Henrik Ibsen

. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had roused some of th

brain, that ripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after his rough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his attitude of passive appreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like

frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the French who entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed sojourn-for he soon determined that if there was going to be civil war in Italy that country was no home for him-we hear but little. This autumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career of Georg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whom he was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we

if he was not taken seriously as a poet, he should try his "fate as a photographer." Bj?rnson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him to put his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsen himself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and all the benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidly forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorations from kings and ministers; Bj?rnson h

ted Italy altogether, settling for three months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath" in the Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he started his five-act comedy, The League of Youth. All September he spent in Munich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden, which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at once he sank down again into his brooding mood of isolation and quietism, roam

as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers The League of Youth to Bj?rnson's The Newly Married Couple (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that The League of Youth was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhap

then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult for an outsider-so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of Copenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of The League of Youth are

r Gynt, and nothing exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bj?rnson was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Bj?rnson must always be leading the majority, Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. They were doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by creating the figure of Stensgaard, in The League of Youth, a frothy and mischievous demagogue who

d from King Carl the order of the Wasa, was feted at banquets, renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bj?rnson were how beginning to be recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined. It was doubtless Bj?rnson's emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such clover at Stockhol

days' expedition up the Nile into Nubia, and then back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on November 17, in the company of an empress and several princes of the blood, he saw the Canal formally opened and graced a grand processional fleet that sailed out from Port Said towards Ismaila. But on the quay at Port Said Ibsen's Norwegian mail was handed to him, and letters and n

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his early works, and in particular of The Pretenders. No definite plan, however, had been formed, when, in the middle of June, war was declared between Germany and France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony, and settled for three months in Copenhagen, where his reception was charmingly sympathetic. By the beginning of October, after t

r, Théophile Gautier was giving the last touches to Emaux et Camées. In December, 1870, Ibsen addressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his "Balloon-Letter," a Hudibrastic rhymed epistle in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a good deal that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminiscences of his trip through Egypt, and

shed and national disaster. The very same events were impressing Goldwin Smith at the very same moment with his famous prophecy that the abolition of all dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquil inauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world. So history moves doggedly on, propheten rechts, propheten links, a perfectly impassive welt-kind in the m

till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the da

lect. For me in particular there would be danger in too much reflection." Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame of mind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of which his imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; at another time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, and to represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presents them to him. In neit

d the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss, Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen's early and insufficiently protected writings. This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own country, where the ver

al visits from some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularly Hans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formal intercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; all this time, let us remember, no Norwegians-"by request." The summer was spent in long rambles over the mountains

of pagan Hellenic worship. There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet. His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in each case inspire

terary pedant with inked fingers and populous beard. He accepted everything, from the parasites to the purple slippers. The dangers of so humble an attendance upon history were escaped with success in the first instalment of his "world drama." In the strong and mounting scenes of Caesar's Apostacy, the rapidity with which the incidents succeed one another, their inherent significance, the innocent splendor of Julian's mind in its first emancipation from the chains of false faith, combine to produce an effect of high

speeches put into the mouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid; as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's drama was too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt. What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here and there i

nted in a place, to pull up his roots. A weariness took possession of him after the publication of his double drama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks a central joint in the structure of his career, what the architects call a "channel" in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen

ars afterwards, in writing to Bj?rnson, the discomfort of that experience was still unallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly enough," he said, "to support myself and my family in the case of my discontinuing my literary work. And I should be obliged to discontinue it if I lived in Christiania. ... This simply means that I should not writ

is Ode for the Millenary Festival. That very striking poem, one of the most solid of Ibsen's lyrical performances, had opened in the key of unmitigated defiance to popular opi

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most unchallenged, and he was a name, at least, in Germany. In England, since 1872, he had not been without a prophet. But in Italy, Russi

was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne or Rossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at least till 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If, in the second portion of his career, he re