of that condition, _Ghosts_ must cause a virulent +scandal. There has been, especially in Germany, a great deal of +medico-philosophical exposure of the under-side of life since 1880. It +is hardly possible that, there, or in any really civilized country, an +analysis of the causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest and +most conventional forms of hereditary disease could again excite such +a startling revulsion of feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew of +investigators, Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of probing +playwrights all over the Continent, have gone further and often fared +much worse than Ibsen did when he dived into the family history of +Kammerherre Alving. When we read _Ghosts_ to-day we cannot recapture the +"new shudder" which it gave us a quarter of a century ago. Yet it must +not be forgotten that the publication of it, in that hide-bound time, +was an act of extraordinary courage. Georg Brandes, always clearsighted, +was alone in being able to perceive at once that _Ghosts_ was no attack +on society, but an effort to place the responsibilities of men and women +on a wholesomer and surer footing, by direct reference to the relation +of both to the child. + +When the same eminent critic, however, went on to say that _Ghosts_ was +"a poetic treatment of the question of heredity," it was more difficult +to follow him. Now that the flash and shock of the playwright's audacity +are discounted, it is natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work of +pure art, _Ghosts_ stands high among Ibsen's writings. I confess, for my +own part, that it seems to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that is +to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. It +is extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as +a foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, the +characters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types than persons. +In the old fighting days it was necessary to praise _Ghosts_ with +extravagance, because the vituperation of the enemy was so stupid and +offensive, but now that there are no serious adversaries left, cooler +judgment admits--not one word that the idiot-adversary said, but--that +there are more convincing plays than _Ghosts_ in Ibsen's repertory. + +Up to this time, Ibsen had been looked upon as the mainstay of the +Conservative party in Norway, in opposition to Bjoernson, who led the +Radicals. But the author of _Ghosts_, who was accused of disseminating +anarchism and nihilism, was now smartly drummed out of the Tory camp +without being welcomed among the Liberals. Each party was eager to +disown him. He was like Coriolanus, when he was deserted by nobles and +people alike, and + +suffer'd by the voice of slaves to be Whoop'd out of Rome. + +The situation gave Ibsen occasion, from the perspective of his exile, to +form some impressions of political life which were at once pungent and +dignified: + +"I am more and more confirmed" [he said, Jan, 3, 1882] "in my belief +that there is something demoralizing in politics and parties. I, at any +rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its +side. Bjoernson says, 'The majority is always right'; and as a practical +politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of +necessity say, 'The minority is always right.'" + +In order to place this view clearly before his countrymen, he set about +composing the extremely vivid and successful play, perhaps the most +successful pamphlet-play that ever was written, which was to put forward +in the clearest light the claim of the minority. He was very busy with +preparations for it all through the summer of 1882, which he spent at +what was now to be for many years his favorite summer resort, Gossensass +in the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to the memory of Ibsen in the +way that Pornic belongs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to Tyndall, +holiday homes in foreign countries, dedicated to blissful work without +disturbance. Here, at a spot now officially named the "Ibsenplatz," he +composed _The Enemy of the People_, engrossed in his invention as was +his wont, reading nothing and thinking of nothing but of the persons +whose history he was weaving. Oddly enough, he thought that this, +too, was to be a "placable" play, written to amuse and stimulate, but +calculated to wound nobody's feelings. The fact was that Ibsen, like +some ocelot or panther of the rocks, had a paw much heavier than he +himself realized, and his "play," in both senses, was a very serious +affair, when he descended to sport with common humanity. + +Another quotation, this time from a letter to Brandes, must be given to +show what Ibsen's attitude was at this moment to his fatherland and to +his art: + +"When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is +at home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged, +a deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might +just as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not need +poetry at home; they get along so well with the party newspapers and the +_Lutheran Weekly_." + +If Ibsen thought that he was offering them "poetry" in _The Enemy of +the People_, he spoke in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has never +opened its arms wide enough to embrace all imaginative literature as +poetry, and in the English sense nothing in the world's drama is denser +or more unqualified prose than _The Enemy of the People_, without +a tinge of romance or rhetoric, as "unideal" as a blue-book. It is, +nevertheless, one of the most certainly successful of its author's +writings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as a pamphlet it +awakens irresistible sympathy; as a specimen of dramatic art, its +construction and evolution are almost faultless. Under a transparent +allegory, it describes the treatment which Ibsen himself had received at +the hands of the Norwegian public for venturing to tell them that their +spa should be drained before visitors were invited to flock to it. +Nevertheless, the playwright has not made the mistake of identifying his +own figure with that of Dr. Stockmann, who is an entirely independent +creation. Mr. Archer has compared the hero with Colonel Newcome, whose +loquacious amicability he does share, but Stockmann's character has much +more energy and initiative than Colonel Newcome's, whom we could never +fancy rousing himself "to purge society." + +Ibsen's practical wisdom in taking the bull by the horns in his reply to +the national reception of _Ghosts_ was proved by the instant success +of _The Enemy of the People_. Presented to the public in this new and +audacious form, the problem of a "moral water-supply" struck sensible +Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it +to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under +the lash. _Ghosts_ itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but _The +Enemy of the People_ received a cordial welcome, and has remained ever +since one of the most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still extremely +effective on the stage, and as it is lightened by more humor than the +author is commonly willing to employ, it attracts even those who are +hostile to the intrusion of anything solemn behind the footlights. +CHAPTER VII + +1883-91 + +With the appearance of _An Enemy of the People_, which was published +in November, 1882, Ibsen entered upon a new stage in his career. He had +completely broken with the Conservative party in Norway, without having +gratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personal +relations of friendliness with Bjoernson, whose generous approval of his +work as a dramatist sustained his spirits, but his own individualism had +been intensified by the hostile reception of _Ghosts_. His life was now +divided between Rome in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, and +in the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he wandered solitary, +taciturn, absorbed in his own thoughts. His meditations led him more and +more into a lonely state. He floated, as on a prophet's carpet, between +the political heavens and earth, capriciously refusing to ascend or +to alight. He had come to a sceptical stage in his mental evolution, +a stage in which he was to remain for a considerable time, gradually +modifying it in a conservative direction. One wonders what the +simple-minded and stalwart Bjoernson thought of being quietly told +(March 28, 1884) that the lower classes are nowhere liberal-minded or +self-sacrificing, and that "in the views expressed by our [Norwegian] +peasants there is not an atom more of real Liberalism than is to be +found among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol." In politics +Ibsen had now become a pagan; "I do not believe," he said, "in the +emancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidence +in the altruism and good will of those in power." This sense of the +uselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next work +on which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonic +tragi-comedy of _The Wild Duck_. The first sketch of it was made during +the spring of 1884 in Rome, but the dramatist took it to Gossensass with +him for the finishing touches, and did not perfect it until the autumn. +It is remarkable that Ibsen invariably speaks of _The Wild Duck_, when +he mentions it in his correspondence, in terms of irony. He calls it a +collection of crazy tricks or tomfooleries, _galskaber_, an expression +which carries with it, in this sense, a confession of wilful paradox. In +something of the same spirit, Robert Browning, in the old days before +he was comprehended, used to speak of "the entirely unintelligible +_Sordello_," as if, sarcastically, to meet criticism half-way. + +When _The Wild Duck_ was first circulated among Ibsen's admirers, it +was received with some bewilderment. Quite slowly the idea received +acceptance that the hitherto so serious and even angry satirist was, +to put it plainly, laughing at himself. The faithful were reluctant to +concede it. But one sees now, clearly enough, that in a sense it was so. +I have tried to show, we imagine Ibsen saying, that your hypocritical +sentimentality needs correction--you live in "A Doll's House." I have +dared to point out to you that your society is physically and morally +rotten and full of "Ghosts." You have repudiated my honest efforts as a +reformer, and called me "An Enemy of the People." Very well, then, have +it so if you please. What a fool am I to trouble about you at all. Go +down a steep place in Gadara and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, it +can amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers Werle. _Vogue la galere_. +"But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the +right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of the +union from the flag," burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegian +politics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway"; +it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of my +caring. It is in reading _The Wild Duck_ that for the first time the +really astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes +apparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist now +relinquishes any other central object than the presentation to his +audience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last, +and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that is +not catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than _Ghosts_, +_The Wild Duck_ is an avalanche which has begun to move, and with +a movement unaffected by the incidents of the plot, long before the +curtain rises. The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all other modern +dramas, depend upon nothing that happens while they are being exhibited, +but rush downwards to their inevitable close in obedience to a series of +long-precedent impulses. In order to gain this effect, the dramatist +has to be acquainted with everything that has ever happened to his +personages, and we are informed that Ibsen used to build up in his own +mind, for months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was now +master of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find one +of the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of _The Wild +Duck_ that "never before had the poet displayed such an amazing power +of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after +veil from the past." + +The result of a searching determination to deal with personal and not +typical forms of temperament is seen in the firmness of the portraiture +in _The Wild Duck_, where, I think, less than ever before, is to be +found a trace of that incoherency which is to be met with occasionally +in all the earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the effect of a +sudden caprice or change of the point of view. There is, so far as I +can judge, no trace of this in _The Wild Duck_, where the continuity of +aspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us that if we tell him our +past, he will tell us our future, and although several of the characters +in _The Wild Duck_ are the most sordid of Ibsen's creations, the author +has made himself so deeply familiar with them that they are absolutely +lifelike. The detestable Hialmar, in whom, by the looking-glass of a +disordered liver, any man may see a picture of himself; the pitiable +Gregers Werle, perpetually thirteenth at table, with his genius for +making an utter mess of other people's lives; the vulgar Gina; the +beautiful girlish figure of the little martyred Hedvig--all are wholly +real and living persons. + +The subject of the play, of course, is one which we do not expect, +or had not hitherto expected, from Ibsen. It is the danger of "a sick +conscience" and the value of illusion. Society may be full of poisonous +vapors and be built on a framework of lies; it is nevertheless prudent +to consider whether the ideal advantages of disturbing it overweigh the +practical disadvantages, and above all to bear in mind that if you rob +the average man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob him of his +happiness. The topsy-turvy nature of a this theme made Ibsen as nearly +"rollicking" as he ever became in his life. We can imagine than as he +wrote the third act of _The Wild Duck_, where so horrible a luncheon +party--"we'll all keep a corner"--gloats over the herring salad, he +indulged again and again in those puffs of soundless and formidable +mirth which Mr. Johan Paulsen describes as so surprising an element of +conversation with Ibsen. + +To the gossip of that amiable Boswell, too, we must turn for a valuable +impression of the solidification of Ibsen's habits which began about +this time, and which marked then even before he left Munich. He had now +successfully separated himself from all society, and even his family +saw him only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him, but, if +sufficiently courageous, must hang about on the staircase, hoping to +catch him for a moment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his study, +into which the daring Paulsen occasionally ventured, Ibsen, we are to +believe, did nothing at all, but "sat bent over the pacific ocean of his +own mind, which mirrored for him a world far more fascinating, vast and +rich than that which lay spread around him." [Note: _Samliv med Ibsen_, +1906, p. 30.] + +And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafes had begun. In Rome Ibsen +had his favorite table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirror +in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his gold +spectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, and +especially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, every +couple that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to +those untiring eyes. The newspaper and the cafe mirror--these were the +books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and +out of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph +in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could +build up a drama. Incessant observation of real life, incessant capture +of unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual living experience leaping +in his hands like a captive wild animal, this was now the substance +from which all Ibsen's dreams and dramas were woven. Concentration of +attention on the vital play of character, this was his one interest. + +Out of this he was roused by a sudden determination to go at last and +see for himself what life in Norway was really like. A New England wit +once denied that a certain brilliant and Europe-loving American author +was a cosmopolitan. "No," he said, "a cosmopolitan is at home even in +his own country." Ibsen began to doubt whether he was not too far off +to follow events in Norway--and these were now beginning to be very +exciting--well enough to form an independent judgment about them; and +after twenty years of exile there is no doubt that the question was +fairly put. _The Wild Duck_ had been published in November, 1884, and +had been acted everywhere in Scandinavia with great success. The critics +and the public were agreed for the first time that Ibsen was a very +great national genius, and that if Norway was not proud of him it would +make a fool of itself in the eyes of Europe. + +Ibsen had said that Norway was a barbarous country, inhabited by two +millions of cats and dogs, but so many agreeable and highly-civilized +compliments found their way to him in Rome that he began to fancy that +the human element was beginning to be introduced. At all events, +he would see for himself, and in June, 1885, instead of stopping at +Gossensass, he pushed bravely on and landed in Christiania. + +At first all went well, but from the very beginning of the visit he +observed, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country was +thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetorical +resolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutional +horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway +from one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, the +Swedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of frenzied +discussion, and in none of these did Ibsen take any sort of pleasure. He +was not politically far-sighted, it must be confessed, nor did he guess +what practical proportions these "theoretical questions" were to assume +in the immediate future. + +That great writer and delightful associate, the Swedish poet, Count +Snoilsky, one of the few whose company never wearied or irritated Ibsen, +joined him in the far north. They spent a pleasant, quiet time together +at Molde, that enchanting little sub-arctic town, where it looks +southward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever guarding +the mountainous horizon. Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, when +Snoilsky had left him, already thinking of a new drama, lingered on at +Molde, spending hours on hours at the end of the jetty, gazing into the +clear, cold sea. His passion for the sea had never betrayed him, and at +Rome, where he had long given up going to any galleries or studios, he +still haunted the house of a Norwegian marine painter, Nils Hansteen, +whose sketches reminded him of old days and recollected waters. + +But the autumn comes on apace in these high latitudes, and Ibsen had to +return to Christiania with its torchlight processions, and late noisy +feasts, and triumphant revolutionary oratory. He disliked it extremely, +and he made up his mind to go back to the indifferent South, where +people did not worry about such things. Unfortunately, the inhabitants +of Christiania did not leave him alone. They were not content to have +him among them as a retired observer, they wanted to make him stand out +definitely on one political side or the other. He was urged, at the end +of September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession planned +in his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough to +see that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably too +self-conscious in believing that a trap was being laid for him. He said +that, not having observed that his presence gave the Union any great +pleasure, he did not care to have its expression of great joy at t his +departure. This was not polite, for it does not appear that the students +had any idea that he intended to depart. He would not address a reply to +the Union as a body, but to "my friends among the students." + +A committee called upon him to beg him to reconsider his resolution, +but he roundly told them that he knew that they were reactionaries, and +wanted to annex him to their party, and that he was not blind to their +tricks. They withdrew in confusion, and Ibsen, in an agony of nervous +ness, determined to put the sea between himself and their machinations. +Early in October he retreated, or rather fled, to Copenhagen, and thence +to Munich, where he breathed again. Meanwhile, the extreme liberal +faction among the students claimed that his action had meant that he was +heart and soul with them, as against the reactionaries. A young Mr. Ove +Rode, who had interviewed him, took upon himself to say that these were +Ibsen's real sentiments. Ibsen fairly stamped with rage, and declared, +in furious communications, that all these things were done on purpose. +"It was an opportunity to insult a poet which it would have been a +sad pity to lose," he remarked, with quivering pen. A reverberant +controversy sprang up in the Norwegian newspapers, and Ibsen, in his +Bavarian harbor of refuge, continued to vibrate all through the winter +of 1885. The exile's return to his native country had proved to be far +from a success. + +Already his new play was taking shape, and the success of his great +personal ambition, namely that his son, Sigurd, should be taken with +honor into the diplomatic service of his country, did such to calm his +spirits. Ibsen was growing rich now, as well as famous, and if only the +Norwegians would let him alone, he might well be happy. The new play +was _Rosmersholm_, and it took its impulse from a speech which Ibsen had +made during his journey, at Trondhjem, where he expounded the gospel of +individualism to a respectful audience of workingmen, and had laid +down the necessity of introducing an aristocratic strain, _et adeligt +element_, into the life of a truly democratic state, a strain which +woman and labor were to unite in developing. He said: "I am thinking, +of course, not of birth, nor of money, nor even of intellect, but of the +nobility which grows out of character. It is _character_ alone which can +make us free." This nobility of character must be fostered, mainly, by +the united efforts of motherhood and labor. This was quite a new creed +in Norway, and it bewildered his hearers, but it is remarkable to notice +how the best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded to the appeal, +and how little surprise the present generation would express at a +repetition of such sentiments. And out of this idea of "nobility" of +public character _Rosmersholm_ directly sprang. + +We are not left to conjecture in this respect. In a letter to Bjoern +Kristensen (February 13, 1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, while +correcting a misconception of the purpose of _Rosmersholm_, that "the +play deals with the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have +to wage with themselves in order to bring their lives into harmony with +their convictions.... Conscience is very conservative. It has its deep +roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict." When +we come to read _Rosmersholm_ it is not difficult to see how this order +of ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The mansion called by +that name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois +aristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timid +conservatism as is represented by Rector Kroll, with his horror of all +things new because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in its inherent +nobility, is to be superior to a craven horror of the democracy, and is +to show, by the courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny, that +it 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, did +not construct his drama sturdily enough on realistic lines. While not +one of his works is more suggestive than _Rosmersholm_, there is not one +which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral +house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of +a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The +absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to +eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. +Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief +and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is +a sort of troll; nobody can explain--and yet an explanation seems +requisite--what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to +work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright +for once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of +_Rosmersholm_ that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last, +Ibsen, in the act of theorizing, loses his hold upon reality. He places +his ingenious, elaborate and--given the premises--inevitable denouement +in a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan +opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately +on the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of real +life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality +of _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that +he may leap the further forward. + +In other words, _Rosmersholm_ is the proof of Ibsen's desire to conquer +another field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with great +severity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was nevertheless +ineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of the +spectator no other impression than that he was observing something which +had actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in which +it would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, the +principle that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, "like +some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times." But the soul of man +cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly +prosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but +that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever +there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut +himself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowing +how to set about it, that he would once more give the spiritual and +the imaginative qualities their place in his work. These had now been +excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of _Peer Gynt_, +and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again in +verse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenile +and fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-like +bard of sixty. But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, and +especially to fantastic beauty of landscape. + +The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the old +enchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods +and the waters which we had lost sight of since _Peer Gynt_. But this +element was still more evident in _The Lady from the Sea_, which was. +published in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long hours, in the +summer of 1885, at the end of the pier at Molde, gazing down into the +waters, or watching the steamers arriving and departing, coming from +the great sea beyond the fjord or going towards it. As was his wont, +he stored up these impressions, making no immediate use of them. He +actually prepared _The Lady from the Sea_ in very different, although +still marine surroundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for the +summer at the pretty and ancient, but very mild little town of Saeby, +with the sands in front of him and rolling woods behind. From Saeby +it was a short journey to Frederikshavn, "which he liked very much--he +could knock about all day among the shipping, talking to the sailors, +and so forth. Besides, he found the neighborhood of the sea favorable to +contemplation and constructive thought." So Mr. Archer, who visited him +at Saeby; and I myself, a year or two later, picked up at Frederikshavn +an oral tradition of Ibsen, with his hands behind his back, and the +frock-coat tightly buttoned, stalking, stalking alone for hours on the +interminable promenade between the great harbor moles of 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 is +never dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and there +is thrown over the whole texture of it a glamour of romance, of mystery, +of beauty, which had not appeared in Ibsen's work since the completion +of _Peer Gynt_. Again, after the appearance of so many strenuous +tragedies, it was pleasant to welcome a pure comedy. _The Lady from +the Sea_ [Note: In the _Neue Rundschau_ for December, 1906, there was +published a first draft of _The Lady from the Sea_, dating as far back +as 1800.] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defence +of individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity of +developing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism. +It is in some respects the reverse of _Rosmersholm_; the bitterness +of restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death, +being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and gratified +individuality, which leads to health and peace. To the remarkable +estimate of _The Lady from the Sea_ formed by some critics, and in +particular by M. Jules de Gaultier, we shall return in a general +consideration of the symbolic plays, of which it is the earliest. +Enough to say here that even those who did not plunge so deeply into +its mysteries found it a remarkably agreeable spectacle, and that it has +continued to be, in Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popular of +its author's works. + +Ibsen left his little tavern at Saeby towards the end of September, +1887, in consequence of an invitation to proceed directly to Stockholm, +where his Swedish admirers, now very numerous and enthusiastic, would +no longer be deprived of the pleasure of entertaining him publicly. +He appeared before them, the breast of his coat sparkling with foreign +stars and crosses, the Urim and Thummim of general European recognition. +He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out lived all the obscurity +of his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries--even in recalcitrant +Norway--he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age. +In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of the +sang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of high +and settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was now +discussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of what +is even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers at +Stockholm told him that he had taken a foremost place in re-creating +their sense of life, that he was a fashioner and a builder of new social +forms, that he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-Builder. +The reply he made to their enthusiasm was dignified and reserved, but it +revealed a sense of high gratification. Skule's long doubt was over; +he believed at last in his own kingdom, and that the world would be +ultimately the better for the stamp of his masterful soul upon its +surface. + +It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat dreaming through the early +part of the uneventful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melancholy +when, in the following year, he settled down to the composition of a +new play which was to treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He told +Snoilsky that for several reasons this work made very slow progress, +"and it robbed him of his summer holidays." From May to November, 1890, +he was uninterruptedly in Munich writing what is known to us now as +_Hedda Gabler_. He finished it at last, saying as he did so, "It has +not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I +principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and +human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions +and principles of the present day." It was a proof of the immense growth +of Ibsen's celebrity that editions of _Hedda Gabler_ were called for +almost simultaneously, in the winter of 1890, in London, New York, +St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow, as well as in Copenhagen, +Stockholm and Christiania. There was no other living author in the world +at that moment who excited so much curiosity among the intellectual +classes, and none who exercised so much influence on the younger +generation of authors and thinkers. + +In _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen returned, for the last time, but with +concentrated vigor, to the prosaic ideal of his central period. He never +succeeded in being more objective in drama, he never kept more closely +to the bare facts of nature nor rejected more vigorously the ornaments +of romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play. There is no poetic +suggestion here, no species of symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, or +monster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Archer when he +says that he finds it impossible to extract any sort of general idea +from _Hedda Gabler_, or to accept it as a satire of any condition of +society. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individual +that she interested Ibsen. We have been told, since the poet's death, +that he was greatly struck by the case, which came under his notice at +Munich, of a German lady who poisoned herself because she was bored +with life, and had strayed into a false position. _Hedda Gabler_ is the +realization of such an individual case. At first sight, it seemed as +though Ibsen had been influenced by Dumas _fils_, which might have been +true, in spite of the marked dislike which each expressed for the other; +[Note: It is said that _La Route de Thebes_, which Dumas had begun +when he died, was to have been a deliberate attack on the methods and +influence of Ibsen. Ibsen, on his part, loathed Dumas.] but closer +examination showed that Hedda Gabler had no sort of relation with the +pamphlets of the master of Parisian problem-tragedy. + +The attempt to show that _Hedda Gabler_ "proved" anything was annoying +to Ibsen, who said, with more than his customary firmness, "It was not +my purpose to deal with what people call problems in this play. What I +chiefly tried to do was to paint human beings, human emotions and human +fate, against a background of some of the conditions and laws of society +as it exists to-day." The German critics, a little puzzled to find +a longitude and latitude for Tesman's "tastefully decorated" villa, +declared that this time Ibsen had written an "international," not a +locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the +contrary, _Hedda Gabler_ is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian +of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly +civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural +little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a +lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality +in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the +Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a "west end of +Christiania" of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it was +that to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than the +latter. + +A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had +special opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately +(1907) depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomed +to a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom she +had mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth. In other +circumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good." If +this ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered as +the leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil +is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes +thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact +of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been +useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might +paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine +and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and +the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent +egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her +cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an +equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the +mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called a +caricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him into +regions where the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power. + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +LAST YEARS + +With the publication of _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen passed into what we may +call his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of his +own growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as the +most eminent imaginative writer of the three Scandinavian countries, but +as the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of what +it would become. In 1880, Norway, the youngest and long the rawest of +the three civilizations, was now the foremost in activity, and though +the influence of Bjoernson and Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was not +to be compared for breadth and complexity with that of Ibsen. The nature +of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between +1880 and 1890, that is to say from _Ghosts_ to _Hedda Gabler_, was +destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama +of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace +and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and +sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in +Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and +catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the +old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its +faded elegance it withered up and vanished. + +The next event was that the new generation in the three Northern +countries, deprived of its traditional authorities, looked about for a +prophet and a father, and they found what they wanted in the exceedingly +uncompromising elderly gentleman who remained so silent in the cafes +of Rome and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this unseen and +unsympathetic personage was extraordinary, and took forms of amazing +extravagance. Ibsen's impassivity merely heightened the enthusiasm of +his countless admirers, who were found, it should be stated, almost +entirely among persons who were born after his exile from Norway. +His writings supplied a challenge to character and intelligence +which appealed to those who disliked the earlier system of morals and +aesthetics against which he had so long fought single-handed. + +Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the position +that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country, +that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling +group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied +laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented, +for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and with +those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little +later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthful +minds of any vigor or elasticity. + +In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for Ibsen took forms of almost +preposterous violence. The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam, +has given a curious and amusing account of the rage for Ibsen which came +to its height about 1880. The question which every student asked his +friend, every lover his mistress, was "What do you think of Ibsen?" Not +to be a believer in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which love +or friendship might easily be shipwrecked. It was quoted gravely as +an insufferable incompatibility for the state of marriage. There was +a curious and secret symbolism running through the whole of youthful +Swedish society, from which their elders were cunningly excluded, by +which the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to hand, presented on +solemn occasions, became the emblems of the problems interesting to +generous youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty and truth. +The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had become +clogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sources +of emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies, +spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it was +Ibsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded the +emancipation. + +The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always according +to knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the +abuse showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are now +describing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian +and German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: "Stella Kleve" (Mathilda +Malling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen how +many "misunderstood" women would leave their homes in imitation of Nora, +and how many lovesick housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca, +he would have thrown ashes on his head and have retreated into the +deserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the +tragic circumstance where much was so purely comic. But if there were +elements of tragicomedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far more +important elements of vigorous and wholesome intellectual independence; +and it was during this period of Ibsen's almost hectic popularity that +the foundations of a new fiction and a new drama were laid in Sweden, +Denmark and Norway. A whole generation sucked strength and energy from +his early writings, since it is to be remarked that, from 1880 to 1890, +the great prestige of Ibsen did not depend so much on the dramas he was +then producing, as on the earlier works of his poetic youth, now reread +with an unexampled fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of Robert +Browning, which faintly resembles that of Ibsen, did not attract the +younger generation to the volumes which 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 was +not so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those old +but now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, _The Pretenders_, +_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. + +In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strong +personal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did he +find it confined to Scandinavia. He had travelled about in Germany, and +everywhere his plays were being acted. Berlin was wild about him; at +Weimar he was feted like a conqueror. He did not settle down at Munich +until May, and here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer, hard at +work. After the success of _Hedda Gabler_, which overpowered all adverse +comment, Ibsen began to long to be in Norway again, and this feeling +was combined, in a curious way, with a very powerful emotion which now +entered into his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful existence, +mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himself +to the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desert +in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams. No adventure, of any +prominent kind, had ever been seen to diversify Ibsen's perfectly +decorous and domestic career. And now he was more than sixty, and the +gray tones were gathering round him more thickly than ever, when a real +ray of vermilion descended out of the sky and filled his horizon with +color. + +In the season of 1889, among the summer boarders at Gossensass, there +appeared a young Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach. She +used to sit on a certain bench in the Pferchthal, and when the poet, +whom she adored from afar, passed by, she had the courage to smile at +him. Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon Ibsen was on +the bench at her side. He readily discovered where she lived; no less +readily he gained an introduction to the family with whom she boarded. +There was a window-seat in the _salle a manger_; it was deep and shaded +by odorous flowering shrubs; it lent itself to endless conversation. +The episode was strange, the passion improbable, incomprehensible, +profoundly natural and true. Perhaps, until they parted in the last days +of September, neither the old man nor the young girl realized what their +relations had meant to each. Youth secured its revenge, however; Miss +Bardach soon wrote from Vienna that she was now more tranquil, more +independent, happy at last. Ibsen, on the other hand, was heart-broken, +quivering with ecstasy, overwhelmed with joy and despair. + +It was the enigma in his "princess," as he called her; that completed +Miss Bardach's sorcery over the old poet. She seems to have been no +coquette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at his feet; she broke +the thread which bound the charms of her spirit and poured them over +him. He, for his part, remaining discreet and respectful, was shattered +with happiness. To a friend of mine, a young Norwegian man of letters, +Ibsen said about this time: "Oh, you can always love, but I am happier +than the happiest, for I am beloved." Long afterwards, on his seventieth +birthday, when his own natural force was failing, he wrote to Miss +Bardach, "That summer at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the most +harmonious portion of my whole existence. I scarcely venture to think +of it, and yet I think of nothing else. Ah! forever!" He did not dare to +send her _The Master-Builder_, since her presence interpenetrated every +line of it like a perfume, and when, we are told, she sent him her +photograph, signed "Princess of Orangia," her too-bold identification +of herself with Hilda Wangel hurt him as a rough touch, that finer tact +would have avoided. There can be no doubt at all that while she was +now largely absorbed by the compliment to her own vanity, he was still +absolutely enthralled and bewitched, and that what was fun to her made +life and death to him. + +This very curious episode [Note: It was quite unknown until the +correspondence--which has not been translated into English--was +published by Georg Brandes at the desire of the lady herself (September, +1906).], which modifies in several important respects our conception +of the dramatist's character, is analogous with the apparent change +of disposition which made Renan surprise his unthinking admirers so +suddenly at the epoch of _L'Eau de Jouvence_ and _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_. +It was founded, of course, on that dangerous susceptibility to which +an elderly man of genius, whose life had been spent in labor and +reflection, may be inclined to resign himself, as he sees the sands +running out of the hour-glass, and realizes that in analyzing and +dissecting emotion he has never had time to enjoy it. Time is so short, +the nerves so fragile and so finite, the dreadful illusion, the _maia_, +so irresistible, that the old man gives way to it, and would sooner die +at once than not make one grasp at happiness. + +It will have been remarked that Ibsen's habit was to store up an +impression, but not to use it immediately on creative work. We need, +therefore, feel no surprise that there is not a trace of the Bardach +episode in _Hedda Gabler_, although the composition of that play +immediately followed the _hohes, schmerzliches Glueck_ at Gossensass. He +was, too, no moonlight serenader, and his intense emotion is perfectly +compatible with the outline of some of the gossip which was repeated at +the time of his death; Ibsen being reported to have said of the Viennese +girl: "She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her--for my +play." These things are very complex, and not to be hastily dismissed, +especially on the rough and ready English system. There would be give +and take in such a complicated situation, when the object was, as Ibsen +himself says, out of reach _unversichtbar_. There is no question that +for every pang which Hilda made her ancient lover suffer, he would +enrich his imagination with a dozen points of experience. There is no +paradox in saying that the poet was overwhelmed with a passion and yet +consciously made it serve as material for his plays. From this time +onwards every dramatic work of his bears the stamp of those hours among +the roses at Gossensass. + +To the spring of 1891 belongs Ibsen's somewhat momentous visit to +Vienna, where he was invited by Dr. Max Burckhard, the director of the +Burg Theatre, to superintend the performance of his _Pretenders_. Ibsen +had already, in strict privacy, visited Vienna, where his plays enjoyed +an increasing success, but this was his first public entrance into a +city which he admired on the whole more than any other city of Europe. +"Mein schoener Wien!" he used to murmur, with quite a clan of affection. +In April, 1891, after the triumph of his tragedy on the stage, Ibsen +was the guest at a public banquet at Vienna, when the ovations were +overwhelming and were extended until four o'clock next morning. A +performance of _The Wild Duck_ produced, what was almost as dear to +Ibsen as praise, a violent polemic, and he passed on out of a world of +storm and passion to Buda-Pesth, where he saw _A Doll's House_ acted +in Hungarian, amid thunders of applause, and where he was the guest +of Count Albert Apponyi. These were the happy and fruitful years which +consoled the heart of the poet for the bitter time when + +"Hate's decree Dwelt in his thoughts intolerable." + +In the ensuing summer, in July, 1891, Ibsen left Munich with every +intention of returning to it, but with the plan of a long summer trip +in Norway, where the triumphant success of _Hedda Gabler_ had been very +agreeable to his feelings. Once more he pushed up through the country to +Trondhjem, a city which had always attracted him and pleased him. Here +he presently embarked on one of the summer coasting-steamers, and saw +the shores of Nordland and Finmark for the first time, visiting the +North Cape itself. He came back to Christiania for the rest of the +season, with no prospect of staying. But he enjoyed a most flattering +reception; he was begged to resume his practical citizenship, and he was +assured that life in Norway would be made very pleasant to him. In the +autumn, therefore, in his abrupt way, he took an apartment in Viktoria +Terrasse, and sent to Munich for his furniture. He said to a friend +who expressed surprise at this settlement: "I may just as well make +Christiania my headquarters as Munich. The railway takes me in a very +short time wherever I want to go; and when I am bored with Norway I can +travel elsewhere." But he never felt the fatigue he anticipated, and, +but for brief visits to Copenhagen or Stockholm, he left his native +country no more after 1891, although he changed his abode in Christiania +itself. + +For the first twelve months Ibsen enjoyed the pleasures of the prodigal +returned, and fed with gusto on the fatted calf. Then, when three years +separated him from the illuminating soul-adventures of Gossensass, he +began to turn them into a play. It proved to be _The Master-Builder_, +and was published before the close of December, 1892, with the date 1893 +on the title-page. This play was running for some time in Germany and +England before it was played in Scandinavia. But on the evening of +March 8, 1893, it was simultaneously given at the National Theatre in +Christiania and at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. It was a work which +greatly puzzled the critics, and its meaning was scarcely apparent until +it had been seen on the stage, for which the oddity of its arrangements +are singularly well adapted. It was, however, almost immediately noticed +that it marked a new departure in Ibsen's writings. Here was an end of +the purely realistic and prosaic social dramas, which had reigned from +_The League of Youth_ to _Hedda Gabler_, and here was a return to the +strange and haunting beauty of the old imaginative pieces. Mr. Archer +was happily inspired when he spoke of "the pure melody" of the piece, +and the best scenes of _The Master-Builder_ were heroically and almost +recklessly poetical. + +This remarkable composition is full of what, for want of a better word, +we must call "symbolism." In the conversations between Solness and Hilda +much is introduced which is really almost unintelligible unless we take +it to be autobiographical. The Master-Builder is one who constructs, +not houses, but poems and plays. It is the poet himself who gives +expression, in the pathetic and erratic confessions of Solness, to his +doubts, his craven timidities, his selfish secrets, and his terror at +the uniformity of his "luck." It is less easy to see exactly what Ibsen +believed himself to be presenting to us in the enigmatical figure of +Hilda, so attractive and genial, so exquisitely refreshing, and yet +radically so cruel and superficial. She is perhaps conceived as a symbol +of Youth, arriving too late within the circle which Age has trodden +for its steps to walk in, and luring it too rashly, by the mirage of +happiness, into paths no longer within its physical and moral capacity. +"Hypnotism," Mr. Archer tells us, "is the first and last word of the +dramatic action"; perhaps thought-transference more exactly expresses +the idea, but I should not have stated even this quite so strongly. The +ground of the dramatic action seems to me to be the balance of Nemesis, +the fatal necessity that those who enjoy exceptional advantages in life +shall pay for them by not less exceptional, but perhaps less obvious, +disadvantages. The motto of the piece--at least of the first two of its +acts--might be the couplet of the French tragedian:-- + +C'est un ordre des dieux qui jamais ne se rompt De nous vendre bien cher +les grands biens qu'ils nous font. + +Beneath this, which we may call the transcendental aspect of the play, +we find a solid and objective study of the self-made man, the headstrong +amateur, who has never submitted to the wholesome discipline of +professional training, but who has trusted to the help of those trolls +or mascots, his native talent and his unfailing "luck." Upon such a man +descends Hilda, the disorganizer, who pierces the armor of his conceit +by a direct appeal to his passions. Solness has been the irresistible +sorcerer, through his good fortune, but he is not protected in his +climacteric against this unexpected attack upon the senses. Samson +philanders with Delila, and discovers that his strength is shorn from +him. There is no doubt that Ibsen intended in _The Master-Builder_ a +searching examination of "luck" and the tyranny of it, the terrible +effects of it on the Broviks and the Kajas whom nobody remembers, but +whose bodies lie under the wheels of its car. The dramatic situation is +here extremely interesting; it consists in the fact that Solness, who +breaks every one else, is broken by Hilda. The inherent hardness of +youth, which makes no allowances, which demands its kingdom here and now +upon the table, was never more powerfully depicted. Solness is smashed +by his impact with Hilda, as china is against a stone. In all this it +would be a mistake to see anything directly autobiographical, although +so much in the character and position of Solness may remind us, +legitimately enough, of Ibsen himself, and his adventures. + +The personal record of Ibsen in these years is almost silent. He was +growing old and set in his habits. He was growing rich, too, and he +surrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His wealth, it may here +be said, was founded entirely upon the success of his works, but was +fostered by his extreme adroitness as a man of business. Those who are +so fond of saying that any man of genius might have excelled in some +other capacity are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen as +the model financier. He certainly possessed a remarkable aptitude for +affairs, and we learn that his speculations were at once daring and +crafty. People who are weary of commiserating the poverty of poets may +be pleased to learn that when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiest +private citizens of Christiania, and this was wholly in consequence of +the care he had taken in protecting his copyrights and administering his +receipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct which tells us that + + Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature, + Mais sa bonte s'arrkete a la litterature, + +we must believe, with Ibsen's enemies, that his fortunes were not under +the divine protection. + +The actual numbers of each of his works printed since he first published +with Hegel in Copenhagen--a connection which he preserved without a +breach until the end--have been stated since his death. They contain +some points of interest. After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editions +of each new play, but they went off at first slowly. _The Lady from the +Sea_ was the earliest to appear, at once, in an issue of 10,000 copies, +which was soon exhausted. So great, however, had the public interest in +Ibsen become in 1894 that the edition of 10,000 copies of _Little Eyolf_ +was found quite inadequate to meet the first order, and it was enlarged +to 15,000, all of which were gone in a fortnight. This circulation in so +small a reading public as that of Denmark and Norway was unprecedented, +and it must be remembered that the simultaneous translations into most +of the languages of Europe are not included. + +_Little Eyolf_, which was written in Christiania during the spring and +summer of 1894, was issued, according to Ibsen's cometary custom, as the +second week of December rolled round. The reception of it was stormy, +even in Scandinavia, and led to violent outbursts of controversy. No +work from the master's pen had roused more difference of opinion among +the critics since the bluster over _Ghosts_ fourteen years before. Those +who prefer to absolute success in the creation of a work of art the +personal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed to +place _Little Eyolf_ very high among his writings. Nowhere is he more +independent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may even +be said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this play +may fairly be considered in the light of a _tour de force_. Ibsen--one +would conjecture--is trying to see to what extremities of agile +independence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped me; +but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty not +quite 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-Wife +are but illustrations or symbolic properties--and of these four, one +(Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to have +challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three +characters in it. By a process of elimination this has been done +by Aeschylus (in the _Agamemnon_), by Racine (in _Phe*dre_ and +_Andromaque_), and in our own day by Maeterlinck (in _Pelle*as et +Me*lisande_). But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his +experiment seems not wholly successful. _Little Eyolf_, at least, is, +from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazard +the conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satisfaction to write, +but for enjoyment the reader may prefer less prodigious agility on the +trapeze. + +If we turn from the technical virtuosity of _Little Eyolf_ to its moral +aspects, we find it a very dreadful play, set in darkness which nothing +illuminates but the twinkling sweetness of Asta. The mysterious symbol +of the Rat-Wife breaks in upon the pair whose love is turning to hate, +the man waxing cold as the wife grows hot. The Angel of God, in the +guise of an old beggar-woman, descends into their garden, and she drags +away, by an invisible chain, "the little gnawing thing," the pathetic +lame child. The effect on the pair of Eyolf's death by drowning is the +subject of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is incarnate, and she +seems the most vigorous, and, it must be added, the most repulsive, +of Ibsen's feminine creations. The reckless violence of Rita's energy, +indeed, interpreted by a competent actress--played, for instance, as it +was in London most admirably by Miss Achurch--is almost too painful for +a public exhibition, and to the old criticism, "nec pueros coram populo +Medea trucidet," if a pedant chooses to press it, there teems no reply. +The sex question, as treated in _Little Eyolf_, recalls _The Kreutzer +Sonata_ (1889) of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask Ibsen +whether there was anything in this, he was displeased, and stoutly +denied it. What, an author denies, however, is not always evidence. + +Nothing further of general interest happened to Ibsen until 1896, when +he sat down to compose another drama, _John Gabriel Borkman_. This was a +study of the mental adventures of a man of high commercial imagination, +who is artificially parted from all that contact with real affairs +which keeps such energy on the track, and who goes mad with dreams of +incalculable power, a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was +said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysis +of character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of the +failure and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of fraud in 1895, +and sentenced to a long period of penal servitude. + +Whether this be so or not, we have in the person of John Gabriel +Borkman a prominent example of the ninteenth century type of criminous +speculator, in whom the vastness of view and the splendidly altruistic +audacity present themselves as elements which render it exceedingly +difficult to say how far the malefactor is morally responsible for +his crime. He has imagined, and to a certain point has carried out, a +monster metal "trust," for the success of which he lacks neither courage +nor knowledge nor practical administrative capacity, but only that +trifling concomitant, sufficiency of capital. To keep the fires blazing +until his vast model is molten into the mould, he helps himself to +money here, there, and everywhere, scarcely giving a thought to his +responsibilities, so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph. +He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice all these his involuntary +supporters. Unhappily, just before his scheme is ready and the metal +runs, he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, and finds himself in +prison. + +Side by side with this study of commercial madness runs a thread of that +new sense of the preciousness of vital joy which had occupied Ibsen so +much ever since the last of the summers at Gossensass. The figure of +Erhart Borkman is a very interesting one to the theatrical student. In +the ruin of the family, all hopes concentre in him. Every one claims +him, and in the bosoms of each of his shattered parents a secret hope +is born, Mrs. Borkman believing that by a brilliant career of commercial +rectitude 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 will +enjoy his life, he will throw off all the burdens both of responsibility +and of restitution. He has no ambition and little natural feeling; +he simply must be happy, and he suddenly elopes, leaving all their +anticipations bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who has +nothing but her beauty to recommend her. Deserted thus by the _ignis +fatuus_ of youth, the collapse of the three old people is complete. +Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way, and he wanders out into +the winter's night, full of vague dreams of what he can still do in the +world, if he can only break from his bondage and shatter his dream. He +dies there in the snow, and the two old sisters, who have followed him +in an anxiety which overcomes their mutual hatred, arrive in time to +see him pass away. We leave them in the wood, "a dead man and two +shadows"--so Ella Rentheim puts it--"for _that_ is what the cold has +made of us"; the central moral of the piece being that all the errors of +humanity spring from cold-heartedness and neglect of the natural heat +of love. That Borkman embezzled money, and reduced hundreds of innocent +people to beggary, might be condoned; but there is no pardon for his +cruel bargaining for wealth with the soul of Ella Rentheim, since that +is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. There are points of +obscurity, and one or two of positive and even regrettable whimsicality, +about _John Gabriel Borkman_, but on the whole it is a work of lofty +originality and of poignant human interest. + +The veteran was now beginning to be conscious of the approaches of old +age, but they were made agreeable to him by many tokens of national +homage. + +On his seventieth birthday, March 20, 1898, Ibsen received the +felicitations of the world. It is pleasing to relate that a group of +admirers in England, a group which included Mr. Asquith, Mr. J. M. +Barrie, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Pinero and +Mr. Bernard Shaw took part in these congratulations and sent Ibsen +a handsome set of silver plate, this being an act which, it had been +discovered, he particularly appreciated. The bearer of this gift was the +earliest of the long stream of visitors to arrive on the morning of the +poet's birthday, and he found Ibsen in company with his wife, his son, +his son's wife (Bjoernson's daughter), and his little grandson, Tankred. +The poet's surprise and pleasure were emphatic. A deputation from the +Storthing, headed by the Leader of the House, deputations representing +the University, the various Christiania Theatres, and other official or +academic bodies arrived at intervals during the course of the day; +and all the afternoon Ibsen was occupied in taking these hundreds of +visitors, in parties, up to the case containing the English tribute, in +showing the objects and in explaining their origin. There could be no +question that the gift gave genuine pleasure to the recipient; it +was the first, as it was to be the last, occasion on which any public +testimony to English appreciation of his genius found its way to Ibsen's +door. + +Immediately after the birthday festivities, which it was observed had +fatigued him, Ibsen started on a visit to Copenhagen, where he was +received by the aged King of Denmark, and to Stockholm, where he was +overpowered with ovations from all classes. There can be no doubt that +this triumphal progress, though deeply grateful to the aged poet's +susceptibilities, made a heavy drain upon his nervous resources. When +he returned to Norway, indeed, he was concealed from all visitors at +his physician's orders, and it is understood that he had some kind of +seizure. It was whispered that he would write no more, and the biennial +drama, due in December, 1898, did not make its appearance. His stores +of health, however, were not easily exhausted; he rested for several +months, and then he was seen once more in Carl Johans Gade, smiling; in +his usual way, and entirely recovered. It was announced that winter that +he was writing his reminiscences, but nothing more was heard of any such +book. + +He was able to take a vivid interest in the preparations for the +National Norwegian Theatre in Christiania, which was finally opened +by the King of Sweden and Norway on September 1, 1899. Early in the +morning, colossal bronze statues of Ibsen and Bjoernson were unveiled in +front of the theatre, and the poets, now, unfortunately, again not on +the best of terms, were seen making vast de*tours for the purpose of +satisfying their curiosity, and yet not meeting one another in flesh +or in metal. The first night, to prevent rivalry, was devoted to +antiquarianism, and to the performance of extracts from the plays of +Holberg. Ibsen and Bjoernson occupied the centre of the dress circle, +sitting uplifted in two gilded fauteuils and segregated by a vast +garland of red and white roses. They were the objects of universal +attention, and the King seemed never to have done smiling and bowing to +the two most famous of his Norwegian subjects. + +The next night was Ibsen's fete, and he occupied, alone, the manager's +box. A poem in his honor, by Niels Collet Vogt, was recited by the +leading actor, who retired, and then rushed down the empty stage, +with his arms extended, shouting "Long live Henrik Ibsen." The immense +audience started to its feet and repeated the words over and over again +with deafening fervor. The poet appeared to be almost overwhelmed +with emotion and pleasure; at length, with a gesture which was quite +pathetic, smiling through his tears, he seemed to beg his friends to +spare him, and the plaudits slowly ceased. _An Enemy of the People_ was +then admirably performed. At the close of every act Ibsen was called to +the front of his box, and when the performance was over, and the actors +had been thanked, the audience turned to him again with a sort of +affectionate ferocity. Ibsen was found to have stolen from his box, but +he was waylaid and forcibly carried back to it. On his reappearance, the +whole theatre rose in a roar of welcome, and it was with difficulty that +the aged poet, now painfully exhausted from the strain of an evening +of such prolonged excitement, could persuade the public to allow him +to withdraw. At length he left the theatre, walking slowly, bowing and +smiling, down a lane cleared for him, far into the street, through the +dense crowd of his admirers. This astonishing night, September 2, 1899, +was the climax of Ibsen's career. + +During all this time Ibsen was secretly at work on another drama, which +he intended as the epilogue to his earlier dramatic work, or at least to +all that he had written since _The Pillars of Society_. This play, which +was his latest, appeared, under the title of _When We Dead Awaken_, +in December, 1899 (with 1900 on the title-page). It was simultaneously +published, in very large editions, in all the principal languages +of Europe, and it was acted also, but it is impossible to deny that, +whether in the study or on the boards, it proved a disappointment. +It displayed, especially in its later acts, many obvious signs of the +weakness incident on old age. + +When it is said that _When We Dead Awaken_ was not worthy of its +predecessors, it should be explained that no falling off was visible in +the technical cleverness with which the dialogue was built up, nor in +the wording of particular sentences. Nothing more natural or amusing, +nothing showing greater, command of the resources of the theatre, had +ever been published by Ibsen himself than the opening act of _When +We Dead Awaken_. But there was certainly in the whole conception a +cloudiness, an ineffectuality, which was very little like anything +that Ibsen had displayed before. The moral of the piece was vague, the +evolution of it incoherent, and indeed in many places it seemed a parody +of his earlier manner. Not Mr. Anstey Guthrie's inimitable scenes +in _Mr. Punch's Ibsen_ were more preposterous than almost all the +appearances of Irene after the first act of _When We Dead Awaken_. + +It is Irene who describes herself as dead, but awakening in the society +of Rubek, whilst Maia, the little gay soulless creature whom the great +sculptor has married, and has got heartily tired of, goes up to the +mountains with Ulpheim the hunter, in pursuit of the free joy of life. +At the close, the assorted couples are caught on the summit of an +exceeding high mountain by a snowstorm, which opens to show Rubek and +Irene "whirled along with the masses of snow, and buried in them," while +Maia and her bear-hunter escape in safety to the plains. Interminable, +and often very sage and penetrating, but always essentially rather +maniacal, conversation fills up the texture of the play, which is +certainly the least successful of Ibsen's mature compositions. The +boredom of Rubek in the midst of his eminence and wealth, and his +conviction that by working in such concentration for the purity of art +he merely wasted his physical life, inspire the portions of the play +which 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 had +received so long before at Gossensass was unhealed to his last moments +of consciousness. An excellent French critic, M. P. G. La Chesnais, +has ingeniously considered the finale of this play as a confession that +Ibsen, at this end of his career, was convinced of the error of his +earlier rigor, and, having ceased to believe in his mission, regretted +the complete sacrifice of his life to his work. But perhaps it is not +necessary to go into such subtleties. _When We Dead Awaken_ is +the production of a very tired old man, whose physical powers were +declining. + +In the year 1900, during our South African War, sentiment in the +Scandinavian countries was very generally ranged on the side of the +Boers. Ibsen, however, expressed himself strongly and publicly in favor +of the English position. In an interview (November 24, 1900), which +produced a considerable sensation, he remarked that the Boers were but +half-cultivated, and had neither the will nor the power to advance +the cause of civilization. Their sole object had come to be a jealous +exclusion of all the higher forms of culture. The English were merely +taking what the Boers themselves had stolen from an earlier race; the +Boers had pitilessly hunted their precursors out of house and home, and +now they were tasting the same cup themselves. These were considerations +which had not occurred to generous sentimentalists in Norway, and +Ibsen's defence of England, which he supported in further communications +with irony and courage, made a great sensation, and threw cold water on +the pro-Boer sentimentalists. In Holland, where Ibsen had a wide +public, this want of sympathy for Dutch prejudice raised a good deal of +resentment, and Ibsen's statements were replied to by the fiery young +journalist, Cornelius Karel Elout, who even published a book on the +subject. Ibsen took dignified notice of Elout's attacks (December 9, +1900), repeating his defence of English policy, and this was the latest +of his public appearances. + +He took an interest, however, in the preparation of the great edition of +his _Collected Works_, which appeared in Copenhagen in 1901 and 1902, +in ten volumes. Before the publication of the latest of these, however, +Ibsen had suffered from an apoplectic stroke, from which he never wholly +recovered. It was believed that any form of mental fatigue might now be +fatal to him, and his life was prolonged by extreme medical care. He was +contented in spirit and even cheerful, but from this time forth he was +more and more completely withdrawn from consecutive interest in what was +going on in the world without. The publication, in succession, of his +juvenile works (_Kaempehoejen_, _Olaf Liljekrans_, both edited by Halvdan +Koht, in 1902), of his _Correspondence_, edited by Koht and Julius +Elias, in 1904, of the bibliographical edition of his collected works by +Carl Naerup, in 1902, left him indifferent and scarcely conscious. The +gathering darkness was broken, it is said, by a gleam of light in +1905; when the freedom of Norway and the accession of King Hakon were +explained to him, he was able to express his joyful approval before the +cloud finally sank upon his intelligence. + +During his long illness Ibsen was troubled by aphasia, and he expressed +himself painfully, now in broken Norwegian, now in still more broken +German. His unhappy hero, Oswald Alving, in _Ghosts_, had thrilled the +world by his cry, "Give me the sun, Mother!" and now Ibsen, with glassy +eyes, gazed at the dim windows, murmuring "Keine Sonne, keine Sonne, +keine Sonne!" At the table where all the works of his maturity had +been written the old man sat, persistently learning and forgetting the +alphabet. "Look!" he said to Julius Elias, pointing to his mournful +pothooks, "See what I am doing! I am sitting here and learning my +letters--my _letters_! I who was once a Writer!" Over this shattered +image of what Ibsen had been, over this dying lion, who could not die, +Mrs. Ibsen watched with the 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 latest +articulate words were addressed to her--"_min soede, kjaere, snille +frue_" (my sweet, dear, good wife); and she taught to adore their +grandfather the three children of a new generation, Tankred, Irene, +Eleonora. + +Ibsen preserved the habit of walking about his room, or standing for +hours staring out of window, until the beginning of May, 1906. Then +a more complete decay confined him to his bed. After several days of +unconsciousness, he died very peacefully in his house on Drammensvej, +opposite the Royal Gardens of Christiania, at half-past two in the +afternoon of May 23, 1906, being in his seventy-ninth year. By a +unanimous vote of the he was awarded a public funeral, which the King of +Norway attended in person, while King Edward VII was represented there +by the British Minister. The event was regarded through out Norway as a +national ceremony of the highest solemnity and importance, and the poet +who had suffered such bitter humiliation and neglect in his youth was +carried to his grave in solemn splendor, to the sound of a people's +lamentation. + + + +CHAPTER IX + +PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS + +During the latest years of his life, which were spent as a wealthy and +prosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms +of legendary celebrity which were equalled by no other living man of +letters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed, +among the dead, by Victor Hugo. When we think of the obscurity of his +youth and middle age, and of his consistent refusal to advertise himself +by any of the little vulgar arts of self-exhibition, this extreme +publicity is at first sight curious, but it can be explained. Norway +is a small and a new country, inordinately, perhaps, but justly and +gracefully proud of those--an Ole Bull, a Frithjof Nansen, an Edvard +Grieg--who spread through the world evidences of its spiritual life. But +the one who was more original, more powerful, more interesting than any +other of her sons, had persistently kept aloof from the soil of Norway, +and was at length recaptured and shut up in a golden cage with more +expenditure of delicate labor than any perverse canary or escaped +macaw had ever needed. Ibsen safely housed in Christiania!--it was the +recovery of an important national asset, the resumption, after years of +vexation and loss, of the intellectual regalia of Norway. + +Ibsen, then--recaptured, though still in a frame of mind which left the +captors nervous--was naturally an object of pride. For the benefit of +the hundreds of tourists who annually pass through Christiania, it was +more than tempting, it was irresistible to point out, in slow advance +along Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a table in the Grand +Cafe, "our greatest citizen." To this species of demonstration Ibsen +unconsciously lent himself by his immobility, his regularity of habits, +his solemn taciturnity. He had become more like a strange physical +object than like a man among men. He was visible broadly and quietly, +not conversing, rarely moving, quite isolated and self-contained, a +recognized public spectacle, delivered up, as though bound hand and +foot, to the kodak-hunter and the maker of "spicy" paragraphs. That +Ibsen was never seen to do anything, or heard to say anything, that +those who boasted of being intimate with him obviously lied in their +teeth--all this prepared him for sacrifice. Christiania is a hot-bed +of gossip, and its press one of the most "chatty" in the world. Our +"greatest living author" was offered up as a wave-offering, and he +smoked daily on the altar of the newspapers. + +It will be extremely rash of the biographers of the future to try to +follow Ibsen's life day by day in the Christiania press from, let +us say, 1891 to 1901. During that decade he occupied the reporters +immensely, and he was particularly useful to the active young men who +telegraph "chat" to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Berlin. +Snapshots of Ibsen, dangerous illness of the playwright, quaint habits +of the Norwegian dramatist, a poet's double life, anecdotes of Ibsen and +Mrs.----, rumors of the King's attitude to Ibsen--this pollenta, dressed +a dozen ways, was the standing dish at every journalist's table. If a +space needed filling, a very rude reply to some fatuous question might +be fitted in and called "Instance of Ibsen's Wit." The crop of fable was +enormous, and always seemed to find a gratified public, for whom nothing +was too absurd if it was supposed to illustrate "our great national +poet." Ibsen, meanwhile, did nothing at all. He never refuted a calumny, +never corrected a story, but he threw an ironic glance through his +gold-rimmed spectacles as he strolled down Carl Johan with his hands +behind his back. + +His personal appearance, it must be admitted, formed a tempting +basis upon which to build a legend. His force of will had gradually +transfigured his bodily forms until he thoroughly looked the part which +he was expected to fill. At the age of thirty, to judge by the early +photographs, he had been a commonplace-looking little man, with a shock +of coal-black hair and a full beard, one of those hirsute types common +in the Teutonic races, which may prove, on inquiry, to be painter, +musician, or engraver, or possibly engineer, but less probably poet. +Then came the exile from Norway, and the residence in Rome, marked by a +little bust which stands before me now, where the beard is cut away into +two round whiskers so as to release the firm round chin, and the long +upper lip is clean-shaved. Here there is more liveliness, but still no +distinction. Then comes a further advance--a photograph (in which I feel +a tender pride, for it was made to please me) taken in Dresden (October +15, 1873), where the brow, perfectly smooth and white, has widened out, +the whiskers have become less chubby, and the small, scrutinizing eyes +absolutely sparkle with malice. Here, you say at last, is no poet, +indeed, but an unusually cultivated banker or surprisingly adroit +solicitor. Here the hair, retreating from the great forehead, begins to +curl and roll with a distinguished wildness; here the long mouth, like +a slit in the face, losing itself at each end in whisker, is a symbol of +concentrated will power, a drawer in some bureau, containing treasures, +firmly locked up. + +Then came Munich, where Ibsen's character underwent very considerable +changes, or rather where its natural features became fixed and +emphasized. We are not left without precious indication of his gestures +and his looks at this time, when he was a little past the age of +fifty. Where so much has been extravagantly written, or described in +a journalistic key of false emphasis, great is the value of a quiet +portrait by one of those who has studied Ibsen most intelligently. It is +perhaps the most careful pen-sketch of him in any language. + +Mr. William Archer, then, has given the following account of his first +meeting with Ibsen. It was in the Scandinavia Club, in Rome, at the +close of 1881:-- + +I had been about a quarter of an hour in the room, and was standing +close to the door, when it opened, and in glided an undersized man with +very broad shoulders and a large, leonine head, wearing a long black +frock-coat with very broad lapels, on one of which a knot of red ribbon +was conspicuous. I knew him at once, but was a little taken aback by his +low stature. In spite of all the famous instances to the contrary, one +instinctively associates greatness with size. His natural height was +even somewhat diminished by a habit of bending forward slightly from the +waist, begotten, no doubt, of short-sightedness, and the need to peer +into things. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his hands +behind his back--an unobtrusive personality, which would have been +insignificant had the head been strictly proportionate to the rest +of the frame. But there was nothing insignificant about the high and +massive forehead, crowned with a mane of (then) iron-gray hair, the +small and pale but piercing eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, or +the thin lipped mouth, depressed at the corners into a curve indicative +of iron will, and set between bushy whiskers of the same dark gray as +the hair. The most cursory observer could not but recognize power and +character in the head; yet one would scarcely have guessed it to be the +power of a poet, the character of a prophet. Misled, perhaps, by the +ribbon at the buttonhole, and by an expression of reserve, almost of +secretiveness, in the lines of the tight-shut mouth, one would rather +have supposed one's self face to face with an eminent statesman or +diplomatist. + +With the further advance of years all that was singular in Ibsen's +appearance became accentuated. The hair and beard turned snowy white; +the former rose in a fierce sort of Oberland, the latter was kept square +and full, crossing underneath the truculent chin that escaped from it. +As Ibsen walked to a banquet in Christiania, he looked quite small +under the blaze of crosses, stars and belts which he displayed when he +unbuttoned the long black overcoat which enclosed him tightly. Never +was he seen without his hands behind him, and the poet Holger Drachmann +started a theory that as Ibsen could do nothing in the world but write, +the Muse tied his wrists together at the small of his back whenever they +were not actually engaged in composition. His regularity in all habits, +his mechanical ways, were the subject of much amusement. He must sit day +after day in the same chair, at the same table, in the same corner +of the cafe, and woe to the ignorant intruder who was accidentally +beforehand with him. No word was spoken, but the indignant poet stood +at a distance, glaring, until the stranger should be pierced with +embarrassment, and should rise and flee away. + +Ibsen had the reputation of being dangerous and difficult of access. +But the evidence of those who knew him best point to his having +been phlegmatic rather than morose. He was "umbrageous," ready to be +discomposed by the action of others, but, if not vexed or startled, +he was elaborately courteous. He had a great dislike of any abrupt +movement, and if he was startled, he had the instinct of a wild animal, +to bite. It was a pain to him to have the chain of his thoughts suddenly +broken, and he could not bear to be addressed by chance acquaintances +in street or cafe. When he was resident in Munich and Dresden, the +difficulty of obtaining an interview with Ibsen was notorious. His wife +protected him from strangers, and if her defences broke down, and the +stranger contrived to penetrate the inner fastness, Ibsen might suddenly +appear in the doorway, half in a rage, half quivering with distress, and +say, in heartrending tones, "Bitte um Arbeitsruhe"--"Please let me work +in peace!" They used to tell how in Munich a rich baron, who was the +local Maecenas of letters, once bored Ibsen with a long recital of his +love affairs, and ended by saying, with a wonderful air of fatuity, +"To you, Master, I come, because of your unparalleled knowledge of +the female heart. In your hands I place my fate. Advise me, and I will +follow your advice." Ibsen snapped his mouth and glared through his +spectacles; then in a low voice of concentrated fury he said: "Get +home, and--go to bed!" whereat his noble visitor withdrew, clothed with +indignation as with a garment. + +His voice was uniform, soft and quiet. The bitter things he said seemed +the bitterer for his gentle way of saying them. As his shape grew burly +and his head of hair enormous, the smallness of his extremities became +accentuated. His little hands were always folded away as he tripped upon +his tiny feet. His movements were slow and distrait. He wasted few words +on the current incidents of life, and I was myself the witness, in +1899, of his _sang-froid_ under distressing circumstances. Ibsen was +descending a polished marble staircase when his feet slipped and he fell +swiftly, precipitately, downward. He must have injured himself severely, +he might have been killed, if two young gentlemen had not darted forward +below and caught him in their arms. Once more set the right way up, +Ibsen softly thanked his saviours with much frugality of phrase--"Tak, +mine Herrer!"--tenderly touched an abraded surface of his top-hat, and +marched 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 to +peer into a gold-mine and not catch a glitter from the hidden treasure. +But his dumbness was not so bitterly ironical as it was popularly +supposed to be. It came largely from a very strange passivity which +made definite action unwelcome to him. He could never be induced to pay +visits, yet he would urge his wife and his son to accept invitations, +and when they returned he would insist on being told every +particular--who was there, what was said, even what everybody wore. +He never went to a theatre or concert-room, except on the very rare +occasions when he could be induced to be present at the performance of +his own plays. But he was extremely fond of hearing about the stage. He +had a memory for little things and an observation of trifles which was +extraordinary. He thought it amazing that people could go into a room +and not notice the pattern of the carpet, the color of the curtains, +the objects on the walls; these being details which he could not help +observing and retaining. This trait comes out in his copious and minute +stage directions. + +Ibsen was simplicity itself; no man was ever less affected. But his +character was closed; he was perpetually on the defensive. He was seldom +confidential, he never "gave way"; his emotions and his affections +were genuine, but his heart was a fenced city. He had little sense of +domestic comfort; his rooms were bare and neat, with no personal objects +save those which belonged to his wife. Even in the days of his wealth, +in the fine house on Drammensvej, there was a singular absence of +individuality about his dwelling rooms. They might have been prepared +for a rich American traveller in some hotel. Through a large portion of +his career in Germany he lived in furnished rooms, not because he did +not possess furniture of his own, which was stored up, but because he +paid no sort of homage to his own penates. He had friends, but he did +not cultivate them; he rather permitted them, at intervals, to cultivate +him. To Georg Brandes (March 6, 1870) he wrote: "Friends are a costly +luxury; and when one has devoted one's self wholly to a profession and +a mission here in life, there is no place left for friends." The very +charming story of Ibsen's throwing his arms round old Hans Christian +Andersen's neck, and forcing him to be genial and amiable, [Note: +_Samliv med Ibsen._] is not inconsistent with the general rule of +passivity and shyness which he preserved in matters of friendship. + +Ibsen's reading was singularly limited. In his fine rooms on Drammensvej +I remember being struck by seeing no books at all, except the large +Bible which always lay at his side, and formed his constant study. He +disliked having his partiality for the Bible commented on, and if, as +would sometimes be the case, religious people expressed pleasure at +finding him deep in the sacred volume, Ibsen would roughly reply: "It is +only for the sake of the language." He was the enemy of anything which +seemed to approach cant and pretension, and he concealed his own views +as closely as he desired to understand the views of others. He possessed +very little knowledge of literature. The French he despised and +repudiated, although he certainly had studied Voltaire with advantage; +of the Italians he knew only Dante and of the English only Shakespeare, +both of whom he had studied in translations. In Danish he read and +reread Holberg, who throughout his life unquestionably remained Ibsen's +favorite author; he preserved a certain admiration for the Danish +classics of his youth: Heiberg, Hertz, Schack-Steffelt. In German, the +foreign language which he read most currently, he was strangely ignorant +of Schiller and Heine, and hostile to Goethe, although _Brand_ and _Peer +Gynt_ must owe something of their form to _Faust_. But the German poets +whom he really enjoyed were two dramatists of the age preceding his +own, Otto Ludwig (1813-65) and Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). Each of these +playwrights had been occupied in making certain reforms, of a realistic +tendency, in the existing tradition of the stage, and each of them +dealt, before any one else in Europe did so, with "problems" on the +stage. These two German poets, but Hebbel particularly, passed from +romanticism to realism, and so on to mysticism, in a manner fascinating +to Ibsen, whom it is possible that they influenced. [Note: It would +be interesting to compare _Die Niebelungen_, the trilogy which Hebbel +published in 1862, in which the struggle between pagan and Christian +ideals of conduct is analyzed, with Ibsen's _Emperor and Galilean_.] He +remained, in later years, persistently ignorant of Zola, and of Tolstoi +he had read, with contemptuous disapproval, only some of the polemical +pamphlets. He said to me, in 1899, of the great Russian: "Tolstoi?--he +is mad!" with a screwing up of the features such as a child makes at the +thought of a black draught. + +If he read at all, it was poetry. His indifference to music was +complete; he had, in fact, no ear whatever, and could not distinguish +one tune from another. His efforts to appreciate the music which +Grieg made for _Peer Gynt_ were pathetic. But for verse his sense was +exceedingly delicate, and the sound of poetry gave him acute pleasure. +At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he was fatigued by the riot +of rhymes which pursued him through his dreams, and which his memory +vainly strove to recapture. For academic philosophy and systems of +philosophic thought he had a great impatience. The vexed question of +what he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher, Soeren Kierkegaard, has +never been solved. Brandes has insisted, again and again, on the +close relation between _Brand_ and other works of Ibsen and the famous +_Either-Or_ of Kierkegaard; "it actually seems," he says, "as though +Ibsen had aspired to the honor of being called Kierkegaard's poet." +Ibsen, however, aspired to no such honor, and, while he never actually +denied the influence, the relation between him and the philosopher seems +to be much rather one of parallelism than of imitation. Ibsen was a +poetical psychologist of the first order, but he could not bring himself +to read the prose of the professional thinkers. + +In his attitude both to philosophical and poetical literature Ibsen is +with such apparently remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley; in +his realism and his mysticism he is unrelated to immediate predecessors, +and has no wish to be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest in +the observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosity +about what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects. +Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the same +as that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or +had even turned over the pages of the _Criticism of Pure Reason_. It is +not necessary to suppose that he had done so. The peculiar aspect of +the Ego as the principal and ultimately sole guide to truth was revealed +anew to the Norwegian poet, and references to Kant, or to Fichte, or to +Kierkegaard, seem, therefore, to be beside the mark. The watchword of +_Brand_, with his cry of "All or Nothing," his absolute repudiation of +compromise, was not a literary conception, but was founded, without the +help of books, on a profound contemplation of human nature, mainly, no +doubt, as Ibsen found it in himself. But in these days of the tyranny +of literature it is curious to meet with an author of the first rank who +worked without a library. + +Ibsen's study of women was evidently so close, and what he writes about +them is usually so penetrating, that many legends have naturally sprung +up about the manner in which he gained his experience. Of these, most +are pure fiction. As a matter of fact, Ibsen was shy with women, and +unless they took the initiative, he contented himself with watching them +from a distance: and noting their ways in silence. The early flirtation +with Miss Rikke Hoist at Bergen, which takes so prominent a place in +Ibsen's story mainly because such incidents were extremely rare in it, +is a typical instance. If this young girl of sixteen had not taken +the matter into her own hands, running up the steps of the hotel and +flinging her posy of flowers into the face of the young poet, the +incident would have closed in his watching her down the street, +while the fire smouldered in his eyes. It was not until her fresh +field-blossoms had struck him on the cheek that he was emboldened to +follow her and to send her the lyrical roses and auriculas which live +forever in his poems. If we wish to note the difference of temperament, +we have but to contrast Ibsen's affair with Rikke Holst with Goethe's +attitude to Christiana Vulpius; in doing so, we bring the passive and +the active lover face to face. + +Ibsen would gladly have married his flower of the field, a vision of +whose bright, untrammelled adolescence reappears again and again in +his works, and plainly in _The Master-Builder_. But he escaped a great +danger in failing to secure her as his wife, for Rikke Holst, when she +had lost her girlish freshness, would probably have had little character +and no culture to fall back upon. He waited, fortunately for his +happiness, until he secured Susannah Thoresen. Mrs. Ibsen, his faithful +guide, guardian and companion for half a century, will live among the +entirely successful wives of difficult men of genius. In the midst +of the spiteful gossip of Christiania she had to traverse her _via +dolorosa_, for it was part of the fun of the journalists to represent +this husband and wife as permanently alienated. That Ibsen was easy to +live with is not probable, but his wife not merely contrived to do it, +but by her watchfulness, her adroitness, and, when necessary, by her +firmness of decision, she smoothed the path for the great man whom +she adored, and who was to her a great wilful child to be cajoled and +circumvented. He was absolutely dependent on her, although he affected +amusing airs of independence; and if she absented herself, there were +soon cries in the house of "My Cat, My Cat!" the pet name by which he +called his wife. Of their domestic ways little is yet known in detail, +but everything can be imagined. + +To the enigma of Ibsen's character it was believed that his private +correspondence might supply a key. His letters were collected and +arranged while he was still alive, but he was not any longer in a +mental condition which permitted him to offer any help in comment to +his editors. His son, Mr. Sigurd Ibsen, superintended the work, and two +careful bibliographers, Mr. Halvdan Koht and Mr. Julius Elias, +carried out the scheme in two volumes [Note: _Breve fra Henrik Ibsen_, +Gyldendalske Boghadel, 1904.], with the execution of which no fault can +be suggested. But the enigma remained unsolved; the sphinx spoke much, +but failed to answer the questions we had been asking. These letters, +in the first place, suffer from the fact that Ibsen was a relentless +destroyer of documents; they are all written by him; not one single +example had been preserved of the correspondence to which this is +the reply. Then Ibsen's letters, as revealers of the unseen mood, are +particularly unsatisfactory. With rare exceptions, he remains throughout +them tightly buttoned up in his long and legendary frock-coat. There is +no laughter and no tears in his letters; he is occasionally extremely +angry, and exudes drops of poison, like the captive scorpion which he +caught when he was in Italy, and loved to watch and tease. But there +is no self-abandonment, and very little emotion; the letters are +principally historical and critical, "finger-posts for commentators." +They give valuable information about the genius of his works, but they +tell almost less about his inner moral nature than do his imaginative +writings. + +In his youth the scorpion in Ibsen's heart seems to have stung him +occasionally to acts which afterwards filled him with embarrassment. We +hear that in his Bergen days he sent to Lading, his fellow-teacher +at the theatre, a challenge of which, when the mood was over, he was +greatly ashamed. It is said that on another occasion, under the pressure +of annoyance, maddened with fear and insomnia, he sprang out of bed in +his shirt and tried to throw himself into the sea off one of the quays +in the harbor. Such performances were futile and ridiculous, and they +belong only to his youth. It seems certain that he schooled himself +to the suppression of such evidences of his anger, and that he did so +largely by shutting up within his breast all the fire that rose there. +The _Correspondence_--dark lantern as it is--seems to illuminate this +condition of things; we see before us Ibsen with his hands clenched, his +mouth tightly shut, rigid with determination not to "let himself go," +the eyes alone blazing behind the gleaming spectacles. + +An instance of his suppression of personal feeling may be offered. The +lengthiest of all Ibsen's published letters describes to Brandes (April +25, 1866) the suicide, at Rome, of a young Danish lawyer, Ludvig David, +of whom Ibsen had seen a good deal. The lad threw himself head-foremost +out of window, in a crisis of fever. Ibsen writes down all the minutest +details with feeling and refinement, but with as little sympathetic +emotion as if he was drawing up a report for the police. With this trait +may be compared his extreme interest in the detailed accounts of public +trials; he liked to read exactly what the prisoner said, and all the +evidence of the witnesses. In this Ibsen resembled Robert Browning, +whose curiosity about the small incidents surrounding a large event was +boundless. When Ibsen, in the course of such an investigation, found the +real purpose of some strange act dawn upon him, he exhibited an almost +childish pleasure; and this was doubled when the interpretation was one +which had not presented itself to the conventional legal authorities. + +In everything connected with the execution of his own work there was +no limit to the pains which he was willing to take. His handwriting +had always been neat, but it was commonplace in his early years. The +exquisite calligraphy which he ultimately used on every occasion, and +the beauty of which was famous far and wide, he adopted deliberately +when he was in Rome in 1862. To the end of his life, although in the +latest years the letters lost, from the shakiness of his hand, some of +their almost Chinese perfection, he wrote his smallest notes in this +character. His zeal for elaboration as an artist led him to collect a +mass of consistent imaginary information about the personages in his +plays, who became to him absolutely real. It is related how, some one +happening to say that Nora, in _A Doll's House_, had a curious name, +Ibsen immediately replied, "Oh! her full name was Leonora; but that was +shortened to Nora when she was quite a little girl. Of course, you know, +she was terribly spoilt by her parents." Nothing of this is revealed in +the play itself, but Ibsen was familiar with the past history of all the +characters he created. All through his career he seems to have been long +haunted by the central notion of his pieces, and to have laid it +aside, sometimes for many years, until a set of incidents spontaneously +crystallized around it. When the medium in which he was going to work +became certain he would put himself through a long course of study in +the technical phraseology appropriate to the subject. No pains were too +great to prepare him for the final task. + +When Mr. Archer visited Ibsen in the Harmonien Hotel at Saeby in 1887 +he extracted some valuable evidence from him as to his methods of +composition:-- + +It seems that the _idea_ of a piece generally presents itself before +the characters and incidents, though, when I put this to him flatly, he +denied it. It seems to follow, however, from his saying that there is a +certain stage in the incubation of a play when it might as easily turn +into all essay as into a drama. He has to incarnate the ideas, as it +were, in character and incident, before the actual work of creation +can be said to have fairly begun. Different plans and ideas, he admits, +often flow together, and the play he ultimately produces is sometimes +very unlike the intention with which he set out. He writes and rewrites, +scribbles and destroys, an enormous amount before he makes the exquisite +fair copy he sends to Copenhagen. + +He altered, as we have said, the printed text of his earlier works, in +order to bring them into harmony with his finished style, but he did not +do this, so far as I remember, after the publication of _Brand_. In the +case of all the dramas of his maturity he modified nothing when the work +had once been given to the world. + + + +CHAPTER X + +INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS + +Having accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen as a disturbing and +revolutionizing force, which met with the utmost resistance at the +outset, and was gradually accepted before the close of his career, we +may try to define what the nature of his revolt was, and what it was, +precisely, that he attacked. It may be roughly said that what peculiarly +roused the animosity of Ibsen was the character which has become +stereotyped in one order of ideas, good in themselves but gradually +outworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a new kind. Ibsen +meditated upon the obscurantism of the old regime until he created +figures like Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school are +crystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympathetically +into the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, there +is no one of his plays more valuable in its purely theoretic way than +_Rosmersholm_. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it +surveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies upon +Rosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can go +no further. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would be +salutary, he cannot move--he is bound in invisible chains. It is useless +to argue with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic, but he +simply cannot, when it comes to action, cross the bridge where Beate +threw herself into the torrent. + +But Ibsen had not the ardor of the fighting optimist. He was one who +"doubted clouds would break," who dreamed, since "right was worsted, +wrong would triumph." With Robert Browning he had but this one thing in +common, that both were fighters, both "held we fall to rise, are baffled +to fight better," but the dark fatalism of the Norwegian poet was in +other things in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness of the +English one. Browning and Ibsen alike considered that the race must be +reformed periodically or it would die. The former anticipated reform +as cheerily as the sower expects harvest. Ibsen had no such happy +certainty. He was convinced of the necessity of breaking up the old +illusions, the imaginative call for revolt, but his faith wavered as to +the success of the new movements. The old order, in its resistance to +all change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but it is the work of +a blind Sampson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground. +In _Rosmersholm_, all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the +lucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutly +intrenched. In the end it is not the new idea who conquers; it is the +antique house, with its traditions, its avenging vision of white horses, +which breaks the too-clairvoyant Rebecca. + +This doubt of the final success of intelligence, this obstinate question +whether, after all, as we so glibly intimate, the old order changeth at +all, whether, on the contrary, it has not become a Juggernaut car that +crushes all originality and independence out of action, this breathes +more and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler +condemns the old order, in its dulness, its stifling mediocrity, but she +is unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, and +she sinks into deeper moral dissolution. She hates all that has been +done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that +detestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees +the need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its own +sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do, +to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Loevborg, and to kill herself +with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the +Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do best to die. + +We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love of self is the +fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of +self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every +manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between +the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda +Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the +master-builder Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in +the act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoons +to death, "dizzy, lost, yet unupbraiding." Ibsen's exact meaning in the +detail of these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but they repay +the closest and most reiterated study. Perhaps the most curious of all +is _The Lady from the Sea_, which has been examined from the technically +psychological view by a learned French philosopher, M. Jules de +Gaultier. For M. de Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen's +conception of human life, with its conflicting instincts and +responsibilities, is more fully centred in _The Lady from the Sea_ than +in any other of his productions. + +The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen's constant aim is to +reconcile and to conciliate the two biological hypotheses which +have divided opinion in the nineteenth century, and which are known +respectively by the names of Cuvier and Lamarck; namely, that of the +invariability of species and that of the mutability of organic forms. +In the reconciliation of these hypotheses Ibsen finds the only process +which is truly encouraging to life. According to this theory, all the +trouble, all the weariness, all the waste of moral existences around +us comes from the neglect of one or other of these principles, and +true health, social or individual, is impossible without the harmonious +application of them both. According to this view, the apotheosis of +Ibsen's genius, or at least the most successful elucidation of his +scheme of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in _The Lady from +the Sea_ where Wangel succeeds in winning the heart of Ellida back from +the fascination of the Stranger. It is certainly in this mysterious and +strangely attractive play that Ibsen has insisted, more than anywhere +else, on the necessity of taking physiology into consideration in every +discussion of morals. He refers, like a zooelogist, to the laws which +regulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decision +of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example of +the limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. The +extraordinary ingenuity of M. de Gaultier's analysis of this play +deserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted, as embraced by +Ibsen's intention, may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect +that, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct of Ibsen was +probably subtler still. + +In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward, with the glimmering taper of +his Catilina, there was but one person in the world who fancied that +the light might pass from lamp to lamp and in half a century form an +important part of the intellectual illumination of Europe. The one +person who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself. Against +all probability and common-sense, this apothecary's assistant, this +ill-educated youth who had just been plucked in his preliminary +examination, who positively was, and remained, unable to pass the first +tests and become a student at the University, maintained in his +inmost soul the belief that he was born to be "a king of thought." The +impression is perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makes +the case unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that it +happened to be true. But the impact of Ibsen with the social order of +his age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unlucky +than that of any other great man of the same class with whose biography +we have been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all that +was successful and respectable and "nice" from the outset of his career +until near the end of it. + +Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to the +world there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in the +mouth like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it as +nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one +of those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no other +writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing +with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the +satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and +thin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns, Ibsen is +uniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problems +of life than any other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but it was +his surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays of +Alexandre Dumas _fils_ flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon. +But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all the +protean forms of organic social life and coldly draws up his diagnosis +like a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. We +have seen that, long before a sentence was written, he had invented and +studied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characters +who were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their +experience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he was +building up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, fetiches +which represented people to him, stood arranged on his writing table, +and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by some +feat of black magic, he turned them into living persons, typical and yet +individual. + +We have recorded that the actual writing down of the dialogue was often +swift and easy, when the period of incubation was complete. Each of +Ibsen's plays presupposes a long history behind it; each starts like an +ancient Greek tragedy, in the full process of catastrophe. This +method of composition was extraordinary, was perhaps, in modern +times, unparalleled. It accounted in measure for the coherency, the +inevitability, of all the detail, but it also accounted for some of the +difficulties which meet us in the task of interpretation. Ibsen calls +for an expositor, and will doubtless give occupation to an endless +series of scholiasts. They will not easily exhaust their theme, and to +the last something will escape, something will defy their most careful +examination. It is not disrespectful to his memory to claim that Ibsen +sometimes packed his stuff too closely. Criticism, when it marvels most +at the wonder of his genius, is constrained to believe that he sometimes +threw too much of his soul into his composition, that he did not stand +far enough away from it always to command its general effect. The +result, especially in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, and +excites the spectator too much. + +One very curious example of Ibsen's minute care is found in the +copiousness of his stage directions. Later playwrights have imitated +him in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago such +minuteness seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential +to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The +stage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader who +desires to follow the dramatist's thought step by step without losing +the least link. These notes of his intention will be of ever-increasing +value as the recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In 1899 Ibsen +remarked to me that it was almost useless for actors nowadays to try to +perform the comedies of Holberg, because there were no stage directions +and the tradition was lost. Of his own work, fortunately, that can never +be said. Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating studies of the +Greek Tragedies, has pointed out more than once the "undesigned and +unforeseen defect with which, in studying ancient drama, we must +perpetually reckon," namely, the loss of the action and of the +equivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine "what problems +Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the _Poetae Scenici +Graeci_," and not more difficult to realize how many things there would +be to puzzle us in _Ghosts_ and _The Wild Duck_ if we possessed nothing +but the bare text. + +The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, so +passionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to be +welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in +Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an +extravagant character. At the present moment any one conversant with +Norwegian society who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer +or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will be +surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the +attractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almost +universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be +found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into +the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national +conscience, that even works like _Ghosts_, which shocked, and works like +_Rosmersholm_, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, were +excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who +reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at +every national habit and showed a worm at the root of every national +tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be +accompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation," and +he who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last resting +place by a Parliament and a King. + +It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to the +whole world--his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this +dissemination--yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home +that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how +hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between +his country and himself was complete long before the prophet died. As he +walked about, the strange, picturesque little old man, in the streets +of Christiania, his fellow-citizens gazed at him with a little fear, +but with some affection and with unbounded reverence. They understood +at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it +applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it +their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante +said in the _New Life_:-- + +e costui Che viene a consolar la nostra mente, Ed e la sua tanto +possente, Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui. + +No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which +Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his _virtu_, upon the Norwegian +conscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it and had +banished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows will +doubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, and +at the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the +world, owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurtured +in that new temper of mind, that _spiritel nuovo d'amore_ which was +inculcated by the whole work of Ibsen. + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Henrik Ibsen, by Edmund Gosse + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRIK IBSEN *** + +***** This file should be named 8152.txt or 8152.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/8/1/5/8152/ + +Produced by Ted Garvin, Nicole Apostola and David Widger + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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