Love's Comedy Part 39

[At this moment the piano strikes up a dance, and champagne corks explode in the background. The gentlemen hurry to and fro with their ladies on their arms. GULDSTAD approaches SVANHILD and bows: she starts momentarily, then collects herself and gives him her hand. MRS. HALM and her family, who have watched the scene in suspense, throng about them with expressions of rapture, which are overpowered by the music and the merriment of the dancers in the garden.

[But from the country the following chorus rings loud and defiant through the dance music:

CHORUS OF FALK AND THE STUDENTS.

And what if I shattered my roaming bark, It was pa.s.sing sweet to be roaming!

MOST OF THE COMPANY.

Hurrah!

[Dance and merriment; the curtain falls.

NOTES

1. "_William Russel._" An original historic tragedy, found upon the career of the ill-fated Lord William Russell, by Andreas Munch, cousin of the historian P. A. Munch. It was produced at Christiania in 1857, the year of Ibsen's return from Bergen, and reviewed by him in the _Ill.u.s.teret Nyhedsblad_ for that year, Nos. 61 and 52. Professor Johan Storm of Christiania, to whose kindness I owe these particulars, adds that "it is rather a fine play and created a certain sensation in its time; but Munch is forgotten."

2. _A grey old stager_. Ibsen's friend P. Botten-Hansen, author of the play _Hyldrebryllupet_.

3. _A Svanhild like the old_. In the tale of the Volsungs Svanhild was the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun,--the _Siegfried_ and Kriemhild of _Nibelungenlied_. The fierce King Jormunrek, hearing of her matchless beauty, sends his son Randwer to woo her in his name.

Randwer is, however, induced to woo her in his own, and the girl approves. Jormunrek thereupon causes Randwer to be arrested and hanged, and meeting with Svanhild, as he and his men ride home from the hunt, tramples her to death under their horses' hoofs.

Gudrun incites her sons Sorli and Hamdir to avenge their sister: they boldly enter Jormunrek's hall, and succeed in cutting off his hands and feet, but are themselves slain by his men. This last dramatic episode is told in the Eddic _Hamthismol_.

4. _In the remotest east there grows a plant_. The germ of the famous tea-simile is due to Fru Collett's romance, "The Officials Daughters" (cf. Introduction, p. ix.). But she exploits the idea only under a single and obvious aspect, viz., the comparison of the tender bloom of love with the precious firstling blade which brews the quintessential tea for the Chinese emperor's table; what the world calls love being, like what it calls tea a coa.r.s.e and flavourless after-crop. Ibsen has, it will be seen given a number of ingenious developments to the a.n.a.logy. I know Fru Collett's work only through the accounts of it given by Brandes and Jaeger.

5. _Another Burns_. In the original: "Dolen" ("The Dalesman"), that is A. O. Vinje, Ibsen's friend and literary comrade, editor of the journal so-called and hence known familiarly by its name.

See the Introduction.

6. _Like Old Monta.n.u.s_. The hero of Holberg's comedy _Erasmus Monta.n.u.s_, who returns from foreign travel to his native parish with the discovery that the world is _not_ flat. Public indignation is aroused, and Monta.n.u.s finds it expedient to announce that his eyes had deceived him, that "the world _is_ flat, gentlemen."