Henrik Ibsen

ter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, made his way over

and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pure Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, was wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost on Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, marrie

ich kept all his forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the Ibsens had been in preserving their res

he town pillory was at the right of and the mad-house, the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to the left; in front was Latin school and the grammar school, while the church occupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospec

droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls

ceedingly lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became. Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself or close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or less closely related, and dances, dinners and music parties followed each other, winter and summer, in almost unbroken sequence. Many travellers, too, passed through the town, and, as there were as yet no regular inns, they lodged with friends or connections. W

rocess had been gone through was a little broken-down farmhouse called Venst?b, in the outskirts of Skien. Ibsen afterwards stated that those who had taken most advantage of his parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were precisely those who now most markedly turned a cold shoulder on them. It is likely enough that this may have been the case, but one sees how inevitably Ibsen would, i

ess of which he was accustomed to bolt himself. Here were some dreary old books, among others Harrison's folio History of the City of London, as well as a paint-box, an hour-glass, an extinct eight-day clock, properties which were faith

that of a child," and when he died, in 1865, Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who helped in the lessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of wonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual gift for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently, perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards boasted of h

e napkin was that for painting. A little while before he left school, he was found to have been working hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of the young Ibsen-a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view from the windows at Venst?b, a boy in peasant dress seated on a

ths. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied, so Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for th

hich could not be indulged. Until a later date than this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J. C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Düsseldorf, where the teaching attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meant a long and serious expenditure of money, together wi

developed. So far as the genius of a very great man is influenced by his surroundings, and by his physical condition in those surroundings, it was the atmosphere of Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen. Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit of clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew, the town which he hated, the schoolmate

century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters. Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked rocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect

n years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of Europe had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence such as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a ma

f Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection with the capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the capital was as yet little more than we should call a village. There would, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the best inhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain graceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish eleg

he contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal," compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and strychnine and the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He

ng, but he was rude, truculent and contradictory. The youthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of its elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson has, in such conditions, enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not a favorite even with the girls, whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One of the young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe the effect which the poet made upon t

ave started prematurely in life or literature. The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost an accident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, and some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" to the vexation of various worthy persons. The earliest trace of talent seems to been in this direction, in the

Bergen. In 1848 Stub was an invalid schoolmaster, who, it appears, eked out his income by giving instruction, by correspondence, in style. How Ibsen heard of him does not seem to be known, but when, in 1851, Ibsen entered, with needless acri

hich almost coincided with his twentieth birthday. He was born again, a child of '48. There were risings in Vienna, in Milan, in Rome. Venice was proclaimed a republic, the Pope fled to Gaeta, the streets of Berlin

his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man. The old clouds vanished, and though the social difficulties which hemmed in his career were as gross as ever, he himself no longer doubted what was to be his aim in life. The cry of revolution came to him, of revolution faint indeed and br

od up, and

ire, mistrus

f bitter sle

or sandals

nd patience

ings maybe,

years that

and his s

and his sta

nd his cloak w

f the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution of February, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to take up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, wh

st; a voice i

depth, and I

e epigraph of Ibsen'

imstad. Through the whole series of his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, e

onveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugs with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointed out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of Catilina takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to the stor

er perceived the character of the man against whom these diatribes are directed than he devoured them greedily (jeg slugte disse skrifter). The opening words of Sallust, which every schoolboy has to read-we can imagine with what an extraordinary force they would strike upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen. Lucius Catilina nobili genere nat

the writers of his age or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust. There can be no doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his unflinching method of building up his edifice of invective, stone by stone; his close, unidealistic, dry

Catiline, and this was placed before him in a more thrilling way by the austere reserve of the historian. No doubt, to a young poet, when that poet was Ibsen, there would be something deeply attractive in the sombre, archaic

ing in cat-calls and grimaces. He was now discovered like Caliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the strenuous arts of friendship. One of those who thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due, who held a post in the custom-house; the other was Ole Schulerud (1827-59), who deserves a cordial acknowledgment from every admirer of Ibsen. He also was in the recei

ed a very lively paper of recollecti

eptionally strong constitution, for when his financial conditions compelled him to practice the most stringent economy, he tried to do without underclothing, and fi

e night hours of 1848-49 there was being composed in the garret over the apothecary's shop a three-act tragedy in blank verse, on the conspiracy of Catiline. With his own hand, when the first draft was completed, Schulerud made a clean copy of the drama, and in the autumn of 1849 he went to Christiania with the double purpose of placing Catilina at the theatre and securing a publisher for it. A letter (October 15, 1849) from Ibsen, first printed in 1904-the only document we possess of this earliest period-

nning a romance, The Prisoner at Akershus (this was to deal with the story of Christian Lofthus); and above all he was busy writing a tragedy of Olaf Trygves?n. [Note: On the authority of the Breve, pp. 59, 59, where Halvdan Koht prints "Olaf Tr." and "Olaf T." expanding th

ng; he could endure Grimstad and the gallipots no longer. In March, 1850, at the age of twent