Henrik Ibsen

emained in Bergen, cramped by want of means in his material condition, and much harassed and worried by the little pressing requirements of the the

ase himself, now to please the bourgeois of Bergen, all this must be done by the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundred years earlier, we may imagi

re doggedly, but certainly not in a convivial spirit. The Norwegians are a hospitable and festal people, and there is no question that the manager of the theatre would have unusual opportunities of being jolly with his friends. But it does not appear that Ibsen made friends; if so, they were f

this time, he had begun to know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluency which was, it appears, always ungrammatical. But, as is not unfrequent with a man who is f

w-year's gift to the play-goers of Bergen was St. John's Night, 1853, a piece which has not been printed; in 1854 he revived The Warrior's Barrow; in 1855 he made an immense although irregular advance with Lady Inger at ?straat; in 1856 he produced The Feast at Solhoug; in 1857 a rewritten version of the early Olaf Liljekrans. These are the juvenile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted in the recognized canon

ectly from comparatively modern history, and treated purely for its value as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this point of view it curiously exemplifies a remark of Hazlitt: "The progress of manners and k

riarch, a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an embittered patriotism were legitimately centred. Unfortunately, "the progress of knowledge," as Hazlitt would say, exposed the f

raert Livsbillede] has to give us of

duct. The motive power of her actions was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly in an amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and her status. We find her, for instance, on one occasion seizing the estates of a neighbor, and holding them till she was actually forced to resign them. When she gave her daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it was to s

ist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of history of having been an idealist of the

ver, this radical difference that in Lady Inger there is nothing preternatural, and it is, indeed, in this play that Ibsen seems first to appreciate the value of a stiff attention to realism. The romantic elements of the story, however, completely dominate his imagination, and when we have read

ents openin

eas in fairy

dy of the Candelabra. Through the windows, on the landward side, a procession of mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, eac

d and irritated men. "Now there is no knight left in our land," says Finn, but-and this is the point from which the play starts-there is Inger Gyldenl?ve. We have approached the moment of crisis when the fortunes and the fates of Norway rest upon the firmness of this ma

hrift to Olaf Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, the Mother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had a great simplicity, a noble outline with

n of a purely physical attractiveness; Nils Lykke is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fortunes, with impudent ease, in the home of his ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in his only, the majestic Inger is reduced from a queen to a pawn. All manhood, we are told, is dead in Norway; if this be so, then what a field is cleared where a heroine like Inger, not young a

rious persons meet at ?straat? Who sends them? Whence do they come and whither do they go? To these questions, no doubt, an answer can be found, and it is partly given, and very awkwardly, by the incessant introduction of narrative. The confused and melodramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils Lykke and Skaktavl is of central importance, but what is it about? The business with Lucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste

1856. He denied, in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poet whom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced the movement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainder of his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism, and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted for gospel. However, literary history must be built on the evidence before it, and the actual text of The Feas

deepened in passion and melody, till they culminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage, Svend Dyring's House (1837) and King René's Daughter (1845). The genius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in all Europe there were not two authors less alike. Hertz would have pleased Kenelm Digby, and if that romantic being had read Dani

allad-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 displ

ture, 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 ac

ssand, 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 Asbj?rnsen. 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 Ibse

ponded to its vigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "the titanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other pro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions." He believed that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "our national epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase in his essay which is very interesting, in the light it t

f 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

ess 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

be acted by mortal men. Hi?rdis 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 th

l the characters in The Vikings. They are "great bea

dark with dr

range spoi

en, as stra

heads, cam

e long low

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

d 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;

s works may gratify their tendency by seeing in the discussions between Dagny and Hi?rdis 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 bun

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 t

s second marriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and Ibsen a strong friendship had sprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French, and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which her name lives in Norwegian litera

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 it

lank-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 Bj?rnson as its head (Synn?ve Solbakken, 1857; Arne, 1858), with Camilla Collett's Prefect's Daughters, 1855, as its herald; with ?stgaard's sketches of peasant life and humors in the mountains

as harsh and saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of his life, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in

ke to one mor

, like him with f

an's art, and t

ost enjoy con

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 wi

e 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 for

directed his endeavors, just as Nature feels her way in her blind preliminary attempts to form her types. H?kon and Skule are pretenders to the same throne, scions of royalty out of whom a king may be made. But the first is the incarnation of fortune, victory, right and confidence; the second-the principal figure in the play, masterly in its truth and originality-is the brooder, a prey to inward struggle and endless distrust, b

lliant Bj?rnson. The luminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence and good fortune of Bj?rnson- H?kon 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 Bj?rnson's "belt of strength," as it was H?kon's, t