CHAPTER II: EARLY INFLUENCES
CHAPTER III: LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57)
CHAPTER IV: THE SATIRES (1857-67)
CHAPTER V: 1868-75
CHAPTER VI: 1875-82
CHAPTER VII: 1883-91
CHAPTER VIII: LAST YEARS
CHAPTER IX: PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
CHAPTER X: INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen in 1868
Ibsen in Dresden, October, 1873
From a drawing by Gustav Laerum
Facsimile of Ibsen's Handwriting
Ibsen. From the painting by Eilif Petersen
Bust of Ibsen, about 1865
PREFACE
Numerous and varied as have been the analyses of Ibsen's works
published, in all languages, since the completion of his writings, there
exists no biographical study which brings together, on a general plan,
what has been recorded of his adventures as an author. Hitherto the only
accepted Life of Ibsen has been _Et literaert Livsbillede_, published
in 1888 by Henrik Jaeger; of this an English translation was issued in
1890. Henrik Jaeger (who must not be confounded with the novelist, Hans
Henrik Jaeger) was a lecturer and dramatic critic, residing near Bergen,
whose book would possess little value had he not succeeded in persuading
Ibsen to give him a good deal of valuable information respecting his
early life in that city. In its own day, principally on this account,
Jaeger's volume was useful, supplying a large number of facts which were
new to the public. But the advance of Ibsen's activity, and the increase
of knowledge since his death, have so much extended and modified the
poet's history that _Et literaert Livsbillede_ has become obsolete.
The principal authorities of which I have made use in the following
pages are the minute bibliographical _Oplysninger_ of J. B. Halvorsen,
marvels of ingenious labor, continued after Halvorsen's death by Sten
Konow (1901); the _Letters of Henrik Ibsen_, published in two volumes,
by H. Koht and J. Elias, in 1904, and now issued in an English
translation (Hodder & Stoughton); the recollections and notes of various
friends, published in the periodicals of Scandinavia and Germany
after his death; T. Blanc's _Et Bidrag til den Ibsenskte Digtnings
Scenehistorie_ (1906); and, most of all, the invaluable _Samliv med
Ibsen_ (1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned writer aspires, in
measure, to be Ibsen's Boswell, and his book is a series of chapters
reminiscent of the dramatist's talk and manners, chiefly during those
central years of his life which he spent in Germany. It is a trivial,
naive and rather thin production, but it has something of the true
Boswellian touch, and builds up before us a lifelike portrait.
From the materials, too, collected for many years past by Mr. William
Archer, I have received important help. Indeed, of Mr. Archer it is
difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation.
It is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metrical
writings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume, and
that I had the privilege, in consequence, of being the first person to
introduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend for
a moment that it is not a gratification to me, after so many years and
after such surprising developments, to know that this was the fact. But,
save for this accident of time, it was Mr. Archer and no other who was
really the introducer of Ibsen to English readers. For a quarter of a
century he was the protagonist in the fight against misconstruction and
stupidity; with wonderful courage, with not less wonderful good temper
and persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place of
the false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius.
Mr. William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attached
to the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in England
and America.
In these pages, where the space at my disposal was so small, I have not
been willing to waste it by repeating the plots of any of those plays of
Ibsen which are open to the English reader. It would please me best if
this book might be read in connection with the final edition of _Ibsen's
Complete Dramatic Works_, now being prepared by Mr. Archer in eleven
volumes (W. Heinemann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole work by those
volumes of it which have already appeared, I have little hesitation in
saying that no other foreign author of the second half of the nineteenth
century has been so ably and exhaustively edited in English as Ibsen has
been in this instance.
The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further be
recommended to the study of Carl Naerup's _Norsk Litteraturhistories
siste Tidsrum_ (1905), a critical history of Norwegian literature since
1890, which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modern
ideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway, scarcely one of
whom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the tyranny
of Ibsen's personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen in England
and France has often missed something of its historical value by not
taking into consideration that movement of intellectual life in Norway
which has surrounded him and which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may be
allowed to say of my little book that this side of the subject has been
particularly borne in mind in the course of its composition.
E. G.
KLOBENSTEIN.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish
skipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century,
made his way over from Stege, the capital of the island of Moeen, and
became a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the
family, all following the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorous
disposition, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinister
and taciturn wives, who, by the way, were always, it would seem, Danes
or Germans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet had, after a
hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of pure
Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik, was
wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls lost on
Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem
of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in 1797, married in 1825
a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg, of the same town of Skien;
she was one year his senior, and the daughter of a merchant. It was in
1771 that the Ibsens, leaving Bergen, had settled in Skien, which was,
and still is, an important centre of the timber and shipping trades on
the south-east shore of the country.
It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort of
Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise,
and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea. Much of a
wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains
of heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than
to recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which kept all his
forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to
insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which
marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely
provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find
anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the
Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in that
inability to resist the call of the sea, generation after generation,
if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of the
conventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect elements
of his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son who
was born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months after
their marriage.
This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, although he never used the
second name, was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House,
in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20, The house stood on one
side of a large, open square; the town pillory was at the right of and
the mad-house, the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to the
left; in front was Latin school and the grammar school, while the church
occupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospect the tourist
can no longer sentimentalize, for the whole of this part of Skien
was burned down in 1886, to the poet's unbridled satisfaction. "The
inhabitants of Skien," he said with grim humor, "were quite unworthy to
possess my birthplace."
He declared that the harsh elements of landscape, mentioned above, were
those which earliest captivated his infant attention, and he added that
the square space, with the church in the midst of it, was filled all day
long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls, while from dawn
to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that
was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by
hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls, taking advantage of that
force. "Afterwards, when I read about the guillotine, I always thought
of those saws," said the poet, whose earliest flight of fancy seems to
have been this association of womanhood with the shriek of the sawmill.
In 1888, just before his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen wrote out for Henrik
Jaeger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It is
from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is
taken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories,
many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting, however, to find
that his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimistic
character. "Skien," he says, "in my young days, was an exceedingly
lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became.
Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself
or close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or less
closely related, and dances, dinners and music parties followed each
other, winter and summer, in almost unbroken sequence. Many travellers,
too, passed through the town, and, as there were as yet no regular inns,
they lodged with friends or connections. We almost always had guests in
our large, roomy house, especially at Christmas and Fair-time, when the
house was full, and we kept open table from morning till night." The
mind reverts to the majestic old wooden mansions which play so prominent
a part in Thomas Krag's novels, or to the house of Mrs. Solness'
parents, the burning down of which started the Master-Builder's
fortunes. Most of these grand old timber houses in Norway have indeed,
by this time, been so burned down.
We may speculate on what the effect of this genial open-handedness might
have been, had it lasted, on the genius of the poet. But fortune had
harsher views of what befitted the training of so acrid a nature. When
Ibsen was eight years of age, his father's business was found to be in
such disorder that everything had to be sold to meet his creditors. The
only piece of property left when this process had been gone through
was a little broken-down farmhouse called Venstoeb, in the outskirts of
Skien. Ibsen afterwards stated that those who had taken most advantage
of his parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were precisely
those who now most markedly turned a cold shoulder on them. It is likely
enough that this may have been the case, but one sees how inevitably
Ibsen would, in after years, be convinced that it was. He believed
himself to have been, personally, much mortified and humiliated in
childhood by the change in the family status. Already, by all accounts,
he had begun to live a life of moral isolation. His excellent sister
long afterwards described him as an unsociable child, never a pleasant
companion, and out of sympathy with all the rest of the family.
We recollect, in _The Wild Duck_, the garret which was the domain of
Hedvig and of that symbolic bird. At Venstoeb, the infant Ibsen possessed
a like retreat, a little room near the back entrance, which was sacred
to him and into the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt himself.
Here were some dreary old books, among others Harrison's folio _History
of the City of London_, as well as a paint-box, an hour-glass, an
extinct eight-day clock, properties which were faithfully introduced,
half a century later, into _The Wild Duck_. His sister says that the
only outdoor amusement he cared for as a boy was building, and she
describes the prolonged construction of a castle, in the spirit of _The
Master-Builder_.
Very soon he began to go to school, but to neither of the public
institutions in the town. He attended what is described as a "small
middle-class school," kept by a man called Johan Hansen, who was the
only person connected with his childhood, except his sister, for whom
the poet retained in after life any agreeable sentiment. "Johan Hansen,"
he says, "had a mild, amiable temper, like that of a child," and when he
died, in 1865, Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who helped in the
lessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of
wonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual
gift for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently,
perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards
boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in
itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, at
the age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic description
of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he must
have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence of
the author, "passive at the nadir of dismay."
No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more
ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has
done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with
anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only
talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting.
A little while before he left school, he was found to have been working
hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of
the young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view
from the windows at Venstoeb, a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock,
the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid,"
overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must have
been, founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, a
far-away following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy
"patriot-painters" of the school of Dahl.
It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had considerable
intellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood the
ambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks and
months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied,
so Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In
neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for
the National Gallery, but it is highly significant that such earnest
students of precise excellence in another art should first of all have
schooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color.
In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken away
from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with a
young middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the future proposed
no task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the local
schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be a professional
artist, but that was one which could not be indulged. Until a later date
than this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary
technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden, because J.
C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Duesseldorf, where the teaching
attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic profession meant
a long and serious expenditure of money, together with a very doubtful
prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who had seemed the very
genius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died, having scarcely begun to
sell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not surprising that Knud
Ibsen, whose to were in a worse condition than ever, refused even to
consider a course of life which would entail a heavy and long-continued
expense.
Ibsen hung about at home for a few months, then, shortly before his
sixteenth birthday, he apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of Mann,
at the little town of Grimstad, between Arendal and Christianssand, on
the extreme south-east corner of the Norwegian coast. This was his home
for more than five years; here he became a poet, and here the peculiar
color and tone of his temperament were developed. So far as the genius
of a very great man is influenced by his surroundings, and by his
physical condition in those surroundings, it was the atmosphere of
Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen.
Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit of
clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew, the town which
he hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly
dunce. We find him next, with an apron round his middle and a pestle in
his hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. What
Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats--"Back to the shop, Mr. John,
stick to plasters, pills and ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the
author of _Endymion_, was strictly true of the author of _Peer Gynt_.
Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to
Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius.
For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the most
important of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of the
most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for
a century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters.
Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing
at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it
looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked
rocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect
uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything;
in Ibsen's time there are said to have been about five hundred of these
apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one
of the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in fraying
ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter.
For several years nothing is recorded, and there was probably very
little that demanded record, of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own
interesting notes, it is obvious, refer only to the closing months of
the period. Ten years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of
Europe had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence
such as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of
life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness
and a thousand bitters."
It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his sixth to his twentieth
year, suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was at
war--the phrase is his own--with the little community in which he lived.
And yet it seems to have been, in its tiny way, a tolerant and even
friendly little community. It is difficult for us to realize what life
in a remote coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection
with the capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the
capital was as yet little more than we should call a village. There
would, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the best
inhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain
graceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected
from Copenhagen, would mark the more conservative citizens, male and
female. A fierier generation--not hot enough, however, to set the
fjord on flame--would celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the
country in numerous patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy like
Ibsen would, on the whole, prefer the former type, but he would despise
them both.
He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a poverty that excluded all
indulgence, beyond the bare necessities, in food and clothes and
books. We can conceive the meagre advance of his position, first a
mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice
of friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some
bright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr.
Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he
contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal,"
compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real
grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have
dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too,
and strychnine and the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the
admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies
in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of
anger, against which all arguments are useless, which bubbles up in the
heart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, and
knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in
manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us
with pathetic naivete, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to
the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had
permitted it.
As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace. By
the respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its little
inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quite
nice." The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man, who did not
seem to realize his menial position. He was certainly intelligent, and
Grimstad would have overlooked the pills and ointments if his manners
had been engaging, but he was rude, truculent and contradictory. The
youthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of
its elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson has, in such
conditions, enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not a
favorite even with the girls, whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One of
the young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe the
effect which the poet made upon them. They had none of them liked him,
she said, "because"--she hesitated for the word--"because he was so
_spectral_." This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to us for
a moment the distempered youth, almost incorporeal, displayed wandering
about at twilight and in lonely places, held in common esteem to be
malevolent, and expressing by gestures rather than by words sentiments
of a nature far from complimentary or agreeable.
Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his
twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the
passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked
apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious,
and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is
unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature.
The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost an
accident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, and
some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" to
the vexation of various worthy persons. The earliest trace of
talent seems to been in this direction, in the form of lampoons
or "characters," as people called them in the seventeenth century,
sarcastic descriptions of types in which certain individuals could be
recognized. No doubt if these could be recovered, we should find them
rough and artless, but containing germs of the future keenness of
portraiture. They were keen enough, it seems, to rouse great resentment
in Grimstad.
There is evidence to show that the lad had docility enough, at all
events, to look about for some aid in the composition of Norwegian
prose. We should know nothing of it but for a passage in Ibsen's later
polemic with Paul Jansenius Stub of Bergen. In 1848 Stub was an
invalid schoolmaster, who, it appears, eked out his income by giving
instruction, by correspondence, in style. How Ibsen heard of him does
not seem to be known, but when, in 1851, Ibsen entered, with needless
acrimony, into a controversy with his previous teacher about the
theatre, Stub complained of his ingratitude, since he had "taught the
boy to write." Stub's intervention in the matter, doubtless, was limited
to the correction of a few exercises.
Ibsen's own theory was that his intellect and character were awakened
by the stir of revolution throughout Europe. The first political event
which really interested him was the proclamation of the French Republic,
which almost coincided with his twentieth birthday. He was born again,
a child of '48. There were risings in Vienna, in Milan, in Rome. Venice
was proclaimed a republic, the Pope fled to Gaeta, the streets of Berlin
ran with the blood of the populace. The Magyars rose against Jellalic
and his Croat troops; the Czechs demanded their autonomy; in response to
the revolutionary feeling in Germany, Schleswig-Holstein was up in arms.
Each of these events, and others like them, and all occurring in the
rapid months of that momentous year, smote like hammers on the door of
Ibsen's brain, till it quivered with enthusiasm and excitement. The
old brooding languor was at an end, and with surprising clearness and
firmness he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man.
The old clouds vanished, and though the social difficulties which hemmed
in his career were as gross as ever, he himself no longer doubted
what was to be his aim in life. The cry of revolution came to him, of
revolution faint indeed and broken, the voice of a minority appealing
frantically and for a moment against the overwhelming forces of a
respectable majority, but it came to him just at the moment when his
young spirit was prepared to receive it with faith and joy. The effect
on Ibsen's character was sudden and it was final:
Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,
And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,
And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must
And what things maybe, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust
And alter; and his spirit's meat
Was freedom, and his staff was wrought
Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.
We are not left to conjecture on the subject; in a document of extreme
interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his
commentators, the preface to the second (1876) edition of _Catilina_,
he has described what the influences were which roused him out of
the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution of
February, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a
series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to
take up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, when all his duties
were over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret
where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world,
instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his
first drama, the opening lines of which,
"I must, I must; a voice is crying to me
From my soul's depth, and I will follow it,"
might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole life's work.
In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has noted, with that
clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the
"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of
mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of
his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its
ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its
intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded
sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent in
the poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were
burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to
his readers.
But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now presented
itself. He was so busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he says, to
steal his hours for study. He still inhabited the upper room, which he
calls a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his status,
assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his social
conveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding drugs
with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has pointed
out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama of
_Catilina_ takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of
the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to
the story had to be given in the night hours. When he emerged from the
garret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in theology, a Mr. Monrad,
brother of the afterwards famous professor. By a remarkable chance, the
subject given by the University for examination was the Conspiracy of
Catiline, to be studied in the history of Sallust and the oration of
Cicero.
No theme could have been more singularly well fitted to fire the
enthusiasm of Ibsen. At no time of his life a linguist, or much
interested in history, it is probable that the difficulty of
concentrating his attention on a Latin text would have been
insurmountable had the subject been less intimately sympathetic to him.
But he tells us that he had no sooner perceived the character of the man
against whom these diatribes are directed than he devoured them greedily
(_jeg slugte disse skrifter_). The opening words of Sallust, which every
schoolboy has to read--we can imagine with what an extraordinary force
they would strike upon the resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen.
_Lucius Catilina nobili genere natus, magna vi et animi et corporis, sed
ingenio malo pravoque_--how does this at once bring up an image of the
arch-rebel, of Satan himself, as the poets have conceived him, how does
it attract, with its effects of energy, intelligence and pride, the
curiosity of one whose way of life, as Keats would say, is still
undecided, his ambition still thick-sighted!
It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that absorbed Ibsen.
Criticism likes to trace a predecessor behind every genius, a Perugino
for Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the master-mind
that started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers of his age
or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust. There can be
no doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his unflinching
method of building up his edifice of invective, stone by stone; his
close, unidealistic, dry penetration into character; his clinical
attitude, unmoved at the death-bed of a reputation; that all these
qualities were directly operative on the mind and intellectual character
of Ibsen, and went a long way to mould it while moulding was still
possible.
There is no evidence to show that the oration of Cicero moved him nearly
so much as the narratives of Sallust. After all, the object of Cicero
was to crush the conspiracy, but what Ibsen was interested in was
the character of Catiline, and this was placed before him in a more
thrilling way by the austere reserve of the historian. No doubt, to a
young poet, when that poet was Ibsen, there would be something deeply
attractive in the sombre, archaic style, and icy violence of Sallust.
How thankful we ought to be that the historian, with his long sonorous
words--_flagitiosorum ac facinorosorum_--did not make of our perfervid
apothecary a mere tub-thumper of Corinthian prose!
Ibsen now formed the two earliest friendships of his life. He had
reached the age of twenty without, as it would seem, having been able
to make his inner nature audible to those around him. He had been to
the inhabitants of Grimstad a stranger within their gates, not speaking
their language; or, rather, wholly "spectral," speaking no language at
all, but indulging in cat-calls and grimaces. He was now discovered like
Caliban, and tamed, and made vocal, by the strenuous arts of friendship.
One of those who thus interpreted him was a young musician, Due, who
held a post in the custom-house; the other was Ole Schulerud (1827-59),
who deserves a cordial acknowledgment from every admirer of Ibsen. He
also was in the receipt of custom, and a young man of small independent
means. To Schulerud and to Due, Ibsen revealed his poetic plans, and
he seems to have found in them both sympathizers with his republican
enthusiasms and transcendental schemes for the liberation of the
peoples. It was a stirring time, in 1848, and all generous young blood
was flowing fast in the same direction.
Since Ibsen's death, Due has published a very lively paper of
recollections of the old Grimstad days. He says:
His daily schedule admitted few intervals for rest or sleep. Yet I never
heard Ibsen complain of being tired. His health was uniformly good.
He must have had an exceptionally strong constitution, for when his
financial conditions compelled him to practice the most stringent
economy, he tried to do without underclothing, and finally even without
stockings. In these experiments he succeeded; and in winter he went
without an overcoat; yet without being troubled by colds or other bodily
ills.
We have seen that Ibsen was so busy that he had to steal from his duties
the necessary hours for study. But out of these hours, he tells us, he
stole moments for the writing of poetry, of the revolutionary poetry
of which we have spoken, and for a great quantity of lyrics of a
sentimental and fanciful kind. Due was the confidant to whom he recited
the latter, and one at least of these early pieces survives, set to
music by this friend. But to Schulerud a graver secret was intrusted, no
less than that in the night hours of 1848-49 there was being composed
in the garret over the apothecary's shop a three-act tragedy in blank
verse, on the conspiracy of Catiline. With his own hand, when the first
draft was completed, Schulerud made a clean copy of the drama, and in
the autumn of 1849 he went to Christiania with the double purpose of
placing _Catilina_ at the theatre and securing a publisher for it. A
letter (October 15, 1849) from Ibsen, first printed in 1904--the only
document we possess of this earliest period--displays to a painful
degree the torturing anxiety with which the poet awaited news of his
play, and, incidentally, exposes his poverty. With all Schulerud's
energy, he found it impossible to gain attention for _Catilina_ at the
theatre, and in January, 1850, Ibsen received what he called its "death
warrant," but it was presently brought out as a volume, under the
pseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme, at Schulerud's expense. Of _Catilina_
about thirty copies were sold, and it attracted no notice whatever from
the press.
Meanwhile, left alone in Grimstad, since Due was now with Schulerud in
Christiania, Ibsen had been busy with many literary projects. He had
been writing an abundance of lyrics, he had begun a one-act drama called
"The Normans," afterwards turned into _Kaempehoejen_; he was planning a
romance, _The Prisoner at Akershus_ (this was to deal with the story of
Christian Lofthus); and above all he was busy writing a tragedy of
_Olaf Trygvesoen_. [Note: On the authority of the Breve, pp. 59, 59,
where Halvdan Koht prints "Olaf Tr." and "Olaf T." expanding these to
Tr[ygvesoen]. But is it quite certain that what Ibsen wrote in these
letters was not "Olaf Li." and "Olaf L.," and that the reference is not
to Olaf Liljekrans, which was certainly begun at Grimstad? Is there any
other evidence that Ibsen ever started an _Olaf Trygvesoen_?]
One of his poems had already been printed in a Christiania newspaper.
The call was overwhelming; he could endure Grimstad and the gallipots
no longer. In March, 1850, at the age of twenty-one, Ibsen stuck a few
dollars in his pocket and went off to try his fortune in the capital.