While I was still too weak to write, I received a letter from Henrik
Ibsen (dated December 20, 1870), which impressed me greatly. Henrik
Ibsen and I had been on friendly terms with one another since April,
1866, but it was only about this time that our intimacy began to emit
sparks, an intimacy which was destined to have a very widening
influence upon me, and which is perhaps not without traces on the
stages of his poetical progress.
Ibsen thought I had already recovered, and wrote to me as to a
convalescent. He complained bitterly of the conquest of Rome by the
Italians: Rome was now taken from "us men" and given over to the
"politicians"; it had been a spot sacred to peace, and was so no
longer.--This assertion was at variance with my religion. It seemed to
me unpermissible to desire, for aesthetic reasons, to see the
restoration of an ecclesiastical régime, with its remorseless system of
oppression. Human happiness and intellectual progress were worth more
than the retention of the idylls of naiveté. I replied to him by
declaring my faith in freedom and soon he outdid me in this, as in
other domains.
But there was one other part of the letter that went to my heart and
rejoiced me. It was where Ibsen wrote that what was wanted was a revolt
in the human mind, and in that I ought to be one of the leaders. These
words, which were in exact agreement with my own secret hope, fired my
imagination, ill though I was. It seemed to me that after having felt
myself isolated so long, I had at last met with the mind that
understood me and felt as I did, a real fellow-fighter. As soon as I
was once more fit to use my pen, I wrote a flaming reply in verse
(headed, The Hospital in Rome, the night of January 9, 1871). In it I
described how solitary I had been, in my intellectual fight and
endeavour, and expressed my contentment at having found a brother in
him.