Henrik Ibsen

arly months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were The Editor and A Bankruptcy, in which Bj?rnson suddenly swooped from his sagas and hi

n broadly over the surface of his own next work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bj?rnson had carried a very spirited r

875, indeed, if not earlier, he was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of inanimation, t

s discarded in favor of a frock- coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rather shyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself in frequent straits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollar b

de in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must be quoted, although it is well known, since

acted my own intention and prevented the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural c

877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, hélas! cette p

weden and Norway; it had the good fortune to be taken up warmly in Germany. What Ibsen's idea was, in the new sort of realistic drama which he was inventing, was, in fact, perceived at once by German audiences, although it was not always approved of. He was the guest of the theatromaniac Duke of Saxe-

e of his development marked by Pillars of Society, that the play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suited the German public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with their theatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical intelligence of the Anglo-American public, and ... below that of the French public. This is of

had Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the well-made play. Gloomy and homely as are the earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the "well- made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very much of the usual "bless-ye-my-children" order. The loss of the Indian Girl is miraculously prevented, and at the end the characters ar

g to civilization at large, not to the system of one particular nation. He was, in consequence, endowed, almost automatically, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a central point; if he was to be limited at all, he might be styled European, although, perhaps, few Western citizens would have had less difficulty than he in making themselves comprehended by a Chinese, Japanese or Indian mind of unusual breadth and cultivation. On the oth

le evolution of his fate, as Bj?rnson was following his. It was as inevitable that Ibsen should grow to his full height in solitude as it was that Bj?rnson should pine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of popular meetings, torchli

rteen years in which Ibsen and Bj?rnson were nothing to one another, and these were not years of unmingled mental happiness for either of them. But during this long period each of th

possesses more dramatic power than any other play-writer of our day." When we remember that, in France alone, Augier and Dumas fils and Hugo, Halévy and Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though a sound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said about Ibsen, though it were whisper

indeed for him: "The only man in Norway who has frankly, boldly and generously taken my part is Bj?rnson. It is just like him; he has, in truth, a great, a kingly soul; and I shall never forget what he has done now." Six months later, on occasion of Bj?rnson's jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed: "My thanks for the work done side by side with

that the pressure of German surroundings was unfavorable to the healthy evolution of his genius. In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although it was no longer the quiet and aristocratic Rome of Papal days, was still immensely attractive to his temperament. He was now, in some measure, "a person of means," and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formed a small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed, great care. The result could be s

s. But he was no longer suffering from what he himself had called "the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly black spot." He went to Amalfi for the summer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with his present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what is probably the most widely famous of all his works, A Doll's House. The day before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublished letter of July 4, 1879): "I have been living here with my family since September

even be said that it was the first modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that even here the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The arm of coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever and entertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of real life. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, dressed to go out, to Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when th

hwords were repeated from mouth to mouth. The great statement and reply-"No man sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves," "Hundreds of thousands of women have done so!"-roused interminable discussion in countless family circles. The disputes were at one time so violent as to threaten the peace of households; a school of

ed by the reception of his latest play into a mood rather different from that which he expressed at any other period. As has often been said, he did not pose as a prophet or

t has not been my own personal experience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emanci

which was to deal with the gradual development of his mind, and to be called From Skien to Rome. Whether he actually wrote any of this seems uncertain; that he should have planned it shows a certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now in his fifty-third year, he might be nearly at the end of his resources. As a matter of fact, he was just entering upon a new inheritance. In the summer of 1881 he went, as usual now, to Sorrento, and there [Note: So the authorities state: but in an unpublished lett

Every day I receive letters and newspaper articles decrying or praising it. I consider it absolutely impossible that any German theatre will accept the play at present. I hardly believe that they will dare to play

of life since 1880. It is hardly possible that, there, or in any really civilized country, an analysis of the causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest and most conventional forms of hereditary disease could again excite such a startling revulsion of feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew of investigators, Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of probing playwrights all over the Continent, have gone further and often fared much worse than Ibsen did when he dived into the family history of Kammerher

for my own part, that it seems to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that is to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. It is extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as a foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, the characters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types tha

s. But the author of Ghosts, who was accused of disseminating anarchism and nihilism, was now smartly drummed out of the Tory camp without bein

ce of slaves to be

tive of his exile, to form some impressions of poli

at any rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its side. Bj?rnson says, 'The majority is always right';

Gossensass in the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to the memory of Ibsen in the way that Pornic belongs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to Tyndall, holiday homes in foreign countries, dedicated to blissful work without disturbance. Here, at a spot now officially named the "Ibsenplatz," he composed The Enemy of the People, engrossed in his invention as was his wont, reading nothing and thinking of nothing b

des, must be given to show what Ibsen's attitude w

thing is judged, a deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might just as well end my literary activi

f the most certainly successful of its author's writings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as a pamphlet it awakens irresistible sympathy; as a specimen of dramatic art, its construction and evolution are almost faultless. Under a transparent allegory, it describes the treatment which Ibsen himself had received at the hands of the Norwegian public for venturing to tell them that their spa should be drained before visit

Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under the lash. Ghosts itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but The Enemy of the People received a cordial welcome, and has remained eve