HENRIK IBSEN
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF IBSEN'S WORKS 
 WITH DATES OF PUBLICATION. 
 
 CATALINA. 1850. 
 
 THE WARRIOR'S TOMB (unpublished). 
 
 NORMA: OR, A POLITICIAN'S LOVE (unpublished). 
 
 ST. JOHN'S NIGHT (unpublished). 
 
 FRU INGER OF OESTRAAT. 1857. 
 
 OLAF LILJEKRANS (unpublished). 
 
 THE FEAST AT SOLHAUG. 1857. 
 
 THE CHIEFTAINS OF HELGELAND. 1858. 
 
 LOVE'S COMEDY. 1862. 
 
 THE PRETENDERS. 1864. 
 
 BRAND. 1866. 
 
 PEER GYNT. 1867. 
 
 THE YOUNG MEN'S UNION. 1869. 
 
 POEMS. 1871. 
 
 EMPEROR AND GALILEAN. 1873. 
 
 THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY. 1877. 
 
 A DOLL HOME. 1879. 
 
 GHOSTS. 1881. 
 
 AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE. 1882. 
 
 THE WILD DUCK. 1884. 
 
 ROSMERSHOLM. l886. 
 
 THE LADY FROM THE SEA. 1888. 
 
 HEDDA GABLER 1890. 
 
 THE MASTER BUILDER. 1892. 
 
 LITTLE EYOLF. 1894. 
 
 JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN. 1896. 
 
 WHEN WE DEAD AWAKE. 1899.
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY 
 
 BY HENRIK JAEGER 
 
 Jtotn tfye 
 BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 WITH A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BY THE TRANSLATOR 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 A. C. McCLURG & CO. 
 1901
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 
 A. C. McCLURG & CO. 
 
 1901
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 interest now taken, among English-speak- 
 -*- ing people, in the writings of HENRIK IBSEN, 
 seems to make it desirable that some extended 
 account of his life and work should be placed 
 within the reach of the public. I had for some 
 time been contemplating the preparation of a 
 critical essay upon the subject, when this work 
 by Henrik Jaeger came into my hands, and I 
 concluded to translate it instead of writing the 
 original study of which I had at first thought. 
 While Herr Jaeger's book, being addressed pri- 
 marily to the Scandinavian public, already 
 familiar with Ibsen's writings, is, in some respects, 
 not exactly what would have been written with a 
 strictly English-speaking audience in view, it seems, 
 on the whole, to cover the ground fairly well and 
 to be, for the most part, just and intelligible. The 
 occasional allusions to matters of Scandinavian 
 history and literature may not convey as distinct
 
 IV PREFACE. 
 
 a meaning to an English-speaking as to a Nor- 
 wegian or Danish public, but the picture presented 
 of the subject of the biography is clearly outlined 
 and well-proportioned, his methods and aims are 
 carefully defined, his message is distinctly stated, 
 and the long series of his works made the subject 
 of a broadly sympathetic analysis and criticism. 
 Since a large number of those works already exist 
 in careful English translations, while other trans- 
 lations are likely to follow, the English reader is 
 now, or soon will be, in a position to understand 
 his Ibsen almost as well as he understands his 
 Goethe or his Hugo. 
 
 I say almost as well, because, unfortunately, 
 the two master-works of the great Norwegian 
 " Brand " and " Peer Gynt " are impossible of 
 adequate English translation, almost impossible 
 of English translation at all, as I have abundant 
 reason to know, from the difficulty experienced 
 in reproducing the two hundred or more verses 
 extracted from those poems for use in the present 
 work. The difficulty arises from the character- 
 istic metrical form of the two poems. " Brand " 
 is written wholly, and " Peer Gynt " largely, in 
 rhymed octosyllabic verse, the rhyme often re- 
 peated three or four times, and frequently femi- 
 nine in ending. Such verse might be successfully 
 written in Chaucerian English or in modern Ger-
 
 PREFACE. V 
 
 man, but not in modern English. It is, in short, 
 the verse of " Hudibras," only far more compact 
 and serious, more exact in rhyme, and richer in 
 feminine endings. Acceptable German transla- 
 tions of both poems have been made, and to these 
 the reader must be referred. For the extracts from 
 these two poems included in the present transla- 
 tion, as well as for the other verse translations 
 scattered through its pages, I must beg the read- 
 er's indulgence. The metrical form has been 
 scrupulously reproduced in every respect but 
 one, the feminine rhymes having been often re- 
 placed by rhymes of a single syllable. Even the 
 order of rhyming has been preserved in almost 
 every case. Working under these primary limi- 
 tations, the thought and the figurative form of 
 its expression have been reproduced as accurately 
 as was possible. If the reader still think that the 
 result is doggerel, I will at least remind him that 
 the verse of " Hudibras " the principal example 
 of the form in English poetry is open to the 
 same charge, and that the original Norwegian also 
 often comes dangerously near to producing the 
 effect of doggerel. It is saved, in fact, from the 
 ascription of that quality, only by its compact 
 and pregnant thought and by its intense serious- 
 ness of purpose. Finally, I will say that the 
 verse of Ibsen is often as crabbed as that of
 
 Vi PREFACE. 
 
 Browning in its most perverse form, and that the 
 two poets have about the same disregard for the 
 external graces of poetic diction. 
 
 I have supplied footnotes to the present trans- 
 lation in the few cases in which they seemed ne- 
 cessary to make the text intelligible to an English- 
 speaking public. On the other hand, and this 
 is the only liberty that I have taken with the 
 original, I have suppressed such notes of the 
 author as are merely references to Scandinavian 
 books and periodicals inaccessible to English 
 readers. In place of such notes I thought it 
 best to provide this introduction with a few re- 
 marks upon the existing English translations of 
 Ibsen's plays, and upon one or two critical studies 
 of special importance to which English readers 
 may be referred. 
 
 Of translations, the first to be made was that 
 of " Emperor and Galilean," by Catherine Ray 
 (London, 1876). Then came "A Doll Home," 
 by Henrietta F. Lord (London, 1882), which was 
 first published under the title of " Nora," and 
 which has recently appeared in an American edi- 
 tion under its proper title. The series of prose 
 dramas now being published under the super- 
 vision of William Archer is to include translations 
 of " A Doll Home," " The Young Men's Union," 
 " The Pillars of Society," " Ghosts," " An Enemy
 
 PREFACE. Vll 
 
 of the People," " The Wild Duck," " Fru Inger of 
 Oestraat," " The Chieftains of Helgeland," " The 
 Pretenders," " Rosmersholm," and " The Lady 
 from the Sea," in other words, of all the prose 
 dramas except the great historical tragedy, " Em- 
 peror and Galilean." Then there is the handy 
 volume of " The Camelot Classics," edited by 
 Havelock Ellis, and containing Mr. Archer's trans- 
 lations of " The Pillars of Society " and " Ghosts," 
 and Mrs. Aveling's translation of " An Enemy of 
 the People." Independent translations of " Ros- 
 mersholm " and " The Lady from the Sea " have 
 also been published. 
 
 Among critical studies of Ibsen, the following 
 may be mentioned. " Studies in the Literature of 
 Northern Europe," by Edmund W. Gosse (Lon- 
 don, 1879), is the work which first called the at- 
 tention of English readers to Ibsen's writings, and 
 is still one of our best sources of information upon 
 the subject. The essay by Georg Brandes, to 
 which frequent reference is made in these pages, 
 may be found in " Eminent Authors of the Nine- 
 teenth Century," translated by Rasmus B. Ander- 
 son (New York, 1886). Those who can get 
 access to a file of the short-lived but valuable 
 periodical, " Scandinavia," will find in the first 
 volume (Chicago, 1883-84) a series of papers by 
 the late Thorkild A. Schovelin, which, although
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 written in faulty English, are remarkable for their 
 sympathetic appreciation of Ibsen's genius. The 
 introductions to Mr. Archer's first volume and to 
 the " Camelot " volume already mentioned are in- 
 teresting and trustworthy. As for the articles 
 upon Ibsen to be found in English and American 
 periodicals of the past year, they are far too 
 numerous to specify, and are as a rule of little 
 value. I wish, however, to call attention to an 
 account of "Peer Gynt" the best that I have 
 ever seen in English written by Philip H. 
 Wicksteed for " The Contemporary Review " of 
 August, 1889. 
 
 WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE. 
 
 CHICAGO, 
 
 September, 1890.
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 THIS book has now been out of print for nearly 
 three years, owing to the destruction by fire, 
 early in 1899, of all the copies then unsold. A new 
 edition would be desirable in any case, since the 
 work is still, as it was when the original was first 
 published in 1888, the only authoritative account 
 of Ibsen's life and writings. But a new edition 
 becomes even more necessary for the reason that 
 an important series of plays six in number 
 have been added to the list of Ibsen's writings 
 since Henrik Jaeger prepared this critical biog- 
 raphy in celebration of the dramatist's sixtieth 
 birthday. Moreover, the thirteen years that have 
 elapsed have witnessed an immense broadening of 
 Ibsen's fame throughout the world ; the tide of as- 
 persion and misrepresentation has reached its ebb, 
 and few voices are now raised to question his place 
 among the great spirits of the nineteenth century. 
 When that century ended, there were hardly more 
 than half a dozen living writers in the whole cosmo-
 
 X PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 politan world of letters who could fairly be ranked, 
 either in achieved fame or in influence upon the 
 younger generation, with Henrik Ibsen. 
 
 The importance, both of this biography and its 
 subject, are such that I have no apology to offer 
 for making the work again accessible to the public. 
 But some apology is probably needed for the 
 chapter of my own writing which I have ventured 
 to add. Henrik Jaeger died in 1895, and thus the 
 task of bringing his work down to the present date 
 must perforce be undertaken by some one else. 
 Failing a worthier pen, I have sought to outline 
 the six plays that have appeared since Jaeger's 
 book was written, and to deal with them, as best 
 I might, in the spirit of his work. 
 
 Except for a few trifling corrections, and the 
 additional matter already mentioned, this edition 
 is a reprint of that published in 1890. Even the 
 original preface has been allowed to stand un- 
 changed, thus requiring me to note in the present 
 context the more important contributions made 
 during the past ten or twelve years to the English 
 literature of the subject. By way of translation, 
 much has been done to fill out the series of works 
 accessible in our language. The series of transla- 
 tions made (or supervised) by Mr. William Archer 
 has been extended to include " Peer Gynt," as well 
 as all of the later plays. Mr. Archer is at present
 
 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. xi 
 
 engaged upon a revised edition of the books of 
 this series. By far the most important work of 
 translation thus far done is found in Professor 
 C. H. Herford's versions of " Love's Comedy " and 
 " Brand." The latter translation is one of the most 
 remarkable ever made, and the successful manner 
 in which it has performed a task of extraordinary 
 difficulty goes far to falsify the statement, made in 
 my preface of 1890, that "Brand" is "impossible 
 of adequate English translation." Certainly, Pro- 
 fessor Herford has achieved a success in turning 
 this poem into English that goes far beyond the 
 best that I had supposed possible. The English 
 reader has now no excuse for not becoming ac- 
 quainted with the greatest of Ibsen's works, and he 
 will also find in the translator's introduction to 
 " Brand " one of the deepest and most suggestive 
 pieces of critical writing of which Ibsen has thus 
 far been made the subject. 
 
 The ethical and philosophical problem of 
 " Brand " is indeed a difficult one, and has baffled 
 many commentators. By far the most illuminating 
 discussion of the subject that has come to my at- 
 tention is found in an article by M. A. Stobart, 
 which appeared in " The Fortnightly Review " for 
 August, 1 899. This article shows how deeply the 
 ideals of Brand are rooted in the philosophy of 
 Kierkegaard, and provides an intelligible explana-
 
 xii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 tion of the puzzling final episode of the avalanche 
 and the macaronic ending of the play. Much 
 other Ibsen criticism of the past twelve years must 
 be passed by without mention here, but there are 
 two books that deserve attention. One is " A 
 Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen," 
 by the late H. H. Boyesen, a book published 
 in 1894. This work deals with the writings of Ibsen 
 seriatim down to " The Master Builder," and dis- 
 cusses them in a highly intelligent and interesting 
 fashion. The other book is a translation of three 
 essays by the Danish critic Georg Brandes. These 
 essays are dated, respectively, 1867, 1882, and 1898. 
 The first of these essays is the one frequently men- 
 tioned in the present book. The last of them was 
 the contribution of Dr. Brandes to the celebration 
 of Ibsen's seventieth birthday. The three taken 
 together thus constitute, in the words of Mr. 
 Archer, who edits the English translation, " a 
 contemporaneously noted record of the ever- 
 developing relation, throughout more than thirty 
 years, of these two remarkable minds," and 
 thus " in some sort a running commentary on 
 Ibsen's spiritual development." It is certainly one 
 of the most valuable discussions of Ibsen to be read 
 in the English language. 
 
 W. M. P. 
 CHICAGO, October, 1901.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH (1828-1850) ... 13 
 
 II. APPRENTICESHIP (1850-1857) 66 
 
 III. STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN CHRISTIANIA 
 
 (1858-1864) 118 
 
 IV. CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD- (1864-1869) . . . 162 
 V. REST AND RETROSPECT (1870-1877) . . . 207 
 
 VI. DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE (1877-1888) . . 230 
 
 VII. THE END OF THE HISTORY (1888-1901) . . 276
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN (in the nineties) . . . Frontispiece 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 13 
 
 SKIEN, IBSEN'S NATIVE TOWN 18 
 
 GRIMSTAD 40 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 66 
 
 IBSEN'S BIRTHPLACE 90 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 118. 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN (at the close of the fifties) . . 130 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN (at the beginning of the sixties) 136 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 162 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 207 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN'S WIFE 226 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 230 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN (at the beginning of the seventies) 238 
 
 VENSTOB FARM, NEAR SKIEN 246 
 
 VIGNETTE HEADPIECE 276 
 
 PORTRAIT OF IBSEN (in the eighties) 284
 
 I. 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 
 
 A BOUT the year 1720 a Danish skipper, named 
 * Peter Ibsen, came from Moen to Bergen, 
 became a citizen of the latter place, and married 
 the daughter of a German settler. He was the 
 great- great-grandfather of the poet Henrik Ibsen. 
 
 The great-grandfather bore the name of Henrik 
 Petersen Ibsen, and was also a shipmaster. He 
 married Wenche Dischington, the daughter of a 
 naturalized Scotch settler, but died less than a 
 year after the wedding. The widow afterwards 
 married Dean v. d. Lippe of Solum near Skien, 
 and so her branch of the Ibsen family became 
 associated with that town. From her first mar- 
 riage she had a single son, born after the father's 
 death, and given his name.
 
 14 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Henrik Ibsen, the second, married the daughter 
 of a merchant of Skien named Plesner. Both the 
 merchant and his wife were of German descent. 
 This marriage was also of brief duration. Hen- 
 rik Ibsen had chosen the occupation of his father 
 and grandfather, and the ship owned and com- 
 manded by him went down with every soul on 
 board off Hesnaes near Grimstad, that is, in the 
 quarter where the scene of " Terje Vigen " is laid. 
 Only fragments, including the name-board of the 
 ship, drifted ashore, and told of the disaster. A 
 year after the widow married a shipmaster named 
 Ole Paus, and to him she bore five children. 
 From her first marriage she had one son, Knud, 
 the poet's father. 
 
 His mother's name was Maria Cornelia Alten- 
 burg. She was the daughter of a wealthy mer- 
 chant of Skien, who had himself begun life, after 
 the custom of the time, as a shipmaster. He also 
 was of German ancestry. 
 
 In all four of these generations, then, we see 
 that foreign blood was mingled with the stock 
 of the Danish seaman, German, Scotch, Ger- 
 man, and German once again. Norse admixture 
 might possibly be found at some point or other 
 if the genealogy were to be traced back on the 
 mother's side, but not a single drop of Norse 
 blood has played a direct part in the formation
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 15 
 
 of Henrik Ibsen's temperament, which has, never- 
 theless, been characterized as " peculiarly Norse." 
 
 This ancestry sheds a light upon his character; 
 it helps to explain his isolation and his cosmo- 
 politanism ; it enables us to understand how it is 
 that he has been able so completely to separate 
 himself from the land of his birth, and to pass 
 more than a score of years in voluntary exile. 
 
 It enables us also to discern the origin of even 
 deeper peculiarities of his character. 
 
 One comes almost involuntarily to think of the 
 Puritanism and idealism that have played so es- 
 sential a part in Scotch history, and made such an 
 impress upon Scotch philosophy, when dealing 
 with this man, whose demands upon his fellows 
 are as uncompromising as are those of the idealist, 
 and whose outlook upon the world is as sombre as 
 that of the Puritan. 
 
 And then the German influence ! The German's 
 tendency towards speculation, his liking for pure 
 abstractions, his talent for systematic and logical 
 thought, has not all this left a mark upon Henrik 
 Ibsen's personality, and exerted an influence over 
 his intellectual development? 
 
 If we seek for closer information concerning the 
 quarter from which his intellectual inheritance has 
 come, we must look especially to the women. 
 Their influence has evidently been the most potent.
 
 1 6 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 The grandmother appears to have been a highly 
 gifted lady, according to the standard of her time; 
 she was deeply interested in everything that was 
 going on about her in the world ; hers was an 
 austere and serious nature, inclined towards re- 
 ligion, not at that time a general trait among per- 
 sons living in circles like hers. Of the children 
 of her second marriage we are told that they were 
 marked, with one or two exceptions, by a shy- 
 ness and reserve that made them difficult of 
 approach. 
 
 The mother also was reserved in her disposi- 
 tion, finding it difficult to open herself to others. 
 This characteristic developed with years into a shy- 
 ness that became in some degree the inheritance 
 of her children. 1 One of them thus describes her 
 in a letter to the author of this book : " She was 
 a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the household, 
 and everything to her husband and children. It 
 was not in her to be bitter or reproachful." In 
 this little sketch there seems to lie dormant the 
 germ of a whole series of Ibsen's women. 
 
 The men had a more cheerful temperament. 
 
 The grandfather seems to have had an active 
 
 1 This reserve probably came into the race with the Paus 
 family; for the old Fru Altenburg, Ibsen's mother's mother, was 
 a sister of the Paus with whom his father's mother made her sec- 
 ond marriage, and the children of this second marriage were 
 characterized by just such a reserve.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. I? 
 
 brain and lively interests. His humor was cheer- 
 ful, and he was full of fun and jest, it is said. 
 
 The father inherited his mother's austerity and 
 his father's vivacity. They were combined in him 
 in the form of a keen wit. His character was 
 cheerful and social, his intelligence remarkable, 
 and his wit ever ready for the combat. These 
 qualities made him popular among his fellows, but 
 caused him to be feared at the same time ; for the 
 words which he let fall were not always innocent, 
 and he knew how to say bitter and unsparing things 
 about people who had, in one way or another, 
 awakened his dislike. It was evidently from him 
 that the son inherited those qualities which led 
 him to write " Love's Comedy " and " The Young 
 Men's Union." 
 
 Thus conditioned ancestrally, Henrik Ibsen was 
 born at Skien, March 20, 1828, the first child of 
 his parents. 
 
 Skien was then as now a simple lumber village. 
 It had barely three thousand inhabitants. Small 
 as the town was, its life was varied, and its com- 
 mercial activity considerable. In the middle of 
 the town Knud Ibsen managed an extensive and 
 varied business. 
 
 Ibsen himself has written and placed at my 
 disposal the following account of his boyhood's 
 surroundings :
 
 1 8 HENRI K IBSEN 
 
 " At the time when, a number of years ago, the streets 
 of my native town of Skien were named, or perhaps 
 rechristened, the honor was done me of giving to one 
 of them my name. At least report has said so, and I 
 have been told of it by trustworthy travellers. According 
 to their accounts, this street runs from the marketplace 
 down to the sea, or ' muddringen.' l 
 
 " But if this description be accurate, I cannot imagine 
 why the street has come to bear my name, for in it I was 
 neither born nor did I ever live. On the contrary, I was 
 born in a court near the market-place, Stockmann's 
 Court, it was then called. This court faces the church, 
 with its high steps and its noteworthy tower. At the 
 right of the church stood the town pillory, and at the left 
 the town-hall, with the lockup and the madhouse. The 
 fourth side of the market-place was occupied by the 
 common and the Latin schools. The church stood in a 
 clear space in the middle. 
 
 " This prospect made up, then, the first view of the 
 world that was offered to my sight. It was all architec- 
 tural ; there was nothing green, no open country land- 
 scape. But the air above this four-cornered enclosure of 
 wood and stone was filled, the whole day long, with the 
 subdued roar of the Langefos, the Klosterfos, and the many 
 other falls, and through this sound there pierced, from 
 morning till night, something that resembled the cry of 
 women in keen distress, now rising to a shriek, now 
 subdued to a moan. It was the sound of the hun- 
 dreds of saws, that were at work by the falls. When I 
 read of the guillotine afterwards, I always had to think 
 of these saws. 
 
 1 The word may perhaps be translated "mud-flats " TR.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 1Q 
 
 " The church was naturally the most imposing building 
 of the town. At the time when, one Christmas eve near 
 the close of the last century, Skien was set on fire through 
 the carelessness of a servant-maid, the church which 
 then stood there burned with the rest. The servant- 
 maid was, as might easily happen, put to death. But the 
 town, rebuilt with straight and broad streets upon the 
 slopes and in the hollows where it lies, gained thereby 
 a new church, of which the inhabitants boasted with a 
 certain pride that it was built of yellow Dutch clapboards, 
 that it was the work of an architect from Copenhagen, 
 and that it was exactly like the Kongsberg church. I 
 was not able at that time fully to appreciate these advan- 
 tages, but my mind was deeply impressed by a white, 
 stout, and heayy-limbed angel, with a bowl in his hand, 
 on week-days suspended high up under the roof, but on 
 Sundays, when children were to be baptized, lowered 
 gently into our midst. 
 
 " Even more than by the white angel in the church, my 
 thoughts were occupied by the black poodle who lived 
 at the top of the tower, where the watchman called out 
 the hours of the night. It had glowing red eyes, but was 
 not often seen ; in fact, it appeared, as far as I know, 
 upon one occasion only. It was a New Year's night, and 
 the watchman had just called ' One ' from the window 
 in the front of the tower. Just then the black poodle 
 came up the tower steps behind him, stood for a moment, 
 and glared at him with the fiery eyes, that was all, but 
 the watchman at once fell head foremost out of the tower- 
 window down into the market-place, where he was seen 
 lying dead next morning by all the pious folk who went 
 to the early New Year's service. Since that night no
 
 2O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 watchman has ever called out * One ' from that window 
 in the tower of Skien church. 
 
 " This incident of the watchman and the poodle occurred 
 long before my time, and I have since heard of such things 
 having happened in various other Norwegian churches, in 
 the days of old. But the tower-window in question has 
 stood prominently in my memory since I was a child, be- 
 cause from it I got my first deep and lasting impression. 
 For my nurse took me up into the tower one day, and let 
 me sit right in the open window, held from behind, of 
 course, by her stout arms. I remember distinctly how it 
 struck me to see the crowns of the people's hats ; I looked 
 down into our own rooms, saw the window-frames and 
 curtains, saw my mother standing at one of the windows ; 
 I could even see over the roof of the house into the yard, 
 where our brown horse stood tied near the barn-door and 
 was whisking his tail. 1 remember that on the side of 
 the barn there hung a bright tin pail. Then there was a 
 running about, and a beckoning from our front door, and 
 the nurse pulled me hastily in, and hurried downstairs 
 with me. I do not remember the rest, but I was often 
 told afterwards that my mother had caught sight of me up 
 in the tower-window, that she had shrieked, had fainted, 
 as was common enough then, and, having got hold of 
 me again, had wept, and kissed and caressed me. As a 
 boy, I never after that crossed the market-place without 
 looking up to the tower-window. I felt that the window 
 especially concerned me and the church poodle. 
 
 " I have preserved but one other recollection from 
 those early years. Among the gifts at my christening 
 there was a big silver coin bearing the image of a man's 
 head. The man had a high forehead, a large hooked
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 21 
 
 nose, and a projecting under lip ; furthermore, his neck 
 was bare, which I thought singular. The nurse told me 
 that the man on the coin was ' King Fredrik Rex.' 
 Upon one occasion I took to rolling the coin on the 
 floor, and, as an unfortunate consequence, it rolled into 
 a crack. I believe that my parents saw an evil omen in 
 this, since it was a christening gift. The floor was torn 
 up, and thorough and deep search was made, but King 
 Fredrik Rex never again saw the light of day. For a 
 long time afterwards I looked upon myself as a grave 
 criminal, and whenever Peter Tysker, the town policeman, 
 came out of the town hall and across to our front door, 
 I ran as hurriedly as I could into the nursery, and hid 
 under the bed. 
 
 "We did not live long in the court by the market- 
 place. My father bought a bigger house, into which we 
 moved when I was about four years old. My new home 
 was on a corner, a little farther up town, just at the foot 
 of the ' Hundevad ' hill, named after an old German- 
 speaking doctor, whose imposing wife drove a ' glass 
 coach,' that was transformed into a sleigh for winter. 
 There were many large rooms in this house, both up and 
 down stairs, and we lived a very sociable life there. But 
 we boys were not much within doors. The market- 
 place, where the two biggest schools were situated, was 
 the natural meeting-place and field of battle for the village 
 youth. Rector Oern, an old and lovable man, ruled in 
 the Latin school at that time ; in the common school 
 there was Iver Flasrud, the beadle, also an imposing old 
 fellow, who filled the post of village barber as well. The 
 boys of these two schools had a good many warmly 
 contested battles around the church, but as I belonged
 
 22 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 to neither, I was generally present as a mere onlooker. 
 For the rest, I was not much given to fighting as a boy. 
 I was much more attracted by the pillory, already men- 
 tioned, and by the town hall, with its gloomy mysteries. 
 The pillory was a reddish-brown post, of about a man's 
 height ; on top there was a big round knob, that had 
 been black at one time ; it now looked like an inviting 
 and benevolent human face, a little awry. From the 
 front of the post hung an iron chain, and from this an 
 open bow, which always seemed to me like two small 
 arms, ready to grasp my neck with the greatest of pleasure. 
 It had not been used for many years, but I remember 
 well that it stood there all the time that I lived in Skien. 
 Whether or not it is still there, I do not know. 
 
 " And then there was the town hall. Like the church, 
 it had high steps. Underneath there were dungeon 
 cells, with grated windows looking into the market-place. 
 Within the bars I have seen many pale and sinister faces. 
 One room in the basement of the town hall was called 
 the madhouse, and was really, strange as it now seems to 
 me, at one time used for the confinement of the insane. 
 This room had a grated window like the others, but inside 
 the grating the whole opening was filled by a heavy iron 
 plate, perforated with small round holes, so that it looked 
 like a colander. Furthermore, this cell was said to have 
 served for the confinement of a criminal named Brandeis, 
 much talked of at the time and afterwards branded. It 
 was also inhabited, I believe, by a life-convict, who had 
 escaped, was recaptured, and flogged out on the Li mar- 
 ket-ground. Of this latter, eye-witnesses related that he 
 danced when he was led to the place of punishment, but 
 had to be drawn back to the lockup in a cart.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 23 
 
 " In my boyhood Skien was a lively and sociable town, 
 entirely different from what it was afterwards to become. 
 Many highly-gifted, prominent, and respected families 
 then dwelt, both in the town itself, and on great farms in 
 the neighborhood. These families were mutually bound 
 together by relationships, more or less near, and balls, 
 daytime companies, and musical assemblies followed one 
 upon another in close succession, both summer and win- 
 ter. Also many travellers came to town, and, there being 
 then no inns, the visitors stopped with friends and rela- 
 tives. We nearly always had visiting strangers in our 
 spacious place, and especially at Christmas and fair time 
 our rooms were full, and open house the rule from morning 
 till evening. The Skien Fair came off in February, and 
 it was a happy time for us boys. We began to save up 
 our skillings six months beforehand for the jugglers, and 
 rope-dancers, and circus-riders, and for the purchase of 
 honey-cakes in the fair booths. I do not know if this 
 fair did much for trade ; I think of it as of a great popular 
 festival, lasting the whole week through. 
 
 " In those years not much account was made of the 
 1 7th of May 1 in Skien. A few young men shot with 
 pop-guns out on Blege Hill, or burned fireworks ; that 
 was about all. I have an idea that this reserve in our 
 otherwise demonstrative townspeople was due to consid- 
 eration for a certain highly-esteemed gentleman, who had 
 a country-seat in the neighborhood, and whose head was 
 respected for various reasons. 
 
 " But it was all the merrier on St. John's eve. 2 This 
 
 1 May 17, 1814, the date of adoption of the Norwegian con- 
 stitution. 
 
 2 Midsummer eve, June 23.
 
 24 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 was not celebrated by all the people together, but the 
 boys and the grown-up people grouped themselves into 
 five, six, or more companies, each of which worked to 
 collect the material for its own bonfire. From as early 
 as Whitsuntide we used to go in crowds around the 
 wharves and shops to beg tar-barrels. In this matter a 
 peculiar custom had reigned from time immemorial. 
 Whatever we could not get freely given us was stolen, 
 without either owner or police ever thinking to complain 
 of this sort of violence. A company could thus by 
 degrees collect a whole stack of empty tar-barrels. We 
 had the same time-honored right to old barges. When- 
 ever we found them ashore, if we could succeed in get- 
 ting one quietly away, and well concealing it, we thereby 
 acquired the right of possession, or, at least, our claims 
 were not contested. The day before St. John's eve the 
 barge was borne in triumph through the streets to the 
 place of the bonfire. A fiddler sat up in the barge. I 
 have often witnessed and taken part in such processions." 
 
 What Ibsen has thus told us is sufficient to give 
 an idea of the sort of impressions which his youth 
 received. The sad and the heavy preponderate. 
 The solemnity of the church, the cheerlessness of 
 the lockup, the severity of the pillory, the terror of 
 the madhouse, these were impressions which 
 were certainly capable of casting a shadow over 
 the joyousness of youth, awakening seriousness 
 and an early habit of thought, even when we 
 take account of the opposing influences of Fair 
 diversions and St. John's eve bonfires.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 2$ 
 
 Skien has had for a long time the credit of being 
 a very religious community, and sectarian move- 
 ments have found here one of their most grateful 
 fields of activity. The town was famous in the 
 last century as a nursery of pietism, and it was 
 here that Pastor Lammers labored, giving rise to 
 the movement that since has borne his name. 
 From Skien as a focus it spread over the country 
 and made a general stir in the religious conscious- 
 ness. Naturally the movement was strongest in 
 Skien itself, and with it Ibsen was brought into 
 intimate relations, since a number of his closest 
 kindred were affected by it. Recollections and 
 experiences of this period of unrest provided, in 
 part, the material for " Brand." 
 
 The germ of another of Ibsen's works " The 
 Young Men's Union " has been sought, not 
 without reason, in the impressions of his native 
 town. For the town had its aristocracy, consisting 
 of the officials and the wealthy, old-established 
 families of the neighborhood ; the rest were ple- 
 beians. Between these two classes there was 
 raised a barrier as insurmountable as that be- 
 tween the burghers and the nobles of a small 
 German State of the last century. It was im- 
 possible to pass this barrier by means of ability 
 and force; every one who seemed to succeed in 
 so doing was looked upon as a parvenu, d la Pro -
 
 26 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 prietaer Monsen, however secure might seem his 
 position. On the other hand, it was easy enough 
 to be put without the circle when a man's circum- 
 stances became so reduced as to no longer warrant 
 his admission. 
 
 The Ibsen household ranked with the aristoc- 
 racy both by its situation and its connections, and 
 it was, in Ibsen's earliest childhood, a centre of 
 the social life of the town. Knud Ibsen was a man 
 whose wit and other social gifts enabled him to 
 gather people about him ; and he was, besides, a 
 liberal host, taking great satisfaction in maintain- 
 ing a large and open house. 
 
 But when Henrik Ibsen was eight years old 
 there came a sudden end to this life of comfort 
 The father was obliged to turn his property over 
 to his creditors, and all that the family retained 
 after their demands had been satisfied was Ven- 
 stob farm, a small estate, neglected and in bad 
 repair, just out of town. Here the family took 
 refuge after the catastrophe, and their life here 
 was marked by an economy and a retirement that 
 stood in the sharpest contrast to its previous 
 splendor. If the family had previously paid little 
 heed to the social distinctions existing in the little 
 town, they were now made to feel them all the 
 more in the days of their reverse. The new con- 
 dition of things doubtless cast a dark shadow upon
 
 CHILDHOOD AA T D YOUTH. 2J 
 
 the little home, and next to his parents Henrik 
 Ibsen, as the oldest of the children, was the one to 
 feel it most keenly. He had been suddenly put 
 outside, and early gained the experience to which 
 he gave expression in 1850 in one of his first 
 poems : 
 
 " Either must them at life's feast 
 Sit at table as a guest, 
 Or a looker-on stand staring 
 Through the lighted window-pane, 
 In the cold and wind and rain, 
 Outside, not to enter daring." 
 
 Certain it is, in any case, that attention was drawn 
 at an early age to his seriousness, so unnatural in a 
 boy. He did not play like the other children. 
 When his four younger brothers and sisters strove 
 with one another in play out in the yard, he 
 sought refuge from their thoughtless pranks in a 
 little room opening upon a passage which led to 
 the kitchen, and fastened the door with a hasp. 
 He sat here, not only in summer, but in the coldest 
 of the winter. " For us," his sister writes in the 
 letter already mentioned, " he was not a comforta- 
 ble boy to get along with, and we used to bother 
 him regularly by throwing stones and snowballs 
 at the wall and door to get him to come out and 
 play with us ; and when he could not stand our 
 siege any longer, he would rush out and after us ; 
 but he was not skilful at any sort of sport, and
 
 28 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 violence was very far from his character, so noth- 
 ing came of his appearance, and when he had 
 chased us far enough off he went back into his 
 closet." 
 
 What was he about in there? 
 
 First and foremost, he busied himself over a lot 
 of old books he had got hold of. In this closet 
 he became acquainted with the old book of which 
 Hedwig speaks in the third act of " The Wild 
 Duck," and the words which he places in her 
 mouth may certainly be reckoned as a personal 
 recollection from his childhood. 
 
 " And do you read in the books ? " asks 
 Gregers. 
 
 " Yes, when I can manage it; but most of 
 them are in English, and I do not know that. I 
 look at the pictures, however. There is a big, 
 heavy book called ' Harrison's History of Lon- 
 don; ' it is certainly a hundred years old, and 
 there are such a lot of pictures in it. At the 
 beginning there is a picture of death with an 
 hour-glass and a maiden. I think that is horrid. 
 But then there are all the other pictures, with 
 churches, and castles, and streets, and great ships 
 sailing on the sea." 
 
 When he was not at his books he occupied him- 
 self with magic arts. " He got leave to appear 
 on certain Sunday afternoons as a magician in
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 2Q 
 
 one of the rooms of the house," we read in the 
 letter, " and all the neighbors around were invited 
 to witness the performance. I see him distinctly, 
 in his short jacket, standing behind a large chest 
 that was decorated and draped for the occasion, 
 and where he presided over performances that 
 appeared like witchcraft to the amazed spectators. 
 Of course no one knew that Henrik's younger 
 brother, well paid for his assistance, was inside 
 the chest. The brother had stipulated for pay by 
 threatening a scandal if it were withheld ; and as 
 that would have been, to a boy with Henrik's 
 disposition, the most dreadful thing that could 
 have happened, he always promised everything 
 that the other demanded." 
 
 He also busied himself with pencil and water- 
 colors. He drew a great many figures, gor- 
 geously clad, on pasteboard. These were cut out, 
 fastened to bits of wood, so that they could stand 
 on their own legs, and arranged in various groups, 
 some busily conversing, others in serious atti- 
 tudes, with a mien that made it evident that some- 
 thing important was on foot. These were the 
 first scenic arrangements of the future dramatist. 
 
 The only out-door pleasure that he cared for 
 was building. At times he was very busy at this. 
 " I remember among other things a fort," his 
 sister writes. " It seemed to me then a great
 
 3O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 work of art, and he and his younger brother had 
 worked at it for a long time. But the fort was not 
 destined to stand ; as soon as completed it was 
 stormed and demolished." Probably he had been 
 reading of some historical event, and had taken 
 this means of giving it reality. 
 
 He attended a real-school in Skien, conducted 
 by two candidates in theology. Here he learned 
 the common branches, and a little Latin. He was 
 especially interested in the religious instructions, 
 and would sit for hours with his text-book, hunt- 
 ing up in the Bible the passages referred to. 
 
 When he was fourteen the family moved back 
 into Skien ; he was confirmed shortly afterwards, 
 and then left home to earn his living and make 
 his way in the world. Under such economical 
 conditions as had been his lot, there can be no 
 question of choosing the profession to which one 
 is most inclined. One must put up with that 
 which can be had at the least expense, and that 
 gives the most speedy promise of support. 
 
 Ibsen wished to become an artist, and had de- 
 voted himself with growing enthusiasm to painting 
 and drawing; he even kept up these occupations 
 after his appearance as an author. Of how 
 marked his talents in this direction were, it is at 
 present impossible to form an opinion, as I have 
 not been able to trace a single one of his artistic
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUl^H. 3* 
 
 efforts. 1 But that it was more than a fancy with 
 him is shown by the deep interest in plastic art 
 which he has kept through the years. Paintings 
 have been the only things that he has cared to 
 possess all the way down to the present time, and 
 during his frequent and long sojourns in Italy he 
 has made a very pretty collection of renaissance 
 pictures. He is very proud of this collection, and 
 has taken it with him, regardless of cost, wherever 
 he has settled down for any length of time. His 
 fine and unerring judgment of plastic art also dis- 
 closes in him the painters disposition. 
 
 In his youth, however, there could of course be 
 no question of the cultivation of this talent; the 
 circumstances of his family were too restricted to 
 admit of such a thing, and so he was sent to the 
 Grimstad apothecary to serve an apprenticeship 
 as a pharmacist. At the age of sixteen he left 
 nis native town and his family, never to return to 
 them except for one or two brief visits. 
 
 What had he received from life there at home 
 in his native town? It had laid a burden upon 
 his mind. It had aroused in him a feeling of re- 
 pugnance for all those instruments of coercion 
 that society brings to bear upon those who, by 
 
 1 Botten-Hansen, in a biographical sketch published in the " II- 
 lustreret Nyhedsblad " for 1863, calls him " a not unsuccessful 
 dilettante painter." 
 
 3
 
 32 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 their own fault, or by the force of circumstances, 
 come into conflict with the general order of things. 
 The prison, the madhouse, the pillory, and pub- 
 lic opinion had impressed themselves as so many 
 threats upon his consciousness. The contrast 
 between poverty and affluence had been made one 
 of his first experiences; he had learned to know 
 both before he was old enough to think clearly 
 about them, and he had early been made to feel 
 the difference that exists socially between the poor 
 and the rich. All this had developed that reserve 
 to which he had inherited a tendency; it had 
 taught him to keep his own counsel, had made 
 him quiet, serious, and taciturn. 
 
 Life for him did not mean intercourse with 
 others ; his life was in the world of thought and 
 of dreams. 
 
 Thus accoutred he left his native town and 
 went to his new dwelling-place. This was, as has 
 been said, when he was entering upon his six- 
 teenth year, and he remained there until he was 
 nearly twenty-two. Thus he spent more than five 
 years in this corner. 
 
 Grimstad is an even smaller town than Skien. 
 When Ibsen was there it did not have more than 
 eight hundred inhabitants. 
 
 Like most Norwegian towns to the eastward of 
 Kristianssand, it is a little village of ship-owners,
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 33 
 
 substantial and well-to-do. And with success 
 comes comfort. In a little village like this the 
 thought of the inhabitants does not fly far; when 
 they step over the threshold it is usually to inquire 
 " whether the sloop has gotten over," or about 
 the latest freight-quotations. Rarely, when great 
 events are happening in the outside world, they 
 cast some feeble waves against these coast towns, 
 and those especially interested exchange a word 
 or two about the latest news when they meet one 
 another in the street. This done, they shake their 
 heads and pass on. In such a town there is one 
 club, one apothecary, one barber, and one inn. 
 The apothecary is the town exchange, where all 
 the idlers gather and discuss the events of the 
 day, local matters especially, always of most in- 
 terest. Every one knows his neighbors inside and 
 out. No jot of a man's private affairs is concealed. 
 And they all salute one another; the richest man 
 gets the lowest bow, the next richest the next low- 
 est, and so down the scale to the common laborer, 
 who only gets a nod, while he himself stands re- 
 spectfully, hat in hand. A stranger, coming to 
 such a town, is astonished at the respectful salu- 
 tations given him by the poor people whom he 
 meets ; all this cringing makes him ill at ease. 
 This is because he does not understand such 
 patriarchal customs; but the unsophisticated vil-
 
 34 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 lager understands them, and he finds it obviously 
 wise to observe them when he meets a well-dressed 
 stranger in the street, whether he know him or not, 
 for one can never tell how great a personage the 
 stranger may be. In such a town everything 
 moves slowly, quietly, and smoothly on ; there is 
 plenty of time, and haste makes waste. If a thing 
 is not done to-day, it can be done to-morrow. All 
 that is not customary is excess ; personal peculiar- 
 ities are reckoned as faults ; any display of energy 
 is regarded as eccentricity, and eccentricity is a 
 crime. 
 
 But the sea stretches without, free and mighty, 
 bringing wealth, and wreckage, and the latest 
 Parisian fashions to the snug little town, from the 
 great restless world in the distance. 
 
 Such are these little towns even yet, and such 
 was certainly this one in Ibsen's youth and long 
 afterwards. 
 
 From the sketch given by Ibsen in his preface 
 to the second edition of " Catilina," we know what 
 was his life in this little community. We know 
 that these five years were a period of growth and 
 unrest in his life. He formed bold plans for the 
 future, and was swayed by ambitious ideas. He 
 would not be content with being a pharmacist; he 
 would, to begin with, climb a round higher up the 
 social ladder, become a student, and study medi-
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 35 
 
 cine. And at the same time his poetic faculty 
 gave its first signs of life ; he had to steal the 
 hours he spent in study, and from these stolen 
 study hours, he again stole minutes for poetry. 
 
 This was in 1848 and 1849. The February 
 Revolution, and the political events to which it 
 gave rise in other lands, put all Europe into com- 
 motion, and the disturbance was mirrored in 
 young Henrik Ibsen's mind. He followed the 
 march of events as well as a Grimstad apothecary's 
 apprentice could, and with youthful ardor he took 
 sides with all who fought for freedom and against 
 the oppressor. This spirit appears in his poems 
 written during that period. 
 
 When, in August, 1849, the Magyars suffered 
 their overwhelming defeat, he wrote a glowing 
 poem " To Hungary," in which he gave expression 
 to his grief at Hungary's and freedom's defeat. 
 At the close, however, he found consolation in the 
 thought that the vanquished Hungarian heroes 
 like the Poles, and like those who, on the scaffold, 
 drenched German earth with their blood would 
 stand as shining examples for the coming 
 generation. 
 
 " When the strength of younger races, on the throne avenging 
 
 hurled, 
 
 Mighty as an autumn tempest, drives the tyrant from the world, 
 Shall the name of Magyar a noble watchword for us be, 
 And the shades of fallen heroes lead us on to victory ! "
 
 36 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 At this time he wrote also the series of sonnets 
 about the war between Germany and Denmark, 
 which are mentioned in the preface to " Catilina." 
 There were twelve of them in all, and they bore 
 the resounding title : " Scandinavians, Awake ! An 
 appeal to the Norwegian and Swedish Brothers." 
 This was a sort of precursor of " A Brother in 
 Need," and in it the youthful writer enthusiastically 
 proclaimed that Norway and Sweden must come 
 to Denmark's help, if they would maintain their 
 honor, and secure their future as independent 
 states. 
 
 That a young man in a subordinate position 
 should entertain such ideas and put them into 
 verse was obviously a fact that could not escape 
 notice in such a " crow-corner " especially as he 
 did not refrain, " upon more exalted occasions," 
 from expressing himself in conversation with a 
 passion in consonance with his verse. 
 
 Nothing more was needed to mark him out for 
 attention. That a raw apprentice to an apothecary 
 should dare, in the presence of his elders, to talk 
 of subjects concerning which they did not them- 
 selves dare to have an opinion, this was too 
 audacious ! 
 
 But the matter did not rest here. Having once 
 put himself into antagonism to his surroundings, 
 Ibsen was not the man to shrink from battle. He
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 37 
 
 had the modest man's shyness about putting him- 
 self forward, and the diffident man's terror of 
 causing scandal and exciting derision; but for this 
 very reason he felt it to be a significant fact that 
 his sayings should cause offence and awaken laugh- 
 ter ; and, instead of yielding to attack, he assumed 
 the offensive himself. The young and undeveloped 
 genius, with the confidence of youth, held his own 
 in this nest of narrow conservatism. " Truth com- 
 pels me to say," he humorously observes in the 
 preface to " Catilina," " that my actions, under 
 these circumstances, were not such as were calcu- 
 lated to arouse any great hope that society would, 
 as a result of my efforts, be a gainer in civic virtue ; 
 for I fell out with many, on account of epigrams 
 and caricature-sketches, who deserved better of me, 
 and whose friendship I prized at heart. Altogether, 
 while a heavy storm was raging without, I found 
 myself on a war-footing with the little community 
 to which I was bound by circumstances." 
 
 It may be said that this war was but a tempest 
 in a teapot ; yet how characteristic of Ibsen it was ! 
 how distinctly it indicated his subsequent attitude 
 towards society ! 
 
 The relation between society and the individual 
 is usually considered to be a peaceful one. Society 
 is an agreement between its individual members to 
 do and to leave undone certain things ; the welfare
 
 38 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 of the whole being the welfare of its parts. Soci- 
 ety protects the individual, upon condition that the 
 individual fulfil certain obligations towards society, 
 obligations whose purpose is to strengthen and 
 sustain the system of mutual protection upon which 
 the permanence of society depends, and to secure 
 the regular and healthful progress which is its 
 aim. 
 
 But the relation between society and the indi- 
 vidual is not, after all, quite so idyllic and peaceful 
 as this view would have it ; there are shadows as well, 
 and the darkest of them is the tendency of society to 
 encroach unduly upon the individual. Society has 
 a tendency to exert its regulative influence over 
 territories with which it is not concerned, a ten- 
 dency to impose laws upon the individual in fields 
 where he has a right to be his own master. In 
 matters of opinion and conviction, for 'example, 
 the individual should be sovereign ; and yet here 
 society tends to make a standard of the judgment 
 of the majority, and to condemn those individuals 
 who refuse to recognize it. And the smaller the 
 society, the greater the number of these regions 
 does it seek to control, the greater is its incli- 
 nation to set rules in matters where individuality 
 should be its own rule; the less willing it is to 
 admit that the exception may be justified. In this 
 there lies a danger, not merely for individual free-
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 39 
 
 dom, but for society itself, for social progress de- 
 pends upon originality, and originality is in its. 
 very nature exceptional. Genius is the most im- 
 portant and necessary of all exceptions ; and when 
 society so narrows itself as to leave no place for 
 genius, it becomes necessary to revolt against so- 
 ciety and to oppose the principle of the excep- 
 tional to the tyranny of custom. Individually 
 viewed, the relation between the individual and 
 society thus becomes, not a friendly relation for 
 mutual benefit, but an opposed and hostile rela- 
 tion. Society appears to the individual as a tyrant, 
 not a protector, as a hindrance, not an aid to per- 
 sonal development, and its conventions as instru- 
 ments of torture, to rack or compress individuality 
 into conformity with the set standard. This is the 
 view that has led to the anarchistic social theories 
 of our age. 
 
 To such a relation with his environment Henrik 
 Ibsen felt that he had come during his appren- 
 ticeship at Grimstad ; and there already dawned 
 upon his mind, dimly and with the uncertain 
 light of youth, the view that was to illumine so 
 clearly a whole series of the works of his ripest 
 manhood. 
 
 Under such circumstances, in the preparation 
 for his examen artium, he studied Sallust's " Cati- 
 line " and Cicero's " Orations against Catiline."
 
 4O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 He devoured these accounts of the old Roman 
 anarchist ; and. through the moralizing and hypo- 
 critical indignation of Sallust, and the rhetorical 
 pleading of Cicero, there appeared to him a pic- 
 ture of Catiline in revolt against society, a pic- 
 ture that in more than one respect foreshadowed 
 his own future development. 
 
 Vasenius has set himself the task of proving 
 that the Catiline .of Ibsen's drama is a true rep- 
 resentation of the historic personage of that 
 name, or, as he expresses it, " that the intuition 
 of this youthful poet led him to grasp, with his- 
 torical accuracy, the fundamental motive of Cati- 
 line's character." But, however interesting this 
 question may be from an aesthetic standpoint, it 
 has little psychological value, because it does 
 not enlighten us as to the poet's relation to the 
 material that lay before him. The poet of " Cati- 
 lina " had no inkling of those historical researches 
 to which the Finnish critic appeals. He knew 
 only the Catiline of Cicero and Sallust, and to 
 ascribe the rest to intuition is in no wise profit- 
 able, since to modern psychology intuition ap- 
 pears to be as mystical a conception as that of 
 "vital force" to modern physiology. The only 
 historical investigation that would here be of 
 profit would be a comparison of Ibsen's work 
 with its sources, and a setting forth of his atti-
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 41 
 
 tude toward them. We will be contented with 
 calling attention to one or two important points 
 only. 
 
 Between Sallust's and Cicero's conception of 
 Catiline there is no difference of kind, merely 
 one of degree. In the eyes of both he is an 
 almost wholly unprincipled adventurer, who is 
 only concerned with the gratification of his pas- 
 sions, and who, in a sort of desperate madness, 
 resorts to the most desperate measures, since he 
 cannot attain his purpose by lawful means. 
 
 For Ibsen he is, on the contrary, first and 
 foremost an indignant idealist, seeing and resent- 
 ing the utter rottenness of his time, but himself 
 too much a child of that corrupt age to play the 
 part of reformer successfully. He is a Catiline 
 who thinks and speaks like a sort of Cato. Read 
 only his characterization, given in the very first 
 scene, of the condition of affairs at Rome : 
 
 " Here reigns injustice, 
 And tyranny finds elsewhere no such sway. 
 We are indeed republican in name ; 
 Yet every citizen is but a bondsman 
 Plunged into debt, dependent as a serf 
 Upon the favor of a venal senate. 
 Vanished for aye the ancient social spirit, 
 The freedom which was once Rome's proudest boast. 
 And life and safety are a grace bestowed 
 But by the senate, to be bought with gold. 
 Here justice must give way to despotism, 
 The nobles by the mighty overshadowed."
 
 42 HENRIK IBSKN. 
 
 And the poet undoubtedly wishes to be taken 
 literally and directly when, immediately afterward, 
 he allows Catiline to characterize himself as 
 
 " A man whose haart is stirred in freedom's cause, 
 
 The foe of all injustice and all wrong, 
 Friend of the feeble, crushed by unjust laws, 
 And filled with courage to o'erthrow the strong." 
 
 Or when, later, he represents him as thus out- 
 lining his plans: 
 
 "The civic freedom 't is I would restore, 
 The public spirit that in times gone by 
 Held sway in Rome. I would bring back to earth 
 That golden age when every Roman gladly 
 Offered his life upon his country's altar. 
 His patrimony for the people's welfare." 
 
 In one place the author makes him even refer 
 to Cato by name, when speaking of the dreams 
 that he has cherished : - 
 
 " Dreams have I had at times, and mighty visions 
 Have risen to my view, and passed before me. 
 I dreamed I soared with wings like Icarus 
 High above earth, beneath the vault of heaven ; 
 I dreamed my hands were granted of the gods 
 Gigantic strength and power to grasp the lightning. 
 And with this hand I seized the thunderbolt, 
 To hurl it on the city far beneath me. 
 And then the lurid, licking flames arose, 
 And Rome was laid in ashen ruins low. 
 Then called I with a loud and potent voice 
 On Cato's kin to rise from out their tombs, 
 And myriad spirits rose at my command, 
 Took, life again, and raised Rome from the dust"
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 43 
 
 Ibsen's own revolutionary enthusiasm rings in 
 all this talk about civic spirit, and in these pro- 
 tests against oppression and injustice. General 
 and indefinite as they are, they make of " Cati- 
 lina " a literary landmark in the revolutionary 
 movement of the forties. The February Revo- 
 lution had, as is well known, a social character, 
 and had herein a point of similarity to that of 
 Catiline. He might indeed have been made the 
 hero of the work of some revolutionary poet of 
 his own age, for his programme was to a certain 
 extent socialistic. When Cicero relates of him 
 that he denied the possibility of a faithful cham- 
 pion of the poor arising save from the ranks of 
 the poor, 1 he records a trait that such a poet 
 would have put to use. Ibsen, however, lets this 
 pass almost unnoticed ; he gives a free transla- 
 tion of the expression, " the champion of the 
 poor " (" friend of the feeble, crushed by unjust 
 laws"), and there lets the matter rest. The social 
 aspect of the revolutionary movement of the age 
 had not yet been perceived by him, and so the 
 plans of his Catiline were represented as essen- 
 tially political and moral. Ibsen merely gave 
 form to his youthful and indefinite revolutionary 
 sympathies, and altered them only so far as was 
 
 1 " Negavit miserorum fidelem defensorem inveniri posse, nisi 
 eum qui ipse miser esset."
 
 44 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 demanded by historical fact. Rome, in Catiline's 
 time, was a republic in decay ; consequently his 
 purpose must be to restore the good old repub- 
 lican Rome, while the revolutionary party of the 
 forties did not seek to re-establish an old order 
 of things, but to shape a new one. 
 
 Ibsen's Catiline is then but the historically cos- 
 tumed image of his own feelings and moods at that 
 time, and the author puts his most secret thoughts 
 and dreams into the mouth of his hero. In the 
 letter already quoted from, his sister tells of a con- 
 versation she had with him at that time, upon the 
 occasion of one of his visits to the family. They 
 were walking out to the Kapitels Mountain, a 
 height near Skien, bearing the ruins of an old 
 cloistered church. He explained to her that he 
 wished to attain to " the utmost possible clearness 
 of vision and fulness of power." 
 
 " And when you shall have attained to it, what 
 then? " she asked. 
 
 " Then I wish to die," he answered. 
 
 This ideal, enthusiastic, and impersonal ambition 
 of his youth is exactly reproduced in the following 
 verses of " Catilina." 
 
 " If but one moment I might shine in splendor, 
 Blaze like a falling star upon the night, 
 If I might but achieve one noble deed, 
 And link the name of Catiline forever 
 To fame and to undying memory,
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 45 
 
 Then gladly would I, in the hour of triumph 
 All things forsake, hie to an unknown shore ; 
 Then gladly plunge the dagger in my heart, 
 
 And gladly die, - for then I should have lived." 
 
 k 
 
 But however closely the figure of Catiline, with 
 his craving for the ideal, stands related to his poet, 
 Ibsen found himself compelled, in the development 
 of the piece, to set himself apart from his subject, 
 to properly motivate the tragic outcome. 
 
 Catiline succumbs without having realized his 
 splendid dream, and this is brought about by two 
 causes. 
 
 One of these is to be sought in the pettiness of 
 his following, unable to comprehend the worth of 
 his noble and lofty aims, and willing to fight only 
 for personal ends. It is a recognition of this that 
 impels Catiline to the utterance of the destructive 
 or nihilistic fancies which are thus expressed : 
 
 " Well, then, if ancient Rome may not be raised 
 Up by this hand, our Rome shall pass away ! 
 And soon, where ranks of marble columns stand, 
 Columns of smoke shall rise 'mid crackling flames; 
 Temples and palaces shall lie in ruins, 
 And from its height the Capitol be hurled." 
 
 But he finally sees that he cannot attain even this 
 negative end with the " miscreant and cowardly 
 horde," attached to him only through necessity 
 and love of plunder. Then, and for the first time, 
 his watchword becomes revenge :
 
 46 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 " Revenge for all the hopes and all the dreams, 
 Crushed for me by a hostile destiny ! 
 Revenge for all my wrecked and wasted life." 
 
 So, by the pettiness of circumstance, he is driven 
 step by step from his ideal plans into negation, 
 disappointment, and thirst for revenge, and thereby 
 is his downfall justified. 
 
 But there is, as has been said, another cause to 
 bring about this end, and it is to be found in 
 Catiline's personality. For Ibsen has not made an 
 ideal abstraction of his hero ; he has indeed be- 
 stowed upon him a variety of personal qualities 
 which raise him high above the crowd ; he makes 
 him resolute, courageous, sympathetic, and truth- 
 loving, and beyond all this, he has given him 
 the ideal craving to rise above his surroundings; 
 but he has endowed him besides with passions of 
 the wildest sort. Ibsen did not for a moment 
 doubt that Sallust and Cicero are right in saying 
 that Catiline had led a lawless existence, and 
 given himself over to the wildest of excess. So 
 there is a split in his personality, a contradiction 
 in his nature, that influences the shaping of his 
 destiny. 
 
 Finally, then, Catiline appeared to Ibsen a man 
 with great plans and a strong thirst to accomplish 
 something great and good, but unsupported by his 
 environment, and without the purity of character
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 47 
 
 and the energy of volition that are needful for the 
 accomplishment of a lofty purpose. So that Ibsen 
 has good cause to say, in the preface to the second 
 edition : " Many things and much upon which my 
 later work has turned the contradiction between 
 endowment and desire, between capacity and will, 
 at once the entire tragedy and comedy of man- 
 kind and of the individual may here be dimly 
 discerned." 
 
 In the piece this contradiction appears not only 
 in Catiline's character, it becomes incarnate in two 
 women, Aurelia and Furia. These are rather two 
 principles than two characters, disputing for the 
 possession of the hero at the same time that they 
 are struggling within him. It might almost be 
 said that in these two women his thoughts and 
 feelings take shape. Aurelia, his wife, is depicted 
 as his better self; she has the power, at certain 
 moments, of drawing out all that is tender and 
 gentle in his disposition. The vestal Furia, on the 
 other hand, has an equally great, but very different 
 power over him ; she represents his wild and pas- 
 sionate desires ; she inspires him to both deed and 
 misdeed. She is at once an amazon, calling him 
 to battle for great ends, and a goddess of ven- 
 geance, driving him on to destruction. Of this 
 she is fully conscious, for, although she loves 
 Catiline, her constant thought is to be revenged 
 
 4
 
 48 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 upon him, for he has seduced her sister, Silvia, 
 and thus been the cause of her death. 
 
 But, abstract and formal as is the conception of 
 these two figures, there may be traced in them the 
 germ of the two female figures who long ruled 
 over Ibsen's fancy, and who appear again and 
 again in his imaginative work. Aurelia stands for 
 the tender affection that sacrifices all and pardons 
 all ; she is the first sketch of a whole gallery of 
 Ibsen's women ; and, like all first sketches, this 
 one is rough and overdrawn; her self-abnegation, 
 gentleness, and tenderness know no bounds; she 
 is in this respect superhuman. But the funda- 
 mental traits of later and allied creations are easily 
 to be recognized in her. 
 
 Furia is also recognizable as the prototype of 
 another important, if less numerous group. She 
 is a wild and grandly conceived Valkyrie, and has, 
 as such, the fundamental characteristics of Hjordis. 
 When she thus discourses of her own life, * 
 
 " How empty is this uneventful life, 
 Dim as the flame of an expiring torch ! 
 A field how narrow for my great ambition, 
 For lofty purpose, and for wild desire ! 
 All is contracted here within these walls; 
 Here life grows set and hope di'es slowly out ; 
 Here drowsily the day sinks to its end, 
 And never thought takes shape and grows to deed," 
 
 we get a distinct glimpse of Hjordis in the dis- 
 tance. The difference is only this, that Furia is
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 49 
 
 confined to vestal service in the temple of the 
 goddess, and Hjordis is tied to Gunnar's farm as 
 his wife. When Furia, a moment afterward, pro- 
 poses to Catiline that they fly together, to begin a 
 new life, rich in thought and deed, in some far-off 
 country, we involuntarily call to mind that Hjordis 
 makes exactly the same proposition to Sigurd. 
 They even have in common a thirst for vengeance 
 upon the man whom they love, although the cause 
 is different ; and both end by stabbing him, to find 
 in the world of shades that union that was denied 
 them in life. 
 
 When " Catilina " was written Ibsen had read, 
 as far as he can remember, no other dramatists 
 but Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger. There are 
 things in " Catilina " that might lead one to think 
 of Shakspere's Roman tragedies ; in the closing 
 act, especially, one is tempted to recall the last 
 act of " Julius Caesar; " but at that time Ibsen knew 
 Shakspere only by name, so there can be no ques- 
 tion of influence from that quarter. He was ac- 
 customed to being, to a great extent, his own 
 instructor in preparing for his examination ; he 
 was that also in his early dramatic efforts. This 
 makes " Catilina " all the more remarkable, dra- 
 matically considered. He had not learned much 
 of Oehlenschlaeger as yet; he had got from him 
 the idea of the blank iambic pentameter verse,
 
 5O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and in his moulding of that verse there are various 
 things that point to Oehlenschlaiger's influence. 
 But Ibsen's restless spirit made it impossible for 
 him to adhere to any system. After a while the 
 pentameter unrhymed iambics become too monot- 
 onous for him ; he seeks for a form more lyrical in 
 character, and finds relief in long series of rhymed 
 iambics, finding a haven at last in pompous tro- 
 chaic strophes, turgidly lyrical in their movement 
 The same characteristic restlessness appears in 
 the scenic arrangement of the material. The three 
 acts take us to no less than nine different spots ; 
 in the first act scenes are shifted with truly Shaks- 
 perean frequency, there being five tableaux, or 
 nearly as many as there are scenes. In the second 
 act things are better managed, and there are but 
 three changes of scene, while the entire third act 
 passes in one place. The composition of the piece 
 itself evidently contributed to the author's com- 
 mand of scenic arrangement. Still more charac- 
 teristic is the dramatic development. There is no 
 question of real counter-play, for not one of 
 Catiline's opponents appears in the cast; action 
 is reduced to a minimum, and dramatic situations 
 are almost wanting. Furia, with her desire for 
 revenge, only serves to hasten the development; 
 the treason of Curtius results in a purely external 
 catastrophe; and the duplicity of Lentulus is an
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 51 
 
 episode that has no influence upon the march of 
 events. The conflict is altogether an internal one, 
 and the development occurs only in Catiline's soul, 
 yet it is not wholly without dramatic interest. In 
 the energy with which is traced the psychological 
 development, from Catiline's self-accusation in the 
 first speeches, through his disappointments and 
 perplexities, until the madness which finally clouds 
 his brain, in this energy a reader of the present 
 day may discern, in spite of youthful awkwardness 
 and youthful defects, the stuff of which the future 
 master of the psychological drama was to be 
 made. 
 
 " Catilina's " fate, when it left the author's hand, 
 is generally known. Its formal defects being very 
 apparent, it found favor with neither theatre nor 
 publisher. The theatrical management politely but 
 firmly rejected it, and among the publishers " the 
 one making the most favorable offer demanded 
 such and such a sum for printing the piece with- 
 out any promise of honorarium." When it even- 
 tually was printed in Christiania, at the expense 
 of an enthusiastic and self-denying friend, its fate 
 was not much more cheerful. It excited a little 
 attention and aroused some interest in student 
 circles, but the critics found it immature, and the 
 public was entirely indifferent to it. While people 
 poured into the theatre to witness such a trifle as
 
 52 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 " In the Mountain Pasture," 1 as good as no one 
 cared to purchase the promising maiden effort of 
 an author destined later to become the foremost 
 dramatist of Norway, and one of the most striking 
 figures in literature. Although one of the local au- 
 thorities in aesthetical matters, Prof. M. J. Monrad, 
 undertook to reply to the critics, and expressed 
 himself in praise of the piece, there were only 
 about thirty copies sold altogether. One of the 
 few people who found a use for the book was a 
 huckster who discovered it to be very well fitted for 
 use as wrapping-paper, and at the time of Ibsen's 
 first sojourn in Christiania bought from him and his 
 friend a large number of copies, one evening when 
 their stomachs were as empty as their purses. 
 
 " For a few days following we lacked none of 
 the necessaries of life," Ibsen remarks laconically. 
 
 The picture which " Catilina " gives us of Hen- 
 rik Ibsen at the age of twenty is deeply inter- 
 esting, but, as I have already suggested, the 
 nature of his material and the restrictions of the 
 dramatic form compelled him to set Catiline so far 
 apart from himself that but a few points of re- 
 semblance remain between the author and his 
 hero. So by the aid of "Catilina" alone it is 
 impossible to get a distinct picture of the young 
 poet. Other materials are needed ; expressions of 
 1 "Til Saeters," a vaudeville very popular at that time.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 53 
 
 a more personal character are required, in other 
 words, letters or poems. 
 
 It follows as a matter of course that Ibsen, dur- 
 ing his stay in Grimstad, wrote other poems than 
 the political appeal referred to in the preface to 
 " Catilina;" but of these early lyric efforts almost 
 nothing got into print. Two poems in the " Chris- 
 tiania Post," one of them being a copy of verses in 
 memory of Oehlenschlsger, are all that I know of, 
 and they help us very little. Ibsen himself has 
 not preserved a single line of manuscript from that 
 period ; when he mentions his political poems in 
 the preface to " Catilina " he does it from memory, 
 adding a cautious " as far as I can recollect." 
 
 Through a very fortunate combination of cir- 
 cumstances I discovered, however, that his youth- 
 ful poems were not lost. Quite a number of such 
 poems are still in existence, and they serve to fill 
 out the sketch of the young poet, outlined by 
 " Catilina," in the most interesting manner. 
 
 The collection consists of twenty-six poems 
 neatly written in a small bound volume. One of 
 them dates from 1847 that is from Ibsen's nine- 
 teenth year, three from 1848, thirteen from 1849, 
 and the remaining nine from 1850. Nearly all of 
 them were written at Grimstad, only two or three 
 having come into being after his departure from 
 that town.
 
 54 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 It would be natural to expect such a collection 
 of juvenile poems to contain many suggestions 
 derived from reading, especially as we know from 
 other sources that their poet developed into full 
 self-consciousness at a much later date. And yet 
 these poems are far less literary than might be 
 thought. In form they are marked by an ease 
 hardly to be expected of the author of " Catilina," 
 yet not very characteristic. But in matter they are 
 all the more so. 
 
 At that time Welhaven set the tone for Norwe- 
 gian lyrical poetry. His "Later Poems" (1845) 
 had made an epoch in romantic poetry and the 
 poetry of nature. They were " spirit ballads " of 
 the romantic school, with its predilections for the 
 middle ages; and with them the nymph-lyric, with 
 its symbolical conception of nature, had come to 
 the front. 
 
 Only once do we notice in Ibsen's work any 
 influence from this quarter, and that is in a poem 
 on " The Miller Boy," which is written in the con- 
 ventional manner of the period, and provided with 
 singing nymphs, harp-playing nixies, and other 
 romantic apparatus. Aside from this, Ibsen re- 
 mains uninfluenced by the tendency of the time, 
 he even sets himself in opposition to it, fully con- 
 scious of what he is about. In a poem " To the 
 Bards of Norway," dating from early in 1850, he
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 55 
 
 asks the poets why they so worship the past 
 ages, " old days enshrined with mouldering mem- 
 ories ; " has not the gift of song been granted 
 them 
 
 " To serve mankind, 
 
 Who would within the poet's inspired song, 
 Their joys, their sorrows, and their longings find ? " 
 
 They sang often enough of nature in Norway, 
 but how came they to forget the Norwegian heart? 
 There lies a treasure worthy the quest of Norwe- 
 gian poetry, whose aim should be to portray the 
 life of the people. 
 
 In this first poetic programme- Ibsen's own fu- 
 ture work is foreshadowed, although it was not 
 destined to take the form of an epic presentation of 
 the life of the people. 
 
 For the rest, he made at that time no attempt to 
 write poetry in harmony -with his theories. The 
 poems of his " Catilina " period are all purely per- 
 sonal ; they are concerned with his own moods, 
 thoughts, and impressions. 
 
 Hardly a trace of the future satirist is to be 
 noticed ; a mild attempt at satirical description of 
 a ball is the only instance of this sort. 
 
 The fundamental mood of these poems is elegiac 
 rather than satirical. Many of them have a cast of 
 gentle, dreamy melancholy. The repose of night, 
 rather than the turmoil of day, appeals to their 
 author, and he is one of those for whom moon-
 
 56 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 beams are more poetical than sunlight. No less 
 than six of the poems in this collection are the 
 reflection of moonlight moods. " Moonlight on 
 the Sea," " A Moonlight Musing," " A Moonlight 
 Stroll after the Ball," - - these are titles that need 
 no further explanation. The last-named of these 
 pieces has a special interest, inasmuch as it con- 
 tains the motive of one of the most remarkable of 
 Ibsen's later poems. 
 
 " Hush, how quiet ! from the ball-room stream those joyous tones 
 
 no more, 
 
 And the sounds that pierced the silence of the night time, now 
 are o'er. 
 
 " In the far-off west the moonbeams faint and ever fainter grow, 
 While the earth forgetful sleeps beneath the lilies of the snow. 
 
 " But although the ball is over, yet my thoughts still linger long 
 On the memory of a sylph-like figure flitting midst the 
 throng. 
 
 " Soon the moon shall set, and I with sleep's strong arms encom- 
 passed be, 
 
 And my soul, with memory's treasure laden, glide o'er dream- 
 land's sea." 
 
 As we may see, the motive of " Away " lies 
 ready to hand in this poem, but it is to undergo 
 a characteristic transformation and in place of 
 the moonlight we are to have a cheerless night, 
 dark and windy. Dr. Georg Brandes has taken 
 occasion to remark concerning "Away" and a
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 57 
 
 few others among Ibsen's loveliest poems, that 
 " at some time in the battle of life a lyrical Pega- 
 sus was slain under him." If it may truthfully be 
 said that the author of the fourth act of " Brand " 
 and of the scene of Aase's death in " Peer Gynt " 
 ever had his " lyrical Pegasus " slain, these ele- 
 giac poems of his youth, in spite of their short- 
 comings, will at least bear witness that it once 
 had life. They are the work of a writer whose 
 native sensibilities have not as yet been tempered 
 by that heat of which Ibsen was to sing later, in 
 " Memory's Might." 
 
 But if he had not yet become hardened, his 
 natural reserve had become developed. There is 
 in these poems nothing of the social instinct com- 
 mon to youth; there are no songs in which the 
 author speaks for others; he always says "I," 
 never " we ; " although many be present he is 
 everywhere alone. 
 
 And he is everywhere the introspective muser, 
 with whom the thought has a greater value than 
 the reality underlying it. He has intercourse with 
 actuality only that his intellectual and emotional 
 life may be fructified thereby ; as soon as this is 
 accomplished, actuality no longer concerns him. 
 The poet whose prophetic fancy saw thrones fall- 
 ing at the assault of the hosts of freedom is really 
 occupied much more with the past than with the
 
 58 HEN R IK IBSEN. 
 
 future. Not hope, but memory, is the theme of 
 his youthful song. 
 
 At times he dwells upon autumn, and voices the 
 poet's old complaint that the splendor of summer 
 should have been so brief, and that the flowers 
 should have withered ; but then he finds consola- 
 tion in the thought that one flower remains in its 
 fairest bloom, the flower of memory, which bears 
 the promise of another spring. 
 
 Or he dwells upon the memory of spring itself; 
 true, it is short, but it lives in the recollection, and 
 thus it is with human life. The joy of life is as a 
 brief springtime, but the heart-strings long vibrate 
 plaintively to its memory. 
 
 " The tones are ours, 
 And linger long; 
 They tell of flowers, 
 And springtide song." 
 
 The political poems dwell upon the importance 
 of memory in the life of the people ; it sustains a 
 nation in times of adversity. It is an unhappy 
 people that cannot look to a noble past for the 
 " consolations of memory." 
 
 He subdues his sorrow at a friend's departure 
 by evoking memories of their friendship to shed a 
 mild radiance upon the hour of leave-taking ; and 
 in another poem he suggests memory as the lover's 
 refuge in the absence of the beloved one.
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 59 
 
 Like Falk in " Love's Comedy," he has a far 
 stronger belief in the uplifting influence of loss 
 and of memory than in that of happy possession. 
 Happiness may be but brief, or it may become 
 hackneyed, which means that it ceases to be hap- 
 piness. When we read all this glorification of 
 memory, we involuntarily recall Brand's words, 
 
 " What we win is ours never, 
 What we lose we gain forever." 
 
 We see how far back in Ibsen's life this thought 
 reaches, and we understand how deep-seated it 
 must have been in a nature as introspective and 
 inclined to the ideal as his. 
 
 But the collection also embraces poems which 
 are not so gentle and elegiac in their character. 
 There are poems showing that Ibsen, at the age 
 of twenty, had already begun to exhibit that lean- 
 ing towards the gloomy, the weighty, and the 
 serious, that was afterwards to count for so much 
 in his poetry. 
 
 We find not only moonlight, but the blackest 
 of night as well, in these poems. He dwells, for 
 example, upon the dismalness of a thunder-storm, 
 or he spends a dark autumn evening gazing into 
 the fire, while the storm is raging without, and the 
 rain beating upon the pane. He takes an evening 
 stroll to some remote and gloomy recess of the 
 forest, and there, when the storm arises and min-
 
 60 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 gles its roar with the hooting of the owl, he feels 
 himself at home, and feels " the wild terror " that 
 seizes upon him to be his proper element. 
 
 " Here in this wild and stormy place 
 
 My soul at last finds rest, 
 And here to me seems Nature's face 
 Reflected from my breast." 
 
 Finally he pictures to himself the midnight hour 
 in the churchyard, and with this thought there 
 becomes mingled the old belief in the Dance of 
 Death. The clock in the church tower strikes 
 twelve, and, as in Goethe's " Der Todtentanz " and 
 Saint-Saens's " Danse Macabre," the dead creep 
 up out of their graves and perform their wild 
 dance in the churchyard. Bones beat time, and 
 skulls are drummed upon, until the clock strikes 
 one and the dead scurry back under their stones. 
 So that even Ibsen's well-known " affinity for the 
 dismal" is thus seen to date back to his early 
 youth. 
 
 It is no less interesting to notice the early ripen- 
 ing of his reflective powers. In a poem entitled 
 " Doubt and Hope," written in his twentieth year, 
 he already assumes a sceptical attitude towards the 
 dogmas of the church. This may not be a very 
 striking phenomenon, but it is certainly unusual to 
 find a youth of twenty reflecting upon his doubts, 
 and made unhappy by them. It is unusual for a
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 6l 
 
 doubter of twenty to complain that he is no longer 
 a child ; that he no longer has the child-like mind 
 that in faith sees the way he cannot now find. 
 
 And it is quite as unusual to find a poet of 
 twenty, the age of self-confidence and of mag- 
 nificent plans for the future, doubting his own 
 powers, and giving expression to this doubt in 
 his poetry. In the oldest poem of the collection, 
 " Resignation," the author asks himself if his dream 
 of poetic success be but a phantom, and seems very 
 much inclined to answer the question affirmatively. 
 As a consequence, he sings in melancholy stanzas 
 of the foaming wave, that swells and rolls onward, 
 but breaks at last against the cliff, leaving no trace 
 behind, since the waves that follow after completely 
 efface it. 
 
 Such were the thoughts and fancies with which 
 Henrik Ibsen, as a young man, occupied his hours 
 of solitude. And he was quite as different from 
 the generality of young people when in the com- 
 pany of others. He himself tells us that his poli- 
 tical enthusiasm overflowed at times, and led him 
 to express himself freely, but this certainly did not 
 happen very often. As a rule he was more given 
 to the formation than to the expression of his 
 thoughts. A lady who at that time lived at Grim- 
 stad relates that he went about like an enigma, 
 secured with seven seals. He made a serious,
 
 62 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 gloomy, almost dismal impression. A few of his 
 female friends tried to make out what in the world 
 there was in this remarkable man; others could 
 not help being afraid of him. There was nothing 
 strange in this, for it would be difficult to imagine 
 any one less likely to play the cavalier according 
 to the standard of the village maiden. 
 
 Imagine him, for example, taking part in a ball. 
 While the other young men give themselves up to 
 boisterous mirth, he stands apart and reflects upon 
 all the sorrow concealed beneath this smiling ex- 
 terior, and upon the number of dancers who seek 
 in the waltz forgetfulness of their sufferings. He 
 even finds a certain pleasure in dwelling upon these 
 thoughts, and they are for him an element in the 
 poetry of the ball no less essential than the dancing 
 and merriment. 1 And in his solitary corner he 
 further muses: " What is it that animates all these 
 joyous and smiling faces ? " he asks himself. " They 
 have come hither expecting contentment and pleas- 
 ure ; have they found what they sought? Does not 
 the ball rather present an ideal picture of the great 
 drama of human life? 
 
 " And what is this ideal? 
 
 " Anticipation, hope, and disappointment ! 
 
 1 This and what follows is taken verbatim from a section of the 
 collection, entitled "Ball Memories: a Fragment from Life in 
 Poetry and Prose."
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 63 
 
 " In these three words behold the whole story 
 of human life ! " 
 
 He to whom, at so early an age, come such 
 thoughts at the sight of human enjoyment, has 
 already taken his place among the outsiders; he 
 is not made for the fulness of life and its pleas- 
 ures; his genius and his experience have already 
 stamped him as the solitary muser. 
 
 And even in case he feels inclined to mingle 
 with the throng, even if he feel himself attracted 
 to some individual, he will hastily draw back into 
 himself, like the mimosa, closing its leaves at the 
 least touch. 
 
 Erotic moods also occur in his " Ball Mem- 
 ories," but of their own peculiar sort. He has 
 written erotic poems before, but to no terrestrial 
 woman, rather to a " dream vision," evoked by 
 an unsatisfied and perhaps insatiable desire. Not 
 even are her individual features those of any hu- 
 man form. But at the ball he meets the glance of 
 a pair of pretty eyes, and the ideal straightway 
 becomes real ; just thus has he pictured to him- 
 self the woman whom he might love. He dances 
 with her, is intoxicated by her bright eyes, and is 
 in the seventh heaven of delight. " What is all 
 the strife and disappointment of a man's lifetime 
 weighed against a half-hour like this?" But this 
 is the crown of the whole matter for him. " Fate ! 
 
 5
 
 64 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 take from me this excess of joy; let not this hour 
 be lengthened and made desecrate. I have found 
 her; what would I more?" And fate grants his 
 prayer ; he learns that she is betrothed, and thus 
 has she fulfilled her mission for him; she has 
 taught him anticipation, hope, and disappoint- 
 ment; further developments do not require her 
 presence, for they take place within, and memory 
 serves. 
 
 In this psychological process, so characteristic 
 of Ibsen's nature, idealistic and even averse to 
 actuality, do we not recognize Falk's longing for 
 a bride? How characteristically and genuinely 
 Falk-like is the cry, " Let not this hour be 
 lengthened and made desecrate ! " This is a 
 sort of affection almost wholly unconcerned with 
 reality. It begins as an ideal dream, touches 
 upon reality in a ball-room passion, and returns 
 as a memory to the region of the ideal. It is 
 like one of those comets that, after wandering 
 through the ether for ages, touch for a moment 
 on the earth's orbit, and then resume their course 
 through empty space. 
 
 Such is the picture of Henrik Ibsen that is given 
 us by his first poems. It is only in a special sense 
 that they may be called youthful poems, for if 
 they reveal to us anything it is the fact that their 
 author had no real youth. He had the ideal
 
 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. 65 
 
 longings and the enthusiasm of youth, but he 
 never knew that careless joy which is its most 
 characteristic mark ; he was never one of those 
 for whom, to use his own phrase, " sport is 
 enough." 
 
 But youth seldom owns such a wealth of possi- 
 bilities as were his. All of those genial gifts which 
 he developed as a poet, exist in embryo in these 
 youthful verses. 
 
 Many years and much strife were needed, how- 
 ever, to bring them to their full development.
 
 II. 
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 
 
 TN the month of March, 1850, Henrik Ibsen 
 * went to Christiania to finish reading for his 
 examination and to " go up." 
 
 Like all others who sought a short cut to the 
 university in those days, he became a pupil in 
 Heltberg's school, a " student factory," in which 
 raw material of the most diverse character was, 
 in a year or two, fashioned into available student- 
 shape by that original and genial teacher. 
 
 A great deal has been written about Heltberg, 
 his school, and his methods of instruction. 
 Bjornson has celebrated his old teacher in a 
 charming poem, Arne Garborg has given an 
 animated description of the school and its teach- 
 ers, and no one who has written Ibsen's biography 
 has failed to mention that Aasmund Olafsson 
 Vinje and Bjornson were Ibsen's schoolmates.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 6? 
 
 All the contemporary testimony is unanimous 
 in describing Heltberg's instruction as unusually 
 interesting and stimulating. Latin and logic 
 meant the same thing for him, and it was the 
 laws of thought that he sought to reveal to his 
 pupils as they worked through the difficult sen- 
 tences and the refined periods of the Roman 
 writers. Thus it came about that his instruc- 
 tion was always perspicuous and entertaining. 
 He always had a striking figure at hand when 
 some grammatical peculiarity was to be ex- 
 plained, or some blunder pointed out, and he 
 made so witty a use of it that the whole class 
 shook with laughter. 
 
 That Ibsen found his account, both as man 
 and Latinist, in the instruction of this master, 
 goes without saying; but the influence cannot 
 have been very great, for his school-days were 
 brief. He was older than the average of artium 
 candidates, and poorer than most of them ; so he 
 was compelled to prepare for examination as speed- 
 ily as possible. After the lapse of a few months 
 he offered himself for the test. Naturally, under 
 these circumstances, the result was not remark- 
 ably brilliant. 
 
 But while he was still at school, he appeared 
 once more before the public. He took occasion 
 to make display of his revolutionary sympa-
 
 68 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 thies again, and set out to write a new dramatic 
 work. 
 
 A South Jutlander named Harro Harring had 
 come to Norway in 1849. His previous life had 
 been adventurous, and he had taken part in the 
 Greek struggle for freedom, and in other upris- 
 ings. Early in 1850 he published a play, "The 
 Testament of America." This was thought by 
 the authorities to overstep the limits of freedom 
 accorded to the press, and he was banished from 
 the country, the 27th of May, 1850, by royal 
 edict. On the morning of the 29th, the police 
 entered his dwelling, seized his person, and put 
 him aboard a steamer, where he was held under 
 guard until its departure. 
 
 When the report of this spread about town, 
 a meeting was called for 5 P. M. to protest against 
 the action taken. A written protest was drawn 
 up, and received about 140 signatures then and 
 there. Henrik Ibsen was one of those present 
 who signed it. His seventeen-year-old school- 
 mate, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, did the same. 
 
 Those assembled at the meeting then proceeded 
 in a body to the residence of the chief minister, 
 and through a deputation presented the address. 
 Then they went down to the wharves ; the deputa- 
 tion boarded the steamer, and addressed a few words 
 to Harring. When he showed himself on deck,
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 69 
 
 three times three cheers were given him. And 
 cheers were also given for fatherland and freedom. 
 Ibsen shared heartily from beginning to end in this 
 improvised demonstration, the only political dem- 
 onstration, in fact, in which he ever took part. 
 
 It was at about this time that he wrote his second 
 play. He spent his Whitsuntide holidays in writ- 
 ing out a little single-act drama, " The Warrior's 
 Tomb," which was 4 accepted by the Christiania 
 theatre, and performed September 26th of that 
 year. 
 
 " The Warrior's Tomb " is far from being as in- 
 teresting a work as " Catilina." Both in form and 
 contents it is an impersonal study in the manner of 
 Oehlenschlaeger's Northern tragedies. 
 
 A Norse viking, Audun, when upon a piratical 
 expedition against the coast of Normandy, is sorely 
 wounded, and deserted by his followers. A little 
 girl, Blanka, who has escaped murder at the hands 
 of the wild vikings, finds and cares for him. When 
 his wounds are healed, he builds a rude hut, and 
 lives there as a hermit with his foster-daughter, 
 who converts him to Christianity. The new faith 
 gives him a horror of the viking life, and, in witness 
 that his old career is at an end, he buries his sword 
 and armor, raising a mound over the spot. Many 
 years afterward, his son Gandalf comes to Nor- 
 mandy to avenge his father's death. He is about
 
 jo HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 to slay both the hermit and Blanka, but the gentle 
 and forgiving spirit that her words reveal makes 
 the duty of vengeance too heavy for him ; and, that 
 he may not break his vow either to be avenged or 
 die, he is about to consecrate himself to death. 
 Then Audun casts off his hermit garb, and explains 
 the real state of affairs. Gandalf returns to Norway 
 bearing Blanka as his bride, but Audun remains 
 behind, choosing to pursue his hermit existence to 
 the end. 
 
 All three of these figures have their parallels in 
 Oehlenschlaeger's tragedies. The old viking, who 
 ends his years as a hermit in the South, where one 
 day his countrymen come upon him, is a figure 
 offered us by Oehlenschlaeger several times. In 
 " The Warings in Micklegarth " he occurs as the 
 old Syrian hermit, who turns out to be Olaf Tryg- 
 vason, and in the second act of " Land Found and 
 Vanished," the same figure appears as the hermit 
 Quetzacoatl, or the Icelander Bjorn, who left his 
 home when his beloved became another's wife. 
 The contrast between Gandalf's Northern rough- 
 ness and Blanka's Southern gentleness is also par- 
 alleled in the " Warings," by the contrast between 
 Harald Haarderaade and Maria. Blanka is the 
 express image of Maria. Both are children of the 
 South ; both admire the strength of the North ; 
 both love Northern heroes and would follow them
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 71 
 
 to Norway; and both consider it their task to 
 exert a softening and elevating influence upon the 
 people among whom they are to live. Only with 
 Ibsen the situation is more essentially a contrast 
 between Christianity and heathendom, while Oeh- 
 lenschlseger lays the stress upon the contrast be- 
 tween Greek civilization and the rude Norse 
 strength. 
 
 Yet in spite of this influence, there is in Ibsen's 
 conception of the viking period something that 
 denotes a departure from Oehlenschlaeger, and 
 gives promise of the future author of " The Chief- 
 tains of Helgeland." These vikings are more 
 savage and fierce than their obvious prototypes ; 
 they are more barbarian, less civilized. It is no- 
 ticeable enough that contemporary criticism, com- 
 mitted as it was to Oehlenschlaeger's conception of 
 the Norse past, found them too rough and savage. 
 
 But the critics gave an encouraging welcome to 
 the little work, and the public did not withhold its 
 sympathy. It had three performances, which was 
 a respectable number for the theatre as it then 
 existed. 
 
 With the performance of" The Warrior's Tomb," 
 at the Christiania theatre, Henrik Ibsen settled 
 down as a Christiania man of letters. All thought 
 of taking up his studies at the university was aban- 
 doned once for all.
 
 72 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Together with his friend, Stud. Jur. Schulerud, 
 " Catilina's " publisher, he lived in a modest quar- 
 ter of the capital. The honorarium for " The War- 
 rior's Tomb " did not last long, and Schulerud's 
 monthly allowance was anything but liberal. Nev- 
 ertheless this devoted comrade shared fairly with 
 his friend. "But it did not provide for dinner," 
 relates Botten-Hansen, " and they could eat no such 
 meal. In order that this might not become known, 
 and they suffer loss of credit thereby at their 
 lodgings, they used to go out at dinner-time, not 
 returning until the people in the house might sup- 
 pose that they had eaten. Then they drank their 
 Coffee, and ate with it some bread, and this had to 
 pass for a dinner. At that time I met Ibsen and 
 his chum almost daily; but they were so light- 
 hearted and cheerful, knowing so well how to con- 
 ceal their singular methods of economy, that I had 
 no suspicion of it until long afterwards." 
 
 This steadfast and devoted friendship has pleas- 
 antly bound Schulerud's name with that of Ibsen ; 
 and the latter displayed his gratitude by intro- 
 ducing a beautiful memorial of his friend into 
 the preface to the second edition of " Catilina." 
 His personality does not seem to have been 
 striking, and he does not seem to have risen 
 intellectually above the common; but his un- 
 bounded devotion to his friend, and his unre-
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 73 
 
 served belief in his powers, doubtless had a 
 beneficial effect upon Ibsen's nature, which was 
 sceptical and given to self-criticism. 
 
 A very different sort of influence was that ex- 
 erted by another dweller under the same roof, 
 Student Theodor Fredrik Abildgaard. He had 
 given himself heart and soul to the labor move- 
 ment which had been started by Marcus Thrane, 
 as a consequence of the ideas awakened by the 
 February Revolution. Abildgaard, who had soon 
 become a leader in the movement, initiated both 
 Ibsen and Schulerud into its mysteries. Ibsen 
 did not occupy any well-defined standpoint with 
 relation to the socialistic notions at the bottom 
 of the agitation, nor did he unreservedly accept 
 the opinions of its leaders. Their plans were 
 too childish and fantastic. The whole affair was 
 so illogical, so immature, and so stupidly man- 
 aged that he could not wholly take its part. 
 But the agitation appealed to him, because it had 
 life and momentum. He went to the meetings, 
 which were held in Abildgaard's rooms, asso- 
 ciated with him and the other leaders, and wrote 
 for the paper which they published. 
 
 After a while Abildgaard and Thrane were 
 arrested and their papers seized. Since among 
 them were manuscripts of Ibsen, he waited for 
 a while in expectation of sharing the fate of his
 
 74 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 friends, although what he had written was not 
 of a very incendiary character, and he could not 
 have been convicted for it. Thanks, however, to 
 the presence of mind of one of the initiated, 
 Ibsen escaped any inconvenience in the matter. 
 When the police came, the superintendent of 
 the newspaper office threw all the compromising 
 manuscripts on the floor, while he concealed, 
 with great solicitude, those which were unimpor- 
 tant. The police were thus led by the nose, and 
 the matter, as far as Ibsen was concerned, ar- 
 ranged. The leaders did not fare so well, and 
 were, after a long imprisonment, sentenced to 
 hard labor for their socialistic propaganda. 1 
 
 Two other men must be named with whom 
 Ibsen came into contact at this period of his 
 life. They were Paul Botten-Hansen and Aas- 
 mund Olafsson Vinje. It was with them that he 
 commenced, at the beginning of the year 1851, 
 the publication of a little weekly paper, whose 
 title-page bore the resounding name of " The 
 Man." 
 
 Both his co-editors were older than Ibsen ; 
 hrs artiums schoolmate Vinje was thirty-three, 
 and Botten-Hansen twenty-six. Although they 
 
 1 Shortly after leaving prison, Thrane came to America, where 
 he lived for the remainder of his life. He died at Eau Claire, 
 Wisconsin, April 30, 1890, at the age of 73. TR.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 75 
 
 could not boast, like Ibsen, of any special lit- 
 erary gift, they were certainly both superior to 
 him at this time, both in knowledge and general 
 development. 
 
 Botten-Hansen had already laid the foundation 
 of his comprehensive acquaintance with foreign 
 literature, and had busied himself especially with 
 young Germany, whose writers he made the sub- 
 ject of a series of articles published in the paper. 
 Vinje was not so well read, but his keen and 
 individual intelligence had ripened, and he had 
 gained a fund of thought and experience in the 
 hard struggle for existence, under shifting con- 
 ditions, that had been his lot. Intercourse and 
 work with these two men doubtless had a stimu- 
 lating influence upon Ibsen's spiritual develop- 
 ment. 
 
 The model for " The Man " was found in Gold- 
 schmidt's " The Corsair," that had in many ways 
 aroused attention in Norway. There was a cer- 
 tain resemblance between " The Corsair " and 
 " The Man," not only in their externals, but also 
 in their political attitude. " The Man," like " The 
 Corsair," was of the opposition without support- 
 ing the opposition as it then existed, and when 
 it wrote in justification of the charge brought 
 against Goldschmidt, that he had not enlisted in 
 the service of any principle, it wrote at the same
 
 76 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 time in justification of its own course. Vinje was 
 the one who, on behalf of the editors, broke a 
 lance for Goldschmidt with a Norwegian writer, 
 who had taken up the old charge. It was 
 a mark of Goldschmidt's greatness, said Vinje, 
 that he belonged to neither of the opposed par- 
 ties; for connection with a distinct party means 
 loss of independence and spiritual enslavement. 
 Genius is solitary; it has this in common with 
 irrationality, that it does not appeal to the 
 average man, but after a while it comes to be 
 understood. This article, which shows us Vinje 
 as an enthusiastic admirer of Goldschmidt, bears 
 an interesting relation to those views of the rela- 
 tion between the majority and the individual 
 which afterward found expression in Ibsen's 
 work. 
 
 When " The Man " joined issue both with the 
 government party and the opposition, it was by 
 no means because the paper occupied a middle 
 standpoint between the two opposing extremes. 
 It was, on the contrary, because the paper was 
 more fully in opposition than the opposition it- 
 self; because it considered the opposition to be 
 lax and without character. In the twenty- three- 
 year old editor of 1851 there are already sugges- 
 tions of the author of "An Enemy of Society; " 
 and his ideas upon the political situation at this
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 77 
 
 time find vent in a satirical production that takes 
 a noticeable place among his youthful works. 
 
 With his head full of the liberal ideas of the 
 period, blazing with zeal for the opposition, and 
 glowing with revolutionary enthusiasm, Ibsen had 
 come to the capital. In this centre of Norwegian 
 intellectual life he doubtless expected to find fully 
 re-echoed all that was ringing in his brain. His 
 first act was to take part in a demonstration, his 
 next to join in friendship with the most radical of 
 the radicals. That this acquaintance was unable to 
 offer him what he sought, I have already explained. 
 
 But in the national assembly the restless ferment 
 of the time must surely find expression ! The 
 opposition in the Storthing l must be a worthy 
 object for his enthusiasm. It did not matter much 
 what it was opposed to; the main thing was that 
 its opposition should be strong and manful. But 
 in this respect the opposition party in the Storthing 
 of 1851 was anything but a grateful object for a 
 young poet's enthusiasm. 
 
 In 1848, it had indeed, for a moment, looked as 
 if the political commotion of the period was not 
 going to pass over without having some effect 
 upon the leaders of the opposition in the Storth- 
 ing. But in the interval between the adjournment 
 
 1 The general assembly of the two legislative houses, the 
 Odelsthing and Lagthing.
 
 78 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 of the Storthing in 1848 and the opening of the 
 next Storthing in 1851 there had happened many 
 things not exactly calculated to inspire the tame 
 Norwegian opposition with courage. Tranquillity 
 had been generally restored in Europe, and the 
 leaders of revolt brought to punishment. The 
 Norwegian opposition in the Storthing of 1851 
 was, in consequence, the weakest and most tract- 
 able opposition in the world. 
 
 The impression that all this made upon Ibsen 
 was one of disappointment. For the first time in 
 his life he came to realize that the ideal was very 
 different from the real, in great matters as well as 
 in small. For the first time he stood face to face 
 with the " Spirit of Compromise." This weakened 
 opposition filled him with scorn, its members 
 seemed to him narrow-minded and petty, and so 
 he wrote "Norma; or a Politician's Love," a 
 musical tragedy in three acts. His first disap- 
 pointment called forth his first satire. 
 
 This youthful and outspoken piece of polemics 
 i based upon Bellini's " Norma." Political nota- 
 bilities take the place of the characters of the 
 opera, and the most powerful blows are dealt out. 
 In the figure of Norma, the opposition in general 
 is derided as characterless, while at the same time 
 several members of the Storthing are singled out 
 by name and branded as fortune-hunters.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 79 
 
 His other poetic contributions to the paper are 
 of no great interest. Five of the poems which 
 later found a place in his one volume of collected 
 verse may be found here in their original form, 
 which is different enough from the final one. 
 Some of them, as " The Fiddler," " Bird and 
 Bird-Catcher," and " The Miner," show that his 
 inclination for the gloomy and uncanny was 
 growing. 
 
 For the rest, his poems in " The Man " showed 
 little independence. In a romantic cycle, " Helge 
 Hundingsbane," he chose for a model Oehlen- 
 schlaeger's romantic style, as it appears in " Helge " 
 and " The Gods of the North." In " A Saturday 
 Evening at Hardanger," he endeavored to depict a 
 scene from the life of the Norwegian peasant, in 
 octaves that show him to have been strongly influ- 
 enced by Paludan-Miiller; they really give us the 
 latter's " Dancing-Girl " in Norwegian costume. 
 Another poem, " The Swan," betrays both in form 
 and matter the influence of A Munch's " Where 
 I Wander about in the South, in the West." The 
 unconscious originality that distinguished Ibsen's 
 first effort, has almost disappeared; he has come 
 under the influence of the study of literature. 
 
 After a lapse of two quarters, the paper took 
 the name of " Andhrimner," after the cook of 
 Valhalla, who provided the Northern gods with
 
 8O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 their daily food, and it became at the same time 
 a general review of literature and politics ; but in 
 neither form did it gain any circulation among tbe 
 public, and never had a hundred subscribers at 
 any one time. At the close of the third quarter 
 it was forced to suspend publication. 
 
 After living in Christiania for a year and a half, 
 and after having successively tried his hand at 
 dramatic composition, lyric poetry, political satire, 
 criticism, and editorial work, Ibsen's position was 
 still as uncertain as ever. 
 
 His appearance had, however, awakened some 
 attention, and won for him a certain reputation; 
 and so, when the newly built theatre at Bergen 
 was looking about for a stage-manager, the choice 
 fell upon him. The 6th of November, 1851, he 
 was appointed " theatre poet " of the Bergen stage, 
 and in the following year, the theatre granted him 
 a travelling stipend of 200 specie dalers, and three 
 months' leave of absence, that he might make 
 himself practically acquainted with the details 
 of stage-management abroad. This stipend was 
 made conditional upon his assuming, after his 
 return, the stage-managership for a period of five 
 years. 
 
 The compensation was very small, only three 
 hundred specie dalers a year; but it assured 
 him a modest support, and, what was still more
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 8 1 
 
 important, the new position gave him abundant 
 opportunity for dramaturgical studies. 
 
 It has been said that the dramatic poet is born, 
 not made. " One may through study become a 
 painter, a sculptor, or a musician, but not a 
 dramatic author," says so prominent a member of 
 the profession as Alexandre Dumas fits, in the 
 preface to " Un Pere Prodigue." " One must be 
 that at once or never, just as one is dark or fair, 
 whether he will or not." 
 
 If this were true, the dramatic talent would offer 
 a singular exception to the laws of development 
 to which all living things, both natural and spirit- 
 ual, are subordinated ; but these laws admit of no 
 exceptions. There is a law to the effect that a 
 faculty is developed by exercise, and that without 
 exercise it remains undeveloped or retrogrades. 
 This law holds good for the dramatic faculty as 
 for any other; indeed, if we come right to the 
 point, it holds good in the dramatic more truly 
 than in the other literary fields, because skill and 
 technique are of greater importance in the drama 
 than in other forms of the poetic art. 
 
 And this technique is not to be acquired by 
 means of theoretical investigations ; it must be 
 studied practically. A piece must be studied from 
 the first rehearsal to its presentation before the 
 public ; its development upon the stage must be
 
 82 HENRIfC IBSEN. 
 
 watched ; and the manager must realize it for him- 
 self until he feels himself identified with the author; 
 he must form a conception of its effect, and of how 
 that effect is to be produced, and all this before 
 that final test of the work which the first perform- 
 ance gives. This performance will, as a rule, 
 bring many interesting surprises ; things which 
 were expected to " do themselves," fall flat, and 
 things to which little attention has been paid, score 
 a success. Where only a smile was expected, loud 
 laughter is heard, and the reverse. One tries to 
 account for all this ; in other words, one begins to 
 understand and learn. The next time one is 
 wiser, but there still remains much that is surpris- 
 ing, much to learn ; and should one even devote 
 his whole life to the task he will never become so 
 certain as to be able to positively foretell how 
 each detail of a dramatic work will look upon 
 the stage. But gradually this result is reached, 
 that one learns to see his own or another's 
 plays as they will appear, while writing or reading 
 them. 
 
 The importance of the fact that Henrik Ibsen 
 came into close relations with the stage at an early 
 period of his life cannot be strongly enough em- 
 phasized. If it had not been for this relation, he 
 would never have attained to that technical mas- 
 tery of dramatic composition which is now justly
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 83 
 
 admired in his works. For about ten years he was 
 bound to the Norwegian theatre in the capacity 
 of stage-manager, and during this time produced 
 at least a hundred pieces. It was a good school 
 to graduate from. It was naturally a very motley 
 collection of works that he thus practically stud- 
 ied; it included Shakspere and Holberg, Oeh- 
 lenschlaeger and Heiberg, his own and Bjornson's 
 youthful works, and, more important still, the 
 works of contemporary French dramatic litera- 
 ture, Scribe especially, whose technique was 
 not without its influence, although, in literary re- 
 spects, he could not be very partial to the Scribe 
 repertoire. 
 
 He did not concern himself greatly with drama- 
 turgical studies of a theoretical description. He 
 read Heiberg's prose writings, especially the noted 
 essay on the vaudeville, and he got hold, while on 
 his travels, of Hermann Hettner's " The Modern 
 Drama," which had just appeared, and which he 
 found to be a very interesting and stimulating 
 book. This was about the whole of his theoretical 
 reading. 
 
 In Christiania he had been able to see con- 
 scientious, if not genial acting. The Danish 
 theatre of the Norwegian capital was not without 
 a number of talented actors ; and they, with the 
 less gifted artists of the theatre, were bound to-
 
 84 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 gether by a definite artistic tradition. They were 
 all more or less intimately related with the great 
 age of Danish acting, which dated from as early as, 
 if not earlier than, the beginning of the century; 
 and even if this acting had a somewhat ideal char- 
 acter, it possessed many substantial virtues, and its 
 study must have been instructive for a young 
 dramatist. 
 
 Then there were the impressions gained during 
 Ibsen's stay in Copenhagen and Dresden during 
 the summer of 1852. These were impressions of 
 a wholly different sort. It so happened that this 
 period was a stirring one both for the Royal 
 Theatre of Copenhagen and for the Dresden 
 theatre. In both Copenhagen and Dresden the 
 academical and idealist tendency still ruled. In 
 the former city it was represented by a director 
 like Johan Ludvig Heiberg; in the latter by a 
 leader like the elegant and tasteful artist Emil 
 Devrient. But in both places a younger artistic 
 talent had made its way to the stage, and intro- 
 duced a new principle, that of realism. In Dres- 
 den this principle was represented by the restless 
 and energetic Pole, Dawison, and in Copenhagen 
 by the intelligent and finely gifted Hoedt. Hoedt's 
 artistic watchword was nature, and Dawison's, 
 passion ; but, unlike as they were in temperament 
 and artistic attitude, they waged in common the
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 85 
 
 battle against idealist declamation and academical 
 decorum. Ibsen, who was enabled to see them 
 both, thus for the first time became acquainted 
 with a new artistic impulse, which corresponded 
 with the new tendency in the dramatic literature 
 of the period. He saw both Hoedt and Dawison 
 play " Hamlet," and was especially captivated by 
 the latter's performance ; while on the other hand, 
 Hoedt's acting afforded him more satisfaction in 
 the comic part of the lover Grignon, in Scribe's 
 " Bataille de Dames." 
 
 At home in Bergen the stage had no such fruit- 
 ful impressions to give him ; things were only in 
 their beginnings, but it must nevertheless have 
 been both pleasing and instructive to observe 
 young talents like those of Johannes Brun, Louise 
 Brun, and Lucie Johannesen in their early de- 
 velopment. 
 
 The theatre at Bergen was one of the fruits of 
 the national enthusiasm that reigned during the 
 forties and fifties. The treasures of popular poetry 
 that Asbjornsen and Moe had brought to light had 
 put the public into a condition of national ecstasy, 
 and the watchword was, a Norwegian art and a 
 Norwegian poetry. The painters should choose 
 Norwegian subjects, the musicians should play or 
 improvise upon Norwegian airs, and the poets 
 should depict the Norwegian people, past and
 
 86 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 present. The style of the folk-song became the 
 literary model, and the Norwegian peasant the 
 literary ideal. 
 
 The spirited Bergeners were in no wise left be- 
 hind by the dwellers at the capital ; they were, on 
 the contrary, the more zealous, when it came to 
 a display of national sympathies. In the town's 
 places of public recreation, the ladies appeared 
 wearing the national colors, and enthusiastically 
 listened to the melodies of " The Pasture Maiden's 
 Sunday," while all the people gathered in the 
 theatre to admire fiddle-playing and Hailing *- 
 dancing by genuine Norwegian peasants, and the 
 singing and declamation of imitation peasants in a 
 light vaudeville like " In the Mountain Pasture." 
 
 This national sentiment was felt even by the 
 author of " Catilina," cosmopolitan as were his 
 inclinations; and he turned from those crises in 
 the world's history that had interested him as 
 apprentice and student, to devote himself wholly 
 to national themes. He had, however, a keen 
 insight into the onesidedness and, superficiality 
 of the national movement, and, although joining 
 with it, he could not refrain from an ironical 
 treatment of certain of its aspects. When in 
 Christiania he had already, in a dramatic criticism, 
 expressed his opinion as to what should be the 
 1 From Hallingdal, a country district of Norway. TR
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 8/ 
 
 aims of a national literature. " The national 
 writer," he had said, " is the one who under- 
 stands how to impart to his work the funda- 
 mental tone that greets us from mountain and 
 valley, from hillside and shore, and that, most 
 important of all, is heard within the depths of 
 our own being." All those external attributes of 
 nationalism, by which the period set such store, 
 were in his eyes like so much tinsel stuck upon 
 the outside. But as a poet he was not yet pre- 
 pared to take this standpoint, and the first dra- 
 matic fruit of the influence exerted upon him by 
 the national movement turned out to be a singular 
 union of realism with national romanticism, hav- 
 ing a firm foothold neither in the romantic nor 
 the real. 
 
 " St. John's Night," produced at the Bergen 
 theatre the 2d of January, 1853, has never been 
 printed, and exists only in one or two inacces- 
 sible manuscript copies. I know the piece only 
 through a synopsis of the action given in Blanc's 
 history of the Bergen theatre, and, as far as it is 
 possible to judge of the piece from this synopsis, 
 it is not without a few points of resemblance to 
 " A Midsummer Night's Dream." In it the nixies 
 play the part of prologue and fly-wheel of the 
 action, about as Puck does in Shakspere, and 
 the elves and hill-folk appear in the more lyrical
 
 88 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 portions. But in spite of this romantic machinery, 
 the real characters in the piece are every-day peo- 
 ple of the period, just as they are in " Master and 
 Pupil," and several of Hostrup's other works of 
 that time. 
 
 The scene is laid upon a farm in Thelemarken, 
 where ladies and students have assembled on St. 
 John's eve. A betrothal is about to be an- 
 nounced, and in celebration of the occasion 
 punch is brought into the garden. Here the 
 nixies come in and express the juice of a mys- 
 terious plant into the punch-bowl. Whoever 
 drinks of this juice is no longer dazzled by out- 
 ward appearances ; the scales drop from his eyes, 
 and he beholds " the inner life, that sits in the 
 secret recesses of the soul; " 
 
 " But those whose minds have nought to ponder, 
 Blind or asleep as before, still wander." 
 
 After the two couples in the piece have par- 
 taken of the punch, they stroll out to the St 
 John's hill, where the mountain opens for those 
 whose sight has been made clear, so that they see 
 the mountain king surrounded by dancing elves 
 and hill-folk. The prosaic natures, on the other 
 hand, see only girls and boys dancing about a 
 St. John's fire, and take the mountain king for a 
 member of the festival committee. A romantic
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 89 
 
 poet is one of these common-place people. A 
 play of elective affinities now takes place, under 
 the influence of the magic draught of the nixies ; 
 the poetically inclined natures now understand 
 each other, and are brought together in spite of 
 the betrothal that had separated them before, while 
 those of prosaic disposition also join forces. At 
 the same time an ancient wrong that had been 
 done the romantic lover is discovered and righted, 
 and all is brought to a satisfactory ending. 
 
 The performance of this piece was not a success, 
 and its importance in the development of the 
 author can hardly be considered greater than that 
 of a study. 
 
 A noticeable proof of the influence upon Ibsen 
 of his practical activity in stage matters was fur- 
 nished two years later, when his next dramatic 
 work came before the public. The work shows 
 that his theatrical occupations had enabled him to 
 profit by some of the principles developed by 
 Hermann Hettner in his little book. Hettner had 
 condemned with great force the loose sort of 
 chronicle play that had been called forth by ad- 
 miration of Shakspere's " histories," and had 
 emphasized the necessity for employing strict 
 rules of composition, and for making of the histor- 
 ical drama a " psychological tragedy of character," 
 if it were to pass for a work of genuine art.
 
 90 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 " Fru Inger of Oestraat " is just such a psycho- 
 logical tragedy of character, and the composition 
 is worked out so energetically that the unities both 
 of time and place are preserved, the entire action 
 taking place in a single night upon Fru Inger's 
 estate. In spite of a few long scenes there is in 
 the development of the action a dramatic power 
 that holds the attention from first to last in an iron 
 grasp, while the gloom, which is the fundamental 
 mood of the piece, deepens from act to act, from 
 the ghostly setting of the first act, through the 
 sepulchral air of the scene which witnesses the 
 separation of Eline and Nils Lykke, to Fru In- 
 ger's hallucinations and murder of her own son. 
 
 The period of Norwegian history treated by 
 Ibsen in this play produces just such a gloomy 
 impression upon us. It was the age of Norway's 
 deepest abasement. 
 
 After Sverre's democratic rule had, in the thir- 
 teenth century, taken away the political influence 
 of the Norwegian aristocracy, the noble families of 
 the country continued to go down hill during the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The families 
 of the old chieftains became extinct one by one, 
 and their possessions became gathered into fewer 
 and fewer hands ; but these great fortunes did not 
 avail to stay the ruin that the process of social 
 decay was steadily bringing on. Says Ernest Sars :
 
 IBSEN'S BIRTHPLACE.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 91 
 
 " This process may be said to have reached com- 
 pletion at the time when the movement of the 
 Reformation reached the Scandinavian countries, 
 since Norway was then completely bereft of a 
 ruling class, having left only families of the 
 lower nobility, which were raised above good 
 peasant stock neither by wealth nor political tradi- 
 tions, and which could not command consideration 
 beyond the limits of their own native districts." 
 But at that time the nobility was the only class 
 able effectively to represent the people in political 
 matters and others concerning their higher inter- 
 ests, so that the decline of the nobility meant the 
 impotence of the nation. In consequence of this, 
 Norway was at the beginning of the sixteenth 
 century " more than ever like a bare trunk or a 
 helpless wreck." Such figures, suggestive of weak- 
 ness and barrenness, are constantly falling from 
 the lips of our historians, when they speak of the 
 period in question. 
 
 In consequence of this dying at the top, there 
 was no concern for the nation's welfare, no love of 
 country among the Norwegians of that age. The 
 last of the Norwegian nobles were Swedish-minded 
 or Danish-minded, according to their personal 
 relations and connections of kindred ; none of 
 them were Norwegian-minded. Even Knut Alfs- 
 son, so highly esteemed as a national martyr, was
 
 92 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 merely a tool, whose connections by birth and 
 marriage made him useful to the Swedes. The 
 one man who speaks a patriotic language, and 
 who seems really to feel for the abasement of his 
 country, is Vincent Lunge. In his letters he 
 speaks boldly, and more than once, of the wretched- 
 ness of the land and of the Norseman's sluggish- 
 ness. But, characteristically enough, this one 
 patriot was not a Norseman, but a Danish noble- 
 man married into a Norwegian family; and his 
 patriotism was, besides, little more than a cloak 
 for his ambition, his covetousness, and his love of 
 command. The charter which he and the other 
 Norwegian state councillors obtained from Fred- 
 erik the First in 1523 was undoubtedly more 
 favorable to the country than that granted by 
 Kristjern the Second ten years previously; but it 
 really amounted to little more than a meaningless 
 scrap of parchment, soon disregarded by the king. 
 The state council still existed, but it was " an in- 
 stitution almost without root, and without the force 
 of will needed to enable it to play an independent 
 part." Danish nobles established themselves in 
 the country, got hold of the best places, possessed 
 themselves, by marriage or other and less honor- 
 able means, of the richest estates, and dealt and 
 ruled about as they pleased. The state of affairs 
 was not far from being utterly lawless; violent
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 93 
 
 feuds, depredations, unpunished seizure of the 
 property of others, plundering expeditions, and 
 even regular petty warfare among the men in 
 power, were the order of the day. Norway has 
 never known another period as gloomy as this, 
 and, if the old figure of a night four centuries long 
 is to serve as a description of Norway's dependent 
 age, then the beginning of the sixteenth century 
 must stand for midnight. 
 
 In the gloomy drama that Ibsen unfolds for us, 
 there appears, then, the spirit of this age, with its 
 paralyzed forces and its dark intrigues, with its 
 crushed hopes and its unrestrained passions, with 
 its ghostly mood and its sepulchral horror. 
 
 No wonder that material like this should appeal 
 to Ibsen, with his natural inclination for the dark 
 and dismal ! No wonder that in successfully pre- 
 senting a living picture of that age, he was also 
 successful, for the first time, in displaying his own 
 personality ! 
 
 But still another sentiment, the patriotic, attracted 
 Ibsen to his material. The period of national 
 awakening that came with the first half of the 
 present century was a period that less than any 
 other could contemplate unstirred the age of the 
 Reformation. The sensitive new-born national 
 feeling could not fail to be excited to grief and 
 indignation by the thought of the nation's deep
 
 94 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 degradation. That Ibsen was stirred by these 
 feelings is seen by his having made them incar- 
 nate in Eline, the fairest creation of the play. The 
 real Eline did not feel thus, a Norwegian woman 
 of that age hardly could have felt thus, but with 
 Ibsen she is the muse of the drama, and he repre- 
 sents in her the feeling of grief at the fate of the 
 fatherland. It was difficult, in the first half of this 
 century, to understand these Norsemen of the 
 Reformation period ; their dulness appeared in- 
 conceivable, and every trace of high-mindedness 
 and patriotic feeling that was discerned, or thought 
 to be discerned in them, was hailed with ent^u- 
 siasm. Thus it was that Knut Alfsson was made 
 into a national hero, and martyr for the love of his 
 country. A. Munch glorifies him in " Pictures 
 from North and South ; " other authors admire 
 him, and Ibsen's piece begins with his name: 
 
 " Who was Knut Alfsson ? " 
 
 " The last champion of Norway." 
 
 These are the opening lines of the play. 
 
 All things considered, there was felt a need to 
 find some object for enthusiasm, something noble 
 and high-minded, in that age so poor in enthu- 
 siasm, nobility, and high-mindedness. It was this 
 need that impelled Ibsen to his conception of the 
 principal character in the piece. About her he 
 has clustered all the dreams of Norway's resurrec-
 
 A PPRENTICESHIP. 9 5 
 
 tion. He makes her stand forth by Knut Alfsson's 
 bier, and swear that her life shall be consecrated 
 to avenge the slain and give freedom to the land. 
 From that moment all believe, herself included, 
 that she is chosen to take up the work that fell 
 from Knut Alfsson's hands on board Henrik 
 Krummedike's ship. All look to her for the 
 word, but she never utters it, for she becomes so 
 bound that she dare not stir. Her love for Sten 
 Sture brings her a son, who is sent to Sweden, and 
 this son is her fate. Whenever she would step 
 forth, fear for her son restrains her. This fear 
 impels her to marry the decrepit Nils Gyldenlove, 
 and to bestow her daughters upon Danish knights; 
 it is affection for this child that makes her lose the 
 confidence of her fellow-countrymen, that draws 
 her into perplexing and ambiguous situations, and 
 that finally impels her to his murder, in the belief 
 that she is striking at another who stands in his 
 path. It is a greatly planned and boldly executed 
 tragic creation. 
 
 But in fact, Fru Inger Ottesdatter was not a 
 being of such heroic mould. She was the last 
 descendant of the old chieftain stock to preserve 
 her position, and she was in consequence the 
 wealthiest person in the country. This fact and 
 no other it is that gives her the place she occupies 
 in history. When her life is examined, it is not
 
 96 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 seen that patriotic considerations governed her 
 actions in any way. The ruling motive in her 
 actions was a far lower one ; it seems to have been 
 mainly a very strong ambition to increase her 
 possessions and magnify her position. Time and 
 again we see her seize upon estates that do not 
 belong to her, and hold them until forced to restore 
 them ; when she marries her daughters to Danish 
 nobles, it is because she finds her account in so 
 doing, since these nobles are the most eligible 
 matches that she can find ; when she interests her- 
 self in a convent and does it services, she knows 
 how to get well repaid in this world's goods; and 
 even when she performs an act of benevolence, 
 she looks for compensation. For example, she 
 gives shelter to Peder Kansler from his pursuers, 
 but she accepts from him a massive gold ring, a 
 hundred Rhenish florins, and a quantity of rose 
 nobles and Hungarian florins, and when she es- 
 pouses later the cause of the " Dalcjunker," it is 
 because she has betrothed one of her daughters to 
 him in the hope that he may become king of 
 Sweden. In this and in other respects she is 
 no worse than her age, but she is also no better ; 
 and, so far from feeling grief at having bestowed 
 her daughters upon strangers, she has the most 
 cordial relations with her step-sons, and allows her- 
 self to be led at will by Vincent Lunge, the oldest
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 97 
 
 of them, whom she regards as the head of the 
 family after Nils Gyldenlove's death. 1 It is from 
 this unpromising material that Ibsen's poetical 
 genius has shaped the magnificent tragic figure 
 with which we are all acquainted. 
 
 It was not, however, until after the creation 
 of Ibsen's drama that the life of Fru Inger Ottes- 
 datter was fully cleared up by historical investi- 
 gation, and, although some of her more charac- 
 teristic features had been at the time pointed 
 out, she was still partly enigmatical, and her 
 story offered much room for conjecture and ex- 
 planation. The way in which Ibsen accounts for 
 her actions by making the " Dalejunker " the il- 
 legitimate fruit of her love for Sten Sture is as 
 historically perverse as it is poetically genial. 
 Every one knows that this was not the case. It 
 is notorious, both that the " Dalejunker " was a 
 cotter's son, and that Fru Inger and Vincent 
 Lunge believed in the justice of his claims, hop- 
 ing to win some advantage by attaching him to 
 themselves, since the rumor was just then spread 
 about that Gustav Vasa had died. But Ibsen has 
 boldly risen superior to these facts, and what his 
 piece has thereby lost in historical accuracy, ic 
 
 1 These historical sketches of the characters of the play are 
 based upon Professor L. Daae's essay, " Fru Inger Ottesdatter 
 and Her Daughters."
 
 98 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 has gained many times over in tragic depth. It 
 is the deep and despairing struggle in Fru Inger's 
 soul between maternal affection and love of coun- 
 try that makes her the powerful tragic character 
 she appears. Thus by perverting history Ibsen 
 has won a great poetic victory. 
 
 He has dealt no less freely with the relation 
 between the two characters which, next to that 
 of Fru Inger, are the most important in the play, 
 those of Eline and Nils Lykke, The only fact 
 that the poet has introduced is that of Nils Lykke's 
 love for both Eline and her sister Lucia. He has 
 altered everything else. 
 
 The real Nils Lykke was married to Eline Gyl- 
 denlove in 1528, who died after five years of wed- 
 lock, leaving her husband two children. After a 
 time an affection grew between him and his sister- 
 in-law Lucia, but this met with the most energetic 
 opposition from the family, because the marriage 
 of a man with his deceased wife's sister was then 
 regarded as incestuous. All the prayers of Lucia 
 and Nils Lykke were in vain, and a son having 
 been born to them, poor Nils Lykke was impris- 
 oned, convicted, and slain in prison in the year 
 of our Lord 1535. 
 
 Ibsen either had no eye for the motive to be 
 found in the story of love, or he could make no 
 use of it. He set Lucia's love so far back in the
 
 APPRENTICESHIP, 99 
 
 story that Eline becomes the second of the sisters 
 to love Nils Lykke, and he has so altered their 
 relations that they come to resemble those of 
 Catiline with Furia. Like the latter, Eline loves the 
 man who has been the cause of her sister's death, 
 and hates the seducer, not knowing him to be one 
 with her lover. And, like Catiline, Nils Lykke 
 is represented by Ibsen as a libertine with whom 
 one love affair more or less is of slight conse- 
 quence. But here the resemblance ceases, for 
 Kline's submission is as little like Furia's venge- 
 fulness as Nils Lykke's crafty diplomacy is like 
 Catiline's blind Berserker career. It is the funda- 
 mental relation, not the individual characterization, 
 that Ibsen has brought forth again and utilized in 
 this play. 1 
 
 As we see, Ibsen has handled the historical 
 facts very freely. In this respect he has not fol- 
 lowed Hettner, who maintains that historical tra- 
 gedy must respect history. The words with which, 
 in a postscript to " Catilina," Ibsen sets forth his 
 
 1 It seems to me that Georg Brandes turns things upside down 
 when, in his first characterization of Ibsen, he draws a parallel 
 between Catiline and Nils Lykke, and says : " That nothing may 
 be wanting in this resemblance the poet has taken the funda- 
 mental motive from ' Catilina,' " etc. It is, in fact, the entire like- 
 ness that is wanting. Vasenius has also protested against thus 
 drawing a parallel 'between Catiline and Nils Lykke. See Bran- 
 des, " Esthetic Studies," and Vasenius, " Ibsen's Dramatic 
 Works."
 
 IOO HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 attitude towards the facts of history, might, with 
 even greater justice, be applied to " Fru Inger of 
 Oestraat." In this postscript he writes as follows: 
 " Historical materials are utilized in part only, and 
 as far as they may be considered to invest the cen- 
 tral idea of the piece." And he very reasonably 
 adds: " It is to be hoped that the author will be 
 pardoned for having given historical names to per- 
 sons who, both as to character and other circum- 
 stances, appear otherwise than history reveals them 
 to us ; and all the more because these names are 
 hardly so conspicuous that their appearance un- 
 der circumstances which history does not record 
 should make a confusing impression." 
 
 For Ibsen the dramatist, history at that time 
 meant no more than we have seen reality to have 
 meant for Ibsen the lyric poet. It was only the 
 starting-point from which he set forth for the 
 world of his own thoughts and fancies. 
 
 From the age of the Reformation Ibsen turned 
 to the saga period. " But the royal sagas and the 
 sterner traditions generally of that remote period 
 did not attract me," he says in the preface to the 
 second edition of " The Feast at Solhaug." " My 
 poetic ends could not at that time be served by 
 conflicts between kings and chieftains, between 
 parties and mobs. That was to come later." But 
 chance then brought to his hand N. M. Peter-
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. ioi 
 
 sen's " Historical Tales of the Icelanders at Home 
 and Abroad," and the perusal of these excellent 
 translations and paraphrases of some of the old 
 Icelandic race-sagas had a marked influence over 
 him. " In these race-chronicles," we read further 
 in the preface just mentioned, "with their portrayal 
 of the varying relations of man to man, of woman 
 to woman, especially of human being to human 
 being, there appealed to me a rich and personal 
 vitality, and from my life with these individual men 
 and women of the past, the first crude and dimly- 
 outlined sketch of ' The Chieftains of Helgeland ' 
 shaped itself in my thought." 
 
 How far the details were thought out by him, he 
 can no longer remember ; but the two women were 
 there who were afterwards to become Hjordis and 
 Dagny. And there was also " a great feast, with 
 stirring and pregnant strife." 
 
 " But here various considerations interfered. 
 Most of them, at least those which were strong- 
 est and most decisive, were of a personal char- 
 acter, but I do not think it altogether insignificant 
 that I busied myself just then with the study of 
 Landstad's collection of ' Norwegian Popular 
 Songs,' which had appeared a year or two be- 
 fore. My mood just then acco/ded better with 
 the literary romanticism of the Middle Ages than 
 with the hard facts of the sagas, better with the
 
 102 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 verse form than with prose, and better with the 
 element of melodious speech in the battle-song 
 than with the language characteristic of the saga." 
 With this confession to aid us, it is not difficult 
 to imagine the mood in which the folk-song came 
 between Ibsen and the saga, which transformed 
 the viking Sigurd into the singer Gudmund, the 
 faithful wife Dagny into the young and love-sick 
 Signe, and the sketch of the tragedy of the " Chief- 
 tains " into the lyrical love-drama, " The Feast at 
 Solhaug." Besides, we find among Ibsen's poems 
 one or two which shed a light upon his feelings. 
 That entitled " Field Flowers and Potted Plants " 
 begins thus : 
 
 " Your taste I cannot understand at all ; 
 
 For Heaven's sake, where are your eyes ? 
 Surely a beauty you will not call 
 
 Such a giddy thing, if you are wise," 
 
 and ends with the following stanza : 
 
 " Shrewd reason to me no comfort yields, 
 
 With its wearisome tale twice-told ; 
 For she is a child of the air and the fields, 
 And sixteen bright summers old." 
 
 And the poem that comes next in the collection, 
 " A Bird Song," suggests the mood that has found 
 expression in the story of Signe's and Gudmund's 
 love : 
 
 " I painted poem-pictures 
 
 With play of colors bright, 
 While two brown eyes were watching, 
 All filled with laughing light."
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 1 03 
 
 It was doubtless under the influence of these 
 lively brown eyes that " The Feast at Solhaug " 
 came into being. So the piece has remained as the 
 brightest and most cheerful among Ibsen's works ; 
 there are, indeed, dark and threatening storm- 
 clouds on the horizon, but they disperse without 
 having wrought any destruction ; the dissonances 
 have no serious result, and the play ends with a rich 
 final harmony. It is not alone in its rhythmical 
 aspect that " a light summer zephyr breathes " 
 over the piece, to use Ibsen's own expression. 
 
 " The Feast at Solhaug " brought its author suc- 
 cess. It was played before a crowded house and 
 greeted with uproarious applause. " At the close 
 of the performance, author and actors were called 
 out several times. Later in the evening the or- 
 chestra, accompanied by a large portion of the 
 audience, serenaded me at the window. I almost 
 believe that I was carried away to the extent of 
 making some sort of a speech to the crowd ; at 
 any rate, I know that I felt very happy " (Preface 
 to the second edition). The piece received six 
 performances during that season, a large number 
 for Bergen, and was revived a number of times 
 afterwards. For the first time it made Ibsen's 
 name known in wider circles, for it was given 
 not only in Christiania, but also in Copenhagen 
 and Stockholm.
 
 104 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 But if theatre and public received the piece fa- 
 vorably, the critics were not so well disposed. A 
 score of years previously Henrik Hertz in his play 
 " Svend Uyring's House," had used the metre of 
 the Danish battle-songs, and now that Ibsen had 
 made use of a similar metre, taken from the Norse 
 popular songs, his work was at once characterized 
 as an imitation of Hertz. When the piece was 
 produced in Christiania, some of the critics of the 
 press endeavored to point out similarities, and 
 when the play became known in Denmark, things 
 were naturally worse rather than better. It was 
 " a study of ' Svend Dyring's House,' and far in- 
 ferior to its model in every respect; " it was 
 " neither more nor less than a colorless copy 
 of Hertz's play; " it was " a bad Norwegian 
 copy of a good Danish work," etc. 
 
 That these judgments are very superficial and 
 misleading has been clearly and carefully shown 
 by Vasenius in his graduating thesis. Vasenius 
 analyzes both pieces, points out the great dramatic 
 faults of Hertz's drama, and concludes that " The 
 Feast at Solhaug " is a far better work, dramat- 
 ically, than its assumed prototype, a conclusion 
 to which any just dramaturgical objection can 
 hardly be made. But he is not contented with 
 this, and goes on to compare the motives and the 
 characters of the two pieces, easily proving that
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 105 
 
 they have nothing to do with one another. Who- 
 ever looks closely into the matter must see that 
 any attempt to explain " The Feast at Solhaug " 
 as an imitation of " Svend Dyring's House " is 
 only made possible by completely setting aside 
 the leading motive and the principal characters of 
 Ibsen's piece. With Hertz the principal motive 
 is, as we know, Ridder Stig's disastrous use of the 
 mysterious runes, and the pregnant consequences 
 for Ragnhild. About this are grouped these sec- 
 ondary motives: I. The wicked Guldborg's cru- 
 elty to her step-children, whose mother cannot 
 rest in her grave because of the treatment they 
 receive, but hovers about them in ghostly guise. 
 2. Ridder Stig's love for Regisse. 3. Tage Bolt's 
 wooing of Ragnhild. 
 
 In Ibsen's piece there are no runes and there is 
 no mysterious power that answers to them. There 
 is nothing supernatural in Margit's love for Gud- 
 mund Alfson ; it arises and is developed in the 
 most natural manner possible. Nor is there in 
 Ibsen anything corresponding to the wicked step- 
 mother and the ghost. On the other hand, there 
 is a certain resemblance between Ridder Stig's 
 and Gudmund Alfson's position as between the 
 two sisters. Both Stig and Gudmund are loved by 
 both and disdain one of them, but this situation is 
 too common in literature and not characteristic
 
 106 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 enough to afford a basis for the charge of imita- 
 tion. If the charge might be brought upon such 
 grounds as these, the most absurd consequences 
 would follow. Finally, there is a similarity be- 
 tween Tage Bolt's place in the construction of the 
 Danish piece and Knud Gjcesling's place in the 
 Norwegian. Both Tage and Knud woo one of 
 the two sisters ; the suit of both is lost, under very 
 different circumstances, indeed, but on account of 
 the respective love of the sisters for Ridder Stig 
 and Gudmund Alfson ; both seek revenge in a noc- 
 turnal attack upon the place ; and both are over- 
 powered and bound. Let it be admitted that 
 Hertz's play influenced Ibsen upon this point; 
 such a correspondence of minor motive is surely 
 not enough to make the piece neither more nor 
 less than a copy, especially when there is so great 
 a difference in the leading motive. 
 
 The leading motive in " The Feast at Solhaug " 
 finds nothing whatever to correspond with it in 
 " Svend Dyring's House." The leading motive is 
 Margit's love for Gudmund, and I have already 
 remarked that this love is not characterized by 
 anything supernatural in its origin and develop- 
 ment. Nor is its main characteristic to be found 
 in the fact that it is scorned, so that in this respect 
 also it is unlike Ragnhild's. Margit believes that 
 Gudmund would prefer her if he were free ; her
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 107 
 
 love is depicted as that of a married woman for a 
 stranger. Upon this situation alone is the struggle 
 of the play based, and every attempt to explain 
 it upon the theory of its being an imitation of 
 " Svend Dyring's House " must necessarily prove 
 futile, and this especially since Ibsen, in the pre- 
 face to the second edition, has explained the gen- 
 esis of the piece in so interesting and satisfactory a 
 manner. 
 
 But back of all this there is still the formal re- 
 semblance which comes from the use of the met- 
 rical form of the battle-song. It is not impossible 
 that " Svend Dyring's House " may have impelled 
 Ibsen to make use of that form, although this is 
 denied by Ibsen in his preface to the second edi- 
 tion. How little he, at the time of its production, 
 felt indebted to Hertz in this and in other respects 
 is best seen from the fact that he produced " Svend 
 Dyring's House " at the Bergen theatre less than 
 two months after the first production of " The 
 Feast at Solhaug." Ibsen's piece was played for 
 the first time January 2, 1856, and that of Hertz 
 followed February 24. 
 
 Ibsen's contention is, then, that his study of 
 Landstad's " Folk-Songs " offers a sufficient ex- 
 planation of the form given to his piece, and when 
 we read his little essay, of the following year, 
 " Upon the Battle-Song and its Poetic Signifi-
 
 108 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 cance," and see how warm a welcome he gave 
 the folk-song, and how great a part he thought 
 it destined to play in poetic art, such an ex- 
 planation as he offers seems wholly plausible. 
 " The time will come," wrote Ibsen upon that 
 occasion, " when the national poetry will turn to 
 the folk-song as to an inexhaustible gold mine, 
 and when the latter, refined, restored to its pristine 
 purity, and exalted by art, will again take hold 
 of the people." As a dramatic author he even 
 preferred the folk-song to the saga. " The saga 
 is wholly epic," he writes, " while the battle-song 
 has the lyric element. has it, although not as 
 the drama has it, and the dramatic poet who 
 takes his material from the song, does not need 
 to remodel his material as much as does the poet 
 who takes it from the saga. This circumstance 
 is advantageous to the poet, for it enables him 
 to reproduce in his work a more exact and a 
 more intimate picture of the age and the events 
 with which he deals ; by this means (if he be 
 otherwise competent) he can present his hero to 
 the public as the public already knows him from 
 the folk-song. Furthermore, the commodious 
 metre of the song allows of much freedom in its 
 use, and this is of great importance in dramatic 
 dialogue; so there can be no doubt that sooner 
 or later this poetic quarry will be largely drawn
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 1 09 
 
 upon by the poet, who will erect his structure 
 upon the foundation laid by Oehlenschlaeger. . . . 
 National poetry in Norway began with the saga ; 
 the turn of the battle-song has now come." 
 
 It was, then, in the spirit and the style of the 
 battle-song that " Olaf Liljekrans," Ibsen's next 
 dramatic work, was written. It 'is more romantic 
 in mood than " The Feast at Solhaug," although 
 not to be compared with that work for strength 
 and firmness of hand. 
 
 The action of this unprinted three-act drama 
 may be outlined as follows : 
 
 Fru Kirsten Liljekrans and her neighbor, Arne 
 from Guldvik, have agreed to put an end to the 
 feud long existing between their two families, and, 
 to seal the reconciliation, Arne's daughter Inge- 
 berg is to wed Fru Kirsten's son Olaf. Both 
 Arne and Fru Kirsten are very much interested 
 in having the wedding come off; the former, who 
 is an ambitious peasant, desires to become con- 
 nected with so distinguished a family as that of 
 Liljekrans ; the latter wishes to support the tot- 
 tering family finances by means of the substantial 
 possessions of the man of Guldvik. Just before 
 the wedding, however, Olaf makes an excursion 
 into the mountains, and there, in a mountain val- 
 ley, meets a young girl, Alfhild, who makes so 
 marked an impression upon him that he forgets
 
 1 10 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 his betrothed and everything else, and begs Alf- 
 hild to return with him to the village and become 
 his wife. Alfhild is a child of nature ; the moun- 
 tain valley in which she has grown up in the 
 society of her father, Thorgeir the fiddler, has not 
 been populated since it was ravaged by the Black 
 Death, and she has never been out of the valley. 
 With nafve delight at thought of the novel sights 
 awaiting her, she follows Olaf; but they have 
 barely reached the village when Olaf remembers 
 his earlier obligations, and his mother's pleas cause 
 him to desert Alfhild. Beside herself with grief 
 and despair, the latter sets fire to the house, the 
 scene of the wedding, and hastens back to her 
 far-off valley, while at the same time the bride 
 takes flight with Hemming, her father's workman, 
 whom she prefers to Olaf. Alfhild is pursued 
 and seized by Fru Kirsten and her people; she 
 is condemned to death upon the spot, and the 
 sentence is to be at once executed, unless " some 
 man of spotless fame shall step fonvard, declare 
 her innocent, and proclaim himself willing to 
 marry her then and there." At the last moment 
 Olaf Liljekrans appears, and, repenting of his 
 former weakness, declares that he will save and 
 wed her, to which resolution Fru Kirsten finally 
 gives her consent, upon learning that the rich, 
 uninhabited valley belongs to Alfhild. At the
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 1 1 1 
 
 end, Ingeberg and Hemming also receive Arne's 
 forgiveness and blessing. 
 
 As we know, there is a folk-song bearing the title 
 of Ibsen's piece. It may be found in Landstad's 
 " Norwegian Folk-Songs." The Olaf Liljekrans of 
 the song is betrothed as in the play, and the wed- 
 ding is soon to be held. Then he meets the elves, 
 who seek to bewitch him, but he resists their en- 
 chantments, and does not allow himself to be 
 frightened at their threats. For this they punish 
 him with such blows that he dies shortly after re- 
 turning home. One or two passages in the piece 
 refer to this song, and a little of the dialogue is 
 borrowed from its verse. Probably the idea of 
 Fru Kirsten was taken from the folk-song in which 
 Olaf 's mother plays a part similar to that played 
 by Fru Kirsten in the beginning of the piece ; and 
 Olafs bereft and perplexed condition, as repre- 
 sented in the first act, may be considered a feature 
 which we owe to the influence of the folk-song. 
 But there is no further resemblance between the 
 song and the drama. Beyond this they have noth- 
 ing in common either in action or in character. 
 
 Neither was the folk-song the germ of the piece. 
 This has already developed root and stem before 
 the influence of the folk-song makes itself felt, and 
 so any such influence has little to do with the de- 
 velopment of the action. What it does chiefly is
 
 1 12 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to give the play a figure and a name. This figure 
 is not, however, the principal character; Alfhild 
 must be considered as occupying that position, 
 and it may be shown that hers is the oldest figure 
 in the piece. 
 
 This young girl, living in a mountain valley, the 
 inhabitants of which died when " the great plague 
 swept over the villages," is found, when looked at 
 more closely, to be no other than the " Justedals- 
 rypa " of the legend. This legend, as given by A. 
 Faye, first gave Ibsen the idea of his drama. The 
 very year when he wrote " Catilina " he was plan- 
 ning to deal dramatically with the story of " Juste- 
 dalrypa," and he even set to work. The work was 
 put aside, however, after the first two acts had been 
 written, but the manuscript of 1850 still exists, and 
 bears the title, " The Grouse l of Justedal : a Na- 
 tional Play in Four Acts." The title-figure is that 
 of Alfhild in " Olaf Liljekrans," and she even bears 
 that name, while the action seems to have been 
 planned much as it was worked out in the later 
 and completed drama. 
 
 " Olaf Liljekrans " brings to an end the period 
 of Ibsen's apprenticeship in Bergen ; it was the 
 last of the pieces written by him for the Bergen 
 theatre during his management. It marks the 
 close, as " St. John's Night " marks the beginning; 
 1 " Rype" means grouse or ptarmigan. TR.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 113 
 
 and the two pieces have a certain similarity to one 
 another. They are both somewhat tentative, vague, 
 and inconsequent, and the reason is that they stand 
 at the boundaries of a peculiar period of Ibsen's 
 development. In " St. John's Night " the roman- 
 ticism of the folk-song begins to exert an influence : 
 in " Olaf Liljekrans " this influence is about to dis- 
 appear. Just as " St. John's Night " was preceded 
 by a definition of national poetry, so " Olaf Lilje- 
 krans " is followed by an aesthetic discussion. 
 This is the already mentioned essay, " Upon the 
 Battle-Song and its Poetic Significance." The 
 passage quoted shows how great an importance 
 was attached by Ibsen to the influence of the folk- 
 song; but his practice did not fully carry out his 
 theory. In " Olaf Liljekrans," as we have already 
 said, the romantic influence of the folk-song has 
 almost disappeared. 
 
 Formally considered, the dissolution of this 
 influence may be seen at the first glance. Verse 
 and prose struggle with one another for prece- 
 dence, and in this case, unlike '* The Feast at 
 Solhaug," it is not only the lyrical portion which 
 is written in verse ; but commonplace minor scenes 
 are given in metrical form, while romantic love- 
 scenes between the leading characters appear in 
 prose garb. 
 
 The lack of definiteness on the part of the
 
 114 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 psychological development is, if possible, even 
 more marked. A striking change of mood is 
 characteristic both of Olaf and Alfhild. At one 
 moment they arc romantically inclined, at the 
 next they speak in a wholly natural and practi- 
 cal manner. Upon the mountain in the first act 
 Olaf speaks and thinks in such a manner that 
 we can easily believe Alfhild to be a genuine 
 elf-woman who has bewitched him, and not an 
 ordinary mortal with whom he has fallen in love ; 
 but hardly has he returned to the village when 
 the romantic mood leaves him, and he is bent 
 by the every-day considerations which the mother 
 urges. It is thus also with Alfhild. After she 
 has set fire to the bridal house, her mood is at 
 high romantic pressure, she speaks " with a marked 
 and growing accent of bewilderment," according 
 to the direction given in the manuscript; but 
 when she is seized and brought before Fru Kirsten 
 for judgment, she is quiet, self-possessed, and 
 natural. Transitions like this, abrupt and un- 
 motivated, occur frequently. Romanticism no 
 longer furnishes the main spring of action; it 
 appears rather in a series of outward effects. 
 
 And finally, when we consider the idea of the 
 piece, we become again sensible of the dissolution 
 of the romantic influence. For this idea is that 
 of the conflict between the romantic and the real.
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 1 1 5 
 
 These two conflicting views of life appear in Olaf 
 in direct contrast. Under Alfhild's influence he 
 sees everything with romantic eyes; but under 
 his mother's influence things appear to him as 
 they really are. Alfhild is cast in a wholly 
 different mould, and- the contradiction that exists 
 in Olaf's character, exists for her only as a form 
 of external resistance. She represents the roman- 
 tic at strife with brutal reality, and her defeat in 
 this struggle is like any other triumph of the real. 
 But Ibsen's sympathy is still upon the romantic 
 side and it is with bitter despondency that he 
 allows romanticism to draw the shorter straw. 
 
 " Olaf Liljekrans " had but two performances. 
 Ibsen himself was not pleased with his piece and 
 never had it printed. Two years after its pro- 
 duction he sought to transform it into a romantic 
 opera. The first act was completed and put aside 
 for a couple of years ; then he took it up again, 
 began the second act, and sent a copy of the first 
 to the composer Udbye, who had expressed a 
 willingness to write the music ; but hardly had he 
 taken this step, when the whole plan was given 
 up. 1 
 
 1 The original manuscript, dated 1859, belongs to a gentleman 
 in Christiania. The copy sent to Udbye belongs to the Scientific 
 Society of Throndhjem, together with Ibsen's letter to Udbye, 
 dated July 18, 1861, and the latter's account of the subsequent 
 dealings between poet and composer.
 
 Il6 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 The simple fact is that when " Olaf Liljekrans " 
 was written Ibsen's development had reached a 
 point from which there was no way leading back to 
 romanticism. Everything pointed onward to new 
 fields and new horizons. One period of his de- 
 velopment was closed, and a. new one was to be- 
 gin. The folk-song had nothing further to offer 
 him ; it was now the turn of the saga. 
 
 And at this time also the five years were over 
 for which he was pledged to the Bergen theatre as 
 director. Dramaturgically considered, they had 
 been fruitful years for him, and they had been 
 made significant for his development by the ferment 
 of romanticism. But the process of fermentation 
 was now over, with the period of his apprentice- 
 ship ; he had mastered his art ; he had attained, 
 provisionally at least, to clearness and rest. 
 
 But the clearness and rest were not to last long, 
 and new struggles, new doubts, were awaiting him 
 under changed conditions. 
 
 A new position that of director of the Nor- 
 wegian theatre at Christiania was ready to re- 
 ceive him, and the city that had witnessed his 
 early struggle for existence, was, during the seven 
 years following, to witness the struggle of his man- 
 hood for a secure position among poets. 
 
 In the summer of 1857 he left Bergen, returning 
 thither the next year for a brief visit and to wed
 
 APPRENTICESHIP. 1 1/ 
 
 his betrothed, the one to whom, after many years 
 of companionship for better for worse, he was 
 to dedicate so charming an expression of his 
 " Thanks " as the following : 
 
 " Her cares were the shadows 
 
 That darkened my road, 
 Her joys were the angels 
 My pathway that showed. 
 
 " Her 'home is out yonder, 
 And freedom its light, 
 By the sea where the poet 
 Sees imaged his flight. 
 
 " Of her race are the figures 
 
 Marching along, 
 With banners all waving, 
 Seen in my song. 
 
 " It was she that kindled 
 
 My soul to glow ; 
 And all that I owe her 
 None other may know. 
 
 " And although she awaited 
 
 No thanks for pay, 
 
 I have sung and printed 
 
 This grateful lay "
 
 III. 
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 
 
 TT7HEN Ibsen came to Christiania for the 
 * * second time he brought with him the be- 
 ginning of a new dramatic work. The impres- 
 sions and the images that had been left with him 
 from his perusal of the Icelandic race-sagas had 
 continued to occupy his mind, and had, while he 
 was still in Bergen, assumed a definite dramatic 
 and psychological form. 
 
 One thing only was not quite clear to him at 
 first, and this was the style in which the saga- 
 drama should be written. In the essay " Upon 
 the Battle-Song and its Poetic Significance " he 
 is much busied with this problem.
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 119 
 
 Of one thing he was certain, that the form 
 chosen by Oehlenschlaeger could not be utilized. 
 " It will certainly come to be recognized," he 
 wrote, " that the iambic pentameter is by no 
 means the most appropriate form for the treatment 
 of subjects from the Scandinavian past ; this form 
 of verse is entirely foreign to our national metres, 
 and it is only by means of a national form that 
 full justice may be done the national material." 
 
 But Oehlenschlaeger had attempted another form 
 as well, that of Greek tragedy. Might not this 
 be the most suitable ? In another passage of the 
 essay we read : " Although the saga records fall 
 within the Christian period of the North, yet their 
 poetry is essentially pagan, and so their material 
 may be more suitably handled in the old Greek 
 manner than in that which is known as the 
 modern Christian manner. For this reason Oeh- 
 lenschlaeger's ' Baldur the Good ' was more suc- 
 cessful than any other of his dramatic works." 
 
 According to Botten-Hansen's biography, Ibsen 
 began to write " The Chieftains " in verse, and 
 from what we have just read, he must have con- 
 templated carrying out the work in the Greek 
 style. A Norse tragedy of fate in the Greek 
 style, such was probably the task as it first 
 shaped itself for him. 
 
 But he had not gone very far before new doubts
 
 120 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 arose. He had already perceived, when he wrote 
 the essay on the battle-song, that still another 
 form was available for a work of this sort. " A 
 prose ' Haakon Jarl' from Oehlenschlaeger's pen 
 might be quite as poetic as one in verse," he had 
 written ; and that by " prose " he meant the style 
 of the sagas themselves may hardly be doubted. 
 
 The year before, Bjornson had written " Between 
 the Battles," which had not yet, however, been 
 either printed or performed. In that little work 
 the attempt was made, for the first time, to employ 
 the saga style in dramatic poetry, but Bjornson 
 was too young and too lyrically inclined to be 
 successful in conforming to the strict require- 
 ments of that style. So it was really Ibsen who 
 first brought it into dramatic use, while Bjornson 
 at the same time, in " Synnove Solbakken," again 
 brought it into employment for narrative purposes. 
 So these two poets found themselves on common 
 ground for the first time, each, independently of 
 the other, turning to the pithy and laconic modes 
 of expression of the old Norsemen in search of a 
 form for the embodiment of his ideas. 
 
 The manner in which Ibsen solved the prob- 
 lem has justly been admired both by con- 
 temporary and later critics. Here is nothing 
 superfluous and nothing unessential ; no mono- 
 logue, and no lyric outburst; the dialogue glows
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 121 
 
 with passion, but the glow never becomes flame or 
 gives out sparks ; here is caustic wit and biting 
 repartee, but the fighting is not carried on with 
 light rapiers ; we seem to be watching a battle 
 for life and death with the short, heavy swords 
 which the old vikings used, hatred and love, 
 friendship and vengeance, scorn and grief, all 
 are as intense as in the sagas themselves; their 
 style could not find a better match, and, as we 
 read, we think involuntarily of Henrik Werge- 
 land's words about the speech of the Norwegian 
 mountaineer : 
 
 " As within the forest ringing, 
 Deep the shining axe strikes home." 
 
 And it is not only the saga style, it is the 
 soul as well that speaks to us in this greatly 
 planned work. 
 
 One critic after another has reproached the 
 author for degrading the demigods of the " Vol- 
 sunga Saga" by making them mere Norwegian 
 and Icelandic vikings of the age of Erik Blodox, 
 and for culling from other sagas effective scenes 
 for his piece. The only one who, as far as I 
 know, has protested against these assertions is 
 Vasenius, who maintains that Ibsen did quite 
 right in making vikings out of the heroes of the 
 "Volsunga Saga," and that he has borrowed 
 nothing whatever from other sagas. He who
 
 I 22 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 will take the trouble, however, to look through 
 the sagas of which there may be question, will 
 perceive that neither view accurately states the 
 relation of the piece to its sources. 
 
 " The Chieftains of Helgeland " does not stand 
 in as intimate a relation to the " Volsunga Saga " 
 as the critic has assumed. A portion of the 
 story and something of the scheme of action of 
 the play have been taken from that saga, but 
 only the general outlines of the saga have been 
 reproduced, not its incidents, and even less its 
 characters. 
 
 Sigurd Viking, like Sigurd Fafnersbane, has 
 done the deed demanded by Hjordis (Brynhild) 
 of the man who shall marry her, and has after- 
 ward, like his heroic namesake, renounced her 
 in the interest of his foster-brother Gunnar, tak- 
 ing himself another woman for wife. The latter, 
 in a conversation with Hjordis (Brynhild), ex- 
 plains the situation, and Hjordis in consequence 
 brings about Sigurd's death and her own. As 
 we see, all this must be expressed in very general 
 terms, if it is to apply to both saga and drama. 
 
 Is there any other resemblance? Yes, there 
 is one more. After Gudrun has revealed the 
 secret there follows a scene in which she en- 
 deavors to quiet Brynhild, bidding her think no 
 more about it; then there is a scene in which
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANA. 12$ 
 
 Sigurd explains the situation to Brynhild ; and, 
 finally, there is a scene in which Brynhild urges 
 Gunnar to slay Sigurd. All three of these scenes 
 have analogues in the third act of " The Chief- 
 tains," but they stand in a different order, and 
 nothing of their contents has been transferred to 
 the drama. 
 
 It is thus indisputable that a connection exists 
 between " The Chieftains " and the " Volsunga 
 Saga," but the relation is as free as that of " Fru 
 Inger of Oestraat " to the facts of history. " The 
 Chieftains " cannot possibly be called a drama- 
 tization of the corresponding portions of the 
 " Volsunga Saga ; " the piece cannot even be 
 accurately described as a free dramatic para- 
 phrase. If we are to be exact, we may call it 
 a dramatic work which utilizes, after a consider- 
 able alteration, certain of the leading features of 
 the saga. 
 
 The relation of the piece to other sagas may 
 be similarly characterized. The circumstances 
 under which Oernulf is slain find their proto- 
 types in " Egil's Saga." Egil's famous chant of 
 mourning for his son is utilized in a quite simi- 
 lar manner. Egil, grieving for the loss of his 
 son, refuses to take any food. His daughter 
 Thorgerde then says: "Now, father, would I 
 wish that we might live long enough for thee
 
 124 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to make a chant for Bodvar, and for me to en- 
 grave it, and thereafter we may die if it seem 
 best. For it will be long ere thy son Thorsten 
 make a chant for his brother; it is "not fitting 
 that there be no funeral feast made for him, yet 
 how may there be such, if none of us appear?" 
 Egil replies that he may now hardly sing, even 
 if he make endeavor; " but attempt it I will," he 
 says. And when the chant is over, we read in 
 the saga : " As Egil went on with the chant, his 
 strength waxed, and when it was finished he 
 sang it for Asgerde, Thorgerde, and the rest of 
 his people. Then he arose and took the high 
 seat." Here Ibsen has really dramatized the saga. 
 And other details, although not quite so accu- 
 rately reproduced, may be found in the sagas, 
 which Ibsen learned to know through Petersen's 
 translations. The magnificently conceived invita- 
 tion to the feast in the second act has many 
 analogies in the sagas. Oernulfs question con- 
 cerning the death of Thorolf, and the observation 
 made by him in that connection, are suggested 
 by Kveldulf's words upon the death of his son 
 Thorolf; what Hjordis says of the bow-string 
 is taken from Halgerde's famous saying upon 
 the occasion of Gunnar of Hlidarende's last fight; 
 while finally, in the tragic story told of the love 
 of Kjartan and Gudrun in the " Laxdsla Saga,"
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 12$ 
 
 we have a narrative presenting many analogies to 
 the fate of Sigurd and Hjordis. 
 
 All these things may be called trifles, but they 
 do not permit us to say that the charge of borrow- 
 ing important details from various sagas for the 
 adornment of Ibsen's dramatization of the " Vol- 
 sunga Saga" has been disproved. Let us look 
 at what is of most importance, at the characters 
 themselves. Can it be truthfully said of them 
 that they are the " Volsunga Saga" heroes spoiled 
 by Ibsen? 
 
 What has Sigurd Viking in common with 
 Sigurd Fafnersbane? Name, courage, doughti- 
 ness in battle. The name, which has misled more 
 than one critic, was chosen by Ibsen as a common 
 viking name, and courage and doughtiness were 
 as common among the vikings of the time of 
 Erik Blodox as among the semi-mythical char- 
 acters of the " Volsunga Saga." If Ibsen's in- 
 tention was to depict Sigurd Fafnersbane, he 
 must have been indeed a bungler not to do it 
 better. But his object was a very different one ; 
 it was the creation of a typical viking figure of 
 the close of the viking period, of the period near- 
 est to the introduction of Christianity; and this 
 task was successfully accomplished by him. And 
 what point of contact is there between the char- 
 acters of Gunnar Herse and Gunnar Gjukkesson?
 
 126 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 The one is as gentle and peacefully disposed as 
 the other is fierce and eager for combat. Finally, 
 if we are to look for a distinct prototype of each 
 figure, we should look to " Njal's Saga " rather 
 than to the " Volsunga Saga." When Gunnar 
 of Hlidarende has overthrown his opponent at 
 Rangaa, he says, " I know not whether I should 
 be reckoned the less brave than others in that 
 the slaying of men is the less to my taste." These 
 words indicate the mainspring of Gunnar Herse's 
 character. And in the same saga one might per- 
 haps find more of the character of Hjordis than 
 in the " Volsunga Saga." Hjordis has, just like 
 Brynhild, a true Valkyrie nature, but she has 
 much more in common with the wicked women 
 of the race-sagas. Her opposition to Kaare the 
 peasant, her biting and malicious words at the 
 feast, her sternness and vengefulness bring her in- 
 to far closer kinship with Gunnar of Hlidarende's 
 wife Halgerde, with the difference, however, that 
 Ibsen has endeavored to motivate and to make 
 humanly natural that which in " Njal's Saga " is 
 unprovoked and unnatural malevolence. Prob- 
 ably no one will assert that Dagny resembles 
 the Gudrun of the " Volsunga Saga." In spite 
 of Ibsen's own words in the preface to " The 
 Feast at Solhaug," concerning the two female 
 types which reading of the sagas revealed to him,
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 127 
 
 Dagny is not directly related to anything in the 
 saga literature, unless Kjartan's wife, Hrefna, in the 
 " Laxdaela Saga," be taken as having afforded 
 a bare suggestion for Ibsen's creation. Last of 
 all we have Oernulf, who is typical of the elder, 
 barbaric, and less civilized race of the vikings. 
 Egil Skallagrimsbn in his old age, and several 
 other saga figures, doubtless sat as models for 
 him. With his venerable strength, his hardiness, 
 his insistence upon his rights, and his love for 
 gold and possessions, he is a typical figure of 
 the viking period. 
 
 I think I have now shown that any attempt 
 to explain " The Chieftains " as a dramatic para- 
 phrase of the " Volsunga Saga," based upon a 
 comparison between play and saga, must prove 
 abortive. It would satisfactorily characterize the 
 work to say that Ibsen gathered his impressions 
 from reading a whole series of sagas, and that 
 he worked them freely into an organic whole, 
 which is a remarkable reproduction of the spirit 
 of the race-sagas, but which rarely makes literal 
 use of them. 
 
 In these race-sagas, with their wild scenes and 
 passions, he found just what he needed for the 
 " human investiture of the moods, the images, 
 and the thoughts then occupying his mind, or 
 more or less distinctly hovering about it." The 
 
 9
 
 128 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 poet whose first work foreshadowed the great 
 tragic " contradiction between craving and gift, 
 between will and possibility," must have found 
 a singular attraction in such firmly moulded and 
 distinct personalities as are represented by Oern- 
 tilf and Sigurd. And the poet whose early activ- 
 ity had produced a sketch like that of Furia, must 
 have recognized his own fancies in the wild and 
 passionate women in whose likeness Hjordis was 
 chiselled. The first effort of his youth is firmly 
 linked with the first work of his ripened manhood. 
 " The Chieftains of Helgoland " was as epoch- 
 making a work in Norwegian dramatic poetry as 
 was " Synnove Solbakken " in narrative literature. 
 It made a closer approach to Norse antiquity than 
 any previous work had succeeded in making. 
 From Evald's " Balder's Death " to Oehlenschlae- 
 ger's " Haakon Jarl " a great step was taken in 
 the direction of a just conception and presentation 
 of the old Norseman, but the step from Oehlen- 
 schlaeger to Ibsen was still greater. No wonder 
 that to the generation which viewed ancient Nor- 
 way with Oehlenschlaeger's eyes the piece seemed 
 crude, and the effort to bring a dramatic work into 
 so close a relation with the sagas seemed mistaken. 
 " The rude and savage life which they depict," 
 wrote J. L. Heiberg, in his censure of Ibsen's work, 
 " is tempered, in the original form, by its epic
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 129 
 
 presentation, but from the moment when this life 
 is dramatized, nothing is left but the material itself 
 in all its crudity." The author has used this ma- 
 terial " in so objective a manner, that it is made 
 for us a stumbling-block, since everything that is 
 harsh in the epic becomes yet harsher in the 
 drama." " A Norwegian stage will hardly be 
 created in the laboratory where these experiments 
 are performed." In consequence of this censure, 
 the play was rejected by the royal theatre of Copen- 
 hagen, and fared no better in Christiania. The 
 battle for a national theatre was being hotly waged 
 in the capital. The Christiania theatre was still 
 Danish ; its personnel was almost exclusively 
 Danish, and a Dane (Borgaard) had its artistic 
 management. A large portion of the public, es- 
 pecially of the older generation, found this entirely 
 proper, and so the Danish artists were admired, 
 and every attempt to create a Norwegian dramatic 
 art was looked upon with suspicion and scorn. 
 
 Opposed to this theatre and its following were 
 all those who contended that Norway's stage must 
 be Norwegian, if it were to do its proper work in 
 the cultivation of the people. A few of these men 
 had, in 1852, established a sort of dramatic school 
 for the purpose of educating Norwegian actors. 
 The school soon became a theatre, " The Nor- 
 wegian Theatre," and between the two theatres
 
 130 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 there was about a decade of hot rivalry, both press 
 and public taking sides. As director of the Nor- 
 wegian theatre, Ibsen occupied an outpost in this 
 struggle, and cast himself heart and soul into the 
 fray. 
 
 The year before Ibsen's return to Christiania 
 there had been a great battle about the nationality 
 of the theatre. Bjornson and all the national party 
 demanded that henceforth the Christiania theatre 
 should not be recruited from Denmark. This de- 
 mand not being complied with, a hissing concert 
 was organized for the reception of a new Danish 
 actor, and this demonstration resulted in the en- 
 gagement of a number of Norwegian actors; but 
 the Danish director continued to treat Norwegian 
 matters in a very stepmotherly fashion, and he 
 was especially reproached for his neglect of Nor- 
 wegian literature. After the hissing concert there 
 had been a cessation of hostilities, which lasted 
 until Henrik Ibsen offered " The Chieftains " to 
 the Christiania theatre in 1857, his own theatre 
 not being well enough equipped to produce it. 
 At first, Borgaard said that it should be produced 
 in the course of the season, but after half a year 
 had passed the author was informed that " the 
 financial condition of the theatre did not permit 
 the payment of an honorarium for original works." 
 Since, but a short time before, the financial condi-
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 (At the close of the fifties
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 131 
 
 tion of the theatre had permitted a considerable 
 augmentation of the salaries of a number of the 
 Danish actors, and since nothing was said in the 
 notification of a production the following season, 
 this conduct was held by many to be a declaration 
 of war upon the national dramatic literature. So 
 Ibsen published in " Aftenbladet " a hot attack 
 upon the management of the theatre. This led to 
 a violent controversy, in which Ibsen was abused 
 in the roughest manner by the other party, while 
 Bjornson and Botten-Hansen took his part. Noth- 
 ing was then left him but to publish " The Chief- 
 tains" in book form, and at the same time to 
 produce it at the Norwegian theatre. It was not 
 until 1861 that it was added to the repertoire of 
 the Christiania theatre, of which it has since been 
 one of the ornaments. 
 
 How deeply Ibsen at that time felt himself in 
 sympathy with the national movement appears 
 most clearly from the fact that he conceived the 
 idea of an association for the purpose of resisting 
 foreign influence and asserting the national princi- 
 ple in art. Just think of Henrik Ibsen as the 
 founder of an association ! 
 
 The idea was canvassed in the office of " Aften- 
 bladet " by Ibsen and two of the editors of that 
 sheet, Richter, now (1888) minister of state, and 
 Bjornson. As a result, Bjornson and Ibsen issued
 
 132 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 invitations to join in such an association. It was 
 organized Nov. 22, 1859, under the name of " The 
 Norwegian Society." Bjornson was made presi- 
 dent, and Ibsen vice-president. Opposition to the 
 Diisseldorf school of painting was one of the prin- 
 ciples of the society, which was a little unfortu- 
 nate, because it prevented a number of people from 
 joining. The only thing meant by this was an ex- 
 pression of opposition to the excess of foreign 
 influence in the domain of plastic art. The princi- 
 pal aim of the society was to combat Danish dra- 
 matic art in Norway, and, largely in consequence of 
 its activity, Wilhelm Wiehe, the chief Danish actor 
 in Christiania, withdrew from the Norwegian stage 
 shortly after. This led to doleful lamentations in 
 prose and verse in the public press on the part of 
 the Danish-minded. A. Munch shrieked : - 
 
 " What ? Is it possible the hour's cry, 
 Empty of all but savage Berserk rage, 
 Has driven such an actor from the stage ? 
 Surely, the public sympathy is his, 
 And every thought that sane and worthy is ! " 
 
 And H. O. Blom, in a rhymed epistle to Wiehe, 
 suggested that the Day of Judgment was at hand 
 for the theatre ; all of which impelled Ibsen to take 
 the field with his bold and witty " Open Letter to 
 the Poet H. O. Blom." After a few years the 
 national party came out victorious ; most of the 
 Danish actors withdrew, Borgaard was dismissed,
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 133 
 
 and the Norwegian theatre became united with 
 the Christiania theatre. 
 
 Otherwise "The Norwegian Society :; did not 
 play any important part. In 1860 it appointed a 
 committee, with Ibsen as one of the members, for 
 the purpose of bringing together the best artists 
 from Bergen and the two theatres of the capital in 
 a series of Norwegian festival performances in 
 Christiania; but the direction of the Christiania 
 theatre having declined to give its stage for this 
 purpose, the plan came to nothing, and " The 
 Norwegian Society" missed the honor of carrying 
 it through. Later many members of the Stor- 
 thing joined the association, which resulted in its 
 transformation into a sort of political society ; 
 Ibsen then gradually withdrew, and the society 
 soon collapsed. 
 
 In another circle, less pronounced in its opposi- 
 tional tendencies, he continued to move. This was 
 a little gathering of men engaged or interested in lit- 
 erary pursuits, which Botten-Hansen collected about 
 him. They met at times in Botten-Hansen's book- 
 lined rooms, at times in a little Swiss -cafe", known as 
 L'Orsa's Cafe, where a small and modest room was 
 appropriated by the gathering. Although the time 
 was fruitful in political controversy, men of the 
 most diverse views met thus together, attracted by 
 Botten-Hansen's philanthropic and lovable person-
 
 134 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 ality. A. O. Vinje, Ernst Sars, Christian Friele, 
 L. L. Daae, and others, thus met peaceably upon 
 neutral ground. Asbjornsen's humor made at 
 times a pleasant diversion in the serious literary 
 conversations, and even Welhaven put in an ap- 
 pearance now and then. When he and Vinje 
 began upon one of their audacious and witty word- 
 tournaments, there was life and laughter enough in 
 the camp. Ibsen was one of the most frequent 
 visitors to these gatherings, and a large share of 
 the time left him from his theatrical labors was 
 spent at Botten-Hansen's or in the little back room 
 of L'Orsa's Cafe. 
 
 These years were not rich in literary production, 
 but he wrote a series of poems, among which 
 " Terje Vigen " and " On the Mountain Plains," 
 both dated 1860, are the most important. The 
 latter of these poems shows distinctly enough in 
 what a state of commotion he was, and that some- 
 thing new was seeking for expression in his poetry, 
 without his quite knowing what it was or what it 
 signified. 
 
 It goes almost without saying that he was at this 
 time planning to break new paths for the drama. 
 In the summer of 1858 he had already begun to 
 make studies for " The Pretenders," but the plan 
 of this work was for a time set aside, and another 
 gradually absorbed his attention. Not from an-
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 135 
 
 cient times, but from his own, would he take his 
 material; it was not a historical tragedy, but a 
 modern comedy, that he would write. The satirist 
 was growing in him, and " Love's Comedy" shaped 
 itself at the expense of the newly planned historical 
 tragedy. 
 
 But formal difficulties stood in the way of the 
 execution of this plan. A modern comedy must 
 obviously be written in prose, and its characters 
 must speak in the manner of cultivated men and 
 women of the period. The scheme was outlined 
 and the work begun, but the further he progressed 
 with it, the less he was satisfied. He had so long 
 held intercourse with the style of the saga and 
 with the expressions and phrases of the romantic 
 Middle Ages that it was, in the beginning, neither 
 easy nor natural for him to write in the ordinary 
 language of conversation. It seemed stiffer than 
 it ought to be, and he came to feel that his dia- 
 logue, was not sufficiently impressive. So prose 
 was abandoned, and the piece translated some- 
 times line for line, and at others with greater free- 
 dom into the familiar rhymed iambics which 
 have been so justly admired for their wit and liveli- 
 ness. " The Young Men's Union " was the first 
 play in which Ibsen successfully imparted these 
 characteristic to dialogue in modern prose. 
 
 The scene ot " Love's Comedy " is laid, as is
 
 136 HENRIK IBSEM 
 
 well known, in a villa at Drammensvejen, and the 
 characters are every-day men, women, students, 
 clerks, and merchants. The author had even the 
 unparalleled audacity to introduce the clergy upon 
 the stage, and to ridicule it in the person of Pastor 
 Straamand. As a piece of contemporary satire it 
 is a courageous work, fresh in its humor and bold 
 in its outcome. 
 
 " There is something in the inspiration of 
 ' Love's Comedy ' that takes us back to Fru Col- 
 lett's ' The Magistrate's Daughters,' " observes 
 Georg Brandes, in his well-known characteriza- 
 tion of Henrik Ibsen ; that book " waged quite as 
 wittily, although less formally, the warfare against 
 betrothal and marriage which is carried on in 
 Ibsen's book with a firm and virile hand." These 
 two works have undeniably in common the attack 
 upon betrothal and marriage, but the standpoint 
 from which the attack is made is very different. 
 
 It is the manage de convcnance that is attacked 
 in Fru Collett's novel. No marriage can result in 
 happiness unless based on mutual affection, and in 
 such a matter the feeling of the woman must 
 count for much more than in other matters. 
 These two theses may be regarded as the poles 
 about which the book revolves. 
 
 Ibsen, on the contrary, does not attack the 
 mariage dc convenance ; he even makes one of
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 (At the beginning of the sixties.)
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 137 
 
 the most sympathetic characters in the play, the 
 merchant Guldstad, speak vigorously in its defence, 
 and the importance which Ibsen himself attaches 
 to this defence appears in its influence upon the 
 outcome of the action. For it is Guldstad's de- 
 fence of the rational marriage, as opposed to the 
 marriage of inclination, that brings about the 
 separation of Falk and Svanhild. 
 
 The very thing against which the satire of the 
 piece is directed from beginning to end is the sort 
 of union entered into through affection. The real 
 theme of the play is the manner in which love 
 is quenched by such unions. From the moment 
 that love becomes official its doom is sealed. First 
 of all come the aunts and female friends and " slay 
 love's poesy" by their officious interest in the 
 betrothed pair; then follows marriage with its 
 struggle for subsistence and its imbecile baby-talk. 
 That which began as a festival ends by becoming 
 merely trivial, and most men, so far from being 
 elevated by thus living in common with their 
 wives, fall into a dull and soulless life of routine. 
 
 " Profit by your experience, look around, 
 See how each pair of lovers act and speak 
 As if their wealth were wholly without bound. 
 First reckless to the altar rush this pair ; 
 Then to their new and happy home return, 
 And for a time their life seems bright and fair. 
 Now comes the day of reckoning, and there ! 
 Behold how bankrupt is the whole, concern !
 
 138 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Bankrupt the bloom of youth upon her face, 
 Bankrupt the flower of thought within her soul, 
 Bankrupt the glow that promised life to grace, 
 His courage bankrupt now beyond control. 
 Bankruptcy over the whole household hovers ; 
 And yet this pair set bravely out together, 
 And seemed to be a first-class firm of lovers I " 
 
 Thus it was with Straamand and his Maren, with 
 Styver and Froken Skjaere, and thus it is with 
 Lind and Anna. These are the " matches of in- 
 clination," and they all end in triviality because 
 love is not strong enough to endure. 
 
 " The flame is spent ! barely the smoke remains ! 
 Sic transit gloria amoris, maiden ! " 
 
 It is with love as with religion ; as it becomes 
 official it loses in force. The men of our age are 
 too insignificant to be capable of loving, and yet 
 they go about and fancy that they are capable, 
 and this is the tragi-comedy of the situation. 
 
 " See Lind and Styver, the parson and his wife 
 As love's Yule-goats r they masquerade about, 
 Faith on their lips and falsehood in their soul, 
 Yet thought quite worthy people on the whole I 
 With lies to one another they 're replying, 
 Yet no one dare reproach them for their lying." 
 
 Falk and Svanhild present a contrast to this 
 apathetic feeling, which both recognize and de- 
 
 i " Julebukke " here translated " Yule-goats " refers to the 
 Norwegian custom of masquerading at Christmas time disguised 
 with the horns and skins of goats and other animals. TR.
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 139 
 
 plore, but they are too wholly children of their 
 age to feel sure that their love will overcome the 
 triviality of life. They feel, as Svanhild puts it, 
 that 
 
 " From this day 
 
 Our festal march must take the downward way; 
 And when the day of reckoning is at hand, 
 And we before the Mighty Judge shall stand, 
 Then will he ask of us, the Righteous One, 
 What with the treasure lent us we have done. 
 And in our answer, Falk, what grace to save ; 
 ' We lost it on our journey to the grave.'" 
 
 No, if their love is to endure, and to preserve 
 its elevating power, it must be transformed into 
 a memory; it must be freed from the outward 
 forms of daily life and converted into an inner and 
 purely spiritual possession. So Falk and Svanhild 
 come to the conclusion that Ibsen had expressed 
 more than ten years previously in his youthful 
 poems, and Falk, like Ibsen, asserts the ennobling 
 influence of the memory of a past love, when he 
 says : 
 
 " E'en as the grave leads to a better light, 
 So love to life may consecrated be 
 Only when, freed from passion, it takes flight 
 Into the spirit-realm of memory." 
 
 In full accord with his characteristic view the 
 author makes his principal characters part just 
 when they have found one another. The catas- 
 trophe of the piece, which will always seem pain-
 
 140 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 ful in the ordinary view, was for Ibsen its one 
 adornment and poetical solution. 
 
 The originality of " Love's Comedy " rests then 
 upon the author's peculiar and ideally impressed 
 nature. In the name of the ideal he weighed and 
 found love wanting in the imperfect form in which 
 it appears in actual life. He scourged love in the 
 name of love itself; and, although he was not blind 
 to the beauty of home and family life, this ap- 
 pears clearly enough from the words of Straamand 
 and Styver in the third act, his logical mind 
 could admit no compromise. He inexorably 
 maintained that one thing or the other must be 
 chosen. He was so used to contemplation of the 
 pure light of the ideal that he could not be satis- 
 fied with the broken rays of the real. 
 
 " Love's Comedy " was completed in the sum- 
 mer of 1862, and appeared the following winter as 
 a New Year's gift to the readers of the " Illustrated 
 News." 
 
 The next year a new work of Ibsen was ready ; 
 it was the for some time contemplated " Preten- 
 ders." When, in the summer of 1863, he began 
 upon this work, he was hampered by no uncer- 
 tainty or hesitation. The work was written at a 
 spurt, and so easily did the material take shape 
 that six weeks sufficed for its completion. This 
 statement, made by a previous biographer, seems
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIAN/A. 141 
 
 almost incredible ; but Ibsen has given the au- 
 thor of the present work a confirmation of the 
 fact. 
 
 The construction of " The Pretenders " is not a 
 little unlike that of its immediate predecessors. In 
 those the action was confined within the briefest 
 possible period, and there were few changes of 
 scene ; unity of place was almost entirely re- 
 spected. In " The Pretenders," on the contrary, 
 Ibsen has been less rigorous in these respects; 
 several years elapse between the beginning and 
 the end of the piece, and there are numerous 
 changes of scene, two to an act, upon the 
 average. 
 
 But if he have taken greater technical liberties 
 than before, he has, on the other hand, confined 
 himself more closely to the historical record. We 
 find in the history of the period treated the most 
 important of the events described ; and the main 
 traits of character of the leading figures are also 
 recognizable, although Ibsen has genially deepened 
 the given facts. 
 
 Ernst Sars, in drawing the distinction between 
 the followers of Haakon and of Skule, makes use 
 of expressions which may, with slight modifica- 
 tions, be applied to the two parties in the play. 
 He says : " We meet everywhere in this story 
 the same strength and certainty on the one side,
 
 142 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 and the same palsy and lack of confidence on the 
 other. The old Birkebejner appear to us frank 
 and straightforward, like men having an unfalter- 
 ing conviction of the justice of their cause, and an 
 inextinguishable confidence in its final victory. 
 Skule's followers, on the other hand, are given to 
 intrigue and chicanery, seeking to set all sorts of 
 hindrances in the way of their enthusiastic oppo- 
 nents. They do not come squarely out with their 
 aims; and their aims are so at variance with actual 
 conditions that their appearance is characterized 
 by vagueness and irresolution." 
 
 The reason for this contrast appears clearly in 
 history. Haakon represented the carrying out of 
 Sverre's kingly plans ; he had been reared in the 
 unfaltering conviction of his right to rule over the 
 country ; he grew to manhood among the veterans 
 of Sverre's age, who were imbued with his princi- 
 ples, and from whom he accepted those principles 
 as a complete system, and for him the main ques- 
 tion of the age was how to put them into effect. 
 His standpoint was definite and uncomplicated 
 from the first, and it influenced his whole person- 
 ality. What above all else made him strong was 
 the tranquil and equable disposition by which he 
 was distinguished, and which had its root in the 
 unfailing belief that justice and the popular voice 
 were with him.
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIAA T IA. 143 
 
 With Skule it was wholly otherwise. He repre- 
 sented the aristocratic and hierarchial principle at 
 strife with the new kingdom ; but this battle had 
 really been fought out, and the royal power estab- 
 lished, so that Skule's effort to renew the strife was 
 but a last convulsive struggle of the already de- 
 feated cause. Finally, the aristocrats whom Skule 
 represented formed a party with him, but it had 
 already suffered many defeats, and can have been 
 neither numerous nor confident. This appeared 
 distinctly when Skule made open rebellion against 
 Haakon. " In spite of the good fortune which 
 seemed to attend him at the start, it was clear 
 enough at the outset that this attempt to renew 
 warfare upon the Norwegian throne was the act of 
 a desperate gamester, who does not count the 
 chances, but rushes blindly in, hoping that luck 
 will favor him." The higher clergy were no longer 
 united ; and those whom he might count his friends 
 did not dare to join with him ; he had supporters 
 among the aristocracy, but the time was past in 
 which an aristocratic party like that of Erling 
 Skakke could be formed. He could not even build 
 upon the old enmity of the North and the South ; 
 formerly this had been a " rich wellspring of civil 
 warfare," but now " it seems to have been nearly 
 dried up." Thus " Skule's attempt had no support 
 
 either from public sentiment or the ruling interests 
 
 10
 
 144 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 of the land, and a single defeat sufficed to over- 
 throw him." 
 
 As we see, there is a close correspondence be- 
 tween the historical relation of Haakon and Skule 
 as depicted by poet and historian. 
 
 Psychologically, Ibsen has given the two op- 
 posed leaders a profounder significance than they 
 appear to have had in history. 
 
 Haakon does not' seem to have been a genially 
 disposed character, and when Ibsen nevertheless 
 represents him as such, and bestows upon him 
 kingly thoughts, it is doubtless because he felt 
 peculiarly attracted by his personality. 
 
 If we except " St. John's Night," " The Feast 
 at Solhaug," and " Olaf Liljekrans," the calling of 
 his chief characters plays an important part in 
 all the plays which Ibsen at this time had writ- 
 ten. Catiline's call was to save Rome, Fru Inger's 
 to save Norway; Hjordis felt called to be an 
 Amazon, Falk to be a poet. One's calling ap- 
 peared to Ibsen in a mystic, poetical light, and 
 so a figure like that of Haakon, whose belief 
 in his right and whose confidence in his endow- 
 ment were so marked, stood for him in a peculiarly 
 poetic gleam. Ernst Sars is of the opinion that 
 Haakon " is not to be compared for power or 
 poetic splendor with the more conspicuous of his 
 predecessors." Ibsen holds the contrary opinion ;
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 145 
 
 Haakon's greatness is found in the harmony exist- 
 ing between the task he has set himself and the 
 situation in which he is placed. It is found in 
 the unfathomable, the mystical, his great and se- 
 cret calling, his league with " the mighty above," 
 that prepares the way for the chosen, and permits 
 him to march forward to his aim as surely and 
 almost as unconsciously as the somnambulist. 
 
 But contrasted with this mysterious and Alad- 
 din-like certainty stands the man of doubt and 
 deliberation ; he who is never sure of himself; 
 he who dare not choose the one because he 
 may never lose sight of the other that might 
 also be chosen ; he who is God's step-child upon 
 earth, because he is without that inspiration from 
 above which Bishop Nikolas calls ingenium. He 
 is richly equipped ; he is noble and high-minded ; 
 nothing is lacking him save the one thing in which 
 the greatness of the other consists, for in place 
 of this he has the gnawing gift of doubt. In de- 
 picting this personality, Ibsen attained to greater 
 heights and depths than ever before, and more 
 than this, the character is one of the most deeply 
 felt and skilfully drawn in the entire Ibsen gallery. 
 
 Georg Brandes has adduced, with much acute- 
 ness, a little exchange of speech between Skule 
 and Jatgeir the Skald, for the purpose of illus- 
 trating Ibsen's relation to his hero.
 
 146 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 KING SKULE. 
 To be a king what gift is needful for me ? 
 
 JATGEIR. 
 Not that of doubt; thou wouldst not question thus. 
 
 KING SKULE. 
 What gift is needful ? 
 
 JATGEIR. 
 
 Lord, thou art a king. 
 
 KING SKULE. 
 Art then at all times sure thou art a poet ? 
 
 This last reply might serve as a motto for the 
 whole piece. " How much is told in this reply," 
 Brandes remarks. " How the relation is reversed, 
 and the thing transformed into the picture of that 
 which should itself be the picture of the thing ! 
 How painful a confession in that last line : ' Art 
 then at all times sure thou art a poet?'' 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that, when Ibsen 
 became the poet of doubt in " The Pretenders," 
 it was because he had himself felt the worm gnaw- 
 ing at his heart. In the earliest of his youthful 
 poems doubt found words, and we have discerned 
 it later, lurking behind the deliberations that pre- 
 ceded the composition of certain of his works. 
 To what an extent he was tortured by doubts 
 of his own poetic gift appears further from a 
 cycle of poems, published in " The Illustrated
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 147 
 
 News" of 1859, under the title "In the Picture 
 Gallery." The editor says in a note that these 
 poems date from " an earlier period of his life 
 and development ; " they are probably to be re- 
 ferred to the close of his stay at Bergen. This 
 cycle is based upon an impression derived from 
 the Dresden gallery, and the sight of a woman 
 who was sitting and copying Murillo's Madonna. 
 It is the impression which later gave rise to the 
 little poem " In the Gallery," which has found 
 a place in his collected poems. He has placed 
 on her lips a series of poems in which she bewails 
 her vanished dreams of art, and upon this col- 
 lection the poet has placed a crown of sonnets, 
 which give utterance in his own name to the 
 same plaint. 
 
 " Even as the artist in the pictured hall, 
 
 I have had visions fair, too fair to stay; 
 
 And on the wings of poesy away 
 Have sought to fly above this earthly ball, 
 To fly, alas, and afterwards to fall, 
 
 Their early strength gone from my wings for aye. 
 
 The fable-book of youth is shut to-day, 
 And now I see the moral of It all." 
 
 But what is the use of complaining of one's 
 impotence? 
 
 " What is more laughable than to repine 
 In elegies upon one's lyric dearth, 
 To scribble poems, dead at their very birth, 
 And of a gloomy, broken heart to whine ? "
 
 148 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 A hateful spirit visits him now and then in evil 
 hours, and whispers words of doubt and despond- 
 ency in his ear. 
 
 " When speaks that voice to me with bated breath, 
 I seem to hear the peal of funeral chimes, 
 I seem to feel the clammy kiss of death ; " 
 
 but the apparition no longer terrifies him. He is 
 no longer a child ; he understands now what it all 
 means. The spirit hovers about the " last flower " 
 remaining, rank and uncared for, from his spring- 
 time. 
 
 " My anxious thoughts assume this flower shape ; 
 They make me tremble between hope and fear ; 
 From faith to doubt my mind is made to veer. 
 
 " They twine as lovingly about my soul 
 As cling the tendrils of the living grape 
 In Southern vineyards to the rootless pole." 
 
 So great was at times Ibsen's lack of confidence 
 in himself that he felt the need of employing words 
 as passionate as these ; so depressed did he feel, 
 when the courage of life and faith in his poetic gifts 
 were at their ebb, that he could find the adequate 
 expression of his mood only in such despond- 
 ent and despairing phrases. When we read these 
 poems we begin to appreciate the reason of the 
 wonderful delicacy and comprehension displayed 
 in the portrayal of Skule's sceptical nature. 
 
 But when " The Pretenders " was written, this 
 stage of spiritual conflict was passed. Like the
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 149 
 
 young poet in " Love's Comedy," Ibsen required, 
 like the falcon, the aid of adverse winds to gain 
 the heights. His was one of those natures which 
 are not subdued but rise under adverse conditions. 
 As the bitter quinine gives -strength to the nerves, 
 so the bitterness of his circumstances strengthened, 
 little by little, his confidence in himself. 
 
 Many pleasant things may undoubtedly be said 
 of the Norwegian capital, but no one would think 
 of calling it a town in which literature and art 
 flourish. From its condition, at the beginning of 
 the century, as a town of 10,000 inhabitants, it has 
 grown up to be a city with truly American ra- 
 pidity, and has not only reached its first hundred 
 thousand of population, but has got well along 
 into the second. Christiania may even be called 
 an overgrown city, and it is a familiar fact that too 
 rapid growth does not tend to attractiveness. 
 
 Christiania is a new colony with pretensions to 
 be considered a centre of culture. It has grown 
 so fast that it struts about and claims to be a 
 piece of Europe. Yet it is in reality so small that 
 its inhabitants lack elbow-room; they push and 
 thrust one another, and tread on one another's 
 toes, because they have not room to keep out of 
 each other's way. Gossip and personal criticism 
 are incredibly rife ; if a tenant of the barnyard 
 lose a feather, the loss is magnified, by the help
 
 I 50 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 of friends and acquaintances, into that of half a 
 dozen hens. And the people are as unready to 
 recognize merit as they are ready to detract. In 
 larger societies, where men are not so cramped 
 for lack of space, there is more good-will, and 
 the recognition of one does not preclude the 
 recognition of another. But here there is a nar- 
 rowness of view which seems to be based upon 
 the proverb, " There is not room for two great 
 ones in a bag." 
 
 If one endeavor to rise, it must be at the expense 
 of the others. And men are as dependent in their 
 judgments as they are dogmatic. They always 
 wait for the outsider to speak. The author, for 
 example, who will conquer Christiania, must first 
 conquer Copenhagen, even at the present day. 
 
 Artistic and literary productivity is naturally 
 hampered by this state of affairs. Many become 
 weary, and end by conforming to the general 
 indifference and lack of interest everywhere about 
 them. They lose courage and energy, and bid 
 farewell to their ambitions. Others are made 
 bitter and discontented, and thus express them- 
 selves. If one were to collect all the complaints 
 made against Christiania in the literature of the 
 present century, a fine anthology would be the 
 result. 
 
 No Norwegian poet has sung in praise of Chris-
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 151 
 
 tiania. Wergeland is the only one who might be 
 mentioned, and he, characteristically enough, con- 
 fined himself to expressions of satisfaction at the 
 growth of the city. Later on, he came to know 
 it better, his satisfaction vanished, and he bitterly 
 bewailed having been born in Norway; he even 
 thought seriously of seeking a foreign audience. 
 And Welhaven, who was quite well treated, has 
 expressed clearly enough his opinion : 
 
 " The manners of a court are here at fray 
 With petty village ways and views of life, 
 Upon a field ill-fitted for the strife, 
 And neither of the parties gains the day." 
 
 Thus he wrote in " The Twilight." And this was 
 not all ; for, in " Soiree Pictures," he carried the 
 idea still further. To know just how he felt, read 
 "The Thundered Menace." 
 
 " Think of the sufferings of a restless mind 
 By fogs and brooding darkness here confined." 
 
 Camilla Collett has contributed so frequently 
 to the collection that several pages would be re- 
 quired to print what she has said. Only to quote 
 a few lines from one eloquent example, we read 
 in " The Magistrate's Daughters" : " Oh, thou great, 
 thou little town, how cold and dark a cloud hangs 
 over thee ! Thou art great enough, thou thou- 
 sand-beaked, great enough to pick to death him 
 who no longer amuses thee, or him who has in-
 
 1 5 2 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 curred thy dislike. But thou art not great enough 
 for such a wretch to find any nook in which to 
 hide. Great art thou ; thou hast all the longings 
 and the consuming passions of a great city; yet 
 how small thou art and poor, that thou mayst not 
 satisfy the least of them." 
 
 Bjbrnson's voice is also heard. In the epilogue 
 to the first edition of his " Poems and Songs," he 
 describes the struggle between horse and tiger 
 in the Spanish arena, and tells how the enraged 
 public hooted and hissed the tiger when the horse 
 held his own. 
 
 " Who won at last I cannot say; 
 The horse's part 't is mine to play, 
 And the struggle is not over. 
 What is the town where this occurred, 
 And where these cries of rage were heard, 
 You may perhaps discover." 
 
 A characteristic observation to be made in this 
 connection is that none of our more conspicuous 
 living poets have homes in the Norwegian capital. 
 They have either remained in the country, as 
 Bjornson did for a series of years, or they have 
 hidden, like Kielland, in some small village. As 
 a rule, they have gone into voluntary exile for a 
 longer or shorter period. Their more important 
 literary productions have been shaped, of late 
 years, in Paris, Rome, or Munich, not in Chris- 
 tiania.
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 153 
 
 As for Ibsen, he had better occasion than any 
 other to appreciate the disposition of Christiania 
 during the years that he directed the Norwegian 
 theatre of the capital. There seems to have been 
 but few who had any idea that he was a great poet, 
 even after he had furnished proof of the fact by 
 means of such works as " The Chieftains " and 
 " Love's Comedy." 
 
 When " The Chieftains " appeared, it was 
 rather coldly received ; Bjornson's " Synnove " 
 had appeared previously, and public opinion 
 seemed to claim for him a sort of monopoly in 
 the renewal of the style of the saga. Ibsen was put 
 into the shade, and, during the controversy that 
 arose in connection with the rejection of his piece, 
 a great many rude things were said about him by 
 anonymous writers for the newspapers. He was 
 not only charged with dishonesty and " bound- 
 less vanity," but was also told that his piece 
 (which was not then printed) was probably, to 
 judge from his earlier efforts, a work of slight 
 value, such expressions as " Norwegian weeds " 
 and "Norwegian trash" being made use of. 
 " Herr Ibsen as a dramatic author is a complete 
 nonentity, about whom the nation can hardly be 
 expected to plant a protecting hedge," was writ- 
 ten ; and it was said -of " Fru Inger of Oestraat," 
 upon the same occasion, that it " is so bereft of
 
 154 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 poetry and ideality as to be an object of wonder ; 
 every character in this piece has the stamp of 
 vulgarity." 
 
 When " Love's Comedy " appeared, things grew 
 worse rather than better. " Morgenbladet " de- 
 clared that the conception of love in the play 
 was " provincial indeed," such as might have been 
 expected of some country uncle or aunt, but could 
 not have occurred to a poet. The point of view 
 of the piece was " not alone essentially untrue," 
 and " immoral," but " unpoctical, as must be every 
 view which is unable to reconcile the real and the 
 ideal." And even this was nothing as compared 
 with the criticism of " Aftenbladot." Although 
 Ibsen had worked over three years upon the 
 play, it was characterized as " a pitiful product 
 of literary trifling; " it was "a commendation of 
 celibacy, showing that H. Ibsen must have had 
 Roman Catholic notions in his head when he 
 wrote it ; " as a dramatic whole it was " an ab- 
 surdity," and, besides, its author was by no means 
 a remarkable poet. " Ibsen does not possess what 
 is called genius ; he has merely talent, which takes 
 a markedly technical and mechanical direction." 
 
 With the public the book raised " a storm of 
 indignation, fiercer and more widespread than 
 many books can boast of in a community where 
 the large majority look upon literary affairs as
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 155 
 
 matters of no general interest" 1 The thing was 
 carried so far that when, some time afterwards, 
 Ibsen applied for a travelling stipend, one of the 
 professors at the university declared that " the per- 
 son who had written ' Love's Comedy ' deserved a 
 stick rather than a stipend." 
 
 In his capacity as theatrical director also, Ibsen 
 had his full measure of annoyance. Actresses 
 who felt themselves slighted attacked him in the 
 newspapers, and his authority in the town was not 
 great enough to save him from being reviled on 
 account of any beginner who fancied, or whose 
 admirers fancied, that he had been treated slight- 
 ingly. He was blamed also for the language 
 spoken on the stage; some thought the actors 
 were too Norwegian in their speech ; others, that 
 they were not Norwegian enough ; still others com- 
 plained because Ibsen did not have a French coun- 
 tess speak in ostentatiously Norwegian fashion. 
 
 So there was irritation upon all sides ; and this 
 was the more annoying to Ibsen because the 
 theatre was working under extremely unfavorable 
 financial conditions. The city was not large 
 enough to support two competing theatres, and 
 the result was short commons for both. In the 
 summer of 1862 the Norwegian theatre became 
 bankrupt, and Ibsen was, in consequence, left in 
 1 Ibsen's own words in the preface to the second edition.
 
 156 HENRIK IBSEN, 
 
 the lurch. The only income upon which he could 
 count was the twelve hundred crowns that had 
 been granted him as artistic adviser by the Chris- 
 tiania theatre from the beginning of 1863. For 
 this sum he not only gave his literary advice, but 
 was obliged as well to see that the costumes were 
 accurate, and to mount pieces when called upon 
 to do so. 
 
 Since Bjornson had been granted the " poet's 
 salary" in 1863, Ibsen endeavored to obtain a 
 similar allowance from the public treasury, but 
 his demand was not entertained. The only pub- 
 lic stipend granted him was a small sum given to 
 enable him to travel about Norway for the purpose 
 of collecting the popular poetry of the country. 
 
 He was, then, practically, forced to " live by 
 his pen," as the saying is; but this is a mode of 
 subsistence upon which one does not grow fat 
 under Norwegian conditions, especially if, like 
 Ibsen, one feels neither the wish nor the faculty 
 to enter journalism. 
 
 The honoraria paid him by the publishers were 
 almost incredibly small. For " Love's Comedy " 
 he received but one hundred specie dalers, and 
 this was a large honorarium for the period. For 
 " Fru Inger " and " The Chieftains " he did not 
 get half as much ; and when the Christiania theatre 
 finally found it convenient to produce the piece
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 157 
 
 last named, he was put off by the management 
 with a mere bagatelle, being informed that, since 
 the piece was in print, the theatre had a right to 
 produce it without paying the author a skilling. 
 For a poet like Ibsen, whose severe self-criticism 
 pulled to pieces every work newly begun, the 
 moment when it failed to satisfy him, literary ac- 
 tivity, as a mode of subsistence under these cir- 
 cumstances, was not far from being synonymous 
 with starvation. So low were his finances at this 
 time that some of his friends, according to a 
 biographical sketch published in the " Norsk 
 Folkeblad " for 1869, set out in real earnest to 
 use their influence in procuring for him a subordi- 
 nate position in the custom-house, or some simi- 
 lar means of livelihood. A cheerful outlook for 
 the author of " The Chieftains " and " Love's 
 Comedy," to preside over the customs' scales, and 
 calculate the duty on bags of sugar and coffee ! 
 
 To add to this private wretchedness came the 
 war between Denmark and Germany. Ibsen's 
 enthusiasm of 1848 was still alive, and the shape 
 taken by events filled him with grief and indigna- 
 tion. With his warm poetic enthusiasm he could 
 not understand, and still less could he share, the 
 hesitation of the Norwegian national assembly to 
 join with Denmark, and worse than all this was 
 the fact that the academic youth of the country
 
 158 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 remained quietly at home, although in their 
 student gatherings they had sworn, their cham- 
 pagne glasses lifted in pledge thereof, to sacri- 
 fice life and blood in Denmark's cause. 
 
 " The words flowed forth as if from out 
 
 The very heart they came ; 
 They were but phrases, and a drought 
 
 Now follows to our shame 1 
 The tree bade fair to bloom, in sooth, 
 
 Beneath the sunbeams bright ; 
 Now stripped by tempests without ruth, 
 It marks the grave of Norway's youth, 
 
 Upon the first dark night. 
 
 " 'T was but a lie then, nothing worth, 
 
 A J udas kiss of hate, 
 That proudly Norway's sons put forth 
 Down by the Sound of late." 
 
 A feeling of the pettiness of it all burned within 
 him, and mankind appeared to him in a gloomier 
 aspect than ever before. He felt himself glow 
 with scorn for the nation to which he belonged. 
 
 Before this he had viewed his country less and 
 less favorably. In " Love's Comedy " he had at- 
 tacked the crudity of sentiment that he had ob- 
 served ; and even in the historical drama of " The 
 Pretenders" he had found place for an outburst 
 against pettiness and lack of individuality, which 
 shows how his indignation was increasing. We 
 recall the famous verses of Bishop Nikolas in the 
 fifth act,
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. 159 
 
 " Norway's men on their way are going, 
 Irresolute, wavering, whither not knowing; 
 Like pliant willows swayed by the wind, 
 Dry of heart, and stealthy of mind. 
 On one thing only can they agree, 
 That a great man must stoned and hooted be ; 
 Beggary's clout as a flag is raised, 
 And honor takes flight from them amazed." 
 
 The whole of the ghost scene, in which these 
 lines occur, really stands quite apart from the play, 
 and is, dramatically, so obvious a mistake that we 
 may wonder that a dramatist of Henrik Ibsen's 
 rank should have penned it ; but the fact simply 
 was, that his indignation had grown so strong that 
 he could not restrain it ; it had to find expression, 
 even at the expense of the dramatic structure of 
 such a work as " The Pretenders." 
 
 But if these were his feelings during the summer 
 of 1863, what must he have felt the following 
 winter? What was everything he had before seen 
 and experienced compared with what he came to 
 see and experience during the war? The "bitter 
 tonic " that should give him strength to break new 
 paths, was at hand. He had had enough of Nor- 
 way and of N.orthmen. His aim now was to gain 
 the tranquillity and independence needed to enable 
 him to clarify and to shape all the new ideas that 
 were working in his mind. He must escape from 
 the hampering conditions of his life in Christiania;
 
 160 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 he must away from the whole petty round, he 
 must put himself in the position to look at it all 
 frorn a distance, to gain " a higher view of the mat- 
 ter." As a poet, there was no future for him here 
 at home ; he felt as if he were standing on " the 
 edge of his grave," as he afterward expressed it 
 in a poem written for the millennial celebration. 
 And the grave was Christiania, situated in the 
 churchyard called Norway. 
 
 " From this sultry hole away 1 
 Here the air smells of the grave; 
 Here no outspread banner may 
 Freely in the breezes wave 1 " 1 
 
 When he made his application to the govern- 
 ment for a travelling stipend he felt it to be a 
 matter of life and death ; and when the application 
 was really granted, he felt that it brought him 
 salvation. 
 
 But even these last moments at home were not 
 to pass without their characteristic annoyances. 
 It devolved upon the university to decide upon 
 such applications as that which Ibsen had made, 
 and that institution was not to be surpassed in 
 pettiness by the rest of the town. It was upon 
 this occasion that the suggestion concerning the 
 stick was made, and, to crown the work, a grant of 
 but half the sum he had applied for was recom- 
 1 BRAND.
 
 LIFE IN CHRISTIANIA. l6l 
 
 mended. This made the stipend so small that it 
 could be considered neither fish nor fowl. So 
 Ibsen went to the head of the Department of 
 Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, State Coun- 
 cillor Riddervold, and explained to him the situa- 
 tion. The result was that this official granted the 
 entire sum asked for, on behalf of the department 
 of which he was chief. 
 
 The 2d of April, 1864, Ibsen shook the dust of 
 Christiania from his feet. May found him in Ber- 
 lin, and thence he set forth for Trieste and Rome.
 
 IV. 
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 
 
 traveller from the North, who first catches 
 * sight of Italy or of the Mediterranean, is 
 always deeply impressed ; and especially he who, 
 like Ibsen, goes by way of Trieste. During the 
 night one passes through southern Austria, and, 
 waking up before sunrise, looks out of the rail- 
 way carriage window. One can hardly imagine 
 anything more barren and desert-like than the 
 surrounding landscape. The way leads over a 
 vast plain, over which are scattered weather-beaten 
 rocks, which tower up in the most singular shapes. 
 This is the so-called " Karst." The sun rises, but 
 its light cannot make this gray and stony desert 
 appear less barren or more cheerful. Suddenly
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 163 
 
 the train turns a sharp curve, the way leads down 
 a terraced and vine-clad slope, and the blue 
 Adriatic appears far below, decked with white sails 
 that gleam in the sunlight far out upon the horizon. 
 He who has known such a morning hour, can 
 never forget it. 
 
 From Trieste the road goes on to Venice and 
 farther, amid the loveliest and most smiling land- 
 scapes. How luxuriant the vegetation and how 
 bright the colors ! Wherever we go, the light 
 shines, gleams, sparkles ; it seems to us as if we 
 
 had never seen any color but gray before ; the 
 
 if 
 very sky is different, loftier, more transparent, 
 
 deeper of hue. And when the sun goes down, 
 and the night falls, sudden as a surprise, the moon 
 comes out, the radiant moon of the Italian sum- 
 mer night. One may perhaps faintly conceive it 
 by recalling the moonlight of an August evening 
 in Norway. The brightness and beauty of the 
 light make one fairly wild with enthusiasm, make 
 one wander for hours over moonlit fields and 
 through dark groves where the fireflies flit about, 
 sparkling like diamonds in the foliage. 
 
 And besides these impressions of nature, Ibsen 
 received also impressions from the relics of ancient 
 civilization to be seen on all hands in the city 
 which became his dwelling-place. The greatness, 
 wealth, and beauty of that civilization appeared
 
 1 64 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to him in their most imposing form, and he en- 
 deavored, during his excursions about Rome, to 
 make himself familiar with its monuments of past 
 splendor. The study of this testimony to a past 
 civilization and of these ruins that told of its 
 downfall, made Ibsen resolve to treat the downfall 
 dramatically, and he planned a play in which 
 Julian the Apostate should be the principal figure, 
 even beginning to put the plan into execution. 
 But impressions of a different and more personal 
 nature soon got the upper hand. They were 
 
 impressions that he had brought from home. The 
 
 * 
 very contrast offered by his present surroundings 
 
 made these impressions all the more distinct for 
 him. He felt as if his whole life in Norway had 
 been spent in the dark ; it seemed to him as to 
 Oswald, that he could not recall ever having seen 
 the sun shine at home. 1 He had the feeling of 
 having escaped from some gloomy dungeon where 
 he had languished in chains; and, like the freed 
 prisoner, he vowed to himself that he would never 
 return. How poor, cold, confined, and petty was 
 everything at home ! 
 
 And there emerged from all these thoughts and 
 feelings a series of old impressions of nature in 
 
 1 A reference to " Ghosts." There is something similar in 
 
 " Brand." 
 
 " I never saw a sunlit sky, 
 
 From fall of leaf to cuckoo-cry."
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 165 
 
 Norway, which grew to typical intensity under the 
 influence of the contrast between past and present. 
 On one of his commissioned expeditions in search 
 of popular poetry he had, in the summer of 1862, 
 taken a pedestrian trip through the Jotunheim 
 mountains. He started from Lorn, and crossed 
 the range from Baeverdalen to Fortun. The view 
 down from the mountain height into the narrow 
 Fortun valley, with its steep and savage slopes, 
 was one of the memories that awoke within him. 
 Then he had journeyed from Vadeim over Forde 
 to the commercial town of Hellesylt in Sun- 
 delven, where he had sojourned for several days. 
 Close by stood the ruins of a parsonage, de- 
 stroyed by an avalanche. Fearing further land- 
 slides, it had not been rebuilt, and the pastor, 
 with his wife and infant child, were lodging with 
 a peasant upon the mountain side. Ibsen made 
 them a visit and asked the pastor's wife, a young 
 and amiable lady with a cheerful smile, if they were 
 not still afraid of a landslide. " No," she replied, 
 " the house lies so close up to the mountain wall 
 that a slide would pass over without touching it." 
 
 These impressions of travel were put together 
 by Ibsen's fancy into the picture of a mountain 
 valley which we see in " Brand." And with this 
 mountain valley a new conception of Norwegian 
 nature found literary expression.
 
 1 66 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 The poets of preceding periods had dwelt only 
 upon the gentle and graceful aspects of our natural 
 scenery. Reading their poems, a stranger might 
 almost believe that we have a mild and lovely 
 summer all the year round. Fine "sun effects" 
 almost always made of the barest spot " a gleaming 
 little land of fable," as Welhaven puts it ; it is of 
 fair forests and mountains, fragrant with the odor 
 of the spruce, and made melodious by the song 
 of birds, that we read in Asbjornsen's fairy tales ; 
 and of soft summer evenings that the poems of 
 Jorgen Moe tell. Even in darker moods nature 
 was still gentle. So melancholy a nature as Bern- 
 hard Herre went no further than to describe the 
 sadness of autumn ; and an elegiac poet like A. 
 Munch was contented with bemoaning the brief 
 Northern summer. No one pictured the harshness 
 and poverty of Norwegian nature. It was always 
 mild and graceful, whether we saw it with Synnove 
 at Solbakken or with Thorbjorn at Granleden. 
 If a poet ventured for once to engage with our 
 mountain scenery, as Welhaven did in " Eivind 
 Bolt," it was but to sing the sublimity of the im- 
 pression made by the mountains upon us ; and if 
 winter were pictured, as by Jorgen Moe in "A 
 Sleigh Ride," and by Welhaven in " The Race 
 Track," the poet had an eye only for its magical 
 beaut) T . Ibsen himself contributed to this glori-
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. l6/ 
 
 fication of Norwegian scenery when he drew, in 
 " Mountain Life," a delicate and glowing picture 
 of the mountains, " in their splendor of amber 
 and gold." 
 
 Now let " Brand " be taken up and the contrast 
 will be evident. We seem to be transported to 
 another country, many degrees further to the 
 north. The snow drifts, the storm rages, the ice 
 hangs heavy and threatening upon the mountain 
 side, and the sunlight never reaches the dwellers 
 in the valley ; only at midsummer, for a period of 
 some three weeks, is its light seen at all, and then 
 only on the mountain slope. Everything delicate 
 is chilled, grows sickly, and dies ; the grain does 
 not ripen, dearth and famine hover over the settle- 
 ment as a curse. Such is the mountain valley in 
 " Brand." 
 
 But this mountain valley grew upon Henrik 
 Ibsen's imagination until it became the typical 
 Norwegian landscape ; in " Brand " it stands for 
 Norway, just as, in " Peder Paars," Anholt stands 
 for Denmark. The valley people are the whole 
 Norwegian people; and no less novel than the 
 poet's conception of nature is his conception of 
 the people, as compared with that previously cur- 
 rent in literature. The poets of an earlier period 
 had burnt much incense to the Norwegian nation. 
 Soon after 1814 they began to sing with enthusi-
 
 1 68 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 asm of " the mountain's son," and the enthusiasm 
 lasted for two or three decades. When the roman- 
 tic spirit began to assert itself in the forties, this 
 enthusiasm underwent but a slight change in char- 
 acter. Previously, it had raved about the free and 
 proud peasant-proprietor; now the ideal peasant 
 of the poet, living his careless life as in a dream, 
 unconcerned by the trivial and prosaic interests of 
 the day, became the object of its admiration. 
 
 But the people of Ibsen's mountain valley are 
 not poetic figures of this sort. They are people 
 who toil hard to win their subsistence from grudg- 
 ing nature; they are blunted and worn by labor, 
 their heads are bowed, their backs are bent, their 
 gaze is upon the mould, their thought creeps like 
 a worm upon its belly, instead of taking flight like 
 a bird. The struggle for bread comes to be the 
 essential, comes to be the whole of life. 
 
 " All your pater noster, even, 
 Without wings of will is found, 
 By so little fear is stirred, 
 That within the gates of heaven 
 Vibrant as a voice should sound 
 Number four l alone is heard ! 
 That the watchword of the land, 
 That the war-cry of the race, 
 Torn from out its proper place, 
 Every heart it holds in fief, 
 And your tempest-tossed belief 
 Lies a wreck upon the strand." 
 
 1 The fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer, " Give us this day 
 our dailv bread."
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 169 
 
 Even if the people were simply and wholly 'a 
 race of drudges they might have a certain char- 
 acter of their own, but instead of this they squint 
 heavenward with one eye while the other is fixed 
 upon the earth ; thence arises the indecision and 
 lack of character that distinguish them as a nation. 
 
 " Go but about the land, and when 
 You listen to all sorts of men, 
 How each has learned, you soon may see, 
 A little of everything to be. 
 A little serious on occasion, 
 A little faith from former days, 
 A little love of dissipation, 
 Still following in his father's ways, 
 A little warmth, such as belongs 
 To hours of mirth and festal songs, 
 Among our little mountain-folk 
 That never yet a beating took ; 
 In promises a little free, 
 A little sharp, when soberly 
 He weighs the lightly spoken phrase, 
 Called to account in after days. 
 Yet far, as all examples teach, 
 His faults, his virtues, do not reach ; 
 A fraction he, in small and great, 
 For good and ill, a fraction's weight. 
 And then, alas, and worst of all, 
 These fractions do not fit at all." 
 
 And like unto the nation is its conception of 
 God: 
 
 " The Saviour, in the Catholic plan, 
 Is pictured as a child; but here, 
 Your Lord is but a weak old man, 
 Who is his second childhood near.
 
 170 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 He, like the race, is growing old, 
 
 And wears a skull-cap for the cold." 
 
 At the same time that he makes this attack 
 upon the nation the author turns his sharpened 
 weapon upon its official representatives. They 
 are responsible for it all. First of all there is the 
 bailiff, who has grown to be so entirely official 
 that he has ceased to be a man. If he is called on 
 for help, he does not ask how pressing is the need, 
 but only whether the case comes within his baili- 
 wick; and when his dwelling takes fire, he cares 
 deuced little about saving his soul, provided only 
 he can save his official records. He is a charitable 
 man, working for the interest of his district, but 
 he has only an eye for the material. Increase 
 of population, aids to subsistence, the development 
 of means of communication, these are the aims 
 which he boasts of having furthered, and his great 
 philanthropic dream of the future is to build an 
 ingenious combination of public hall, polling-place, 
 madhouse, poorhouse, and lockup. If this plan 
 might only be carried out, then nothing would be 
 wanting. What besides remains is an inspiration 
 of the Evil One, unless we except a little poetry 
 for the evening hours, and a little good-fellowship 
 and speech-making when the punch is brought on 
 at village parties. Besides being bailiff he is a 
 member of the Storthing, and the lash touches
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 17 1 
 
 him in this capacity when Brand describes him as 
 
 " A popular type, not worse 
 Than that ; a man upright and kind, 
 In his way active, fair of mind, 
 Yet to the land a very curse. 
 Not avalanche, wintry blast, or flood, 
 Famine, infection of the blood, 
 Works half the havoc far and near, 
 As such a one from year to year. 
 Those scourges touch our lives alone, 
 But he ! How many hopes o'erthrown, 
 How many generous motions crushed, 
 How many mighty songs are hushed, 
 By such a small, contracted mind ! 
 How many a smile to lips that stole, 
 How many a glow within the soul, 
 How many a vow that might, at need, 
 Have ripened into noble deed, 
 Has been to death by him consigned ! " 
 
 The dean is rather worse than better; as the 
 bailiff leaves everything of an elevating character 
 for holidays and festival occasions, so the dean 
 leaves religion for Sundays. Men must work on 
 week-days ; they need be stirred only on Sunday, 
 when it is the pastor's duty to discourse to them of 
 the ideal ; but he must put a stop to even this as 
 soon as he has come down from the pulpit. A 
 clergyman is not the spiritual guardian of the in- 
 dividual members of the community; he is, first 
 and foremost, an official in the service of the state. 
 He must first do what the state requires, and then 
 look after his own interests. Finally, in the persons
 
 1 72 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 of the schoolmaster and the sexton, the lower rep- 
 resentatives of officialdom are made sport of. The 
 schoolmaster, who, as well as the bailiff, has been a 
 member of the Storthing, says to his colleague : 
 
 " But we too have a different law 
 From that which governs most men's action ; 
 We are the servants of the state, 
 Our part it is to keep things straight, 
 Virtue and science to protect, 
 And passion's promptings to reject, 
 In short, to stand outside of faction." 
 
 And afterward, when they hear Brand playing 
 upon the organ in the church, they are given the 
 following characteristic dialogue : 
 
 THE SCHOOLMASTER. 
 Hm, that might move one, on condition 
 
 THE SEXTON. 
 Yes, were one not a functionary. 
 
 THE SCHOOLMASTER. 
 
 A due regard for our position 
 Must make us of expression chary. 
 
 THE SEXTO.V. 
 
 Yet, were you not compelled to think, 
 Might send to the devil pen and ink, 
 
 THE SCHOOLMASTER. 
 If you were free to feel, instead 
 Of tolling church-bells for the dead, 
 
 THE SEXTON. 
 Friend, no one sees us, let us feel 1
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 173 
 
 THE SCHOOLMASTER. 
 
 'T would be unfitting to reveal 
 That we are human in our hearts. 
 The teaching that the priest imparts 
 Says that no man should play two parts ; 
 Not even he who would be can 
 At once official be, and man. 
 
 These frequent denunciations of officialdom as 
 the cause of popular stupidity and materialism are 
 based in part upon the peculiar conditions of the 
 period, and in part upon the theory of government 
 which influenced, to a certain extent, by those 
 very conditions Henrik Ibsen had shaped. 
 
 The greater portion of the period that had 
 elapsed, from the time of his attainment to man- 
 hood to the time of his leaving Norway, had 
 been a dull and material period, a golden age 
 for officialdom, since administrative activity played 
 the chief part in the history of those years. Ques- 
 tions of national importance, like those of the 
 theatre and of the royal vice-regency, had indeed 
 arisen and made a considerable stir, but those who 
 were responsible for this agitation were regarded 
 by the majority as disturbers of the peace and wild 
 demagogues. That with which opinion was chiefly 
 concerned was neither the independence of the na- 
 tion, nor its intellectual development, but rather its 
 economic welfare. So roads were laid out, large 
 and stately district-prisons erected, commercial re-
 
 1 74 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 lations improved, new means of subsistence pro- 
 vided, temperance associations founded, and many 
 other useful things done. Unfortunately, it was 
 fancied that to do these things was the sum of the 
 nation's obligations. Anything that looked beyond 
 the material was purely visionary, and required to 
 be suppressed. The people should be of one mind, 
 just like the employes of a business house or the 
 soldiers of a company; the ideal citizen was the 
 characterless average man, with no distinct traits, 
 and the rule of life was to cling humbly and un- 
 complainingly to earth. It was said with the dean 
 in " Brand " : 
 
 " If you will think, you soon will see, 
 My little flock, what 's for your best. 
 Can yours be any great behest ? 
 How may you set the bondman free ? 
 You have your little daily task, 
 And more than this you should not ask. 
 Your arms, how useless in the fray I 
 'T is yours to guard your homes to-day. 
 'Twixt wolf and bear what would you do? 
 'Twixt hawk and eagle where were you ? 
 You would but fall the victor's prey." 
 
 It was this cowardly materialism, Ibsen felt, that 
 was responsible for the stand taken by Norway at 
 the time of the war between Denmark and Ger- 
 many, and the poem often makes reference to it 
 
 But the root of his discontent went deeper than 
 the conditions of the time and place; it really
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 175 
 
 grew from the modern idea of the state, and 
 toward that the author eventually directs his at- 
 tack in the name of freedom and individualism. 
 This attack is also made in the unconscious per- 
 son of the dean : 
 
 " The state you '11 find, if it you scan, 
 Exactly half republican. 
 Freedom it hates as 't were the pest ; 
 Equality, it thinks, is best. 
 But that you never can attain 
 Till to one plane all things you level ; 
 Since this you do not, there remain 
 Great inequalities; the evil 
 Grows greater than it was before ; 
 Distinctions count for more and more ; 
 The servant of the church of yore 
 An individual of late 
 Has grown, and weakened is the state." 
 
 All should be made to keep the same pace, 
 
 " For each man his appointed place ; 
 That all keep step as formerly, 
 Should now, as then, our object be." 
 
 The corporal is the ideal leader, and the church, 
 as a part of the regulative machinery of the 
 state, must follow its methods ; the priest must 
 learn of the corporal to lead his followers in 
 unbroken step through life to paradise. 
 
 So the attack upon the Norwegian people, be- 
 gun as a satire of officialdom, is developed into 
 a polemical discussion of the state as an institu- 
 
 12
 
 176 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 tion, and of the official church as a part of the 
 apparatus of government. 
 
 In contrast with everything that is thus attacked, 
 Ibsen has given us Brand. That in which the 
 people are lacking he possesses in superabun- 
 dance ; he is the incarnation of will and idealism, 
 of force and enthusiasm. With all the strength of 
 his simple and massive personality he confronts the 
 prevailing spirit of compromise with his inexor- 
 able "all or nothing; " and, as the champion of 
 individuality, he leads the fight against the rep- 
 resentatives of officialdom, both temporal and 
 spiritual. We are not necessarily to identify 
 Brand with Ibsen; for, although Brand is an 
 ideal creation, his is not a fixed character from 
 the start, any more than are the principal figures 
 of Ibsen's other dramas ; his character is devel- 
 oped with the action of the poem. Although 
 we perceive Ibsen in all that Brand says, he be- 
 comes nowhere wholly identified with his hero. 
 He has endeavored to shape a figure ideally in 
 contrast with those actual qualities against which 
 his satire is directed, and this design has deter- 
 mined the character of Brand. The develop- 
 ment of the poem is the gradual growth, in 
 Brand's mind, of the conviction that the two 
 conceptions of life are irreconcilable. His pur- 
 pose is so to arouse and to steel the people that
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 177 
 
 the individual may arise from his torpor as a 
 distinct personality; and to this end he declares 
 war upon the representatives of officialdom. As, 
 for example, when he says to the bailiff, 
 
 " The people, that so long has drowsed 
 Beneath your rule, shall be aroused ! 
 For long enough their spirit in 
 Your narrow cage confined has been; 
 They who adopt your regimen 
 Mopish and dull go forth again. 
 The nation's best blood you have lapped, 
 The best part of its courage sapped ; 
 Souls have been crushed at your command, 
 That firm as adamant should stand ; 
 But now the day of vengeance nears, 
 And war-cries thunder in your ears." 
 
 He opens his warfare with officialdom by be- 
 coming one of its representatives, by becoming 
 the priest of his native town. He indeed creates 
 a stir and awakens those around him to new life, 
 yet he does not feel altogether satisfied. He 
 does not seem quite able to find room for his 
 ideals in his present environment. The church 
 is too small for the God of whom he testifies, 
 and so he resolves to build a larger one ; but, in 
 putting this resolution into effect, he comes to 
 realize that he himself, the spokesman of the 
 logical, has been occupying an uncertain and 
 illogical position. The dean's words concerning 
 the relation between church and state arouse him
 
 1/8 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to full consciousness of the falsity of his position ; 
 and, with the declaration that the spirit of com- 
 promise is Satan himself, he breaks away from 
 the whole accursed system, this rupture being 
 symbolically indicated by his act of locking the 
 church door and flinging the key into the river. 
 The tragic feature of his destiny lies in the too 
 tardy realization that leads to this breach, in his 
 having made all his sacrifices in vain, in the fact 
 that he, with all his passionate craving for com- 
 pleteness and thoroughness, has himself bowed 
 down to the spirit of compromise, to the Tempter 
 himself. Brand is then by no means an ideal 
 figure, as the term is commonly understood, but 
 a militant character, developed in the very heat 
 of combat; and, however fully he may be the 
 spokesman of Ibsen's controversial notions, the 
 latter has shaped him in so objective a fashion 
 that he appears a distinct character, not a mere 
 speaking-trumpet. 
 
 Artistically viewed, he is a fanciful creation, not 
 a figure from real life; he stands in contrast to 
 the real rather than represents it. And yet the 
 impulse which led Ibsen to shape such a figure is 
 to be found in an actual impression. 
 
 At the time, " Brand " was regarded as an es- 
 sentially Christian poem, mainly because Brand 
 is a priest. It was generally looked upon as a
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 179 
 
 sermon of the brimstone and hell-fire description. 
 Yet Ibsen had already given warning against such 
 a misconception. He allows Einar to fall into this 
 error when he represents him as saying to Brand : 
 
 " Yours is the brood of those who feign 
 That men are dust, and life is vain ; 
 The soul with fear you work upon, 
 Sackcloth and ashes to put on." 
 
 To which Brand replies, 
 
 " No, I am not a preachifier, 
 Nor do I speak as priests for hire ; 
 I may not even Christian be, 
 But as a man I take my stand ; 
 And this I know, that I can see 
 The curse that lies upon this land." 
 
 In the last four of these lines Brand's character 
 is given with the conciseness of a definition ; and, 
 that there may be no doubt at all about the 
 matter, he says shortly afterward, 
 
 " Nor do I in my work pretend 
 Or church or dogma to defend ; 
 From some beginning both are dated, 
 And so it easily may be 
 That we the end of both shall see, 
 Theiry?/.r have all things created." 
 
 But back of all this, man himself, with his possi- 
 bilities of full and symmetrical development, 
 remains as a permanent factor, and him would 
 Brand raise from the mire. As we see, his stand- 
 point is far from being that of the pietist, Einar,
 
 ISO HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 in his missionary period, stands for the pietistic 
 view of life, it is not even a religious standpoint 
 If we read such lines as these, 
 
 " With joy no hearts are breaking here. 
 
 'Twere well indeed, if that were all 
 Our cause for grief ; if pleasure's thrall 
 Thou art, be that from year to year; 
 But be not that to-day, to-morrow, 
 And then next year a prey to sorrow ; 
 Be altogether what thou art, 
 Be something wholly, not in part," 
 
 we shall understand how purely human is the 
 author's standpoint. As the attack upon the 
 church forms only a part of the controversial con- 
 
 
 
 tents of the poem, so the religious element is but 
 one factor in Brand's character. Besides, Ibsen 
 has himself declared that Brand's priestly character 
 and the fact that the problem is given a religious 
 statement, are unessential elements. " I might 
 have embodied the syllogism in the person of a 
 sculptor or a politician as well as in that of a 
 priest," he wrote to Georg Brandes. 
 
 However, the fact that Brand is represented as a 
 priest was not wholly the result of accident. The 
 actual observations upon which the figure was 
 based were made among the clergy. 
 
 Danish critics, Brandes among them, and, follow- 
 ing in his footsteps, the majority of the German 
 writers who have dealt with Ibsen of late, have
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. l8l 
 
 treated him in connection with Soren Kierkegaard, 
 and assumed the poem to have been suggested by 
 the writings of the latter, and by the agitation led 
 by him against the established church. It is easy 
 to understand how this misconception has arisen 
 among foreigners, not intimately acquainted with 
 Norwegian conditions, for the points of resem- 
 blance are obvious. When Kierkegaard bewails 
 the pitiable character of the age, when he exalts 
 the individual, and pours his scorn upon society, 
 when he attacks official Christianity from the 
 standpoint of a broad humanity, and when he, a 
 theologian who had even been a preacher, de- 
 clares, at the close of his life, that, sooner than 
 enter a church, he would commit the grossest of 
 crimes, the analogy which he offers to Brand is 
 sufficiently apparent 
 
 In spite of this, we are but crossing the stream 
 to fetch water when we look to Kierkegaard for 
 the actual model upon which " Brand " was based. 
 At the time when " Brand " was written Ibsen 
 knew almost nothing of Soren Kierkegaard ; he 
 had not read half a dozen sheets of his writings, 
 a little of " Either Or," and some of " The 
 Moment," that was all. The course of Kierke- 
 gaard's last agitation was followed in Norway, and 
 naturally aroused a certain interest there, but it 
 made little impression upon Ibsen, and he never
 
 1 82 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 felt called to be " Kierkegaard's poet," although 
 the term has been applied to him. 
 
 On the other hand, his attention had been very 
 strongly held by the agitation which Pastor G. A. 
 Lammers had aroused, towards the close of the 
 fifties, in Ibsen's native town of Skien. 
 
 Lammers was forty-six years old, and had been 
 a priest for more than twenty years, when he 
 was appointed parish priest of Skien. Shortly 
 thereafter, his health required him to take a rather 
 lengthy trip abroad, and upon his return he en- 
 tered upon the religious movement that since has 
 borne his name. To begin with, the ceremony of 
 absolution and certain others of the ecclesiastical 
 ordinances troubled his conscience. In 1855, he 
 applied for, and obtained, a chaplain, who was 
 to assume the duties which he felt himself unable 
 to discharge ; but this did not satisfy him alto- 
 gether, so, in June, 1856, he applied for leave 
 and a pension. Soon thereafter, he took a step 
 by which his pension was forfeited ; he left the 
 established church and founded a "Free Apostolic- 
 Christian Communion " in Skien. In his appli- 
 cation for leave he stated that his position brought 
 him upwards of 5000 crowns yearly, and that he 
 was the father of two children, unprovided for. 
 His pastoral activity in Skien had made much 
 stir. Some warmly sided with him; others met
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 183 
 
 him with " opposition, scorn, and mockery." We 
 read in a contemporary account that he " fear- 
 lessly chastised irregularities, sin, and vice, in both 
 public and private life." He had an assistant, 
 a school-teacher, who " went about the town, 
 entering every house, asking after every family, 
 and, as far as possible, after every individual 
 member of the community, and inquiring into 
 his temporal and spiritual condition." He was 
 a stern and imperious priest, thundering against 
 every frailty that he fancied he discovered, and 
 administering the severest chastisement to all 
 manner of worldliness. 
 
 But, if his activity while a priest of the estab- 
 lished church had caused a stir, matters became 
 much worse when he stepped out. His farewell 
 sermon lies printed before me, and it is interest- 
 ing reading. The Norwegian church has never, 
 before or afterwards, been so powerfully attacked 
 from its own pulpit. Upon a previous occasion 
 he had called the churches comedy-houses ; in the 
 farewell sermon he offers proof of the statement. 
 " I endeavored to carry out the injunctions of 
 our state church," he says, " or rather, as far 
 as possible, the idea which they embody; but I 
 soon felt the task impossible, for the church seeks 
 to enforce by legislation that which can only be- 
 come truth unto salvation under conditions of the
 
 I 84 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 most absolute freedom." The sacraments were 
 not for each and every one, " but for them alone 
 who in truth turn unto the Lord." " The im- 
 penitent and unbelieving should have no part in 
 them, even if they are not outwardly sinful men, 
 unless it is evident that they wish to become con- 
 verted." Infant baptism was also an absurdity. 
 " Better unbaptized and unconfirmed children ! 
 Better be honestly heathen than thus conform 
 to civil conditions, using the ceremonial of the 
 church to protect and perpetuate a race of liars 
 and hypocrites ! Better forsake everything to 
 which the world clings than take part longer in 
 this terrible play ! " He even denounced the mar- 
 riage ceremony because of the questions which 
 the priest puts to the bridal couple, and he was 
 equally opposed to the burial service. " I may 
 even say that so-called Christian burial in so-called 
 Christian earth has been a cause of grief to my 
 soul, and seemed to me an encouragement to 
 both impenitence and unbelief, not merely when 
 false and misleading discourses are delivered over 
 the dead (and we hear such with terrible fre- 
 quency, especially when the dead and his mourn- 
 ers belong to the more cultivated and intelligent 
 classes), but also when witness is borne of truth 
 unto resurrection, he who is laid to rest having 
 no sure hope of being reckoned with the dead
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 185 
 
 who die in the Lord, and yet being consecrated 
 to his new life with tribute of flowers and sacred 
 song. It is not ours to condemn the departed ; 
 neither is it ours to absolve him." After going on 
 in this fashion for quite a while, he ends his ser- 
 mon with a prayer " that the day come, if that 
 be possible, when here in this so-called house 
 of God, that shall no longer be done which is 
 contrary to God's will, and when here in this 
 fair valley of the Lord, which his creative hand 
 has so nobly shaped, here in our streets and our 
 ways, in our houses and our fields, above our 
 waters and beneath our woods, there shall no 
 longer be heard blasphemies, and seen shameful 
 idolatries, but instead of them prayer to the living 
 God in spirit and in truth, on holy days and week- 
 days, while resting and while toiling in the sweat 
 of the brow, in joy and in affliction." 1 Ibsen 
 knew Lammers personally, and was deeply im- 
 pressed by his manly and intrepid stand. The 
 points of resemblance between Lammers and 
 Brand are obvious, reaching even to details, and 
 when we read how Lammers gathered his flock 
 about him and went out into the fields or up the 
 mountain slope to hold divine service, we per- 
 
 1 This sermon, as well as a sketch of his plan for a " Free Apos- 
 tolic-Christian Communion," were published by Lammers in 
 Skien (1856).
 
 1 86 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 ceive a striking similarity to Brand's conduct. 
 " Kierkegaard was too much of a closet agitator," 
 Ibsen once said in a conversation with the author 
 of this book ; " Lammers, on the other hand, was an 
 open-air agitator, like Brand." But here, as upon 
 other occasions, Ibsen has handled his material 
 with freedom; it has served him as a starting- 
 point, not as an end. His object was not to 
 present and explain a character like that of Lam- 
 mers ; he has merely made use of the serviceable 
 elements of that character. 
 
 His real object was to show how crying the 
 contrast 
 
 " Between things as they really are, 
 And as they rightfully should be." 
 
 Hence the rough form which is given to the poem. 
 It is a philippic, a thundered appeal ; it strikes 
 home ; it has in it no word of concession. It was 
 first begun by Ibsen as an epic poem ; when he 
 afterward gave preference to the dramatic form, he 
 considered dramatic requirements only in so far as 
 they were fitted to his polemical aim. He gave 
 little attention to probability or to strict dramatic 
 motive; those matters were of little consequence 
 in the ideal sphere in which his hero was placed ; 
 he did not even take pains to make his characters 
 speak as it might be supposed that they actually 
 would speak; he was so engaged by his contro-
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 187 
 
 versial and satirical aims that his characters were 
 made to satirize themselves in comically overdrawn 
 descriptions. After Einar's conversion he speaks 
 of himself in the following fashion : 
 
 " The tub of faith has washed me clean, 
 There is no spot upon me seen ; 
 The washing-board of sanctity 
 From mud has scrubbed me wholly free ; 
 And then my Adam's garment I 
 Have cleansed with righteousness's lye ; 
 No surplice half so white and fair 
 As I, thus purified by prayer." 
 
 The bailiff, the dean, the schoolmaster, and the 
 sexton give themselves smart buffets of this sort. 
 There is war to the knife from first to last ; no 
 quarter is given, and there is no cessation of hos- 
 tilities except in the scenes where Agnes appears. 
 She brings an element of gentleness and reconcili- 
 ation into the midst of all this hard and earnest 
 fighting ; she is like a stream of open water run- 
 ning in the middle of a frozen river ; all the author's 
 warmth of feeling has found in her a vent, and this 
 makes of her a wonderfully inviting figure amidst 
 the circumstances that surround her. The tranquil 
 life of the home, upon which, in spite of all his 
 sympathy, Ibsen was a little severe in " Love's 
 Comedy," finds its full expression in the character 
 of Agnes; and when, at the end, the breastwork 
 which has been the scene of the combat is swept
 
 1 88 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 away by an avalanche, we are left with a double 
 impression of sweetness and bitterness, of gentle- 
 ness and of passion. This impression exactly 
 represents the author himself. His nature, funda- 
 mentally gentle, is clothed in mail-armor for the 
 hard battle of life, but his heart beats just as 
 warm beneath all this equipment. 
 
 " Brand " did not bring the battle to an end. 
 Ibsen appeared full-weaponed with another dra- 
 matic poem the following year. "Peer Gynt" 
 stands in the most intimate relation to " Brand." 
 Brand is the antithesis ; Peer Gynt is the image 
 itself. In the former, we have the Norwegian 
 nation as it should be ; in the latter, as it is. In 
 Brand's description of the nation we have the 
 sketch for Peer Gynt's portrait. It stands complete 
 in these lines : - 
 
 " Go but about the land, and when 
 You listen to all sorts of men, 
 How each has learned, you soon may see, 
 A little of everything to be. 
 
 Yet far, as all examples teach, 
 
 His faults, his virtues, do not reach ; 
 
 A fraction he, in small and great, 
 
 For good and ill, a fraction's weight ; 
 
 And then, alas, and worst of all, 
 
 These fractions do not fit at all." 
 
 Peer Gynt is the nation itself, presented in a 
 typical figure. All the faults that Ibsen has dis-
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 189 
 
 cerned are reproduced in him ; he is the personifi- 
 cation of the incomplete, the characterless, the 
 egotistic. If we do not bear this constantly in 
 mind, we shall find portions of the poem incompre- 
 hensible, and be apt to entertain misconceptions. 
 Even Georg Brandes has not escaped such a mis- 
 conception. He quotes, for example, the song of 
 the yarn-balls : 
 
 " We are thoughts ; 
 Thou shouldst have thought us. 
 
 We are a watchword ; 
 
 Thou shouldst have proclaimed us. 
 
 We are works ; 
 
 Thou shouldst have performed us." 
 
 And he adds : " Words of reproach, which we 
 may suppose the poet has uttered to spur 
 himself in moments of relaxation, but which we 
 cannot imagine Peer Gynt to have said in self- 
 accusation. How on earth could this miserable 
 Peer ever have proclaimed a watchword, and how 
 could he reproach himself with not having done 
 so ! " We need only consider Peer Gynt as the 
 mouthpiece of the nation, and we shall find abun- 
 dant meaning in the self-accusation, and this 
 without resorting to any such evasion as the sup- 
 position that the words are merely a personal 
 outburst, interpolated by the poet. The scene
 
 190 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 upon the coast of Morocco, where Peer Gynt is 
 shown us in company with other national types, 
 no longer seems to us arbitrary when we think of 
 him as typical of his own nationality. 
 
 " Peer Gynt " would not, however, have been as 
 complete and vital a work as it is had the author 
 strictly confined himself to the nationally typical. 
 In this work also we find him beginning with an 
 abstraction, and ending with a living individual. 
 
 Nor is Peer Gynt the Norwegian in general ; he 
 is the Norwegian of a certain period, of the closing 
 years of the romantic epoch. In " Brand" certain 
 of the outworks of romanticism were attacked ; 
 we recall, for example, the bailiff's enthusiasm for 
 the times of King Bele; but here the weapon is 
 aimed at the romantic stronghold. Kindred types 
 of the transition period between the days of 
 romanticism and our own may be found in other 
 literatures. Tourguenicff's " Roudine," Spiel- 
 hagen's " Problematic Characters," Schack's " The 
 Visionaries," and, later, Schandorph's " Centre- 
 less," show us characters having this in common 
 with Peer Gynt, that they are visionaries, unable 
 to take a firm hold of actual existence. Ibsen has, 
 however, gone his own way ; while the others have 
 found their types among the cultivated classes, he 
 has found his among the people. Peer Gynt is 
 not, like these others, a product of aesthetic roman-
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 191 
 
 ticism, but rather of that popular and national 
 romanticism which lies at the base of the other. 
 As we know, Ibsen not only took the name of 
 Peer Gynt, but various other details as well, partly 
 from Asbjornsen and Moe's " Popular Tales," and 
 partly from Asbjornsen's "Fairy Tales." 1 He 
 especially dwells upon the fact that Peer Gynts 
 visionary nature is to be accounted for by the 
 tales upon which his mother brought him up. 
 Aase says : 
 
 " We knew nothing better than to forget, 
 It is hard for one to see things just as they are. 
 Unpleasant it is to look fate in the eyes ; 
 And so to shake care from us endeavor we all, 
 And try if we can to keep from thinking at all. 
 Some make use of brandy, and others of lies, 
 And we used fairy tales." 
 
 To the one who reads " Peer Gynt" in 1888 this 
 comparison of the effects of brandy to those of 
 fairy tales does not appear very formidable, but 
 it was a different matter twenty-one years ago ; 
 then it was like a blow in the face of all that was 
 popular and admired in our literature. 
 
 Peer Gynt's training has borne fruit. When we 
 make his acquaintance, he is already a visionary, 
 who, instead of bestirring himself, goes about 
 dreaming with eyes wide open. When he tells 
 
 1 An account, correct in the main, of Ibsen's indebtedness to 
 these sources may be found in L. Passarge's " Henrik Ibsen."
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 about Gudbrand Glesne's ride over Gjendineggen 
 on a reindeer's back, he thoroughly believes it 
 to have been a part of his own experience, al- 
 though his notions of Gjendineggen are so inex- 
 act that it is evident he has never even seen the 
 place. A moment afterwards he falls into a revery 
 inspired by a wonderful cloud, forgetting gossip 
 and the wedding-guests to dream himself riding 
 upon it as emperor. But when he is finally spurred 
 to action, his motive is one of defiance, the usual 
 motive of weak characters. It is out of defiance 
 that he takes flight with Ingrid, and the action is 
 as unconsidered, as meaningless, and as fantastic as 
 any visionary could desire. 
 
 There comes a moment when he realizes that 
 the life of action is better than the life of reflec- 
 tion ; it is when he is hunted like a wild beast by 
 the whole village. 
 
 " Storm and tear 1 stem the mountain-fall ! 
 Strike I pull up the fir-tree, roots and all ! 
 This is life I It can harden a man and raise him, 
 To hell with the lies that perplex and daze him!" 
 
 But this exaltation does not last long, and he 
 is soon engrossed in his fancies again, so deeply 
 that he does not know the difference between what 
 he has actually done and what he has only 
 dreamed of doing, but mingles both confusedly 
 together : -
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 193 
 
 "A lie was the reindeer-ride: 
 Fancy led me astray. 
 Nor climbed I the steep with the bride, 
 Nor drunken was I that day. 
 Pursued by the mountain trold, 
 Pecked at by birds of prey, 
 Jeered at by maidens bold, 
 It was all a lie, I say ! " 
 
 And whenever the serious realities of life con- 
 front him, he seeks to evade them in the way that 
 his mother taught him; he takes flight into his 
 visionary world to 
 
 " Forget the perverse and awry, 
 And all that is cruel and harsh." 
 
 He always goes around, never across ; even by 
 his mother's death-bed he will not look truth in 
 the face, but carries her away with him into the 
 realms of fancy. What a contrast there is be- 
 tween Brand's stern but honest attitude upon the 
 occasion of his mother's death, and the fantastic 
 way in which Peer Gynt smooths with falsehood 
 the passage of his mother from earth. The scene 
 of Aase's death was doubtless meant by Ibsen 
 to stand in contrast with the death of Brand's 
 mother. 
 
 The dual existence thus led by Peer Gynt gives 
 to his character a truly romantic indecision; it 
 makes him weak and cowardly, an egotist and a 
 bungler; it places an impassable chasm between
 
 194 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 desire and deed, between the will to act and the 
 power to carry out the impulse ; his motto is the 
 characteristic : 
 
 " Ay ! think it, and wish it, and will it as well, 
 But do it ? No, that is asking too much." 
 
 Everything that Peer Gynt does is done incom- 
 pletely; he never sets about a resolute action, 
 either good or evil; he destroys with one hand 
 the work of the other, and so is left ineffectual 
 and characterless, and must into the melting-pot, 
 like every one who develops, not into a personality, 
 but into an egotist, the caricature of the indi- 
 vidual, who has not " been himself," but merely 
 " sufficient unto himself." When we read " Peer 
 Gynt," we think involuntarily of H. C. Oersted's 
 axiom, " Forget thyself, but lose it not ! " Peer 
 Gynt's character is based upon the reverse of this 
 principle; he has lost his self, but has never for- 
 gotten it. 
 
 So the figure originally conceived as a national 
 type was gradually transformed into a figure typi- 
 cal merely of that epoch through the closing 
 phase of which Ibsen had lived, and with which 
 he broke forever when he wrote " Brand " and 
 " Peer Gynt." 
 
 There are fewer satiric outbursts in " Peer 
 Gynt" than in "Brand." In the first three acts 
 we find nothing of the sort, except when a little
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 195 
 
 sport is made of Norwegian exclusiveness, which 
 is formulated in the patriotic maxim of the Old 
 Man of the Dovre Fjeld : 
 
 " The cow gives cake and the bullock mead, 
 Whether sweet or sour you should not heed ; 
 From the principal fact let your mind not roam, 
 It is brewed at home." 
 
 And similar sport is made of the would-be re- 
 formers of the Norwegian language when, in the 
 scene of the madhouse at Cairo, Huhu discourses 
 of the language of the orang-utan. The two other 
 madmen who appear upon this occasion are also 
 intended to be taken satirically, but the allusions 
 are so veiled that they will hardly be seen unless 
 pointed out The fellah with the royal mummy 
 on his back is, like Trumpeterstraale, a hit at 
 the Swedes, and the mummy is Charles the Twelfth. 
 The Swedes, like the fellah, are very proud of 
 their " hero-king," although during the war be- 
 tween Denmark and Germany they' gave no evi- 
 dence of having anything in common with him, 
 unless it be that they, like the mummy upon this 
 occasion, " remained quite dead." The minister 
 Hussein, who suffers under the illusion that he 
 is a pen, stands for the whole system of diplo- 
 matic notes and protocols, called forth, during 
 the war, from the Kingdom of Sweden and Nor- 
 way, and especially for a prominent Swedish
 
 196 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 statesman, who was very proud of the notes 
 which he wrote during the progress of the war, 
 and who fancied them to have exerted a marked 
 influence over the course of events. 
 
 But general poetical and psychological consid- 
 erations, rather than a definite satirical purpose, 
 were the author's leading motives during the com- 
 position of " Peer Gynt," so that his hero is not 
 only a characteristic figure from one of the transi- 
 tion periods in the history of this century, but a 
 type having a significance for other countries than 
 those of the North, and it consequently has in spite 
 of its local color been understood by foreigners 
 and aroused their admiration. Passarge, for ex- 
 ample, who has translated the poem into German, 
 writes of it as follows : " ' Peer Gynt ' is, like every 
 great poem, a picture of man, struggling, erring 
 ever, seeking for deliverance. It ranks with the 
 ' Odyssey,' the ' Divine Comedy,' ' Don Quijote,' 
 and ' Faust.' . . . ' Peer Gynt,' despite all its 
 faults, is the poem which bears most distinctly 
 upon its forehead the mark of our age, and the 
 time will come when not only will many commen- 
 taries be written upon it, to illuminate it as a 
 whole and in its details, many of them merely 
 ephemeral allusions, but when it will be looked 
 upon as a truthful reflection of this century, and 
 again and again attract the admiration of mankind."
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 197 
 
 After the performance of this magnificent over- 
 ture the curtain rose in 1869 upon the first com- 
 edy of modern life in Norwegian literature. Ibsen 
 had already made an essay in this direction with 
 " Love's Comedy," but his indignation was then 
 too strong, and his visual angle embraced only the 
 controversial, not the comic ; he scourged his 
 characters instead of holding them up to ridicule. 
 In " Brand " his indignation had risen still higher, 
 and his pen had been almost wholly devoted to 
 controversy. In " Peer Gynt " the waves began 
 to subside, and when " The Young Men's Union " 
 was written in the winter of 186869, his mind had 
 grown so calm that he was free to laugh at the 
 types and conditions that were the objects of his 
 satire. 
 
 When Ibsen regarded the political situation at 
 home, after an absence of four years, his impres- 
 sion cannot have been exactly favorable. The 
 relations between the two parties must have 
 seemed easy-going enough ; there was not then as 
 wide a gulf as afterwards between Right and Left; 
 there were then no strongly contrasted views of 
 life, but merely different attitudes towards one or 
 two of the political questions upon which people 
 are commonly divided. The division might be 
 sharp at times, but it was not dangerous ; it was 
 hardly a question of life and death in the sixties,
 
 198 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 as it was in the beginning of the eighties. An 
 outsider might easily have viewed the situation as 
 a squabble between those in power and those who 
 wished to be, and there was nothing in such a 
 squabble to fire a poet like Ibsen ; he must have 
 felt tolerably indifferent as to the outcome, and 
 could have said with Daniel Hejre: " It is all one 
 to me whether the dog eat the pig or the pig the 
 dog." So Ibsen stood in a free and unembarrassed 
 relation to the contrasting conditions which he 
 pictured, and might swing the lash in either direc- 
 tion, as vigorously as he pleased. Lundestad and 
 Chamberlain Bratsberg were spared as little as 
 Stensgaard and land-owner Monsen. The cham- 
 berlain was depicted as an old aristocrat, without 
 the slightest comprehension of the age in which he 
 lived, and Lundestad as a crafty rogue, willing to 
 resort to any means that would further his ends 
 without bringing him into conflict with the law. 
 Stensgaard and Monsen were represented as ad- 
 venturers seeking to rise, the one a swindler, the 
 other a phrase-monger. Not one of them all is 
 actuated by higher than private interests. 
 
 Stensgaard is a typical figure of the sixties ; his 
 language is the jargon of the average liberal poli- 
 tician of that period. The liberal party was then 
 based upon a sort of romantic nationalism ; its 
 speech was a mixture of Johan Sverdrupian
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 199 
 
 phrases, Bjornsonian turns and figures, and Grundt- 
 vigian sentiment. Bjornson, in particular, had 
 many admirers who attempted to copy his original 
 style ; but that which was characteristic and in- 
 teresting in the model became parody and carica- 
 ture in the imitation of his not over-brilliant 
 followers. Such an imitator Ibsen pictured in 
 Stensgaard, and he has caught the trick with in- 
 comparable accuracy. 
 
 Stensgaard has both egotism and vacillation in 
 common with Peer Gynt. " A repulsive home 
 life, a public school education, soul, character, 
 will, endowment, each resulting in its own pecu- 
 liar tendency, how could these diverse influ- 
 ences fail to develop a discordant personality?" 
 says Fjeldbo, speaking of him. His school train- 
 ing has developed in him an impressionable but 
 unfeeling disposition, and given him the power of 
 facile expression. His home life has stunted the 
 growth of his character. The father's tendency to 
 vegetate is responsible for the son's ever unsatis- 
 fied desire for enjoyment. The mother's simplicity, 
 and the dishonorable character of her occupation 
 have also left their mark. The pawnbroker's son 
 is entirely without the sense of honor ; he has no 
 self-respect, no manly feeling. He has a quick 
 mind, but his intelligence is not developed ; he has 
 not learned to know himself; he is governed by
 
 200 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 his moods, and has never learned to examine into 
 his own conduct. Self-criticism, in consequence, 
 counts for nothing with him, and he believes in the 
 absolute validity of everything he feels, says, and 
 does. He is carried away by his own words, and 
 is ruled by phrases; in fact, this blind faith in 
 words sums up his whole character. When he 
 conceals his self-interestedness with fine phrases 
 he carries with him all who are as destitute of the 
 critical faculty as he himself, and, blind to his own 
 faults, he fails to perceive his selfishness in its 
 nakedness. It is thus natural that he should feel 
 shocked at the conduct of others, although his 
 own conduct has been quite similar. Remember 
 what he says to Bastian, when the latter speaks of 
 paying court to Madam Rundholmen. He mis- 
 leads others, because he first of all misleads 
 himself. 
 
 And to these characteristics he adds a bound- 
 less self-confidence. He worships himself, and 
 seeks to win as high a place in the esteem of 
 others as he has in his own. A true parvenu, he 
 is both vain and reckless, respecting nothing ex- 
 cept what he calls his aim. 
 
 His glibness and his recklessness, his ambition 
 and his self-confidence, his lack of introspective 
 power and his dwarfed moral sense, all make of 
 him a dangerous man, likely to create much dis-
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 2OI 
 
 turbance in seeking to attain his ends. But, for- 
 tunately, he has two characteristics which make 
 him far less dangerous than he otherwise would 
 be. It is easy to see through him, and he blurts 
 out his views upon all occasions. The art of dis- 
 simulation calls for more developed powers of 
 reflection than are his. He is, besides, too self- 
 confident to think that others may possibly not 
 mean what they say, and he believes in their 
 phrases quite as unreservedly as he believes in 
 his own. How should he see through the speech 
 of others, when he cannot even see through his 
 own? This is the standpoint from which we must 
 view him ; a fact clearly perceived by Lundestad, 
 who so easily leads him by the nose, and causes 
 him so completely to prostitute himself. 
 
 " The Young Men's Union " is a modern comedy 
 of character of high rank; even the minor figures 
 have the stamp of a reality at that time without 
 parallel in our literature. Formally considered, 
 also, " The Young Men's Union " was an epoch- 
 making work. The tone of modern conversation 
 which Ibsen had vainly sought to reproduce in 
 " Love's Comedy," is given here in masterly 
 fashion. The dialogue is not written, it is spoken ; 
 there is gossip, twaddle, scolding, and wrangling, 
 just as there is in every-day life. Even the slipshod 
 manner of conversation is copied. When Fjeldbo,
 
 202 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 for example, says : " Premiums. Put them to the 
 ear and you will see more distinctly another time," 
 we notice the slip of style at once, but people 
 speak thus in ordinary conversation. 
 
 It goes almost without saying that a work like 
 this was bound to be misunderstood by the public ; 
 it introduced a new manner into literature, and 
 came so unexpectedly, and as such a surprise, that 
 the proper point of view was generally missed. 
 It represented a new relation to actual life, it took 
 a closer grasp of actuality than any previous work 
 had taken ; and since at the same time it dealt 
 with the representatives of political parties, it was 
 thought that Ibsen had portrayed individual poli- 
 ticians, and attempts were made to point out the 
 originals. No one seemed to feel that this mode 
 of procedure tended to degrade a remarkable im- 
 aginative work to the level of a political pamphlet. 
 Those who could not agree upon the details were 
 still unanimous in viewing the piece as a partisan 
 document. To ridicule a liberal politician was 
 equivalent to ridiculing liberalism in general. In 
 the first heat of partisan fanaticism the fact was 
 unperceived that the piece lashed both parties 
 alike. A writer in " Aftenbladet " said that " the 
 poem was written from a one-sided, partisan stand- 
 point; " and when this notion found currency, it was 
 easy to stand forth as the champion of poetry, and
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 203 
 
 have at the author in its name. The same writer 
 in " Aftenbladet," Kristian Elster, accused Ibsen of 
 having " broken with his own past, of having for- 
 saken that which he had before exalted, of forsak- 
 ing his ideals and denying the spirit of poetry, of 
 celebrating the triumph of provincialism, and of 
 taking the average man for a model." According 
 to him, Selma's outburst in the third act marked 
 " the only moment in the action when the fresh 
 air is permitted to enter, and when we do not 
 breath the poisonous atmosphere of base passion 
 and diluted morality." Even persons of more 
 consequence fell into the same misconception. At 
 the beginning of Bjornson's well-known poem to 
 Johan Sverdrup, there is an express allusion to 
 "The Young Men's Union " in the lines: 
 
 " Because thy mighty name my song 
 Shall bear, thou yet wert wholly wrong 
 To think that onslaught it recalls ; 
 I do not mingle in such brawls 
 
 If poesy's sacred grove be made 
 The assassin's hiding place, if this 
 The new poetic fashion is, 
 
 Then I for one renounce its sliade." 
 
 By the conservative party the piece was received 
 with more satisfaction, but with no clearer compre- 
 hension ; the manner in which it treated conserva- 
 tism was ignored, and the piece was regarded 
 merely as a contribution to the political struggle.
 
 2O4 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 In other words, the party-feeling of the Nor- 
 wegian public was aroused by " The Young 
 Men's Union." Such excitement rarely passes 
 off quietly, and so, when the piece was produced 
 at the Christiania theatre, it created a violent 
 disturbance. Amid the wild music of hisses and 
 applause, of whistling and " bravo " shouting, 
 the first Norwegian comedy of modern life was 
 ushered upon Norway's leading stage. 
 
 On Monday, October 18, 1869, the piece was 
 produced for the first time. A portion of the 
 audience gave expression to its approval, while 
 the rest, by hissing very vigorously, protested 
 against this approval. The battle raged strll more 
 fiercely upon the occasion of the second per- 
 formance, October 20. With the opening words 
 (Lundestad's i/th of May speech) a loud whistling 
 began, which evoked, on the other hand, a zealous 
 demonstration on the part of the author's self- 
 constituted champions. The struggle between 
 hand-clappers and whistlers lasted for several 
 minutes, then the curtain was lowered, and the 
 stage-manager stepped forward, asking the audi- 
 ence if it desired the play to go on, and, in case 
 it did, requesting silence. The play was then 
 uninterruptedly proceeded with as* far as Bastian 
 Monsen's lines in the fourth act, about " the peo- 
 ple; they who possess nothing and are nothing;
 
 CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD. 205 
 
 they who lie in bonds." Then the storm burst 
 forth again, and raged intermittently until the fall 
 of the curtain upon the closing act. Not until 
 the lights were turned out did the disturbance 
 cease within the walls of the theatre, and it was 
 kept up for a while outside, in the corridors and 
 even in the street Upon the third performance, 
 given to a house so closely packed that seats were 
 placed in the space reserved for the orchestra, 
 the battle was renewed ; but from the fourth per- 
 formance onward, peace and order were restored. 
 Ibsen was then in Egypt, a guest of the Khe- 
 dive at the opening of the Suez canal. Here he 
 learned of the reception that had been given his 
 play, and has himself expressed indignation that 
 it should have been dragged into the political 
 contentions of the day. The news aroused in 
 him a mood which afterwards found expression 
 in the little poem "At Port Said." 
 
 " The Orient sun 
 O'er the sea was cast ; 
 All the flags of the globe 
 Streamed from the mast 
 While the wings of music 
 The choral bore. 
 The canal was baptized 
 'Mid the cannon's roar. 
 
 Past the obelisk 
 The steamer sped,
 
 206 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 While the news in the language 
 
 Of home I read, 
 
 That my poem-mirror, 
 
 Polished for men, 
 
 Had been greeted with hisses, 
 
 And tarnished again. 
 
 " The hornet stung, 
 And hurt for a space. 
 Stars, be thanked I 
 'T is the same old place. 
 We greeted the frigate, 
 As past we sailed ; 
 And, waving my hat, 
 The flag I hailed."
 
 V. 
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 TOURING the composition of the three works 
 *~J just discussed, a great change occurred in 
 Ibsen's situation. A long-delayed popularity was 
 at last accorded him in rich measure. " Brand " 
 made him famous at once, one edition after an- 
 other being demanded; and since, in the house 
 of Gyldendal, he had found more liberal pub- 
 lishers than those who had previously undertaken 
 the issue of his works, his financial condition was 
 greatly improved. 
 
 In addition to this, the Storthing of 1866 had 
 granted him the " poet's salary," which he had in 
 vain demanded of its predecessor. This was not, 
 
 14
 
 208 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 however, granted without some difficulty, for State 
 Councillor Riddervold obstinately opposed it, de- 
 claring that he, as the representative of the church, 
 could not approve of a poet's salary for the man 
 who had written " Love's Comedy," and who, in 
 his delineation of Pastor Straamand, had dealt 
 such hard blows to Norwegian, ecclesiasticism. A 
 Danish biographer of 1867 relate, that Bjornson 
 went to the State Councillor, and endeavored to 
 bring him to reason, but unsuccessfully. Then a 
 number of Ibsen's friends took hold of the matter, 
 and were more fortunate. The grant was recom- 
 mended, and the Storthing gave its approval with 
 but four dissenting votes. 
 
 When Ibsen left Norway, it had been his inten- 
 tion to return, and his position as artistic adviser 
 of the Christiania theatre was kept open and wait- 
 ing for him. But, once away from his country, he 
 felt that he could never return to it for good. The 
 " poet's salary " and the large returns from his 
 works placed him in a position to remain abroad, 
 but in 1868 he left Rome for Dresden. In the 
 summer of 1869 he made a visit to Stockholm, 
 and in the following summer to Copenhagen ; in 
 both cities he was received with the greatest re- 
 spect, and even in Norway public opinion sang to 
 a new tune. When, in 1874, after ten years of 
 absence, he made a visit to his former home, he
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 2CX) 
 
 was received with no end of ovations. The stu- 
 dents organized a procession and marched to his 
 dwelling, while his presence in the theatre, at a 
 performance of " The Young Men's Union," was 
 the occasion of vociferous applause from a crowded 
 house. He had at last won the recognition that was 
 due him. 
 
 Under these altered conditions he felt the need 
 of settling up his literary accounts. After sending 
 home " Brand," " Peer Gynt," and " The Young 
 Men's Union," one after the other, there super- 
 venes in his life a period given to rest and retro- 
 spect. He is no longer busied with new works, 
 but with the revision of the old ones. " Emperor 
 and Galilean," the one new work published during 
 these years, is but the completion of a sketch that 
 had occupied him in the period immediately fol- 
 lowing upon his arrival in Rome. Then he is busy 
 recasting the works written before. The Norwegian 
 editions of his earlier works had become gradually 
 exhausted, and he was now called upon to decide 
 what portions of those works should be introduced 
 to the large audience he had won. His severe self- 
 criticism naturally had much to say upon this occa- 
 sion. Three of his youthful dramatic works and a 
 considerable number of poems were not repub- 
 lished at all; "The Feast at Solhaug" was with- 
 held for a number of years, while " Catilina " and
 
 21O HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 " Fru Inger of Oestraat " underwent a fundamental 
 transformation. 
 
 The double drama of " Emperor and Galilean " 
 is Ibsen's most extensive work ; even the two parts 
 taken separately are among his most voluminous 
 productions. " Caesar's Apostasy " is as long as 
 "The Pretenders," and " Emperor Julian " of about 
 the length of " Brand." The original plan of the 
 work probably contemplated a general historical 
 drama having Julian as its principal character, but 
 the plan gradually grew in dimensions, especially 
 after the work was seriously resumed in 1872; 
 strata of new material were superimposed upon 
 the old ones; new aspects of the question and 
 new poetical ideas asserted themselves ; and so the 
 work gradually grew into its present colossal propor- 
 tions. At some future time it will be interesting to 
 investigate the structure of this work, to separate 
 the various layers, indicate the original substratum, 
 and follow the scheme of the drama in its growth. 
 
 " Emperor and Galilean " has an interesting 
 position among Ibsen's works. It is the last of 
 his historical dramas, and stands, in its final form, 
 with all its mysticism, midway between two such 
 delineations of modern life as " The Young Men's 
 Union " and " The Pillars of Society." And it has 
 still greater interest as marking a stage in the de- 
 velopment of Ibsen's view of life.
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 211 
 
 As I have already pointed out, Ibsen's earlier 
 historical dramas with one or two minor excep- 
 tions touch upon " calling." In the last of 
 them, " The Pretenders," vocation or non-vocation 
 was the central theme of the action. In that play, 
 one's calling was treated as a gift from above, fall- 
 ing upon the elect as the apple fell into Aladdin's 
 turban. In " Brand " the conception was different, 
 but no less mystical ; there it was a sort of cate- 
 gorical imperative, guiding mankind from on high, 
 - it was theirs to be as " the tablet upon which 
 God may write." In " Peer Gynt," one's calling 
 was declared that of " being one's self," but this 
 was a more mystical conception than one might 
 suppose, and was explained as being the obliga- 
 tion " to bear the Master's purpose as a sign." 
 One might be himself in two ways, as a coat may 
 be " right side or wrong side out " : 
 
 "You know, they have lately discovered in Paris 
 How portraits to make with the aid of the sun. 
 They can either the image directly give, 
 Or else the so-called negative. 
 In the latter are shadow and light reversed, 
 And wholly unlike they appear at first; 
 But in them the likeness does really inhere, 
 And it only needs to be made to appear." 
 
 This latter thought appears in a new light in 
 " Emperor and Galilean," where it has assumed 
 a fatalist character. The calling is here neither
 
 2 1 2 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 a gift nor a categorical imperative ; it is a neces- 
 sity; the word is no longer " thou shalt," but 
 " thou must." " To will is to be under the ne- 
 cessity of willing." 
 
 Julian's calling is to establish the kingdom, and 
 the kingdom to be established by him is that of 
 the Galilean ; for this the World-Will has marked 
 him out, and thus he is in bonds to necessity. 
 But he may establish this kingdom either posi- 
 tively or negatively; as a child he has already 
 displayed a singular faculty for winning hearts 
 to the Galileans; by the graves of the martyrs 
 he has spoken to the youth of his own age, and 
 converted them to Christianity. But later he mis- 
 takes his calling; he conceives of the kingdom 
 as a temporal empire, not as the spiritual realm 
 of the Galileans, and so he becomes engaged 
 in a life and death struggle with the very king- 
 dom which it is his to establish. Nevertheless 
 the task is to be accomplished by his agency. 
 The very oppressions and persecutions that fall 
 upon the Christians arouse them from the apathy 
 and sloth into which they have fallen; even the 
 weak and the infirm take courage to confess Christ 
 and suffer for his faith; and when at last Julian 
 falls, he has accomplished his appointed task in 
 the establishment of Christianity, since, where 
 apathy and dissension formerly ruled, he now
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 213 
 
 leaves behind him a powerful and united body 
 of believers. There is, as we may see, both 
 mysticism and fatalism in this conception of call- 
 ing; and the development of the idea is, in a man- 
 ner, completed, for no return can be made from 
 the point of fatalism, while mysticism must dis- 
 appear to make place for the purely natural con- 
 ception of calling. In the work of Ibsen immedi- 
 ately preceding, it had indeed disappeared, which 
 provides new evidence of the fact that " Emperor 
 and Galilean " dates, in its original idea, from 
 an earlier period. In " The Young Men's Union," 
 the mystical idea of calling appears as a mere 
 phrase. Stensgaard has no less faith in his calling 
 than Haakon, and is quite as certain of having 
 entered into a pact with Providence. " Thus hath 
 God commanded," he says. " Ay, he, for it is to 
 accomplish his purposes that we go confidently 
 upon our way." That which has previously been 
 sublime, here becomes merely amusing wordiness. 
 Ibsen's mode of thought places sacrifice in a 
 close relation with calling. The latter demands 
 a willingness to renounce, to sacrifice one's per- 
 sonal inclination. To " be one's self" is, then, in 
 absolute contrast to " being self-sufficient;" it is, 
 indeed, " to slay self." Lordship over self, in re- 
 nunciation and in sacrifice for the love of others, 
 is man's principal obligation. Ibsen carries this
 
 214 HE If R IK IBSEN. 
 
 idea so far as to glorify sacrifice for its own 
 sake. This feeling was very evident in " Brand," 
 and it reappears in " Emperor and Galilean " as 
 a glorification of the sufferings of the martyrs. 
 From the standpoint of modern ethics, the martyr 
 is deserving of admiration only when he sacri- 
 fices himself for the good of others; for Ibsen, 
 on the other hand, the elevating and ennobling 
 power of sacrifice is so great that it is valuable 
 on its own account. When the Christians in 
 " Emperor Julian " tear open their wounds with 
 their own hands, or cut their own flesh to cast 
 the pieces at Julian's feet, this is not given as 
 evidence of the desperate deeds to which fanati- 
 cism may lead mankind, but as a measure of the 
 depth and force of the enthusiasm that their 
 faith is able to inspire. It is the proof that, at 
 this historical crisis, the faith is vital and has 
 right upon its side; while the view of life for 
 which Julian battles shows itself to be outworn 
 by the very fact that it cannot lead men to mar- 
 tyrdom. The cause for which no one is ready 
 to sacrifice everything is doomed. So "Emperor 
 and Galilean " represents, viewed in this light, 
 one of the highest points to which Ibsen's ideal- 
 ism attains. In his later works, the conception 
 of sacrifice appears in a far more sober and 
 practical form.
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 215 
 
 Poetically considered, " Emperor and Galilean " 
 does not take the highest rank among Ibsen's 
 works. We feel while reading it that the long 
 period elapsing between the time when it was 
 first planned and the time of its final execution 
 has prevented the material from being properly 
 woven together into a concrete whole. It is 
 noticeable, for example, that Julian is a very dif- 
 ferent and far more interesting character in 
 " Caesar's Apostasy " than in " Emperor Julian." 
 We must indeed admit that the characteristics 
 developed in him as emperor are suggested while 
 he is yet a youth and a Caesar, but it is none 
 the less surprising that his failings become so 
 much more prominent upon his accession to the 
 imperial throne. In " Caesar's Apostasy " he has 
 the complete sympathy of the reader. His is a 
 fresh nature from the first, honestly seeking after 
 the truth, and striving to lead a full and rich 
 existence, preferring life to books and truth to 
 phrases. He is indeed a trifle vain, and he has 
 early learned to dissimulate, but these character- 
 istics may be forgiven in him on account of the 
 difficulty of his position. Even when he craftily 
 causes himself to be acclaimed as emperor, he 
 does not forfeit our sympathy, for it is done in 
 simple self-defence. As commander in Gaul, he 
 has developed an admirable quickness, energy,
 
 2 1 6 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and ability to act; and when he finally separates 
 himself from the Galileans, it is because he can 
 no longer stand the hypocrisy, the dishonesty, 
 and the meanness that he has seen among the 
 Christians. 
 
 But in " Emperor Julian " he appears trans 
 formed; he who desired life is now satisfied with 
 books; from a man of action he has grown a 
 vain literary pedant, content with the outward 
 shell and never reaching the kernel; so that the 
 citizens of Antioch are quite justified in making 
 sport of him. He no longer bears the tragic 
 stamp, and sinks below his former plane only 
 to rise again at the very end. Like Catiline, Fru 
 Inger, and Hjordis, his tragic fate drives him 
 first to madness and then to death. 
 
 As the representative of the great civilization of 
 the ancients we would gladly accord him more 
 significance than Ibsen has; and this remark ap- 
 plies with still greater force to the lesser repre- 
 sentatives of ancient culture who figure in the 
 play. Admit that that civilization was outworn ; 
 admit that it was falling into decay; even in its 
 decline it was capable of producing nobler char- 
 acters than Libanios and his compeers. But in 
 this, as in all other cases where Ibsen has dealt 
 with historical transitions from old to new, he is 
 unreservedly on the side of the new. This was
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 2I/ 
 
 his position both in " The Pretenders " and in 
 the poem written for Norway's millennial cele- 
 bration, when he glorified the deeds of Harald 
 Haarfager at the expense of the liberty-loving 
 heroes of old. 
 
 The style of " Emperor and Galilean " is an in- 
 teresting attempt to reproduce the character of a 
 definite period in literary form. It is the style of 
 later antiquity, with its circuitousness and its 
 artistic turns, that the author has sought to re- 
 produce; the Latin mainly, although to a certain 
 extent the Greek also, seems to have served him 
 as a model. This style gives a strong historical 
 coloring to the work. 
 
 It need hardly be stated that Ibsen's style un- 
 derwent a marked development, and that his ideals 
 in this matter became modified in the course of 
 years. Three well-defined stages of this develop- 
 ment may be pointed out. 
 
 In his youthful poetry the style is determined 
 by feeling. Then follows "a period, beginning with 
 " The Chieftains," during which he endeavored to 
 impress the stamp of nationality strongly upon his 
 style. A trifling anecdote throws some light upon 
 this period. At a sort of charity fair in Christiania 
 a series of tableaux were to be given, accompanied 
 by recitations. Ibsen was called upon to write 
 one of these poems, and Wilhelm Wiehe to recite
 
 218 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 it. When it came to the point, Wiehe declared 
 that it was impossible for him to recite the text 
 that Ibsen had furnished; its language was too 
 distinctly Norwegian to be spoken by a Danish 
 actor in the presence of a Norwegian audience. 
 Even Fru Gundersen who was then Froken 
 Svendson declared that she found it difficult to 
 recite the poem. She had been trained upon the 
 Danish stage at the capital, and this environment 
 had given her language a character which made 
 Ibsen's ultra-Norwegian speech strange to her. 
 Perspicuity is the characteristic of Ibsen's style in 
 the third period of its development, and it was 
 with this in view that he went to work, in the first 
 half of the seventies, to revise his early writings. 
 He found the emotional style of his youth too 
 vague and general, and his revision consisted 
 partly in adding force to it by concentration and 
 condensation, partly in brightening it with new 
 and picturesque words and images, in place of 
 the vague ones previously used. 
 
 In " Catilina," which was published as a sort of 
 jubilee volume twenty-five years after the appear- 
 ance of the first edition, few verses have been left 
 without alteration. Since examples are more in- 
 structive than general observations, I will here 
 give the original form of some of the passages 
 previously quoted from the second edition. The
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 passage in which Catiline declares his object to be 
 the furtherance of civil liberty (page 42), stood 
 originally as follows : 
 
 " For freedom, freedom 't is that I would shape, 
 As pure as in a vanished past it once 
 Did blossom here, I would call back again 
 The time when every Roman with his life 
 Was glad to buy the fatherland's renown, 
 And offered all, its splendor to protect" 
 
 What Catiline says of shining like a fallen star 
 (page 44), has the following form in the first 
 edition: 
 
 " No for a single moment to shine out 
 And brightly flaming as a meteor, 
 With but one noble deed to consecrate 
 My name to fame, to immortality, 
 Ha ! then could I in that selfsame hour 
 Take leave of life, for then I should have lived ; 
 I could take flight unto an unknown shore, 
 I could the dagger plunge into my heart." 
 
 And Furia's outburst (page 48) appears in 
 these words : - 
 
 " How empty is this uneventful life, 
 Dim as the flame of an expiring torch ! 
 Ha! what a field it is for all the wealth 
 Of high, proud plans that swell within my breast, 
 And are contracted here within these walls, 
 Where life grows set, and hope dies slowly out, 
 Where drowsily the day sinks to its end, 
 And nothing worthy of my thought appears."
 
 220 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 As we see, both metrical form and style have 
 been remodelled and more firmly knit. 
 
 " Fru Inger of Oestraat," the second edition of 
 which had appeared the year before, offers further 
 interesting examples of the difference between the 
 works of Ibsen's youth and the style of his ripened 
 manhood. Many extracts are not needed for the 
 illustration of this difference. 
 
 Eline, spying upon her mother's nocturnal wan- 
 derings in the knight's hall, sits down with Bjorn 
 and bids him tell her a fairy-tale. He begins in 
 a voice loud enough to attract attention, and she 
 exclaims : 
 
 " Hush, do not shout thus ; I am not deaf! A 
 fairy-tale should not be bawled out like some scan- 
 dalous rumor, faring over shore and sea; no, it 
 should be whispered quietly (looking toward 
 the door of the hall) as quietly as a ghost walks 
 at midnight." 
 
 Ibsen has seen that here was something super- 
 fluous, weakening the effect, and has struck out 
 the whole of the closing period. Only the first 
 sentence is left, in all its effective brevity. And 
 to give an example of his revision in small mat- 
 ters I take at random a passage from one of 
 Eline's speeches in the conversation that follows 
 between her and her mother:
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 
 
 221 
 
 " As you I pictured to myself 
 those women of whom the old 
 chronicles relate, those women 
 who came forward in the day of 
 danger, and aroused the people 
 to mighty deeds. It seemed to 
 me as if the Lord God himself 
 had impressed a stamp upon your 
 forehead, and marked you out as 
 she who should be a leader to the 
 many thousands who surrounded 
 you. In the high hall knights 
 and pages sang your praises, and 
 about the land the peasant called 
 you Norway's hope and pillar." 
 (1st edition.} 
 
 " Like you I pictured to my- 
 self those women of whom we 
 may read in the chronicles and 
 battle-books. 
 
 " It seemed to me as if the 
 Lord God himself had set his 
 sign upon your forehead, and 
 marked you out as she who 
 should lead the timorous and 
 the irresolute. In the high hall 
 knights and chieftains sang your 
 praises, and even the common 
 people, near and far, called you 
 the land's hope and pillar." 
 
 (2d edition.) 
 
 The fewest changes are made in Kline's famous 
 scene with Nils Lykke and in Fru Inger's mono- 
 logue in the fifth act. The greatest changes are 
 made in Nils Lykke's speeches. The long mono- 
 logue, in particular, with which he introduces him- 
 self to the reader in the second act, has been cut 
 down to about half its original length, both char- 
 acter and play gaining greatly by the reduction. 
 At thought of Lucia's death he says, for example, 
 in the first edition : 
 
 " Flowers fade early here in the North ! A maiden is 
 injured, receives a shock, and so it is over, once for all. 
 I would gladly know whether it is from shame and anger 
 at the loss of what is called honor, or from sorrow and 
 grief that the man to whom she has given herself up 
 proves treacherous. In either case she is a fool, and one 
 fool more or less in the world, that (After a pause,
 
 222 HEN R IK IBSEN. 
 
 smiling) Hm, the springtime of my young life has been 
 rich enough ; every year have I seen a rose run to seed 
 in the spring, and a lily fade in the autumn." 
 
 All this is omitted, and we have instead only the 
 words : " Flowers are crushed, flowers fade," mur- 
 mured, half smiling, by Nils Lykke. The author 
 has been almost as summary in his treatment of 
 Nils Lykke's description of Eline, further on in the 
 monologue. Even so characteristic a bit as the fol- 
 lowing, " The best part of love is remembrance, 
 and I have many memories," has been sacrificed 
 as superfluous. 
 
 Ibsen has treated his lyrical poems still more 
 radically. When we look at the little volume of 
 " Poems " published by him, we are apt to think 
 that his lyrical productivity has been very slight. 
 Yet he wrote and published, in his younger days, 
 so many poems that, if all were included, they 
 would make several collections of the size of the 
 one revised by him. His self-criticism has been 
 more busily at work here than anywhere else. 
 
 As early as 1850 or 1851, he thought of pub- 
 lishing a collection of poems, and the plan was so 
 far carried into execution that the first sheet was 
 printed ; then he thought better of it, and the pub- 
 lication was postponed from one year to another. 
 When the matter was seriously taken up again his 
 criticism was so severe that of his entire lyric out-
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 22$ 
 
 put only fifty-five poems were found worthy to be 
 included. Of the long poem called, in " The Man," 
 " A Saturday Evening at Hardanger," only the 
 brief intermezzo was preserved which now opens 
 the collection under the title of " Fiddlers," and 
 this was reduced from nine to four short stanzas. 
 " In the Picture-Gallery," the poetic cyclus already 
 mentioned, which consisted of twenty-three poems, 
 was condensed into the little poem " In the Gal- 
 lery," while of the separate poems of the cyclus 
 only " Fear of Light " was preserved intact, one or 
 two other bits being utilized in the construction of 
 some short new poems. In " At.Akershus," four 
 stanzas were cut out, and six new ones supplied ; 
 " Building Plans " was reduced from five stanzas to 
 three; " The Eider Duck " from sixteen to seven, 
 etc. These examples show how summarily the 
 poet dealt with his work. 
 
 And when we examine the revision in detail, 
 our impression of the exacting nature of his self- 
 criticism and of the difference between his later 
 and earlier styles will not be diminished. Take, 
 for example, the first verses of " At Akershus." 
 In their original form, they read as follows: 
 
 " The summer night has spread its soft veil over the 
 earth ; fog-dimmed stars shine soft and silver-pale 
 through the mist." 1 
 
 1 It is impossible to make of this an English rhymed stanza 
 without missing the point that the author wishes to make. TR, 
 
 >5
 
 224 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 These fog-dimmed stars, shining soft and silver- 
 pale through the mist, do not please Ibsen when 
 he comes upon them in the work of revision ; the 
 words paint neither the fog nor the solitary stars 
 which shine through it in the summer-night heaven; 
 so, after having made a slight change in the first 
 lines, he rewrites the last lines, giving to the verses 
 this form : 
 
 "The summer night's veil with soft folds spans the 
 earth ; solitary stars, great and quiet, burn pale through 
 the haze." 
 
 This verse so pictures the hazy summer night 
 that the reader sees it before his eyes. And 
 Ibsen's practice in this case has been his practice 
 throughout. All the words which belong to an 
 older poetic terminology, and which are, in conse- 
 quence, a little worn, he replaces by new expres- 
 sions, that are more picturesque in effect, because 
 nearer to actuality. The " wave " is replaced by 
 the " fjord ; " the " cliff" by the " mountain-wall ; " 
 my "room" by my "nest;" to "make one's 
 way" becomes to "break one's way; " to "daz- 
 zle " becomes to " blind ; " to " step " (as on a 
 stairway) becomes to " mount ; " to " slip " (along) 
 is replaced by " proceed " (on land) or by " steer" 
 (at sea) ; " then " is sometimes changed to " at 
 that time," and sometimes particularized as " that 
 evening;" "bright" gold becomes "red" gold,
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 22$ 
 
 and a word like " dark " is sometimes altered to 
 " red," sometimes to " gloomy " (" the red glow 
 in the eye," "the midnight gloomy shaft;" in 
 both cases the word was originally " dark"). 1 
 
 As a rule the alterations are matters of style, 
 but there are a few cases in which changes of a 
 more serious character have been made. " Fear 
 of Light " now ends with the following stanza : 
 
 " When the outposts of day I am nearing 
 
 Are my wits in a sorry plight ; 
 If some great deed 't is mine to accomplish, 
 It must be a deed of night." 
 
 This was added during the process of revision. 
 As published in " The Illustrated Newspaper," the 
 poem ends with the stanza just preceding this. 
 The alteration made in " The Eider Duck " 
 is very characteristic. At first the eider duck 
 was for Ibsen merely an image of perseverance 
 and faithfulness. Man was far less faithful and 
 persevering, for, 
 
 "Once bereft of the treasure thus hidden from sight, 
 His soul is wrapped in eternal night ; 
 His strength is sapped and his spirits depressed, 
 And nothing remains but his bleeding breast." 
 
 All this disappears in the process of revision, 
 
 1 It is painfully evident that no translation can accurately con- 
 vey the author's meaning in this and the accompanying para- 
 graphs, but it has been thought better to reproduce them as well as 
 possible than to leave them out altogether. TR.
 
 226 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and the eider duck is made to serve as an image 
 of the poet's own experience. 
 
 " If his treasure a third time is taken, 't is said, 
 On some night of spring his wings are spread, 
 And he cleaves the mist with his bleeding breast, 
 On some sunnier Southern shore to nest." 
 
 No less characteristic are the changes made 
 in " Building Plans." Of the greater and the 
 lesser aim that of becoming an immortal poet, 
 and that of possessing a woman's love he 
 originally wrote thus : 
 
 "At first I thought the plan possessed a noble harmony; 
 But later on discordant the whole thing seemed to me, 
 And when I grew to reason's age it would not do at all ; 
 The great aim seemed so little ; the lesser aim was all." 
 
 The last two lines are given as follows in the 
 revised editions : 
 
 "The builder grown to reason's age, the castle would not do; 
 The great wing was too little; the lesser wing fell through." 
 
 Such alterations as these testify to the various 
 experiences which united to give Ibsen a darker 
 view of life, and which embittered his disposition 
 as the years flowed by. 
 
 And poems like " The Might of Memory," 
 and " The Grounds of Faith," written just after he 
 went abroad, reproduce his feeling towards Nor- 
 way with an intensified energy of expression. 
 Such verses as the former may serve as a poetical
 
 FRAU IBSEN.
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 22/ 
 
 illustration of the declaration made in Rome that 
 he would never return. 
 
 Yet he came to feel, after some time had elapsed, 
 that he must see his home once more. The first 
 edition of his poems had these closing lines : 
 
 " To the huts of the snowlands 
 
 Every night of the year, 
 From these sunlit lowlands 
 Speeds a cavalier." 
 
 and when in the following year, he sent home his 
 great poem, " For the Millennial Festival," it began 
 with the following greeting of reconciliation : 
 
 " My countrymen, who made for me to flow 
 That tonic draught, bitter, but strong to save, 
 That gave the poet, standing by his grave, 
 New strength to fight beneath the sun's fierce glow ; 
 Who then to me the staff of exile gave, 
 Of fear the sandals, and the pack of woe ; 
 Who sent me with such outfit forth to roam, 
 Here from the world I send this greeting home. 
 
 " I send, and thank you for the griefs that harden 
 And cleanse the soul with flow of bitter tears ; 
 For all the flowers that bloom in life's rich garden 
 Are firmly rooted in those bygone years ; 
 That here in full luxuriant life they grow 
 To chilling blasts sent from afar they owe ; 
 Mist-nurtured, in the sun they here expand, 
 For these best gifts I thank my native land." 
 
 Nevertheless, he felt uneasy and doubtful when, 
 after ten years of absence, he finally determined 
 to revisit his country; he confessed as much as
 
 228 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 this in his address to the students. The cordial 
 reception with which his books had met did not 
 set his mind at rest ; he was still agitated by the 
 question, " How do I stand personally with my 
 fellow-countrymen? " The question was answered 
 by the enthusiasm of his reception. 
 
 Yet it was hardly the desire to have this ques- 
 tion answered that brought him home; it was 
 rather the feeling that he had reached a turning- 
 point in his poetic development. The step taken 
 with " The Young Men's Union " was but the first 
 step in a new path. 
 
 The period of historical tragedy and of contro- 
 versial poetry was past for him ; the drama of 
 modern life was about to absorb his attention. 
 And that he might paint a vital picture of modern 
 life, he felt that he must once more tread Norwe- 
 gian earth and breathe Norwegian air. His rela- 
 tions to actuality were such that a protracted stay 
 at home was not necessary; a brief sojourn would 
 suffice. So he withdrew once more into his exile, 
 and keeping, by the study of books and news- 
 papers, a sharp eye upon home affairs, he began 
 the series of modern dramas whose production has 
 characterized the last ten years of his creative ac- 
 tivity, and which have given him European fame. 
 
 These works lie so near to our age that they 
 may hardly be now examined from the historical
 
 REST AND RETROSPECT. 22Q 
 
 standpoint, and to form a general critical estimate 
 of them does not come within my present pur- 
 pose. So I will be content with a solution of one 
 aspect of the problem which I have set myself, 
 with pointing out their leading motives, and char- 
 acterizing their artistic stamp.
 
 VI. 
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 
 
 / T N HE great historical happenings that closed 
 * the period of the sixties and opened that 
 of the seventies fixed Ibsen's attention in the most 
 marked degree. During the war between Denmark 
 and Germany he had observed, in European poli- 
 tics, that contradiction between word and deed 
 which it gradually became a passion for him to 
 trace out. 
 
 " With forgotten vows, with deceitful words, 
 
 With treaties torn and repealed, 
 With oaths of yesterday broken to-day, 
 You have fertilized history's field," 
 
 he exclaimed to the statesmen of Europe. He 
 came to believe that the age he lived in was an
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 2$ I 
 
 outworn age, and that a new one must be at hand ; 
 and in this connection he instituted comparisons 
 with other critical periods of European civilization, 
 and with the general dissolution which preceded 
 the rise of a new order of things in the later 
 Roman empire, with the period when every 
 thing was falling into ruins; when 
 
 " the castle-wall, 
 The circus, the temple with roof 
 Fallen in, the arch, the colonnade, all 
 Were crushed by the buffalo's hoof. 
 So the future was reared upon this dearth 
 Of the past, and pure was the air. 
 And now there are signs of a nobler birth, 
 Now pestilent fogs from the marshy earth 
 Rise up, and drift here and there." * 
 
 Or he likened the age to that of the decline of 
 ancient Egypt. In both cases a lack of individu- 
 ality was the cause ; for, as he says in " The Bal- 
 loon Letter," 
 
 " When the will no longer thrones, 
 When the body is not torn 
 By joy exultant, hate, and scorn, 
 Beat of pulse and blood's hot flow, 
 Then is all the splendid show 
 But a rattling of dry bones." 
 
 At the time of the war between France and 
 Germany Ibsen seems to have foreseen a new and 
 epoch-making crisis, a new age close at hand. In 
 
 1 From the poem entitled " Abraham Lincoln's Murder "
 
 232 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 "The Balloon Letter," written in December, 1870, 
 he makes definite reference to such a new age: 
 
 " Lady, shall we to the feast ? 
 For the carrier dove when least 
 We expect, may bring the card." 
 
 And in a letter of the same month, written to 
 Georg Brandes, this prophecy finds energetic ex- 
 pression in prose. 
 
 " The events of the day largely occupy my 
 thoughts," he writes. " The old illusory France 
 has gone to pieces ; when the new actual Prussia 
 likewise shall go to pieces, we shall advance with 
 a leap into the coming age. Hej ! How ideas 
 will tumble about us ! And it will be high time, in 
 truth. For up to date we have been but living 
 upon the crumbs from the revolutionary table of 
 the last century, and that food has been long 
 enough chewed and re-chewed. Our concepts call 
 for new meanings and new explanations. Liberty, 
 equality, and fraternity are no longer what they 
 were in the days of the guillotine, of blessed mem- 
 ory. This is just what the politicians will not un- 
 derstand, and for that reason I hate them. Men 
 still call for special revolutions for revolutions 
 in politics, in externals. But all that sort of thing 
 is trumpery. It is the human soul that must 
 revolt." 
 
 What Ibsen awaited of the new age was a condi-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 233 
 
 tion of things favorable to the free development of 
 individuality, unchecked by state or society. In 
 another letter to Georg Brandes, written a month 
 or two later, we read : " The state is the curse of 
 the individual. How has the strength of Prussia 
 been bought? By the sacrifice of the individual 
 to the political and geographical idea. The Kellner 
 is the best soldier. The state must away ! That 
 revolution shall find me on its side. Undermine 
 the conception of the state ; proclaim free will and 
 spiritual kinship as the leading elements in the final 
 settlement, and we shall be on the way to a freedom 
 that will be worth something." This thought, that 
 the state is the foe of individuality, and must, in 
 consequence, away, is one of Ibsen's pet ideas. 
 Sixteen years after this letter was written, I heard 
 him develop the same idea with the same zealous 
 warmth. This idea is characteristic of our age, 
 and may come to play a great part in the future. 
 Even so zealous a defender of the idea of the state 
 as Herbert Spencer, admits, in one of his essays, 
 that we are tending toward a form of government 
 in which "direction will be reduced to a minimum, 
 and freedom raised to a maximum." In fact, as 
 Brandes points out, the ideas shortly afterward 
 proclaimed by the Paris commune were allied to 
 those of Ibsen's letter. Ibsen himself felt this kin- 
 ship of idea; in a letter written to Brandes some
 
 234 HENRJK IBSEN. 
 
 time later he laments that the commune has gone 
 and spoiled his " excellent theory of the state, or 
 rather of the no-state." " The idea will now be 
 powerless for a long while, and I cannot even ad- 
 vocate it in verse without impropriety. And yet I 
 see clearly that it had a sound kernel, and that it 
 will one day be put into effect without being 
 caricatured." 
 
 The Paris commune, and the reaction that fol- 
 lowed upon it, disappointed Henrik Ibsen. Like 
 Maximos, in " Emperor and Galilean," he had 
 thought " the third kingdom " to be at hand, and, 
 like Maximos, also, he was forced to admit his 
 error, and to realize that the time was not yet 
 come. Personal impressions like these are doubt- 
 less responsible for the peculiar way in which 
 the character of the mystic is delineated. 
 
 As long as he believed the new order of things 
 to be at hand, he preserved an attitude of dignified 
 expectancy. 
 
 " Until then I live expectant, 
 Wear kid gloves about the house ; 
 Till then while away the hours, 
 And on parchment poems indite." 
 
 But as soon as he perceived that " Europe's steam- 
 packet," although on its course to new shores, 
 had on board the body of the past, which would 
 long remain there, seeing that the voyage was 
 far from nearing its end, he abandoned the
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 235 
 
 expectant attitude, and began to diagnose the 
 diseases of modern society. The result of these 
 efforts lies before us in the series of social dramas 
 which begins with " The Pillars of Society," and 
 ends, for the present, with " Rosmersholm." 1 
 
 The notorious Russian scientist and anarchist, 
 Prince Kropotkin, in an article in " The Nine- 
 teenth Century," 2 has recently characterized mod- 
 ern social hypocrisy in the following words : " Our 
 principles of morality say : ' Love your neighbor 
 as yourself; ' but let a child follow this principle 
 and take off his coat to give it to the shivering 
 pauper, and his mother will tell him that he must 
 never understand the moral principles in their 
 right sense. If he lives according to them, he 
 will go barefoot, without alleviating the misery 
 round about him. Morality is good on the lips, 
 not in deeds. Our preachers say, ' Who works, 
 prays,' and everybody endeavors to make others 
 work for himself. They say, ' Never lie,' and 
 politics is a big lie. And we accustom ourselves 
 and our children to live under this double-faced 
 morality, which is hypocrisy, and to conciliate 
 our double-facedness by sophistry. Hypocrisy 
 
 1 "The Lady from the Sea" (1888), Ibsen's latest work up to 
 the present date, did not appear in time to be included in this 
 biography. Tr. 
 
 2 February, 1887.
 
 236 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and sophistry become the very basis of our life. 
 But society cannot live under such a morality. 
 It cannot last so ; it must, it will be changed." 
 
 A wholly similar conception of modern society 
 lies at the basis of Ibsen's dramas of modern life, 
 and it is with this modern social hypocrisy that 
 he deals. He no longer takes up bunglers like 
 Peer Gynt, and adventurers like Stensgaard, but 
 rather typical specimens of social man. He makes 
 so many concessions to them, and endows them 
 with so many excellent qualities, that public opin- 
 ion would regard them as wholly worthy and 
 honorable men, and then he tears from them 
 their conventional tatters, leaving their brutal 
 egotism to appear in all its nakedness. 
 
 Consul Bernick is the first of the lot; he is 
 the most respected and conspicuous man of the 
 town, a business-man of the utmost importance, 
 a man who takes the lead in all projects for the 
 general welfare, the liberal-handed benefactor of 
 his native place, one of society's stoutest pillars. 
 Yet egotism lurks behind all his actions ; if he 
 bestows gifts upon the town, it is to win power 
 and consideration ; and when he espouses the 
 cause of the railway, it is because he will profit 
 by its construction. But he dare not carry out 
 his plans in an honest and straightforward manner 
 because of his environment. Society demands
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 237 
 
 that magnificent phrases be used, and so he and 
 everybody else adorn their small acts with mag- 
 nificent phrases. 
 
 There is, moreover, a special sort of social 
 hypocrisy in Norway which Ibsen took this oc- 
 casion to show up. It is a sort of hypocrisy 
 that was in full flower at the time when this 
 piece was written. 
 
 The great European happenings had not made 
 upon the Norwegian public the impression that 
 they had made upon Henrik Ibsen. We were 
 rather terrified by them than otherwise. We had 
 read in the newspapers reports of the horrors of 
 the Paris commune, and mysterious suggestions 
 of a secret society, calling itself the " Interna- 
 tional," whose object was to consign the whole 
 of modern civilization to the flames. And at the 
 same time we read of diverging currents of thought 
 in the world outside, and learned that some of the 
 worst of them were flowing in our direction. But 
 here, fortunately, they would gain no currency; 
 there was peace here and no danger, for our little 
 society was based, thank God, upon safer moral 
 foundations than the great societies abroad. These 
 great societies were generally regarded as falling 
 into hopeless decay; ours, on the contrary, was 
 still in sound condition, and it behooved us to pre- 
 serve it thus by firmly intrenching ourselves, and
 
 238 HEN R IK IBSEN. 
 
 establishing a sort of spiritual quarantine for all 
 modern ideas. Our own moral superiority was at 
 that time one of the special Norwegian articles of 
 faith, as is always the case with small countries 
 that have for a long period been shut off from 
 outside agitations for the promotion of a higher 
 degree of civilization. 
 
 It is against this local social hypocrisy that 
 Ibsen especially takes his stand in " The Pillars 
 of Society." His opinion is that the main differ- 
 ence between large and small communities is to 
 be found in the fact that there is more lying and 
 thieving in the latter than in the former. The 
 smaller the community the more numerous the 
 considerations weighing with the individual, the 
 more personal initiative is crippled, and the fewer 
 great things are achieved, while social morality 
 still serves to cover the same vice and crimes. 
 Bernick, who is at first so indignant at American 
 ship-owners for sending unsafe ships to sea, is 
 finally driven, for the very purpose of preserving 
 his own social position, to become guilty of the 
 same crime. 
 
 When the play appeared, it was natural that the 
 hypocrisy attacked by the author should be prompt 
 to protest. The critics asserted that the picture 
 drawn by Ibsen was not a likeness, that our society 
 was not what he, off in Munich, had imagined it to
 
 HENRIK IBSEN.
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 239 
 
 be, and that it was in reality better and more hon- 
 orable than larger societies. During the ten years 
 that have elapsed since then, the logic of events 
 has decided so irrevocably between author and 
 critic that the sort of hypocrisy in question no 
 longer dares lift its head. 
 
 In "The Pillars of Society" we saw the citizen 
 from the social point of view, but in Consul Ber- 
 nick's relation to his wife there was already offered 
 a suggestion of the citizen as married man. This 
 suggestion was carried out in "A Doll Home." 
 In this case also, the author makes a great number 
 of concessions to the person whose egotism is to 
 be disclosed. Lawyer Helmer is a man who would 
 be taken as an ornament to society; he is pro- 
 priety itself in all that is external, a person of 
 aesthetic inclination and developed taste; he has 
 the strongest possible antipathy to everything that 
 is false and dishonorable; and his conception of 
 financial solvency is so strict that he will not accept 
 a loan, merely because he might die the next day, 
 and thus be prevented from meeting the obligation. 
 In these respects the author has made him a better 
 man than the majority are. But how brutal is the 
 selfishness concealed beneath this fair surface ! 
 How rough and selfish he is in his relations with 
 his wife, not only when he makes the terrible dis- 
 covery of her forgery, but before that, in their 
 16
 
 240 I1ENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 daily life ! She is to live for his sake only, to 
 have no other thought than of him, no feelings, 
 no opinions, save those which are his. 
 
 No other of Ibsen's plays has aroused such per- 
 sistent and varied discussion as " A Doll Home ; " 
 it actually gave rise, in Norway, Denmark, and 
 Sweden, to a whole literature of comment, favor- 
 able and unfavorable. In the latter country it 
 even gave the impulse to a dramatic school, which, 
 taking Ibsen's play for a model, dealt with allied 
 subjects, often, it must be said, in a manner a 
 little suggestive of caricature. 
 
 That which gives " A Doll Home " so conspic- 
 uous a place among Ibsen's works is the circum- 
 stance that here, for the first time, the author ex- 
 tends his old principle of individuality to embrace 
 women as well as men. Women also shall be 
 themselves, be human beings, and not merely their 
 husbands' wives, and their children's mothers. 
 
 " Thou art, first and foremost, wife and 
 mother," says Helmer. 
 
 " That I no- longer believe," replies Nora. " I 
 believe that I am, first and foremost, a human be- 
 ing; I, as well as thou or, in any case, that I 
 should endeavor to become one." 
 
 Ibsen had not previously embraced woman m 
 this view ; he had created a few strong-willed ex- 
 ceptions, but never before had he represented
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 241 
 
 woman as completely carried away by enthusiasm 
 for manly activity ; her great and admirable trait 
 of character was that of being ready to sacrifice ail 
 for the man whom she loved. So was represented 
 Aurelia in " Catilina," so Eline in " Fru Inger," 
 Margrethe, Fru Ragnhild, and Ingebjorg in " The 
 Pretenders," Agnes in " Brand," Solvejg in " Peer 
 Gynt," and Fru Bernick, Froken Bernick, and Lona 
 Hessel in " The Pillars of Society." Even Hjordis 
 might have been such a woman, had she married 
 Sigurd rather than Gunnar. And if the sacrifice 
 was not made for their husbands, it was for their 
 sons. What, besides her son, is the red thread in 
 Fru Inger's life? What is it but affection for her 
 son that makes of Aase, in spite of everything, a 
 sympathetic character? And what to us is Inga 
 of Varteig, save mother to " the king, her mighty 
 son "? Love is the essential trait of woman's char- 
 acter, the love which is ready to sacrifice every 
 thing without hope of reward. So we read, in the 
 first edition of " The Pretenders," this genuinely 
 Ibsenese aphorism : " To love, to sacrifice all, and 
 to forget, that is the saga of womankind." And 
 so Ibsen always pictured woman in a radiant, poetic 
 light, contrasting her with self-loving man ; so all 
 the lyrical impulse, all the fulness of repressed 
 feeling, which he could make no use of in his pre- 
 sentation of man, he lays as a halo around the
 
 242 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 brow of woman. To the delineation of such 
 women are devoted the gentlest and most affecting 
 portions of his work. Nothing can be more deli- 
 cate and graceful than Eline's or Margrethe's love, 
 nothing deeper or warmer than those scenes in the 
 fourth act of " Brand " where the thought of Agnes 
 dwells upon her dead child. Thus we see that 
 Ibsen, more than any other poet, is the champion 
 of woman, and if he does not wholly agree with 
 Bernick, he is not far from doing so when the 
 latter exclaims: "You women are the pillars of 
 society." 
 
 But his fundamental principle was bound, in 
 the course of time, to make him apply to women 
 the same measure of individuality that he applied 
 to men, and when that point was reached, he could 
 no longer regard the faculty of merging herself in 
 the being of another as her highest. As the dia- 
 metrical opposite of egoism this faculty was sure 
 of his sympathy ; but to be one's self was not alone 
 to "die to one's self," and, great as came to be his 
 admiration for altruism, he could not wholly forget 
 the demands of individuality. 
 
 It has been suggested, and rightfully, that the 
 germ of " A Doll Home " may be found in Sel- 
 ma's outburst in the fourth act of " The Young 
 Men's Union," but the first germ of the idea 
 dates further back. In one of the scenes which
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 243 
 
 represent Peer Gynt paying court to Anitra, he 
 says : 
 
 " I would have thee for my pleasure, 
 Of my love the arbitress, 
 I would have thee mine alone ; 
 I would be to thee a treasure 
 Rich as gold or precious stone. 
 Should we part, then life would be 
 Nota bene, worthless grown, 
 And for thee especially. 
 Every inch of thee I 'd see 
 
 Devoted utterly to me. 
 
 T is a fine thing, on the whole, 
 
 That so empty is thy head , 
 
 Of thyself, hadst thou a soul, 
 
 Thou might'st think at times instead. 
 
 I have hit on just the thing, 
 
 Yes, believe me, thou shalt go 
 
 With thine ankle in a ring, 
 
 For us both "t is best 't were so ; 
 
 I will be thy soul, thy king; 
 
 For the rest, the status quo." 
 
 These lines provide a sketch for Helmer's por- 
 trait, and also as the postulate of their satire 
 they embody the view that led Ibsen, in " A 
 Doll Home," to extend to woman the principle 
 of individuality. 
 
 But in accordance with Ibsen's general con 
 ception of woman, this principle is presented in 
 the shape of an earnest appeal, not in that of 
 a bitter reproach for unfulfilled obligations. 
 
 Nora, from the very start, is one of Ibsen's 
 characteristic delineations of woman in the old
 
 244 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 manner; she has, like her predecessors, an un- 
 limited readiness to sacrifice herself. She does 
 not hesitate at forgery to spare her father and 
 save her husband's life, and she feels convinced 
 that the action is a praiseworthy one. When 
 she is told that such an action is looked upon 
 as criminal, she cannot believe it; and even when 
 convinced that such is the case, she would still 
 be willing to repeat the offence if the situation 
 seemed to make it desirable. When Helmer 
 says, " No one sacrifices honor for love," she 
 stands as the spokesman for all of Ibsen's wo- 
 men, as well as for his own conception of her 
 sex, when she exclaims, " A hundred thousand 
 women have done it." When August Strindberg, 
 in the preface to the first part of " Married," 
 takes the poet to task for this reply, characteri- 
 zing it as a sort of chivalric phrase, he simply 
 shows that he does not understand one of the 
 most marked characteristics of Ibsen's work. 
 
 But such unlimited devotion is dangerous to 
 individuality, especially in marriage with a man 
 like Helmer. In such a marriage Nora cannot 
 become a human being; she remains, and must 
 remain, a mere doll. For Helmer's ideal of a 
 wife is much like Peer Gynt's ideal of a mis- 
 tress: just as Peer Gynt would be Anitra's soul, 
 so Helmer would be both Nora's will and con-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 245 
 
 science. She lives in a sort of minority, thinks 
 as a child, and allows herself to be treated as a 
 child. As long as she regards her husband with 
 boundless admiration, and trusts in him uncon- 
 ditionally, things go on fairly well; but the day 
 when trust and admiration collapse, the day when 
 she realizes what sort of man he is for whom she 
 has sacrificed so much, that day brings her life 
 to a crisis, she is then forced to choose between 
 absolute self-renunciation and self-assertion. As 
 we know, Ibsen makes her choose the latter, 
 represents her as breaking the degrading bonds 
 put upon her by this marriage, just as he had 
 represented his earlier ideal figures as breaking 
 the bonds put upon them by society. Having 
 previously pointed out the dangers to individu- 
 ality inherent in the constitution of society, he 
 now points out the dangers inherent in marriage, 
 and ends with a wholesale condemnation of that 
 class of marriages in which the husband is every- 
 thing and the wife nothing. 
 
 The conclusion of " A Doll Home " brought 
 out much adverse criticism. It was, with much 
 diversity of view, condemned; and the general 
 result of this adverse criticism was to characterize 
 it as immoral. 
 
 Ibsen naturally viewed the question in a very 
 different light ; for him it would have been abso-
 
 246 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 lutcly immoral to continue a life in common under 
 such conditions. "Yes, but the children?" it was 
 asked, "what is to become of them? A mother 
 cannot be approved of for leaving her children 
 too." "Yes, the children, yes, do you think 
 perchance that the children will be better off for 
 the continuance of such a marriage?" Ibsen re- 
 plied, and then put a new question. 
 
 The new question was " Ghosts." 
 
 As everybody knows, " Ghosts " and " A Doll 
 Home " stand in a sort of complementary relation 
 one to another. 
 
 Suppose Nora to have returned the day after 
 forsaking her husband's roof; suppose that hus- 
 band to have been not only crude and narrow 
 in thought, but also licentious and vulgar in life; 
 suppose them to have had no children until after 
 her return, and there you have the differences 
 between Helene Alving and Nora Helmer. The 
 last two of these conditions make the discussion 
 of the morality of divorce far less fundamental 
 than in " A Doll Home," but the attack which the 
 play makes upon prevalent opinions is all the more 
 powerful. 
 
 Helene Alving, like Nora, leaves her husband, 
 and he, like Helmer, is made unhappy by her 
 desertion. She takes refuge with Pastor Manders, 
 but this typical spokesman of public opinion per-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 247 
 
 suades her to return to the debauched, and both 
 bodily and spiritually ruined Alving, who there- 
 upon continues in his old ways as if nothing had 
 occurred. What will now happen? The answer 
 given is about this : Her feeling of independence 
 has become enfeebled by her abortive attempt to 
 escape, and she no longer dares act in accordance 
 with her views of right and wrong, fearing, should 
 she do so, to come into conflict with what the pub- 
 lic thinks and says. And, seeing that this public 
 will blame her for the irregularities of her husband, 
 should they come to light, she does everything 
 possible to hide his life from the eyes of the world. 
 She becomes a sacrifice to the general hypocrisy. 
 She sends away the son who is born to her, as soon 
 as he is old enough to be able to understand the true 
 state of things. An early insight into his surround- 
 ings would prove disastrous, and so he must go away, 
 however painful and harmful it may be. This is 
 the advantage that the child derives from the con- 
 tinuance of such a union, not a very great one. 
 Alving goes on in his licentious ways, and she, in 
 trembling and fear, strives to preserve his fame 
 untarnished; for every spot upon his fame will 
 leave two upon hers. Even after his death she 
 continues to watch over his reputation by conceal- 
 ing the story of his irregularities and glorifying his 
 memory. For this reason she erects the asylum.
 
 248 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 But during all this toil in the servile fear of 
 society, there grows within her a feeling of revolt 
 against this society of which she is the slave ; her 
 thought gradually analyzes those relations which 
 society looks upon as noble and holy in them- 
 selves, but which she has come to know only in 
 paltry and distorted shapes. The relations be- 
 tween husband and wife, between brother and 
 sister, between father and son, appear to her mind 
 developed through bitter experience, as mere 
 empty forms, as fine phrases that at some time 
 became invested with a sort of halo, and have 
 since preserved their glamour by virtue of that 
 human infirmity, illustrated by Andersen in his 
 story of " The Emperor's New Clothes." And 
 then comes the son, and his life makes clear the 
 relation between mother and son, the only relation 
 that has as yet escaped her criticism. But the 
 consequences of that prolonged union between 
 Chamberlain Alving and his wife are not yet 
 exhausted. There yet remains the disease which 
 appears in Osvald as a paternal inheritance ; and 
 then, last of all, the relations between Osvald and 
 Regine reveal a gulf of new possibilities. 
 
 This is what the current view leads to ; these are 
 the consequences of those conventional opinions 
 that stalk among us like ghosts. Tear off the 
 veil, scrape away the superficial layer of hypocrisy,
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 249 
 
 and the grinning features of selfishness will con- 
 front you, not only in persons like Regine and 
 cabinet-maker Ensgtrand, but even in such hard- 
 headed and worthy members of society as Pastor 
 Manders. 
 
 No other of Ibsen's works makes so deep and 
 comprehensive an analysis of the prevalent mo- 
 rality. He well knew how superficial was the 
 morality in whose name the ending of " A Doll 
 Home " had been condemned, how much rotten- 
 ness and vulgarity, how much cowardice and 
 hypocrisy, found shelter beneath it. He knew 
 how unsubstantial the foundation upon which 
 society rests. Popular morality was to him a vast 
 bog ; only the lightest persons can cross it without 
 noticing that the ground is not firm beneath their 
 feet, while he whose steps go through learns that, 
 the deeper he sinks, the more yielding becomes 
 the earth beneath him. He is seized with panic ; 
 he struggles to gain a foothold, but he does not 
 find it, for there is none to find. It is worse than 
 a bog, it is as if the firm compact earth itself were 
 torn from under his feet, and he were cast upon 
 the open sea. 
 
 Such was the impression made by the appear- 
 ance of " Ghosts ; " it was overpowering in its 
 tragedy, and all the more effective for being carved 
 out of the life of the present day. The boldness
 
 250 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and compass of its thought were fairly terrifying ; 
 even those who had followed Ibsen step by step, 
 and from drama to drama, shrank back in fear at 
 their first glimpse of the abyss that yawned before 
 them, and endeavored to seek safety in flight. As 
 for the public in general, it set up, through its 
 representatives in the press, a scandalized howl 
 the like of which had not been heard since the 
 appearance of " Love's Comedy." As in 1862, so 
 in 1 88 1, Ibsen was attacked both in his public and 
 his private character; upon him were heaped all 
 the scurrilous vulgarities that are the usual weapons 
 of the public when it seeks to weaken the effect of 
 the work of some venturesome and genial soul. 
 As one of those who at first failed fully to realize 
 the range and significance of the piece, and who 
 in consequence occupied a non-partisan position 
 with reference to it, I had excellent opportunities 
 for observing this mud-volcano in its full activity. 
 The sight was not an edifying one, but nothing 
 else could have done so much in the way of a 
 propaganda of the views expressed in the play, as 
 the testimony thus borne by " society " to its 
 truths. 
 
 That the reception accorded to " Ghosts " aroused 
 Ibsen's indignation goes without saying. After a 
 briefer lapse of time than usual, he had a new piece 
 in readiness, which was at once a defence of him-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 251 
 
 self and a return of the compliment to his oppo- 
 nents. Dr. Tomas Stockmann, in " An Enemy 
 of the People," was placed in a situation exactly 
 similar to that in which Ibsen found himself. He 
 did not, indeed, attempt to show that the current 
 morality of marriage flows from unhealthy sources, 
 but he did something precisely analogous when he 
 pointed out the unhealthiness of the baths in his 
 native village. Upon this there followed vehement 
 opposition, he was deserted at all hands, indigna- 
 tion was aroused, and no one would listen to him. 
 The situation is that in which " Ghosts " placed 
 Henrik Ibsen. Then he permits his hero to make 
 the discovery that society is base and paltry, upon 
 which Stockmann speaks out both for the author 
 and himself, and tells society the truth. It is not 
 a disgrace to be persecuted by such a society, but 
 rather an honor for which every exalted soul must 
 strive. And so far from being crushed by the oppo- 
 sition thus aroused, one is strengthened by it; for 
 the man who is in full accord with society is a weak 
 man, an insignificant character, bound hand and 
 foot by social customs and conventions, while "the 
 strong man is he who stands most alone." 
 
 The manner in which the attack is here made 
 is both new and interesting. It is a direct attack 
 all along the line, not one made from a safe and 
 protected position. It is an advance as far as it is
 
 II EN R IK IBSEN. 
 
 possible to come, an onslaught that does not stop 
 to consider whether or not there are uncovered 
 places along the road it takes; not even if these 
 places may be made points of attack from the rear 
 upon the storming columns of thought. 
 
 And equally new and interesting is the fact 
 that here, in the name of liberty, war is waged 
 upon liberalism and that tyranny of the majority 
 to which liberalism has given birth. Who is right, 
 the man of genius, or society ; the majority, or the 
 individual? "The majority is always right, and 
 always sees the truth," answer the two members of 
 the majority, Hovstad and Billing. "The major- 
 ity is never right, never, I say," answers Doctor 
 Stockmann. " I am right, and a few others, here 
 and there, . . . who have taken hold of the new, 
 growing truths, too young in the world of con- 
 sciousness to have gathered any majority to their 
 support. . . . These men stand out as an advance 
 guard, so far ahead of the rest that the compact 
 files of the majority have not yet reached them." 
 
 ;Esthetically considered, " An Enemy of the 
 People " is not one of the best of Ibsen's works. 
 He is hardly to be forgiven for making the alle- 
 gory of the water-pipes, in the third act, give 
 place to a directly polemical attack upon society; 
 this transition from the image to that for which it 
 stands produces a little of the effect of a change
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 253 
 
 of theme. But it affords a striking measure of the 
 strength of the indignation to which the piece 
 owed its origin. So mighty was this indignation 
 that it could not be contained within its allegorical 
 setting, but had to shape a channel for itself, just 
 as a stream breaks through its restraining banks 
 at the time of the spring freshets. 
 
 But psychologically considered, Ibsen has in 
 this work displayed his usual mastery ; in spite 
 of the fact that Stockmann's situation strongly 
 resembled his own, he succeeded in treating it 
 objectively. The character is far from being a 
 mere mouth-piece for the author's opinions, and 
 is an exceptionally successful study in modern 
 psychology. Stockmann is individual enough to 
 satisfy the most exacting naturalist, and his de- 
 velopment is at every point inevitable. At first, 
 perhaps, it may seem inconsistent that a man who 
 appears so unsuspecting in the first act should 
 speak as Stockmann does in the fourth. But we 
 see the matter in a different light upon a closer ex- 
 amination. It is precisely because he is at first so 
 unsuspicious that the insight into social relations 
 finally gained by him has so powerful an effect 
 upon him. It is precisely for this reason that he 
 is enabled to take so free a view of the matter, 
 and so undaunted a stand. It was also a brilliant 
 idea in the author to represent him as absent-
 
 254 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 minded; the very fact that he is apt to forget 
 little things makes it easy for him to overlook all 
 minor considerations and fix his undivided atten- 
 tion upon the principal thing. He is a wholly 
 new and original figure in Ibsen's gallery, although 
 his development follows in the path of many of his 
 predecessors. 
 
 Yet there is something new in this very develop- 
 ment, something that takes us farther than the ear- 
 lier works. Like Falk, Brand, Nora, and the others, 
 Stockmann ends in isolation; but isolation, in this 
 case, is not synonymous with flight from society. 
 There is, indeed, a moment in which Stockmann 
 thinks of flight. " If I only knew of some primi- 
 tive forest or some South Sea island to be bought 
 cheaply," he says; and even if he cannot find 
 such a refuge, at all events he will go away some- 
 where. " We will live no longer in the midst of 
 such corruption. Pack up as quickly as thou 
 canst, Katrine ; the sooner we get away the bet- 
 ter." But he abandons this plan upon reflection ; 
 he stands by his post to win followers to his side 
 and renew the conflict. '' Here is the battle- 
 field ; here shall the combat take place ; here will 
 I conquer ! Shall I perchance be driven from the 
 field by public opinion and a compact majority 
 and similar abominations? No, thank you! For 
 my purpose is simple, and clear, and straight-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 255 
 
 forward. I will beat it into the heads of these 
 curs that the liberals are the most insidious foes 
 of freemen, that party-platforms are the death- 
 warrant of all vital truth, that considerations of 
 expediency turn morality and justice topsy-turvy, 
 and that as a result of all this it has become hor- 
 rible to live here ! " Disregarding Stockmann's 
 peculiar forms of expression, we may see in these 
 words the programme adopted by Ibsen after 
 " Ghosts " had been rejected by the general public 
 of the Scandinavian countries. It was a distinct 
 and energetic return of the compliment. He was 
 not the man to be frightened as easily as that. 
 
 But after the fire that had blazed up in " An 
 Enemy of the People " had subsided, a sort of de- 
 spondency seemed to settle upon Ibsen. What was 
 the use of it, after all? Were men really capable 
 of adopting the ideal standards of his work? Did 
 their condition, on the whole, make it possible to 
 live lives of truth and freedom? Were the condi- 
 tions of such a life not confined to the few, the 
 exceptions ; and was not falsehood as necessary for 
 the average man as air and food for us all? It had 
 been said of Brand that " his morality, carried to 
 its logical conclusion, would bring half mankind to 
 starvation through love of the ideal ; " was this not 
 true, after all? And what, if it should be true, not 
 
 only of Brand's morality, but of Ibsen's whole ideal 
 
 17
 
 256 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 view of life? Was it not senseless to go about mak- 
 ing the uncompromisingly ideal demand of every- 
 day people? 
 
 There came to Ibsen a period when his mood 
 was such that he asked himself these questions, 
 and, for a time, he was almost ready to answer 
 them in the affirmative. 
 
 So he once more brought forward his ideal 
 heaven-stormer, looked at him in another aspect, 
 placed him under new conditions, and, to correct 
 the impression, shaped a contrasting figure to go 
 with him. The work in which this plan was car- 
 ried out is the saddest and most pessimistic that 
 he has written. Brandes and others have justly 
 urged that, back of Ibsen's pessimistic view of hu- 
 man nature, there lies a markedly optimistic faith 
 in its capability of being made better. When he 
 wrote " The Wild Duck," it almost seems as if this 
 faith had for a moment betrayed him. 
 
 Gregers Werle has neither Brand's strength nor 
 Stockmann's belligerency; he is a poor, unfortu- 
 nate dreamer, everywhere out of place, seeming 
 to have no other object in the world than " to 
 be the thirteenth at table." He has the best opin- 
 ion of mankind, and the most honest purpose to 
 help where help is needed, but whenever he takes 
 hold of anything, he only makes mischief, because 
 his idealism and his optimism mistake both means
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 257 
 
 and end. He would lift his childhood's friend from 
 out of the bog into which he has sunk, and thinks 
 that this may be done merely by bringing the truth 
 to light; but the only result of his efforts is to 
 make that friend reveal the entire extent of his 
 paltriness. He would persuade Hedwig to sacri- 
 fice herself that she may win once more her father's 
 love, but he only succeeds in driving her to com- 
 mit suicide, which adds a new feature to Hjalmar 
 Ekdal's repertoire of declamation. Finally, he 
 gives it all up, and quits the scene to put himself 
 out of the world ; for life, if it really be what it 
 now appears to him, is not worth living. 
 
 Diametrically opposed to this unhappy Don 
 Quijote, we have Relling, with his theory of 
 falsehood, and the life which he fits to it. The 
 world is a wretched place, and men are all bung- 
 lers ; of what earthly use is any attempt to raise 
 them out of falsehood? They live upon lies; 
 without lying they would be as uncomfortable as 
 a frog under the receiver of an air-pump. " Take 
 falsehood from an average man, and you take his 
 happiness as well; " falsehood is the stimulating 
 principle of life, it is like the issue which the 
 physician puts upon a patient's neck. In conse- 
 quence of this view, Relling works for the exact 
 opposite of what Gregers is striving after; he 
 works in behalf of falsehood, and invents lies for
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 those who cannot hit upon sufficiently stimula- 
 ting lies of their own. He makes Molvik fancy 
 himself to be devilish; if he had not done so 
 " the poor honest hog would have succumbed to 
 self-contempt and despair years ago." And he 
 puts it into Hjalmar Ekdal's head to go about 
 declaiming. At bottom, both he and Gregers 
 Werle have the same purpose, that of causing 
 happiness and contentment; but their means are 
 as unlike as possible, and so they hate one an- 
 other, and inveigh against one another, as only 
 two enlightened combatants can. Relling con- 
 siders Gregers as nothing less than an idiot suffer- 
 ing from a fever for righteousness and a delirium 
 for adoration. And Gregers regards Relling as 
 a cynic and nothing more. But Ibsen has a 
 slightly different view of this pessimistic prophet 
 of falsehood ; he points out the good heart that 
 beats back of this work in the service of false- 
 hood ; and when it comes to an estimate of Hjal- 
 mar Ekdal, he sides with Relling and not with 
 Gregers. 
 
 In Ibsen's gallery of bunglers Hjalmar Ekdal 
 has the distinction of being the worst of them all. 
 Peer Gynt is a man of worth, and Stensgaard a 
 sterling fellow in comparison with this miserable 
 being, with his mouth full of beer, buttered bread, 
 and empty phrases, and enjoying the latter almost
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 2$$ 
 
 as much as the former. ^ There is nothing in the 
 world that will not serve him as a subject to de- 
 claim upon; events themselves cause him no 
 emotion, but he is easily stirred by hearing him- 
 self talk about them, and so he goes about enjoy- 
 ing his own emotions early and late. The figure 
 is powerfully drawn, with broad and heavy lines ; 
 at times the pencil is applied with such force that 
 the effect is almost farcical. But we cannot 
 laugh at it with a good conscience ; the paltriness 
 is too great to excite healthy laughter ; it only ex- 
 cites abhorrence and loathing. If the average 
 man were indeed of such poor calibre, Relling 
 would be absolutely right, and Gregers Werle 
 absolutely wrong; but then Ibsen's whole fight 
 against vacillation and falsehood would have been 
 in vain, for the spirits of truth and freedom, the 
 pillars of the society that shall be, would be for- 
 ever homeless among men. 
 
 The despondency which produced " The Wild 
 Duck " was not of long duration. In Ibsen's last 
 work it has disappeared, and his idealism appears 
 anew, in a nobler and more lovable shape than 
 ever before. 
 
 " Rosmersholm " is closely related, in a certain 
 way, to Ibsen's last visit to Norway, in the summer 
 of 1885. Since his last previous visit, the great 
 political struggle had been fought out, and had
 
 26O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 left behind a fanaticism and a bitterness of feeling 
 that amazed him. He was struck by the prevail- 
 ing intolerance of tone among us ; he was unpleas- 
 antly affected by the baleful and vulgar manner in 
 which persons, rather than principles, were made 
 the object of attack. The sight of all the enmities 
 which the struggle had evoked made a sorrowful 
 impression upon him. People who had formerly 
 been the best of friends were now the worst of 
 foes, not from having given personal offence to 
 one another, but merely from having arrived at dif- 
 ferent views of life. Altogether he received the 
 impression as he afterwards observed in con- 
 versation that Norway was not inhabited by 
 two million human beings, but by two million dogs 
 and cats. This impression is reproduced in his 
 delineation of the opposing parties in " Rosmers- 
 holm." The bitterness of the losing party has 
 found an admirable representative in Rector Kroll, 
 and the victorious party's cowardly fear of speak- 
 ing frankly is no less admirably represented by the 
 free-thinker and opportunist Mortensgaard, who 
 considers it necessary to make Christian alliances. 
 " Peder Mortensgaard is chief and lord of the 
 future," says Brendel. " I have never stood in the 
 presence of a greater. Peder Mortensgaard has 
 the gift of almightiness. He can do whatever he 
 will," because " he never will do more than he can.
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 26 1 
 
 Peder Mortensgaard is capable of going through 
 life without ideals. And that, mark you ! 
 that is the great secret of action and victory. That 
 is the sum of all worldly wisdom." And of the 
 struggle in its general aspect, Rosmer says : " Men 
 are growing evil in the conflict now being waged. 
 Peace and joy and reconciliation must be brought 
 to their souls." Humanity tends toward some- 
 thing nobler ; the mind must be set free and the 
 will purified. And even if Rosmer is not the man 
 for such a task, yet the task remains as that which 
 the piece has in view. It is not merely for the 
 cause of truth and liberty that Ibsen is here con- 
 tending; it is for the cause of tolerance and 
 humanity as well. 
 
 Still deeper than the contrast between parties is 
 the contrast between what Rosmer and Rebekka 
 represent. 
 
 Rebekka was the incarnation of recklessness, to 
 begin with. " I believe that then I could have 
 carried any point whatever," she says. " For then 
 I had my courageous, free-born will. I took heed 
 of nothing, gave way to no condition." She was 
 Peer Gynt's exact opposite in the fact that there 
 was for her no gap between conception and exe- 
 cution, between wish and act; she had courage 
 in resolution and was intrepid in action, and thus 
 she gained so immense a power over those among
 
 262 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 whom she was thrown, those whose view of life 
 had made them feeble and discouraged. They 
 have incomplete and vacillating personalities ; she, 
 on the other hand, has a complete personality in 
 her way, and this is the secret of her superiority. 
 And besides this free-grown will, unchecked in its 
 growth by circumstances, she has the emancipated 
 view of life that these circumstances have developed. 
 No prejudices restrict her activity; and her clear 
 and powerful intellect has impelled her " to be of 
 the new era that was dawning, to share in all the 
 new ideas." She will work for the triumph of" the 
 new ideas," and when she learns that Pastor Ros- 
 mer has been, in his youth, under the influence of 
 Ulrik Brendel, she resolves to acquire a similar in- 
 fluence over him, that she may win him over to the 
 new view of life. 
 
 But in her plan there are also mingled motives 
 of a purely personal character. She has come 
 from Finland, and a great new world seems to 
 have opened before her here in the South. She 
 has lived under sad and degrading conditions ; an 
 irresistible desire for happiness has seized upon 
 her, and so she has laid her plans to gain access 
 to Rosmersholm, convinced that there happiness 
 awaits her, in one way or another. 
 
 But hardly has she arrived when she is seized 
 by a violent passion for Pastor Rosmer, "a wild
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 263 
 
 and invincible desire" to possess him. "It came 
 upon me like a storm from the sea. It was like 
 one of our Northern winter storms. It seizes and 
 bears one along as far as may be. One cannot 
 think of resisting." And she stakes every thing 
 upon this passion. What right has his invalid and 
 worn-out wife to impede his liberty and stand in 
 the way of her passion? Beate makes his life 
 sorrowful and unhappy; only with her away can 
 there be any thought for him of a free, happy, and 
 joyous life. So she drives Beate step by step to 
 suicide in the Molle torrent. 
 
 A year has passed since this occurrence when 
 the play begins. The pleasantest and tenderest 
 relation has been established between Rebekka 
 and Rosmer, a relation based upon love, yet not 
 bearing its name ; a relation having all the confi- 
 dence of the happiest marriage, but without its 
 external intimacies ; a relation rich in cordiality 
 and devotion, but without the violence of passion ; 
 a relation in which the minds embrace, not the 
 bodies, and in which the friendly " thou " is the 
 only token of affection given or received. 
 
 From the time when Rebekka first entered the 
 house Rosmer has felt himself drawn to her. He 
 has listened to her words, grasped her thoughts, 
 and read in her books. Lacking in independence, 
 impressionable as he is, she shows herself the su-
 
 264 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 perior in all the questions that arise in their inter- 
 course, and he allows himself to be gradually led 
 away from his former ideal of life, finally coming 
 to share her views unreservedly. In this respect 
 his is the receptive mind, and hers the active 
 one. 
 
 But in another domain this relation is reversed. 
 His pure and noble ways of thinking, his amiability, 
 and his humanity exert a refining influence upon 
 her. Her robust will is softened and subdued by 
 living with him, and her " ugly sensual desires " 
 are calmed and lulled to sleep. " A feeling of 
 tranquillity came upon me, a quiet like that of a 
 bird-cliff beneath our midnight sun." She realizes 
 that what she felt before was not love, and so genu- 
 ine love comes to abide with her, the love that 
 asks nothing for itself, but is willing to sacrifice 
 every thing for its object, " the strong love which 
 is able to renounce, which is content with such a 
 life as that which we two have lived in common." 
 And when her aim is at last reached, when he begs 
 her to take the place of his deceased wife, she 
 dares not do it; for she now perceives that her 
 own actions have forever separated her from him. 
 Love has given her courage to confess and strength 
 to sacrifice ; and so she restores to him his lost sense 
 of blamelessness, and his faith in her love, giving 
 him renewed confidence in his power to ennoble
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 26$ 
 
 men by declaring everything and sacrificing his 
 life. 
 
 But back of these shattered individual destinies 
 there may be discerned two diverse life-principles, 
 each one-sided and inadequate. In Rosmer we 
 have a product of the old and outworn civilization 
 that weakens both view and will. His view can be 
 emancipated, but his will is weak and must remain 
 so. In Rebekka we have a product of unsophis- 
 ticated nature; her view is emancipated, and her 
 will is strong, but it does not become purified until 
 too late. So both these representatives of an im- 
 perfect conduct of life must need succumb, but 
 over their bodies the play points to Ibsen's great 
 and radiant dream of the future, his dream of the 
 man with liberated mind and purified will. This is 
 the exalted type of humanity that Rosmer dreamed 
 of shaping, the happy and noble being who shall 
 live a life of freedom, innocence, and joy. This is 
 the third kingdom, of which Maximos and Julian 
 dreamed, and in which Henrik Ibsen has never 
 lost his faith. 
 
 And as the path toward such a goal, our atten- 
 tion is directed to self-sacrificing love, the opposite 
 of selfishness. To extol this love, " Rosmersholm " 
 was written; this is the ennobling and exalting 
 power in which the play finds its credo. And the 
 credo is not merely of the play ; it is Ibsen's own.
 
 266 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 As he has scourged incompleteness of life and 
 falsehood in the name of truth and freedom, so, in 
 the name of self-sacrificing love, he has done 
 battle with selfishness. 
 
 Truth, freedom, and love are the three corner- 
 stones of the edifice, noble in proportion and 
 serious in purpose, that the poet has erected in the 
 course of years. 
 
 If we look at this edifice as a whole, we cannot 
 fail to be impressed with its completeness. The 
 development of Ibsen's mind shows a logical 
 sequence that is assuredly unique among poets. 
 He has never turned about, never taken a leap, 
 but has moved steadily forward from point to 
 point. The standpoint which 'he occupies at pre- 
 sent is very far from that which he occupied at the 
 start, and the intermediate standpoints have been 
 numerous; it follows, then, as a matter of course, 
 that he has abandoned much to which he formerly 
 held. It has been with him as with one who, 
 travelling through a country, loses, with every new 
 perspective opened before him, something of his 
 view of the road that is left behind ; the principal 
 fact to be considered is that his point of view has be- 
 come ever higher, that his outlook has grown more 
 and more free from work to work. His intellectual 
 development has been in a path that led, not only 
 straight forward, but uninterruptedly upward.
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 267 
 
 And this law holds good for the development of 
 his special creative faculty. As his historical 
 dramas surpassed his romantic ones, so his dramas 
 of modern life dramatically surpass those dealing 
 with historical subjects. 
 
 A whole treatise might be written upon the 
 dramatic form of these later works, and such a 
 treatise doubtless will at some time be written, for 
 Ibsen is technically as remarkable among latter- 
 day writers, as he is spiritually. His work is epoch- 
 making in the history of dramatic art, and will 
 doubtless exert a marked influence over the dra- 
 matic composition of the future. At the present 
 time there is no other dramatist in Europe of 
 whom this may be said. 
 
 The drama has not kept pace with the general 
 development of our century; it has been over- 
 shadowed by the novel, which has taken so pre- 
 dominant a place, that it may almost be considered 
 as the special art-form of modern times. And it 
 owes this conspicuous position to the fact that it 
 has most completely satisfied the demands of our 
 age for truth and naturalism. 
 
 The drama has not succeeded in meeting this 
 demand. The conventional, which has been ban- 
 ished from the novel, still holds sway in the 
 drama. In Augier, in Alexandre Dumas fils, in 
 Sardou, that is to say, in the most prominent
 
 268 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 dramatists of our age, there is so much of the 
 conventional that a naturalist critic like Emile 
 Zola is abundantly justified in judging them 
 severely. Even in Zola's own dramatic works 
 " Therese Raquin," for example the conven- 
 tional plays so great a part that one can hardly 
 think of them as written by the chief of the 
 naturalistic school. 
 
 In Ibsen's dramas of modern life the conven- 
 tional has disappeared, and he has been success- 
 ful in the invention of a new dramatic formula, 
 corresponding to the naturalistic formula in the 
 novel. The characteristic feature of this formula 
 is that the piece never begins where an ordinary 
 piece would begin ; it starts out, on the contrary, 
 from what would be the closing point of an ordi- 
 nary play. All of Ibsen's later pieces are really 
 nothing more than so many grand final catas- 
 trophes. The situation is fully defined before 
 the play begins; all the critical moments are 
 past, and it becomes the task of the play merely 
 to illuminate the given situation, and to carry it 
 out to its remotest consequences. Had an ordi- 
 nary dramatist written " A Doll Home," Nora's 
 forgery would have found its place as a climax 
 midway in the play, and its consequences would 
 have been presented in the last act. Ibsen, on 
 the other hand, makes of the consequences the
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 269 
 
 principal matter, by representing the act as hav- 
 ing occurred before the rise of the curtain. An 
 ordinary dramatist would not have left Rebekka 
 West's intrigue with Fru Rosmer out of the play ; 
 he would have shown it to us. Ibsen is content 
 to analyze its inner and outer consequences. 
 
 This analytic method of dramatic construction is 
 analogous with the method of ancient tragedy, as 
 constructed by Sophocles, while in our own century 
 Schiller, in " Maria Stuart," experimented with 
 it. That which is great and epoch-making in 
 Ibsen's application of this method is that he has 
 discovered the power of the analytical drama to 
 produce a naturalistic picture in the dramatic 
 form. While the ordinary drama can offer but 
 a suggestion of psychological conditions, the ana- 
 lytic drama is able to give a rich and detailed 
 soul-portraiture ; it can make men divulge their 
 most secret thoughts, and this without resort to 
 monologue or other improbable devices. 
 
 Ibsen has perceived this fact and put it to use ; 
 and his dramas of modern life have been given, 
 in consequence, the unique stamp of actuality 
 which characterizes them. 
 
 At the same time the dialogue has steadily 
 grown more and more natural. Most dramatists 
 are guilty of the great mistake of making their 
 characters speak, in a greater or less degree, the
 
 2/0 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 language of the author. With Ibsen each char- 
 acter speaks in his own language; and they do 
 this so consistently that the peculiarities of each 
 appear in the least details. He who has once 
 read "An Enemy of the People," "The Wild 
 Duck," or " Rosmersholm," will recognize one of 
 the lines of Doctor Stockmann, or Gina Ekdal, 
 or Ulrik Brendel, among a hundred others. 
 
 As the creator of the analytical drama of modern 
 life, Ibsen has won a conspicuous place in the lit- 
 erature of our century, and the great attention re- 
 cently attracted to his works in Germany shows 
 that he is gaining a really European fame. Since 
 Holberg's time no other Norwegian writer has 
 played so important a part in Germany as that 
 played by Ibsen at the present moment. His 
 works promise to mark an epoch in German litera- 
 ture ; for a large number of the younger authors 
 and critics, with his name upon their banner, have 
 declared their opposition to the German poets of 
 the older generation. 
 
 But the great public has not yet accorded him 
 full recognition, not in Germany, and even less in 
 Norway. It does not feel at ease face to face with 
 this severe judge; it is made uncomfortable by his 
 poetry, and frightened by its tragic power. The 
 depth of his thought makes unusual demands upon 
 the intelligence of an audience, and so he is con-
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 2JI 
 
 sidered heavy and difficult of comprehension. He 
 is often, indeed, wholly misunderstood, as has been 
 shown in many instances. 
 
 But he goes tranquilly his own way without 
 asking for the applause of the many. " Neither 
 thanks nor menaces may touch him who wills 
 absolutely what he wills." He has solved the 
 problem of "being himself," and for that reason 
 is he so imposing a figure. 
 
 This mighty personality is also revealed in his 
 outward form. As is well known, he is not tall of 
 stature, but he makes an imposing impression. 
 His chest is very powerfully developed, and his 
 head is in proportion. The oval of his face is 
 framed by gray hair and beard, sticking out in all 
 directions with a luxuriance rare in men of Ibsen's 
 age. The compressed lips, the steady gaze through 
 the spectacles, and the heavy eyebrows, produce 
 an impression of resolution in which all the feat- 
 ures share ; and above all there rises so powerfully 
 shaped a brow that one is almost tempted to liken 
 it to the forehead idealized in the Zeus of Otricoli. 
 
 The whole figure gives the impression of enor- 
 mous strength. When in conversation, upon one 
 occasion, he likened Grundtvig to one of the low 
 but stoutly built Roman oaks, I thought in my own 
 mind that the figure was as characteristic of his 
 
 own, as of Grundtvig's outward form. 
 
 18
 
 2/2 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 No one has ever heard of his being sick. Even 
 those infirmities which usually come with age have 
 been spared him. He impresses one as vigor 
 personified. He eats with an appetite that many 
 a young man might envy, and is not affected by 
 draughts or wind, by cold or rain. 
 
 With his wife, Susannah Daae Ibsen, Thoresen 
 by birth, a daughter of Dean Thoresen, of Bergen, 
 and a step-daughter of the authoress Magdalena 
 Thoresen, as well as, until recently, with Dr. 
 Sigurd Ibsen, his- son, at present an attache of the 
 Swedish-Norwegian legation at Washington, he 
 has enjoyed a quiet and contented domestic life 
 in Germany or Italy, since his departure from 
 Norway. He is method personified in everything 
 that he undertakes. One would search far before 
 finding another man whose days are so methodi- 
 cally marked out as those of Henrik Ibsen. 
 
 He rises at seven in summer and a little later in 
 winter. He takes plenty of time in dressing ; he 
 has, in fact, acquired the habit of walking about 
 revolving his poetic plans while putting on his 
 clothes, so it often takes him an hour or two to 
 get ready. Then he eats a light breakfast, and at 
 the stroke of nine sits down at his writing-desk. 
 At one o'clock he leaves his desk, and takes a little 
 walk before dinner. In the afternoon he reads; 
 he sups early, and goes to bed early. Thus his
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 273 
 
 days are divided year out and year in. Even 
 when upon his travels he endeavors, as far as 
 possible, to live in his usual way. 
 
 Ibsen has grown less reserved with years, and 
 is quite free in conversation when but one or two 
 are present. In the presence of many, however, 
 it is still difficult for him to express himself; he 
 feels the " shyness of soul " of which Jatgeir the 
 skald speaks. He feels entirely free only when at 
 work. 
 
 His methods of composition are interesting and 
 characteristic. When he has selected his material, 
 he turns it over in his mind for a long while before 
 setting pen to paper. A great deal of this think- 
 ing is done while taking long and solitary walks. 
 
 When the whole plan is thought out in general 
 outline he makes a rough sketch of it, which he 
 then proceeds to shape, and this is done very 
 rapidly. Finally the manuscript is complete ; but 
 this manuscript is considered a mere preliminary. 
 Not until it is completed does he begin to feel 
 acquainted with his characters, to know their dis- 
 positions, and to feel sure of the manner in which 
 they will express themselves. So this first manu- 
 script is worked over into a second, and from the 
 second a third is carefully written out. He never 
 dispatches- a manuscript until carefully re-written 
 in its final form.
 
 274 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Summer is the best season for work with him. 
 In winter he is mainly occupied in thinking out 
 his plans. In the summer he puts them into exe- 
 cution. Nearly all of his works have been written 
 in the summer months. Of those published since 
 he left Norway in 1864, only two, "The. Young 
 Men's Union " and " Emperor and Galilean," were 
 written in winter. 
 
 When he sets about the execution of one of his 
 plans, he takes only what food is absolutely neces- 
 sary. A small piece of bread and half a cup of 
 black coffee is all that he takes before sitting down 
 to his desk in the morning. He thinks that he 
 would be impeded in his work if he were to eat 
 more. 
 
 Once, when I visited him in Munich, I was 
 amazed to notice how small and close his study 
 was. But this is explained by the fact that he 
 never shuts himself in while at work. He has to 
 pace back and forth through three or four rooms 
 while writing his plays. So he spends four hours 
 every forenoon pacing and writing, writing and 
 pacing, now and then taking a pull at a pipe. 
 Otherwise, he never smokes tobacco. 
 
 During these hours of work he must be alone. 
 His wife is the only one whose presence does not 
 disturb him, and even she keeps out of the way as 
 much as possible.
 
 DRAMAS OF MODERN LIFE. 2J$ 
 
 It is during these solitary and restless pacings 
 to and fro that Henrik Ibsen has written those 
 profound and daring masterpieces, that have 
 opened the eyes of literary Europe to see in 
 him one of the strongest and best-equipped per- 
 sonalities of our age. 
 
 NOTE. The biography as written by Henrik Jaeger, and 
 published in 1888, when Ibsen was sixty years old, ends at 
 this point. The following supplementary chapter, describ- 
 ing the six plays subsequently written, has been prepared by 
 the translator of the present volume.
 
 VII. 
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 
 
 year of Ibsen's sixtieth anniversary wit- 
 -- nessed the publication of " The Lady from 
 the Sea." The history of this play seems to be 
 connected with Ibsen's summer visit to Norway 
 three years earlier. He had remained most of the 
 time at the seacoast town of Moldc, a stopping- 
 place for tourists on their way to the North Cape. 
 The play seems to be based in part upon his im- 
 pressions of the summer life of this place, aroused 
 to a brief season of activity by the impact of the 
 tourist folk, whose numbers had grown greatly 
 during the period of Ibsen's self-imposed exile 
 from his native land. But in still greater part the 
 play is based upon the poet's impressions of the 
 sea itself. An English writer speaks of this so-
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 2 77 
 
 journ in the following terms : " He would stand 
 for hours on the landing-pier, gazing down into 
 the depths or up at the distance. And when, in 
 the following year, he was selecting a retreat for 
 the summer months, he went to Jutland, instead 
 of to the Tyrol as usual, and again it was the sea 
 which enchanted and absorbed him as he wan- 
 dered alone on the sandy shore." 
 
 "The Lady from the Sea" is a title literally 
 translated from an expression which, in slightly 
 altered form, also means " mermaid." Throughout 
 the work Ibsen plays upon the two meanings of 
 the expression, which thus serves him as a vehicle 
 for the symbolism which is nearly always to be 
 found in his writings. The central figure of the 
 play is a woman, Ellida Wangel, whose childhood 
 has been passed in a lonely lighthouse, and whose 
 nature has become possessed of the very spirit of 
 the sea, its vastness, its unfathomable depth, and 
 its uncontrollable freedom. To her there had 
 appeared one day a sailor, a ship's officer who 
 was also a fugitive from justice. She had been 
 captivated by the thought of his free and irre- 
 sponsible life, and the two had entered into a 
 sort of betrothal, the man assuring the woman 
 that he would one day return to claim her, and 
 that when the day came, she must be prepared to 
 go away with him. Several years have passed
 
 2/8 HENRIK . IBSEN. 
 
 since then when the play opens; the sailor has 
 been reported as dead, and Ellida has become 
 the second wife of Dr. Wangel, a well-to-do 
 physician, much older than herself, and the father 
 of two fairly grown daughters. The union has 
 not proved altogether happy, for the thought of 
 her strange lover lies upon Ellida's mind as an 
 obsession, and, although she thinks him dead, her 
 imagination often pictures him as rising from the 
 sea to claim her. She feels that her will would 
 not be strong enough to resist such a demand 
 upon her, and this feeling creates an estrange- 
 ment between herself and the family with which 
 she has become united. The husband and daugh- 
 ters are sensible of this estrangement, but know 
 nothing of its cause. The state of Ellida's mind, 
 as thus portrayed, is one that clearly places her in 
 the shadowy limbo between sanity and insanity, 
 in that borderland of the mental life which Ibsen 
 has so often explored with sharp penetration and 
 delicate art. 
 
 The opening scenes of the play, by means of a 
 series of incidents contrived with great technical 
 skill, place this character before us, and at the 
 same time cause us to surmise that her strange 
 early lover is still alive. She is impelled to dis- 
 close her secret, at first, and in part only, to 
 Arnholm, an old friend, then, a little later, to her
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 279 
 
 husband. Soon after the disclosure has been 
 made, the long absent sailor appears, just landed 
 from an English steamer. He comes to Ellida in 
 her garden, and terrifies her by his demand that 
 she depart with him at once. Wangel enters 
 almost immediately, and she implores her husband 
 to save her from herself. 
 
 WANGEL. 1 What do you want to do, then? You can't 
 imagine that you can take her from me by force, against 
 her own will ! 
 
 THE STRANGER. No. What would be the use of that? 
 If Ellida is to be mine, she must come of her own free 
 will. 
 
 ELLIDA \_starts and cries out]. Of my own free will ! 
 
 WANGEL. And can you suppose ? 
 
 ELLIDA [to herself^. My own free will ! 
 
 WANGEL. You must be out of your mind. Go away ! 
 Go away ! We have nothing more to do with you. 
 
 The stranger leaves, warning Ellida that he shall 
 come for her the following night, when her decision 
 must be made once for all. Wangel, alarmed at 
 his wife's agitation, and in his character as a physi- 
 cian understanding it better than another man would 
 have done, seeks to calm her, and during the next 
 day his efforts to this end are unceasing. The ref- 
 erence to " her own free will " has deeply impressed 
 
 1 The illustrations of this play are taken from the translation 
 by Mrs. William Archer.
 
 280 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 her, and she asks Wangel to give her back her free- 
 dom in order that she may face the situation un- 
 trammelled by any obligations, and thus work out 
 her own destiny. To this demand Wangel cannot 
 then accede, and thus we are left when the last 
 fateful act is reached. 
 
 The final scene is laid in the garden, at night. 
 Wangel and Ellida are together when the stranger 
 appears. Upon the reiteration of his demand, 
 Wangel at first pleads with his wife, then threatens 
 the stranger, and finally grants her impassioned 
 prayer for freedom to decide. " Now you can 
 choose in freedom, and on your own responsibility, 
 Ellida." It is this suggestion of responsibility that 
 determines the direction of her wavering impulses, 
 and saves her for sanity and the orderly life of society. 
 Fixing her eyes upon the stranger, she declares 
 firmly that she can never go with him. " Your 
 will has no longer a feather's weight with me. 
 For me you are a dead man, who has come home 
 from the sea and who is returning to it again. 
 But I am no longer in awe of you : you allure me 
 no more." Turning to her husband as the stranger 
 disappears forever from her life and her imagination, 
 she says : " Yes, my dear, faithful Wangel now 
 I will come to you again. Now I can, for now I 
 come to you in freedom of my own will and 
 on my own responsibility."
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 28 1 
 
 The lesson of all this is clear enough ; it is the 
 lesson enforced by Ibsen over and over again, the 
 lesson that no action has moral worth unless it is 
 the outcome of the individual will, unhampered in 
 its free activity by any extraneous circumstances. 
 Even the most sacred of the conventional sanctions 
 of human conduct must give way before the imperi- 
 ous demand of the individual to be the captain of his 
 own soul and the master of his own fate. If Ibsen 
 generally prefers to make women rather than men 
 the embodiment of this idea, it is because the danger 
 of living. artificial lives is for them the greater, be- 
 cause in the present condition of society they are 
 the greater sufferers from the tyranny of convention 
 and prescription. 
 
 " Hedda Gabler," published in 1890, stands in 
 striking contrast to " The Lady from the Sea," both 
 in its tragic outcome, and in its freedom from more 
 than the merest traces of the symbolism that is so 
 marked a characteristic of its predecessor. In place 
 of a soft opalescence of tint, it has a hard brilliance 
 of coloring that almost offends the eye. But in 
 technical execution, in its fitting of means to ends, 
 in its use of the telling phrase and the pregnant 
 situation, " Hedda Gabler " is a masterpiece of 
 dramaturgic virtuosity. It is at the same time 
 one of the least pleasing and one of the most pow- 
 erful of Ibsen's modern plays.
 
 282 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 If Ellida was a woman who could find rest and 
 true freedom in her ultimate submission to the 
 moral law, Hedda is a woman whose restlessness 
 and lack of any controlling purpose save the satis- 
 faction of her own selfish desires are such that a tragic 
 end is inevitable. She is the daughter of a Norwe- 
 gian officer, who has bequeathed to her a pair of 
 pistols. This incident must be mentioned because 
 the pistols play an important part in the play. As 
 a young woman she has had many admirers, among 
 them one Ejlert Lovborg, a man of brilliant intellect 
 and unregulated life, with whom she is on terms of 
 intimacy. Herself passionless in the ordinary sense, 
 she has a morbid curiosity concerning the conduct 
 of those who live the life of passion, and this curi- 
 osity Lovborg helps her to gratify. After some 
 years, a lover of serious intent presents himself in 
 the person of Jorgen Tesman, a scholar of the 
 pedantic type, who has great industry and small 
 imagination. She marries Tesman without loving 
 him in the least, believing that his prospects are 
 such as to promise her a becoming social position. 
 The couple go abroad upon a wedding-trip, which 
 Tesman devotes almost wholly to the exploration 
 of archives and the accumulation of material for his 
 studies. 
 
 The play opens with the return of these two to 
 Norway. Hedda is already tired to death of her
 
 THE END OF J^HE HISTORY. 283 
 
 domestic experiment, and is prepared to seek dis- 
 traction wherever it may be found. Tesman, good, 
 easy man, cannot see beneath the surface of her 
 life, and imagines that she is no less contented with 
 life than he. What more could a woman ask? 
 She has a comfortable home, and an assured social 
 position. She is, moreover, the wife of a man of 
 growing scholarly reputation, who has a reasonable 
 assurance of nomination to a vacant professorship. 
 At this juncture Lovborg appears upon the scene. 
 He has reformed his dissipated habits, largely 
 under the influence of Thea Elvsted, a woman 
 of the gentle and clinging type, between whom 
 and Hedda their exists the strongest possible of 
 contrasts. Aided by Thea's friendship, Lovborg 
 has regained his intellectual powers, has published 
 an important book upon the history of civilization, 
 and has prepared the manuscript of another and 
 still more important work. He has thus become 
 a possible rival to Tesman in his own field, and the 
 latter is made uneasy, although too good-hearted 
 to feel really envious of his friend. Speaking for 
 the first time to Tesman of his manuscript, Lovborg 
 describes it as a continuation of the published work. 
 
 TESMAN. But, my dear Ejlert, your book comes down 
 to our own times. 
 
 LOVBORG. So it does. And this one deals with the 
 
 future.
 
 284 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 TESMAN. The future ! Why, good heavens ! We don't 
 know anything about that. 
 
 LOVBORG. No. But there is a thing or two to be said 
 about it all the same. \_He opens the package.] Now 
 here 
 
 TESMAN. But that is n't your handwriting. 
 
 LOVBORG. I dictated it. \_He turns over the pages.~\ 
 This first part is about the forces that will determine the 
 future of civilization. And this other \turning the page 
 further on\ this is about the course that civilization 
 will take. 
 
 TESMAN. Extraordinary ! Now I should never have 
 thought of writing anything about that. 
 
 HEDDA [at the glass door, strumming on the pane~\. 
 Hm No, I should say not. 
 
 In this last bit of dialogue, Tesman's whole char- 
 acter is revealed, as well as the scorn felt by his 
 wife for his essentially commonplace mind. It 
 certainly never would have occurred to him to 
 attempt a forecast of the future of civilization, and 
 to Hedda this fact is deeply significant. 
 
 Hedda has no very definite aim, but she is con- 
 scious of the possession of powers of which Tes- 
 man can have no comprehension, and these 
 powers she is determined to exercise, no matter 
 what the cost. A woman of truer poise and 
 finer instincts would seek to realize the joy of 
 life (as so many of Ibsen's women do) ; what 
 Hedda seeks to realize is the joy of mastery, the
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 (/;/ the eighties}
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 285 
 
 satisfaction of influencing the lives of others, and 
 forcing herself into their reckoning. Tesman's 
 inert stolidity has baffled her efforts, and she must 
 seek another object for the exercise of her baleful 
 powers. Lovborg appears on the scene, and her 
 cravings are aroused. He has reformed ; she will 
 persuade him to his undoing. He has found con- 
 tentment in the companionship of Thea ; she will 
 destroy that contentment, and reawaken the old 
 wild impulses within his breast. That she is de- 
 liberately aiming at the happiness of two fellow- 
 mortals is nothing to her ; what is the happiness 
 of others in comparison with the wild pleasure of 
 subduing weak wills to her own strong one, of 
 shaping human lives by her own daemonic power? 
 In this unholy design she is only too successful. 
 Playing upon Lovborg's latent vanity, she persuades 
 him to drink again. He falls readily into his old 
 path, spends the night in reckless carousal, and, in- 
 cidentally, loses the manuscript of his precious 
 new work. Tfye papers fall into Hedda's hands, 
 and are kept by her. The next day he comes to 
 her, remorseful at the thought of his lapse, but be- 
 lieving that;he himself has destroyed his book in 
 a drunken frenzy. He is determined to make an 
 end of his life, and Hedda, instead of dissuading 
 him, finds in this situation a supreme opportunity 
 for the exercise of her power. She gives him one
 
 286 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 of her father's pistols, and bids him do it " in 
 beauty." With this mandate ringing in his ears, 
 Lovborg departs, and Hedda, left alone, takes his 
 manuscript from her desk, and deliberately casts 
 it, leaf by leaf, into the fire. Her purpose is ac- 
 complished ; she has destroyed one human life, and 
 wrecked the happiness of another. 
 
 In the last act, retribution comes upon her. 
 Lovborg's death has been followed by an investi- 
 gation, the pistol has been found, and Hedda's 
 part in the affair promises to be made public. 
 Brack, another of her early admirers, a reptilian 
 sort of person, has it in his power to suppress the 
 evidence, and offers to do so upon her entering 
 into an infamous understanding with him. But 
 Hedda, however she may excite our repulsion in 
 other ways, is not that sort of a woman, and to 
 her this is no solution of the problem that now 
 confronts her. She has a horror of such relation- 
 ships, and she has an equal horror of public scan- 
 dal. She has played with fire, and it has burned 
 her; she must now face the consequences. Her 
 resolution is quickly taken, and, fetching from her 
 desk the pistol still left her, she goes into the back 
 room. A shot is heard, and the tragedy is ended. 
 
 There does not seem to be any particular prob- 
 lem in the play, beyond the general problem of 
 the false position of woman in our modern society. 
 
 i 
 I
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 287 
 
 As long as the individuality of woman is kept 
 from its normal healthy development, Ibsen seems 
 to say, just so long will all sorts of aberrant types 
 make their appearance. Ibsen's women are usu- 
 ally creatures who inspire our warmest sympathies ; 
 they are intensely womanly, and they are, as a rule, 
 spiritually superior to his men. But for once he 
 has gone to the other extreme, and has drawn, as 
 Brandes remarks, " a woman who is more manly 
 than most men, in so far as she has the keenest 
 perception of the mawkishness of the prevail- 
 ing idea of goodness, but who nevertheless is a 
 morally and spiritually unfruitful being, capable of 
 nothing but ruining, destroying, and dying." 
 
 With "The Master Builder," published in 1892, 
 Ibsen reverts to his symbolical manner, and 
 creates a situation which is even more interesting 
 for its suggestiveness than for its literal content. 
 It will be remembered that he once wrote con- 
 cerning " Brand " that the problem involved in 
 the delineation of that figure was not essentially a 
 religious one. " I might have embodied the syl- 
 logism in the person of a sculptor or a politician 
 as well as in that of a priest." One does not need 
 to have read far in his Ibsen to understand this 
 remark, to appreciate the fact that with this 
 writer the problem of the type of character is 
 everything; the environment or the shape given 
 
 19
 
 288 HENRI K IBSEN. 
 
 is little or nothing. The least essential thing, 
 then, about Halvard Solness, the principal char- 
 acter in Ibsen's new play, is the nature of his 
 profession, which is that of a master builder. But 
 when we come to ask what is the problem, what 
 the type that the author has sought to portray 
 in his latest work, we are somewhat puzzled about 
 our answer. It is, as far as the leading character 
 is concerned, a study in morbid psychology ; but 
 the type is highly complex, and does not readily 
 lend itself to definition. 
 
 The characters of the play are these : Halvard 
 Solness, the master builder, a man in middle life ; 
 Aline, his wife; Doctor Herdal, the family phy- 
 sician ; Knut Brovik, a decayed architect, and his 
 son, Ragnar, both now employed by Solness; 
 Kaja Fosli, niece of Knut Brovik, also employed 
 by Solness; and Hilda Wangel, a young woman 
 of whom more hereafter. The play is in three 
 acts, all of which occur in and about the house 
 occupied by Solness both as a place of business 
 and a dwelling. To explain the action of the play, 
 we must, as usual with Ibsen's works, recount the 
 past events which it involves. 
 
 Solness had started as a poor boy in the em- 
 ploy of Architect Brovik. His fortune began with 
 the burning of the family home of his wife, to 
 whom he was early married. In the work of re-
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 289 
 
 building he found an opportunity to exercise his 
 skill, and was thus embarked upon a successful 
 professional career. But the burning of the home 
 had tragic consequences, for it occurred on a 
 winter night, and the exposure brought illness to 
 his wife and death to the twin boys, their children. 
 Professional success attended his steps from this 
 time on, and at the opening of the play his posi- 
 tion as the one architect of the district is unques- 
 tioned. But the fatal accident of twelve years 
 before still affects both the lives that were dark- 
 ened by it. Both continue to brood over their 
 loss, and both show the symptoms of incipient 
 mental derangement, or, at least, a morbid con- 
 dition of mind that borders on derangement. As 
 one sign of psychological disturbance, Solness is 
 haunted by the fear that his position is not secure, 
 that younger men will spring up to supplant him, 
 just as he had supplanted Brovik. This fear is 
 emphasized by his employment of young Brovik, 
 in whom he recognizes a talent that he seeks to 
 suppress. Now, Ragnar Brovik is engaged to 
 marry a young girl, Kaja Fosli by name. Solness 
 employs this young woman as a bookkeeper, hop- 
 ing thereby to keep Ragnar from seeking an inde- 
 pendent career. But Kaja, soon after entering 
 upon her work, becomes passionately attached to 
 Solness, who seems to encourage her affection
 
 20X) HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 without exactly returning it, and is careless of 
 consequences, so long as he may keep Ragnar 
 under his control. 
 
 When the play opens, Ragnar has just had the 
 opportunity to design a villa for some wealthy peo- 
 ple of the district, and wishes his employer to give 
 the plans the stamp of his approval. The elder 
 Brovik, who is rapidly failing in health, wishes to 
 see his son established in life before leaving him 
 forever, and, in an interview with Solness, requests 
 this favor for his son. Solness refuses the request, 
 and the old man goes away sadly disappointed. 
 A little later, in a scene between Solness and Dr. 
 Herdal, the former describes the way in which Kaja 
 had come into his employment. She had appeared 
 one day on a visit to her uncle and cousin. Solness 
 had stood and looked at her, persistently wishing 
 that he might have her in the office, but saying 
 nothing about it. The next day she had come 
 again, and acted as if an agreement had already 
 been made between them. In a word, Ibsen seems 
 to attribute to Solness the power of telepathic 
 suggestion. This idea is borne out by what fol- 
 lows, since, in the second act, after relating to Hilda 
 some singular experiences in his past history, he 
 asks her : 
 
 " Do you not believe this too, Hilda, that there are a 
 few picked and chosen people to whom has fallen the
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 291 
 
 grace, the power, the gift to wish a thing, to desire a 
 thing, to will a thing so persistently and so inexora- 
 bly that they must get it at last? Do you not believe 
 this?" 
 
 Solness believes this, at all events ; it has become 
 his idee fixe ; it provides a clue to the intricacies 
 of his mental life. It means for him not only the 
 power of projecting his thoughts into the minds of 
 others, but also the power of so affecting material 
 things as to shape them to his wishes. As a sub- 
 jective fact, the author is perfectly justified in at- 
 tributing this mania to Solness, but he taxes the 
 scientific reason more severely than is allowable 
 when he supplies the illusion with such objective 
 corroborations as that already given, or as the one 
 to be mentioned presently. 
 
 In his talk with Herdal, the master builder is 
 giving confidential expression to his haunting fear 
 of being pushed aside by the younger generation, 
 and has just said, " Some time youth will come 
 this way and knock at the door," when an actual 
 knock is heard, and Hilda appears upon the scene. 
 She is the younger daughter of Dr. Wangel in 
 " The Lady from the Sea," now grown to be a 
 young woman of twenty-three. Ten years before 
 this very day, Solness had celebrated the erection 
 of a new spire upon the church of her village. It 
 was the custom for the builder, upon the comple-
 
 HENR1K IBSEN. 
 
 tion of such a work, to climb the scaffolding, and 
 place a wreath upon the weather-vane of the spire. 
 This Solness had done, amid the plaudits of the 
 crowd; and of this the child Hilda had been a 
 spectator, shouting " Hurra for Builder Solness ! " 
 and excitedly waving a flag. Afterwards Solness 
 had been entertained at her father's house. Hilda 
 now comes to tell him that upon the day of the 
 festival, he had taken her in his arms, kissed her, 
 and promised to come in ten years and make her a 
 princess. The ten years are now up, and since he 
 has not come to her, she has come to him. Of all 
 this story, Solness remembers nothing, but with 
 his idte fixe, he understands that he must have 
 wished it, and so accepts the situation, pretending 
 to recall the circumstances. 
 
 Hilda, upon her own invitation, remains in the 
 house as a guest of the family, Mrs. Solness mak- 
 ing no apparent objection. Solness, who 1 is drawn 
 toward Hilda by a strong feeling of sympathy, makes 
 of her the confidant that he cannot make of his 
 sickly and brooding wife, and the second act (the 
 next day) is mainly taken up by conversations 
 between the two. Hilda is intended by the author 
 to stand in sharp contrast to Solness, and the sym- 
 pathy between them is that of complementary 
 natures. His mania has resulted in a morbid de- 
 velopment of conscience ; she is the personification
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 293 
 
 of recklessness, in this suggesting the character of 
 Rebekka in " Rosmersholm." The thought of duty 
 repels her ; she lives in her passion for excitement, 
 and does not concern herself with the means by 
 which it may be satisfied. In his conversation with 
 her, Solness reveals the secret that has been gnaw- 
 ing at his heart for years. Believing that his wishes, 
 if sufficiently intense, must become translated into 
 objective fact, he holds himself responsible for the 
 tragic event that had bereft him of his children 
 and cast a dark shadow over the mind of his wife. 
 For he had started in life full of ambition, and he 
 had wished that the old house might burn and open 
 a way for his ambition. From that destruction had 
 dated his professional success, and from it also the 
 morbid sense of guilt that has made his subsequent 
 
 life so unhappy. " Is it not frightful to think," he 
 
 
 
 says, " that I must now go about and reckon it up, 
 pay for it? not with money, but with human hap- 
 piness. And not merely with my own ; with that 
 of others too. Do you see that, Hilda? That is 
 what my artistic success has cost me and others. 
 And every livelong day I must go about and see 
 the price paid for me anew. Again, and again, 
 and still again." 
 
 In the third and last act of the play, following 
 the second upon the same day, the influence of 
 Hilda upon Solness reaches its culmination. He
 
 294 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 finds in her the warm human sympathy for which 
 he has so long yearned, and which it has been use- 
 less to expect from his wife. Let us add that the 
 communion of these two souls is purely spiritual, 
 and that there is no touch of indelicacy in the treat- 
 ment of the situation. The part of the wife is, 
 indeed, throughout, that of self-abnegation ; she 
 realizes that she cannot enter into her husband's 
 life, is ready to accept, and gratefully, any influence 
 that can help to brighten and strengthen it. For a 
 moment Hilda's conscience is aroused by pity for 
 Aline, but the impulse is transitory, and gives way 
 to the pleasure that she feels in exalting Solness 
 above his normal self, in lifting him for a time out 
 of the slough of despond into which he had sunk. 
 Solness has been erecting a new .house for his 
 family, and the building is ready to receive its 
 wreath from the builder according to the custom 
 already mentioned. But Solness confesses that he 
 becomes dizzy upon a height, and that the episode 
 of ten years before, when he himself had crowned 
 the church spire, and captivated Hilda's imagination, 
 was an exceptional fact in his life, an action not 
 since repeated. Hilda urges him to rise above him- 
 self and attempt the impossible once more ; and, 
 in his exaltation, he resolves' to undertake the 
 perilous work. 
 
 The tragic ending soon follows. Solness takes
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 295 
 
 the wreath, and, to the astonishment of his men, 
 starts to mount the spire with it himself. He 
 reaches the summit, hangs the wreath upon the 
 vane, and swings his hat in the air. Hilda raises a 
 jubilant cry, in which the others join, and Solness, 
 tottering, falls to the ground, where he lies lifeless. 
 Word is brought to Hilda, but she can remember 
 only that her hero has once more realized his true 
 self, become again what she has thought him during 
 all the ten years of waiting, and she tenderly says, 
 as the curtain falls, " My my master builder." 
 
 " The Master Builder " is no doubt one of the 
 most puzzling plays that Ibsen has written ; it is also 
 one of the most fascinating. " It gives," in the words 
 of Dr. Brandes, " at one and the same time a sense 
 of enthralment and a sense of deliverance." This 
 " profoundly symbolical work " is one " that echoes 
 and re-echoes in our minds long after we have read 
 it. Great in its art, profound and rich in its sym- 
 bolic language these are the words that rise to 
 our lips ; and impressed, without being touched or 
 softened, we fall to brooding and pondering over its 
 power." 
 
 It is the sadness and sweetness of the play, 
 rather than the possession of symbolic power, 
 that chiefly impress us when we turn to " Little 
 Eyolf," published in 1894. Coming after " Hedda 
 Gabler," and " The Master Builder," this play is
 
 296 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 a relief to the reader, for it is simpler in plan 
 and more obvious in significance. Many of its 
 passages are far-reaching in their implications, 
 and strike into the very depths of the soul ; but 
 the reader is not all the time haunted by the 
 suggestion of some elusive allegory, some hidden 
 meaning that leads him a will-o'-the-wisp chase 
 and lands him in a bog of conjecture. Even the 
 most persistent of searchers for symbols may 
 possibly be content to take this play for what it 
 is, and see in it nothing more than a direct 
 transcript of life under ideal conditions arranged 
 by a consummate artistic sense. 
 
 Alfred Allmers and his wife, Rita, have been 
 married for some ten years, and have one child, 
 a boy of nine, named Eyolf. The child has been 
 crippled in infancy, and is just reaching the age 
 when he realizes the difference between himself 
 and other boys sound of limb. The father, pas- 
 sionately attached to his child, has determined to 
 devote himself to his happiness, and bring what 
 harmony is yet possible into a life so unfitted to 
 battle for itself. He thus states his new-found 
 aim : 
 
 " I will try to bring to light all the rich possibilities that 
 are dawning in his childish soul. I will bring to full 
 growth, to flower and fruit, every germ of noble purpose 
 within him. And I will do more than that I will help
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 297 
 
 him to harmonize his wishes with what things are attainable 
 by him. For now they are not in harmony. He longs 
 for things that will be unattainable all his life long. But 
 I will create joy in his mind." 
 
 These plans are all broken off by the accidental 
 drowning in the fjord of the child, whose winsome 
 figure, like that of Mamillius in " The Winter's 
 Tale," makes but the briefest appearance upon 
 the scene, then passes from our sight, although 
 never from our memory. 
 
 The remaining two acts of the play are es- 
 sentially a study of two women and their relations 
 with Allmers. The one is his wife, the other is 
 Asta Allmers, supposed to be his half-sister. 
 With the latter he has grown up from childhood 
 in the closest intimacy. Now, following close upon 
 the loss of the child, comes the discovery that the 
 supposed relationship of brother and sister does 
 not exist; and the other discovery, which both 
 realize as by a lightning flash, but which neither 
 ventures to commit to words, that they are more 
 to one another than even a brother and sister can 
 be. This situation, which is treated with the great- 
 est delicacy, closes the second act. The character 
 of Rita, the wife, is less transparent than that of 
 Asta, and her motives are not so easily laid bare. 
 She is presented to us as attached to Allmers to 
 the point of grudging him his interest in his intel-
 
 298 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Icctual pursuits, his affection for his supposed sister, 
 and even his absorption in the child. She sees with 
 delight the prospect of a marriage between Asta 
 and a young engineer, who has for some time been 
 laying siege to the sister's heart. A strong scene 
 between husband and wife in the first act strikes 
 the key-note of Rita's character, which must be 
 described as jealous, although the jealousy is of a 
 complex sort, and more morbid than is its wont. 
 The problem of the remaining two acts is that of 
 working out the effects of the child's death upon 
 this passionate nature, and upon the nature 9f the 
 husband, equally passionate in its depths, but out- 
 wardly more restrained. 
 
 To trace the process by which these stricken 
 souls find peace would be impossible without 
 translating the greater part of the two acts that fol- 
 low. For peace finally comes or we are at least 
 assured that its advent is imminent to her, 
 through love, now first realized, for the memory 
 of the lost child ; to him, through a deeper pen- 
 etration into the mystery of life. At first, dazed 
 with grief, the future a blank to both, they in- 
 stinctively turn to one another for help, and, in 
 community of grief, grope towards that higher 
 plane of thought and feeling which is attainable 
 by the courageous, but, perhaps, .only through 
 the refiner's fire of suffering. We leave them
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 299 
 
 with the ascent well begun, and the goal dimly 
 in view. Moved by a common impulse of altru- 
 ism, they resolve, thus bereft of their own child, 
 to make better and brighter the lives of the vil- 
 lage children about them, the very children who 
 had made no effort to save Eyolf from his fate. 
 
 ALLMERS. What do you really think you can do for all 
 these poverty-stricken children? 
 
 RITA. I will try to see if I cannot soften and ennoble 
 their lot. 
 
 ALLMERS. If you can do that, little Eyolf was not 
 born in vain. 
 
 RITA. Nor in vain taken from us. 
 
 ALLMERS [resolutely, fixing his gaze upon her]. Could 
 I not be with you, and help you, Rita? 
 
 RITA. Would you? 
 
 ALLMERS. Yes, if I only knew that I could. 
 
 RITA \_lingeringly\. But then you would have to stay 
 here. 
 
 ALLMERS [gently]. Let us try to make it succeed. 
 
 RITA \in a barely audible voice']. Let us try, Alfred. 
 
 [Both are silent. Allmers goes to the staff and raises 
 the flag that has floated at half-mast. Rita watches him 
 in silenced] 
 
 ALLMERS [coming back to her]. There is a hard day's 
 work before us, Rita. 
 
 RITA. But you shall see the peace of the sabbath fall 
 upon us once more. 
 
 ALLMERS [with quiet emotion"]. Perchance we shall 
 have visits from the world of spirits.
 
 300 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 RITA [whispering]. Spirits? 
 
 ALLMERS. Perchance they are about us those we 
 have lost. 
 
 RITA [nodding slowly]. Our little Eyolf. And your 
 big Eyolf too. 
 
 ALLMERS [gazing into space]. Perhaps on our way 
 through life we may now and then catch some 
 glimpses of them. 
 
 RITA. Where shall we look, Alfred? 
 
 ALLMERS [fixing his eyes upon her]. Above. 
 
 RITA [nods in assent]. Yes, yes, above. 
 
 ALLMERS. Above toward the mountain-peaks tow- 
 ard the stars. And toward the great silence. 
 
 RITA [stretching out her hands to him]. Thank you. 
 
 In this lovely scene, and in the play of which 
 it is the ending, we find once more the Ibsen 
 that has seemed wellnigh lost of recent years, 
 the idealist of " Brand " and " Peer Gynt," the 
 ethical leader who has preached so many ser- 
 mons upon the theme of losing life for the sake 
 of saving it. Somewhere in the play, Rita says, 
 " We are creatures of earth, after all ; " and her 
 husband replies,." But something akin to the sea 
 and the heavens too, Rita." These words may 
 ' almost be said to supply the key-note of the 
 entire work. 
 
 "John Gabriel Borkman " (1896) is a play 
 whose action is based upon an unusually compli- 
 cated series of antecedent circumstances. Many
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY, 301 
 
 years before the play opens, Borkman was the 
 head of a banking establishment. He was an 
 ambitious man, and had conceived a vast plan 
 for the exploitation of the mineral resources of 
 his country. His aims were more than personal, 
 for they looked to an industrial development 
 that promised to better the lot of thousands 
 besides himself. In the furtherance of this plan, 
 he was tempted to a reckless use of the funds in 
 his custody. The cooperation of a business asso- 
 ciate named Hinkel became an absolute necessity, 
 but had to be purchased at a great price. Both 
 Hinkel and Borkman loved a woman, Ella Ren- 
 theim, who for her part loved Borkman. The lat- 
 ter paid the price demanded, ceased his attentions 
 to the woman, and instead married her twin-sister 
 Gunhild. Hinkel, however, found that he had 
 not bought the love he sought, although Borkman 
 had sacrificed it, and learned to his chagrin that 
 Ella remained faithful to the man who had given 
 her up. He revenged himself by exposing Bork- 
 man's dealings, thus bringing about a criminal 
 prosecution, the collapse of Borkman's schemes, 
 and the ruin of those who had trusted in the bank. 
 The prosecution led to Borkman's conviction, 
 and he was sentenced to five years of imprison- 
 ment. Meanwhile Ella had placed a house and 
 the means of support in the hands of her sister,
 
 3O2 HENKIK IBSEN. 
 
 who, with her son Erhart, was left otherwise desti- 
 tute. To this house Borkman returned after his 
 release from prison, but held no communication 
 with his wife, who could not forgive him for the 
 disgrace brought upon the family name. For 
 eight years the family lived in this strange relation, 
 she occupying the lower apartment and he the 
 upper. During all this time the sister had seen 
 neither of them, but had obtained custody of 
 Erhart for several years of his childhood, and be- 
 come devotedly attached to him. When the real 
 play begins, Erhart is twenty years of age, and is 
 living again with his mother, but, like her, has no 
 intercourse with the voluntary prisoner upstairs. 
 
 In the first act, a visit from Ella to her sister, 
 after years of separation, gives an opportunity for 
 the unfolding of the above history. In the long 
 conversation between the sisters, their inmost 
 nature is revealed ; both are passionate, but the 
 passion of the one has remained softened by her 
 love for Borkman, while the passion of the other 
 the wife has stiffened into the bitter pride of 
 an unforgiving woman, and taken the form of an 
 intense resolve that Erhart shall atone for his 
 father's guilt, and once more raise to honor the 
 family name. Deluded by this hope, the one 
 thing to which she clings, the mother does not 
 realize that Erhart has grown up to be a rather
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 303 
 
 commonplace, pleasure-loving youth, chafing under 
 the responsibility that others would set upon his 
 shoulders, swelling with a sense of the joy of 
 life, and seeking distraction in the society of 
 a young and beautiful widow, Fanny Wilton by 
 name, who lives in a neighboring villa. All of 
 these things the mother cannot understand ; but 
 they are realized by the sister, whose attachment 
 to Erhart is such that through it alone he learns 
 what a mother's love really is. The sister, finding 
 her health enfeebled, and knowing that she has 
 not long to live, has resolved to wrest Erhart from 
 his sombre surroundings, if possible, and the pur- 
 pose of the visit is to plead with the mother to 
 give up her son and the " mission " to which she 
 would devote his life. Failing in her entreaty, the 
 sister says that she cannot live without sight of 
 Erhart, and announces her determination to re- 
 main with him, since she may not take him away. 
 During the whole of this long act, Borkman does 
 not appear, but we are ever conscious of his pres- 
 ence, for his footsteps are heard overhead as he 
 paces his apartment with the monotonous persist- 
 ence of a caged lion. 
 
 The second act transfers the scene to Bork- 
 man's apartment, and opens with a long conver- 
 sation between Borkman and Foldal, the latter 
 a simple-minded man of humble position, a suf-
 
 304 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 ferer by Borkman's failure, who yet clings to his 
 old acquaintance with a sort of dog-like fidelity. 
 In this scene, and in the following scene with 
 Ella, Borkman gives expression to his attitude 
 toward those who have wronged him and been 
 wronged by him ; toward his wife and the traitor 
 Hinkel, toward the world of his creditors, and the 
 woman whose love he sacrificed to his ambition. 
 In these scenes, and in the scene with his wife in 
 the third act, we find what may be taken as the 
 central thesis of the play. As far as the world 
 goes, Borkman is simply defiant. He has done 
 wrong, and has atoned for it by suffering. He 
 failed through treachery when within a hair's- 
 breadth of success. Others pass through such 
 crises to fame and honor; he was luckless, and 
 fell into the abyss when success was almost within 
 his grasp. The crime of which the law took cog- 
 nizance is not what weighs most heavily upon his 
 soul, but the crime committed against himself and 
 the woman he loved. As far as the former goes, 
 he believes that he may yet regain his worldly 
 position, but he learns from Ella's lids that in the 
 latter he has sinned past forgiving. 
 
 " You slew the love that was in me. Do you under- 
 stand what. that means? The Bible speaks of a myste- 
 rious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I could not 
 understand before what it might be. Now I understand.
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 305 
 
 The great, unpardonable sin is to slay love in a human 
 heart." 
 
 From this personal reproach he has no words 
 of self-defence, but from the reproach of the vio- 
 lated social order he seeks a somewhat sophistical 
 refuge, as appears in the powerful third act, where 
 he confronts his wife for the first time in eight 
 years. 
 
 " I have given the whole case a rehearing for myself. 
 I have taken it up over and over again. I have been my 
 own accuser, my own counsel, and my own judge. More 
 unpartisan than any one else could be, I may say that. I 
 have walked the floor up there and turned every one of 
 my acts inside out and upside down, looked at them from 
 before and behind in as unsparing and unpitying a way as 
 any lawyer could have done. And the judgment I come 
 to every time is this that the only one I have sinned 
 against is myself." 
 
 It would hardly be fair to take this defiant pro- 
 nouncement as an expression of Ibsen's own 
 opinion of Borkman's offence. Like all strong 
 dramatists, the author has too frequently been 
 made chargeable with the sentiments and opinions 
 of the characters created by him. What we may, 
 however, justly take as the author's personal mes- 
 sage is the insistence upon individualism which is 
 so marked in the words just translated. No mat- 
 ter what a man may have done, he has a right to
 
 3O6 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 be heard as an individual, and commands a certain 
 respect if he is strong enough to impress his in- 
 dividual character upon the minds of those with 
 whom he is associated. 
 
 This consideration leads us to the statement of 
 another of the leading ideas of the play. The 
 young Erhart is an individual also, and makes 
 good his right to be respected as such. He is 
 beset by the claims of three persons, each deter- 
 mined to exact from him what he is not bound to 
 give. The father would have him share in the 
 work of restoring a fallen reputation. The mother 
 would have him do much the same thing, although 
 in a different, independent way. The aunt would 
 have him cling to her on account of her care for 
 his childhood. But he impatiently shakes off 
 these attempts to control his activity, refuses to 
 be bound by the influences of the older genera- 
 tion, determines to carve out his own career, and 
 seeks for happiness in following the dictates of his 
 own desires. We may pity him for the infatua- 
 tion that takes him from home in the company of 
 Mrs. Wilton, a woman several years his senior, 
 and possibly we may despise him for his rejection 
 of any and all obligations toward those who have 
 reared and cared for him, but we must recognize 
 that he, too, no less than his father, has the right 
 of every individual to live his own life (the author
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 307 
 
 uses this very phrase, worn as it is, and gives it 
 fresh vitality), to refuse to take upon his shoulders 
 the burdens for the existence of which he is in no 
 way responsible. 
 
 " No man can save his brother's soul, 
 Or pay his brother's debt " 
 
 might fairly be taken as the motto of this play, 
 as far as it is concerned with Erhart. 
 
 After the departure of the boy in his quest of 
 the joy of life, the drama draws rapidly to its 
 sombre but poetically impressive close. Bork- 
 man, who has left the confinement of his apart- 
 ment for the first time in years, is seized with a 
 sort of frenzy for the free air, and rushes from the 
 house which the departure of his son has just left 
 desolate. Although it is a winter night, and the 
 earth is white with snow, he cannot be persuaded 
 to return, and the fourth act takes place out of 
 doors. At the end, Borkman and Ella Rentheim 
 are left together, she entreating him to seek 
 shelter, and he declaring that he will never again 
 breathe the air of the house that has so long 
 confined him. Yielding to his stronger will, she 
 follows him out into the darkness of the forest, 
 and the landscape shifts (as in the first act oi 
 " Parsifal ") with their progress. Finally, Bork- 
 man sinks down exhausted upon a rustic bench. 
 He is a dying man, but his senses are quickened
 
 308 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to unwonted acuteness, and he seems to enjoy a 
 fulness of life that he has never known before. 
 
 BORKMAN. Ella ! Do you see the mountain ranges 
 there, far over yonder, one behind the other. They rise, 
 they tower. There is my deep, my infinite, my inex- 
 haustible kingdom. 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. Ah, but there comes an icy blast 
 from that kingdom, John. 
 
 BORKMAN. That blast is the breath of life to me, it 
 comes like a greeting from my trusty spirits. I see them, 
 the buried millions ; I feel the veins of metal, they stretch 
 out their bent, branching, enticing arms toward me. I saw 
 them before me like shades endowed with life that night 
 when I stood in the bank vault, candle in hand. You 
 sought to be free then, and I tried to free you. But I 
 could not. The treasure sank again into the depths 
 [stretching forth his hands'}. , But I will whisper it to you 
 here amid the peace of night. I love you as you lie there 
 deep and dark in the semblance of death. I love you, 
 wealth yearning for life, with all your shining train of 
 power and glory ; I love you, love you, love you ! 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM [with quiet, growing feeling']. Yes, 
 your affections are still set down there, John, -they were 
 always there. But up here in the light of day, there was a 
 warm, living, human heart that beat for you. And you 
 crushed that heart. Ah, more than that tenfold worse 
 you sold it for for 
 
 BORKMAN [shivering as with the cold}. For the sake of 
 the kingdom, and the power, and the glory you mean ? 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. Yes, I mean that. I told you this 
 evening once before. You slew affection in the woman
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 309 
 
 who loved you, and whom you loved in return, as far 
 as you could love any one [with upraised arm] . And 
 therefore I foretell you this, John Gabriel Borkman, you 
 will never win the prize you craved for that deed. You 
 will never enter triumphant into your cold and gloomy 
 kingdom ! 
 
 Borkman sinks upon the bench, and presently his 
 wife appears, but only to find her sister watching 
 over his dead body. 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. It was the cold that killed him. 
 
 FRU BORKMAN [shaking her head~\. The cold, you 
 say? The cold had killed him long before. 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. And made shadows of us both, yes. 
 
 FRU BORKMAN. You are right. 
 
 LLA RENTHEIM [with a sad smile'}. One dead man 
 and two shadows the cold has done that. 
 
 FRU BORKMAN. Yes, the cold in the heart. And now 
 we may clasp hands, Ella. 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. Yes, I think we may now. 
 
 FRU BORKMAN. We twin-sisters, over his body, whom 
 we both loved. 
 
 ELLA RENTHEIM. We two shadows over the dead 
 man. 
 
 It is evident from the above analysis that this play 
 is one of the most straightforward and intelligible 
 pieces of work that Ibsen has given us. It has not 
 the tenderness of " Little Eyolf," nor has it the 
 haunting symbolism of "The Master Builder." 
 But it has a strength and a closeness of texture in
 
 310 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 which these plays are somewhat lacking, and proves 
 peculiarly effective as an acting drama. 
 
 The last of Ibsen's plays, " When We Dead 
 Awake," was published in 1899, being separated by 
 three years, instead of the customary two, from its 
 predecessor. The play is further described as " a 
 dramatic epilogue," which seems to mean that the 
 author has definitely closed the series of problem- 
 plays, or studies in social pathology, which was 
 begun in 1878 with "The Pillars of Society," and 
 which is made an even dozen by the work now 
 under discussion. One in search of fanciful anal- 
 ogies might find in that first title some suggestion 
 of an intellectual Samson determined to pull down 
 the temple of modern society, and in the last some 
 suggestion of the nobler social structure that may 
 be expected to spring from the ruins of the old 
 order. 
 
 This is, of course, the merest fancy and nothing 
 more, but it is the prerogative of Ibsen's work to 
 suggest ideas that lie far afield from its direct mes- 
 sage, and it is impossible to remain literal-minded 
 in the presence of the extraordinary series of com- 
 positions now brought to an end. Their signifi- 
 cance is none the less real because it is elusive, and 
 their larger implications must determine our judg- 
 ment quite as much as the nicety of their drama- 
 turgical craftsmanship. " When We Dead Awake "
 
 THE EA T D OF THE HISTORY. 311 
 
 is a title which in itself awakens many echoes from 
 the author's earlier writings. It proclaims anew 
 his whole insistent gospel of the need of spiritual 
 regeneration for an age sunk in slothfulness the 
 gospel of Brand's 
 
 " Forth ! out of this stifling pit ! 
 Vault-like is the air of it ! 
 Not a flag may float unf url'd 
 In this dead and windless world." 
 
 It sounds once more that note of high idealism 
 which is never altogether missing from his work, 
 and which is the real secret of the appeal which he 
 has so powerfully made to all who have ever dreamed 
 of the realization of Utopias and the permanent 
 betterment of the social order. 
 
 But, whatever aspirations may breathe through 
 his symbolism, Dr. Ibsen never forgets that he is a 
 dramatic artist writing for the stage, and that his 
 first concern is the concrete presentation of such 
 men and women as we may at any time meet with in 
 actual life. The new play opens in the most matter- 
 of-fact way at a summer resort on the Norwegian 
 coast. Professor Rubek and his wife Maja are 
 seated outside the hotel. They have just finished 
 breakfast and are reading the newspapers. Rubek 
 is a sculptor of European reputation, who has re- 
 turned to his native land after a lengthy sojourn 
 abroad. Both are restless, and it soon transpires
 
 3 1 2 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 that neither of them has found satisfaction during 
 the years of their married life. It is a case of the 
 deeper sort of incompatibility. An artist and a 
 frivolous woman are joined together, and neither 
 of them can give the other what is most wanted. 
 To him has been denied inspiration for his work, 
 to her the joyous round of gaiety which she craves. 
 For years they have pretended a satisfaction they 
 did not feel, but the breaking-point has nearly been 
 reached. 
 
 All this comes out very clearly in the opening 
 scene. Soon afterwards, the two remaining char- 
 acters of the play appear. One is a landed 
 proprietor named Ulfhejm, the other is Irene, a 
 pale, mysterious woman who turns out to be an 
 old friend of Rubek, no other, in fact, than the 
 woman who had been his model for "The Day of 
 Resurrection," and thus the inspiration of his best 
 artistic effort. She is attended by a deaconess, a 
 shadowy, silent figure, who speaks only three words 
 at the very close of the drama. Ulfhejm, who is 
 an enthusiastic sportsman, is coarse of speech and 
 unconventional in manner. Maja is attracted to 
 him by his abundant animal spirits, and they plan 
 a hunting expedition. When they have gone off 
 together, Rubek is left with Irene, and memories 
 of the past come surging upon him. In the in- 
 timacy of their earlier relations, he had viewed her
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 313 
 
 with the artist's eye only ; she, on the other hand, 
 had loved him with all the strength of her passion- 
 ate nature. To him she had been an episode ; to 
 her he had been everything that makes life desir- 
 able. When they had parted she had become like 
 " The Woman with the Dead Soul " of Mr. Stephen 
 Phillips's poem. She had existed, but the vital 
 spark had been extinguished within her breast. 
 He, learning too late how great was his need of her 
 inspiration, had made a prosaic marriage, and had 
 discovered that the creative impulse had fled be- 
 yond his control. The situation is something like 
 that of " The Master Builder," when the appear- 
 ance of Hilda reawakens in the artist the old 
 aspirations and the old ideal visions. Irene re- 
 proaches the sculptor with having seen in her 
 only the beautiful figure, not the loving woman's 
 soul. 
 
 RUBEK. I was an artist, Irene. 
 
 IRENE. Just that, just that. 
 
 RUBEK. An artist first of all. And I was ill and would 
 create the great work of my life. It should be called 
 " The Day of Resurrection." It should be produced in 
 the likeness of a young woman, waking from the sleep of 
 death. 
 
 IRENE. Our child, yes. 
 
 RUBEK. She should be the noblest, purest, most ideal 
 woman of earth, she who awoke. And then I found you. 
 I could use you with complete satisfaction. And you
 
 314 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 submitted so willingly, so gladly. Left people and home, 
 and followed me. 
 
 IRENE. It was my resurrection from childhood when I 
 followed you. 
 
 RUBEK. That was just why I could use you. You and 
 none other. You became for me a sacrosanct creature, 
 whom I might touch only in the worship of my thoughts. 
 I was still young then, Irene. And I was possessed by 
 the superstition that should I touch you, desire you in 
 reality, it would be a desecration, and put beyond my 
 power the work that I sought to do. And I yet believe 
 there is truth in that. 
 
 IRENE. First the work of art then the human child. 
 
 RUBEK. Judge of it as you will. But I was completely 
 controlled by my task at that time, and it made me jubi- 
 lantly happy. 
 
 IRENE. And your task turned the corner for you, 
 Arnold. 
 
 RUBEK. With thanks and blessings for you, it turned 
 the corner for me. I sought to create the pure woman 
 just as it seemed to me she must awake on the day of 
 resurrection. Not surprised at anything new and un- 
 known and undreamed of, but filled with sacred joy at 
 finding herself unchanged she, the woman of earth 
 in the higher, freer, more joyous lands after the long 
 and dreamless sleep of death. So did I create her in 
 your image I created her, Irene. 
 
 He speaks of a projected journey along the north 
 coast with his wife, but Irene counsels him rather to 
 seek the heights, and asks if he dare meet her again 
 up there. " If we only could ! " is his cry, and she
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 315 
 
 replies: "Why can we not do what we will? 
 Come, Arnold, come up to me." " Why can we 
 not do what we will ? " The whole of Ibsen is 
 in that passionate question. Why does deed fall 
 so far short of impulse? Why do we cripple our 
 lives by making them so much less than our 
 ideals ? Noticeable also in this scene is the re- 
 currence of the typical motive of " The Master 
 Builder," for as Hilda comes to Solness and re- 
 calls the past in such fashion as to rekindle his 
 artistic energies, so Irene comes to the sculptor 
 at a similar period of slackened will, and bids 
 him once more be greatly daring. 
 
 In the second act, Rubek and his wife, in sor- 
 row rather than in passion, say some of the 
 things they have long felt, and put into bare and 
 almost brutal speech their attitude toward one 
 another. After this discussion, Maja leaves the 
 scene, meets Irene, and sends her to Rubek. A 
 long reminiscent dialogue between these two then 
 follows, leading to this poetical and impressive 
 climax : 
 
 IRENE. Look, Arnold. Now the sun is sinking behind 
 the peaks. Just see how red the slanting rays shine upon 
 all the hilltops yonder. 
 
 RUBEK. It is long since I have seen a sunset on the 
 mountains. 
 
 IRENE. And a sunrise?
 
 316 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 RUBEK. I think I have never seen a sunrise. 
 
 IRENE. I saw a wonderfully beautiful sunrise once. 
 
 RUBEK. Did you? Where was it? 
 
 IRENE. High, high up on a dizzy mountain top. You 
 enticed me thither, and promised that I should behold all 
 the glory of the world, if I would only 
 
 RUBEK. If you would only ? Well ? 
 
 IRENE. I did as you told me. Followed you up to 
 the heights. And there I fell on my knees, and be- 
 sought you and worshipped you. Then I saw the 
 sunrise. 
 
 The close of this act brings an appointment be- 
 tween the two to spend the warm bright summer 
 night upon the heights. At the same time it 
 must be remembered that Maja and Ulfhejm have 
 planned a hunting expedition for that night also. 
 
 IRENE. Until to-night. On the upland. 
 
 RUBEK. And you will come, Irene ? 
 
 IRENE. I will truly come. Wait for me here. 
 
 RUBEK. A summer night on the upland. With you, 
 with you. Oh, Irene, it might have been a lifetime. 
 And we have wasted it, we two. 
 
 IRENE. We first come to see the irretrievable when 
 
 RUBEK. When ? 
 
 IRENE. When we dead awake. 
 
 RUBEK. What is it we come to see ? 
 
 IRENE. We see that we have never lived. 
 
 With the last act comes the inevitable tragic 
 ending. The scene is laid high up among the 
 mountains, with precipices on the one hand, and
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 317 
 
 snovvclad peaks on the other. The time is just 
 before sunrise. Maja and Ulfhejm first appear, 
 and after a long dialogue come upon Irene and 
 Rubek. A storm is brewing, and the note of 
 warning is sounded by Ulfhejm. He goes down 
 the mountain with Maja, promising to send succor 
 for the others, but they take little heed of this, 
 having reached the pitch of exaltation that cares 
 nothing for physical dangers, and fears only a re- 
 lapse into the deadly moral conditions of ordinary 
 prosaic life. 
 
 RUBEK. Then let us two dead live life once to the 
 dregs, ere we go down again into our graves. 
 
 IRENE. Arnold ! 
 
 RUBEK. But not here in the twilight. Not here, 
 where the wet, hideous shroud flaps about us. 
 
 IRENE. No, no. Up into the light and all the glitter- 
 ing glory ! Up to the peaks of promise ! 
 
 RUBEK. Up there we will celebrate our bridal festival, 
 Irene, my beloved. 
 
 IRENE. The sun will see us gladly, Arnold. 
 
 RUBEK. All the powers of light will see us gladly. 
 And all the powers of darkness. \_Taking her hand~\ Will 
 you follow me, then, my gracious bride? 
 
 IRENE. Willing and gladly will I follow my lord and 
 master. 
 
 RUBEK. We must first make our way through the 
 mists, Irene, and then 
 
 IRENE. Yes, through all the mists, and so straight up to 
 the towering peak, that gleams in the sunrise.
 
 3 1 8 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 As the two pass upward hand in hand, the tempest 
 increases in violence. The silent attendant of 
 Irene appears and looks about for her mistress. 
 The jubilant voice of Maja is heard from far 
 below. Then, with a roar like thunder, an ava- 
 lanche sweeps down the mountain side, and buries 
 the devoted two in its depths. 
 
 Such is the scene which, like the similar scene 
 in " Brand," leaves us awe-stricken at the close of 
 the drama. We leave to others the task of read- 
 ing a lesson into this tragic presentment of two 
 human souls thus brought to the crisis of their 
 lives. Journalism and by journalism is meant 
 the sort of writing which, whether found in news- 
 papers or in books, invariably balks at every form 
 of idealism, and always, of the possible motives 
 for any course of action, assumes the basest or the 
 least worthy, to offer the most rational explana- 
 tion journalism, we say, will scoff at this story, 
 just as it scoffed at " L'Abbesse de Jouarre " and 
 " Die Versunkene Glocke," with both of which 
 works this drama has suggestive affinities. But 
 we pity the reader who can contemplate the situ- 
 ation here created by the genius of Dr. Ibsen, 
 and find only prosaic emotions to feel, only pro- 
 saic things to say. An awful pity and an awful 
 sense of omnipotent fate seem the fitting subjec- 
 tive accompaniment of the tragedy here worked
 
 THE END OF THE HISTORY. 319 
 
 out with unerring objective mastery. In the 
 presence of such creative power, of such a cer- 
 tain grasp upon the very core of passion, such an 
 envisagement of the problem of life when stripped 
 of all adventitious trappings, all criticism seems 
 futile, and all comment superfluous. 
 
 Ibsen returned to Norway for permanent resi- 
 dence several years ago, making his home in 
 Christiania, and the honors that have since been 
 heaped upon him by his fellow-countrymen, now 
 unanimous in the pride with which they claim him, 
 have richly atoned for the mistrust and calumny 
 of the earlier years. He has become a prophet 
 for his own country, as well as for the rest of the 
 world, and has entered into the full heritage of his 
 fame. His seventieth birthday, in 1898, was made 
 the occasion of the heartiest of celebrations, and 
 evoked tributes of praise for his work from all 
 parts of the world. This year (1901) he has 
 suffered from a severe illness which leaves little 
 hope of a restoration to his former activity. It is 
 understood that he has prepared some sort of an 
 autobiography, but, such is his habitual secretive- 
 ness concerning his literary work, not even his 
 closest friends know very much about it. Even 
 during the months of his recent illness he has 
 been working almost daily at some composition of 
 which no other human being has yet had sight.
 
 32O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 It is evident that the work of his' life is practically 
 completed ; the content and significance of that 
 life-work, as set forth in the preceding pages, are 
 such as to make of it one of the most remarkable 
 intellectual manifestations of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, and to insure its profound and lasting in- 
 fluence upon the twentieth century. 
 
 THE END
 
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