Henrik Ibsen

h the Conservative party in Norway, without having gratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personal relations of friendliness with Bj?rns

84) that the lower classes are nowhere liberal-minded or self- sacrificing, and that "in the views expressed by our [Norwegian] peasants there is not an atom more of real Liberalism than is to be found among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol." In politics Ibsen had now become a pagan; "I do not believe," he said, "in the emancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidence in the altruism and good will of those in power." This sense of the uselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next work on which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonic tragi-comedy of The Wild Duck. The first

erle. Vogue la galère. "But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of the union from the flag," burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegian politics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway"; it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of my caring. It is in reading The Wild Duck that for the first time the really astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes apparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist now relinquishes any other central object than the presentation to his audience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last, and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that is not catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than Ghosts, The Wild Duck is an avalanche which

he point of view. There is, so far as I can judge, no trace of this in The Wild Duck, where the continuity of aspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us that if we tell him our past, he will tell us our future, and although several of the characters in The Wild Duck are the most sordid of Ibsen's creations, the author has made himself so deeply familiar with them that they a

advantages of disturbing it overweigh the practical disadvantages, and above all to bear in mind that if you rob the average man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob him of his happiness. The topsy-turvy nature of a this theme made Ibsen as nearly "rollicking" as he ever became in his life. We can ima

nd even his family saw him only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him, but, if sufficiently courageous, must hang about on the staircase, hoping to catch him for a moment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his study, into which the daring Paulsen occas

e that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to those untiring eyes. The newspaper and the cafe mirror-these were the books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and out of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could

ntry." Ibsen began to doubt whether he was not too far off to follow events in Norway-and these were now beginning to be very exciting-well enough to form an independent judgment about them; and after twenty years of exile there is no doubt that the question was fairly put. The Wild Duck had

ized compliments found their way to him in Rome that he began to fancy that the human element was beginning to be introduced. At all e

empty. He had a constitutional horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway from one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, the Swedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of fren

outhward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever guarding the mountainous horizon. Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, when Snoilsky had left him, already thinking of a new drama, lingered on at Molde, spending hours on hours at the end of the jetty, gazing into t

e not content to have him among them as a retired observer, they wanted to make him stand out definitely on one political side or the other. He was urged, at the end of September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession planned in his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough to see that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably too self-conscious in

Copenhagen, and thence to Munich, where he breathed again. Meanwhile, the extreme liberal faction among the students claimed that his action had meant that he was heart and soul with them, as against the reactionaries. A young Mr. Ove Rode, who had interviewed him, took upon himself to say that these were Ibsen's real sentiments. Ibsen fairly stamped with rage, and declared, in furious communications,

where he expounded the gospel of individualism to a respectful audience of workingmen, and had laid down the necessity of introducing an aristocratic strain, et adeligt element, into the life of a truly democratic state, a strain which woman and labor were to unite in developing. He said: "I am thinking, of course, not of birth, nor of money, nor even of intellect, but of the nobility which grows out of character. It is character alone which can make us

ervative. It has its deep roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict." When we come to read Rosmersholm it is not difficult to see how this order of ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The mansion called by that name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois aristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timid conservatism

personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is a sort of troll; nobody can explain-and yet an explanation seems requisite-what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright for once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of Rosmersholm that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last, Ibsen

tic poetry should be considered extinct, "like some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times." But the soul of man cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly prosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut himself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowing how to set about it, that

fjord or going towards it. As was his wont, he stored up these impressions, making no immediate use of them. He actually prepared The Lady from the Sea in very different, although still marine surroundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for the summer at the pretty and ancient, but very mild little town of Saeby, with the sands in front of him and rolling woods behind. From Saeby it was a short journey to Frederikshavn, "which he liked very much-he could knock about all day among the shipping, talki

Neue Rundschau for December, 1906, there was published a first draft of The Lady from the Sea, dating as far back as 1800.] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defence of individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity of developing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism. It is in some respects the reverse of Rosmersholm; the bitterness of restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death, being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and

of his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries-even in recalcitrant Norway-he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age. In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of the sang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of high and settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was now discussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of what is even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers at Sto

as uninterruptedly in Munich writing what is known to us now as Hedda Gabler. He finished it at last, saying as he did so, "It has not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day." It was a proof of the immense growth of Ibsen's ce

nds it impossible to extract any sort of general idea from Hedda Gabler, or to accept it as a satire of any condition of society. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individual that she interested Ibsen. We have been told, since the poet's death, that he was greatly struck by the case, which came under his notice at Munich, of a German lady who poisoned herself because she was bored with life, and had strayed into a false position. Hedda Gabler is the realization of such an individu

nd a longitude and latitude for Tesman's "tastefully decorated" villa, declared that this time Ibsen had written an "international," not a locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little

the leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves,