Henrik Ibsen Part 3

Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and possibly with the person, of Hertz, when he was in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt whatever that, while he was anxiously questioning his own future, and conscious of crude faults in _Lady Inger_, he set himself, as a task, to write in the manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt that it was a deliberate exercise, and we see the results in _The Feast at Solhoug_ and in _Olaf Liljekrans_. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and prose, like Hertz's romantic dramas; there is the same determination to achieve the chivalric ideal; but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master.

Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering about him, dances without an ungraceful gesture through the elaborate and yet simple masque that he has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high and sudden flights of metrical writing, but breaks down surprisingly at awkward intervals, and displays a hopeless inconsistency between his own nature and the medium in which he is forcing himself to write. As a proof that the similarity between _The Feast at Solhoug_ and _Svend Dyring's House_ is accidental, it has been pointed out that Ibsen produced his own play on the Bergen stage in January, 1856, and revived Hertz's a month later. It might, surely, be more sensibly urged that this fact shows how much he was captivated by the charm of the Danish dramatist.

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

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

Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his theory, has given rather a confused account of the circ.u.mstances that led to the composition of his next play, _The Vikings at Helgeland_. But it is clear that in looking through Petersen for a subject which would display, in broad and primitive forms, the clash of character in an ancient Norwegian family, he fell upon "Volsungasaga," and somewhat rashly responded to its vigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "the t.i.tanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other pro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions." He believed that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "our national epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase in his essay which is very interesting, in the light it throws upon the object which the author had before him in writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_.

He says clearly--and this was intended as a revolt against the tradition of Oehlenschlager--"it was not my aim to present our mythic world, but simply our life in primitive times." Brandes says of this departure that it is "indeed a new conquest, but, like so many conquests, a.s.sociated with very extensive plundering."

In turning to an examination of _The Vikings_, the first point which demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the verse in _The Feast at Solhoug_ about the trenchant prose of _The Vikings_, and the crepuscular dimness of _Lady Inger_ is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness.

Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do and mean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent presentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of their value. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of _The Vikings at Helgeland_, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in our criticism of the author's choice of a subject. It is valuable to compare Ibsen's treatment of Icelandic family-saga with that of William Morris; let us say, in _The Lovers of Gudrun_. That enchanting little epic deals with an episode from one of the great Iceland narratives, and follows it much more closely than Ibsen's does. But we are conscious of a less painful effort and of a more human result. Morris does successfully what Ibsen unsuccessfully aimed at doing: he translates the heroic and half-fabulous action into terms that are human and credible.

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

There is great vigor, however, in many of the scenes in _The Vikings_.

The appearance of Hiordis on the stage, in the opening act, marks, perhaps, the first occasion on which Ibsen had put forth his full strength as a playwright. This entrance of Hiordis ought to be extremely effective; in fact, we understand, it rarely is. The cause of this disappointment can easily be discovered. It is the misfortune of The Vikings that it is hardly to be acted by mortal men. Hiordis herself is superhuman; she has eaten the heart of a wolf, she claims direct descent from a race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur about the conception of her form and character, but it is a grandeur which might well daunt a human actress. One can faintly imagine the part being played by Mrs.

Siddons, with such an extremity of fierceness and terror that ladies and gentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in hysterics, as in the days of Byron. Where Hiordis insults her guests, and contrives the horrid murder of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have a stage-dilemma presented to us-either the actress must treat the scene inadequately, or else intolerably. _Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet_, and we shrink from Hiordis with a physical disgust. Her great hands and shrieking mouth are like Bellona's, and they smell of blood.

What is true of Hiordis is true in less degree of all the characters in _The Vikings_. They are "great beautiful half-witted men," as Mr.

Chesterton would say:

Our sea was dark with dreadful ships Full of strange spoil and fire, And hairy men, as strange as sin, With horrid heads, came wading in Through the long low sea-mire.

This is the other side of the picture; this is how ornulf and his seven terrible sons must have appeared to Kaare the peasant, and this is how, to tell the truth, they would in real life appear to us. The persons in _The Vikings at Helgeland_ are so primitive that they scarcely appeal to our sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color that the poet has lavished upon them, and the majestic sentiments which he has put into their mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helgeland must have regarded them as those of Surbiton regarded the beings who were shot down from Mars in Mr. Wells' blood-curdling story.

_The Vikings at Helgeland_ is a work of extraordinary violence and agitation. The personages bark at one another like seals and roar like sea-lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night." ornulf, the aged father of a grim and speechless clan, is sorely wounded at the beginning of the play, but it makes no difference to him; no one binds up his arm, but he talks, fights, travels as before. We may see here foreshadowed various features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here is his favorite conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair to say that there is more than this to applaud in _The Vikings at Helgeland_; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more than any Scandinavian critic has done, justly draws attention to the n.o.bility of ornulf's entrance in the third act. Yet, on the whole, I confess myself unable to be surprised at the severity with which Heiberg judged _The Vikings_ at its first appearance, a severity which must have wounded Ibsen to the quick.

The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in Ibsen's condition. The period for which he had undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had now come to a close, and he was not anxious to prolong it. He had had enough of Bergen, to which only one chain now bound him. Those who read the incidents of a poet's life into the pages of his works may gratify their tendency by seeing in the discussions between Dagny and Hiordis some echo of the thoughts which were occupying Ibsen's mind in relation to the married state. Since his death, the story has been told of his love-affair with a very young girl, Rikke Holst, who had attracted his notice by throwing a bunch of wild flowers in his face, and whom he followed and desired to marry. Her father had rejected the proposal with indignation. Ibsen had suffered considerably, but this was, after all, an early and a very fugitive sentiment, which made no deep impression on his heart, although it seems to have always lingered in his memory.

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

The household of her father, Hans Conrad Th.o.r.esen, was the most cultivated in Bergen. He himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was a bookish, meditative man of no particular initiative, but he had married, as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh, a Dane by birth, and for a long time, with the possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland's sister, the most active woman of letters in Norway. Mrs. Th.o.r.esen was the step-mother of Susannah, the only child of her husband's second marriage. Between Magdalene Th.o.r.esen and Ibsen a strong friendship had sprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French, and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which her name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long as Ibsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on the stage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine years his senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must have been a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet. And now the wise Magdalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating to him the best treasure of the family circle, the gay and yet mysterious Susannah.

While he was writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_, and courting Susannah Th.o.r.esen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settle in Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned, thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence of six years. Now began another period of six years more, these the most painful in Ibsen's life, when, as Halvorsen has said, he had to fight not merely for the existence of himself and his family, but for the very existence of Norwegian poetry and the Norwegian stage. This struggle was an excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled with debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with further responsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondary house, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink of bankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in the country that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to court starvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The only published volume of Ibsen's which had (up to 1863) sold at all was _The Warriors_, by which he had made in all 227 specie dollars (or about 25).

The Christiania he had come to, however, was not that which he had left.

In many directions it had developed rapidly. From an intellectual point of view, the labors of the nationalists had made themselves felt; the folk-lore of Landstad, Moe and Asbjornsen had impressed young imaginations. In some of its forms the development was unpleasing and discouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies of Andreas Munch (_Salomon de Caus_, 1855; _Lord William Russell_, 1857) was, for instance, an irritating step in the wrong direction. The new-born school of prose fiction, with Bjornson as its head (_Synnove Solbakken_, 1857; _Arne_, 1858), with Camilla Collett's _Prefect's Daughters_, 1855, as its herald; with ostgaard's sketches of peasant life and humors in the mountains (1852)--all this was a direct menace to the popularity of the national stage, offering an easy and alluring alternative for home-loving citizens. Was it certain that the cla.s.sic Danish, which alone Ibsen cared to write, would continue to be the language of the cultivated cla.s.ses in Norway? Here was Ivar Aasen (in 1853) showing that the irritating landsmaal could be used for prose and verse.

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

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.

With what I most enjoy contented least.

How little his greatness was perceived in the Christiania literary coteries may be gathered from the little fact that the species of official anthology of _Modern Norwegian Poets_, published in 1859, though it netted the shallows of national song very closely, contained not a line by the author of the lovely lyrics in _The Feast at Solhoug_.

It was at this low and miserable moment that Ibsen's talent suddenly took wings; he conceived, in the summer of 1858, what finally became, five years later, his first acknowledged masterpiece, and perhaps the most finished of all his writings, the sculptural tragedy of _The Pretenders_.

_The Pretenders_ (_Kongsemnerne_, properly stuff from which Kings can be made) is the earliest of the plays of Ibsen in which the psychological interest is predominant, and in which there is no attempt to disguise the fact. Nothing that has since been written about this drama, the very perfection of which is baffling to criticism, has improved upon the impression which Georg Brandes received from it when he first read it forty years ago. The pa.s.sage is cla.s.sic, and deserves to be cited, if only as perhaps the very earliest instance in which the genius of Ibsen was rewarded by the a.n.a.lysis of a great critic. Brandes wrote (in 1867):--

What is it that The Pretenders treats of? Looked at simply, it is an old story. We all know the tale of Aladdin and Nureddin, the simple legend in the Arabian Nights, and our great poet's [Oehlenschlager's]

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

To a poet the achievements of his greatest contemporaries in their common art have all the importance of high deeds in statesmanship and war. It is, therefore, by no means extravagant to see in the n.o.ble emulation of the two dukes in _The Pretenders_ some reflection of Ibsen's att.i.tude to the youthful and brilliant Bjornson. The luminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence and good fortune of Bjornson-Hkon could not but offer a violent contrast with the gloom and hesitation, the sick revulsions of hope and final lack of conviction, of Ibsen-Skule. It was Bjornson's "belt of strength," as it was Hkon's, that he had utter belief in himself, and with this his rival could not yet girdle himself. "The luckiest man is the greatest man," says Bishop Nicholas in the play, and Bjornson seemed in these melancholy years as lucky as Ibsen was unlucky. But the Bishop's views were not wide enough, and the end was not yet.

CHAPTER IV

THE SATIRES (1857-67)

Temperament and environment combined at the period we have now reached to turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm und Drang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature were awakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of his age. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until 1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama.

But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic rhyme.

With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must be borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_, was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had been rampant in the generation of Byron--in the famous words:--

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

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

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

Unfortunately, the people laughed at will never consent to think the way well mannered, and Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste," that vaguest and most insidious of accusations. We are told that he began his enterprise in prose [Note: "_Svanhild_: a Comedy in three acts and in prose: 1860," is understood to exist still in ma.n.u.script], but found that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity of Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started _Love's Comedy_, therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack should take. He was very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he was easily convinced that the times were out of joint. Then he observed that if there was anything that the Norwegian upper cla.s.ses prided themselves upon it was their conduct of betrothal and marriage. Plato had said that the familiarity of young persons before marriage prevented enmity and disappointment in later years, that it was useful to know the peculiarities of temperament beforehand, and so, being accustomed to them, to discount them. But Ibsen was not of this opinion, or rather, perhaps, he did not choose to be. The extremely slow and public method of betrothal in the North gave him his first opportunity.

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

In the sunny orchard-closes, While the warblers sing and swing, Care not whether bl.u.s.tering Autumn Break the promises of Spring; Rose and white the apple-blossom Hides you from the sultry sky; Let it flutter, blown and scattered, On the meadow by and by.

In the s.e.xual struggle, that is to say, the lovers should not pause to consider the worldly advantages of their match, but should fly in secret to each other's arms. By the law of battle, the female should be s.n.a.t.c.hed to the conqueror's saddle-bow, and ridden away with into the night, not subjected to the jokes and the good advice and the impertinent congratulations of the clan. Young Lochinvar does not wait to ask the counsel of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of her aunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where ford there is none. Ibsen is in favor of the _mariage de convenance_, which suppresses, without favor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above all, anything is better than the publicity, the meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal, which kills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are apt to break their own eggs if intruding hands have touched them.

This is the central point in _Love's Comedy_, but there is much beside this in its reckless satire on the "sanct.i.ties" of domestic life. The burden of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the impertinent poet touches with levity upon the question of the duration of marriage:

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

Sweep the gra.s.s and heap the blossom!

Let it shrivel, pale and blown!

Throw the wicket wide! Sheep, cattle, Let them browse among the best!

_I_ broke off the flowers; what matter Who may graze among the rest!

_Love's Comedy_ is perhaps the most diverting of Ibsen's works; it is certainly the most impertinent. If there was one cla.s.s in Norwegian society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler s.e.x, to which every poet looks for an audience, was not less deeply outraged by the want of indulgence which he had shown for all forms of amorous sentiment, although Ibsen had really, through his satire on the methods of betrothal, risen to something like a philosophical examination of the essence of love itself.

To Brandes, who reproached him for not recording the history of ideal engagements, and who remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes and rotten potatoes in this world," Ibsen cynically replied, "I am afraid none of the sound ones have come under my notice"; and when Guldstad proves to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount importance of creature comforts, the last word of distrust in the sustaining power of love had been said. The popular impression of Ibsen as an "immoral" writer seems to be primarily founded on the paradox and fireworks of _Love's Comedy_.

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

Among Ibsen's writings _Terje Vigen_ is unique as a piece of pure sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or pungency. It is the story of a much-injured and revengeful Norse pilot, who, having the chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and Milady, saves them at the mute appeal of their blue-eyed English baby.

_Terje Vigen_ is a masterpiece of what we may define as the "dash-away-a-manly-tear" cla.s.s of narrative. It is extremely well written and picturesque, but the wonder is that, of all people in the world, Ibsen should have written it.

His short lyric poems of this period betray much more clearly the real temper of the man. They are filled full and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with longing and impatience, with painful pa.s.sion and with hope deferred. It is in the strident lyrics Ibsen wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can best read the record of his mind, and share its exasperations, and wonder at its elasticity. The series of sonnets _In a Picture Gallery_ is a strangely violent confession of distrust in his own genius; the _Epistle to H. O. Blom_ a candid admission of his more than distrust in the talent and honesty of others. It was the peculiarity and danger of Ibsen's position that he represented no one but himself. For instance, the liberty of many of the expressions in _Love's Comedy_ led those who were beginning a movement in favor of the emanc.i.p.ation of women to believe that Ibsen was in sympathy with them, but he was not. All through his life, although his luminous penetration into character led him to be scrupulously fair in his a.n.a.lysis of female character, he was never a genuine supporter of the extension of public responsibility to the s.e.x. A little later (in 1869), when John Stuart Mill's _Subjection of Women_ produced a sensation in Scandinavia, and met with many enthusiastic supporters, Ibsen coldly reserved his opinion. He was always an observer, always a clinical a.n.a.lyst at the bedside of society, never a prophet, never a propagandist.

His troubles gathered upon him. Neither theatre consented to act _Love's Comedy_, and it would not even have been printed but for the zeal of the young novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great honor, bought for about 35 the right to publish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he was editing. Then the storm broke out; the press was unanimously adverse, and in private circles abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In 1862 the second theatre became bankrupt, and Ibsen was thrown on the world, the most unpopular man of his day, and crippled with debts. It is true that he was engaged at the Christiania Theatre at a nominal salary of about a pound a week, but he could not live on that. In August, 1860, he had made a pathetic appeal to the Government for a _digter-gage_, a payment to a poet, such as is freely given to talent in the Northern countries. Sums were voted to Bjornson and Vinje, but to Ibsen not a penny. By some influence, however, for he was not without friends, he was granted in March, 1862, a travelling grant of less than 20 to enable him to wander for two months in western Hardanger and the districts around the Sognefjord for the purpose of collecting folk-songs and legends. The results of this journey were prepared for publication, but never appeared. This interesting excursion, however, has left its mark stamped broadly upon _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.