EARLY INFLUENCES
In middle life Ibsen, who suppressed for as long a time as he could most
of his other juvenile works, deliberately lifted _Catilina_ from the
oblivion into which it had fallen, and replaced it in the series of his
writings. This is enough to indicate to us that he regarded it as of
relative importance, and imperfect as it is, and unlike his later plays,
it demands some critical examination. I not know whether any one ever
happened to ask Ibsen whether he had been aware that Alexandre Dumas
produced in Paris a five-act drama of _Catiline_ at the very moment
(October, 1848) when Ibsen started the composition of his. It is quite
possible that the young Norwegian saw this fact noted in a newspaper,
and immediately determined to try what he could make of the same
subject. In Dumas' play Catiline is presented merely as a demagogue; he
is the red Flag personified, and the political situation in France is
discussed under a slight veil of Roman history. Catiline is simply a
sort of Robespierre brought up to date. There is no trace of all this in
Ibsen.
Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much more
similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of
_Catiline_ which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsen
had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wager
that, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of Ben
Jonson. Yet there is an odd sort of resemblance, founded on the fact
that each poet keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the Latins.
Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of Catiline
as if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the narrative,
each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of the
arch-conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In both
poems, Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is--
Armed with a glory high as his despair.
Another resemblance between the old English and the modern Norwegian
dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require
lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson's
case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance
the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to the
stage.
This is a very curious example, among many which might be brought
forward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all
his early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. This
tendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in _Brand_ and
_Peer Gynt_, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted
for his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had
quitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic
expression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear
it altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in
itself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements.
The close of Ibsen's _Catalina_ is, as we have said, composed entirely
in rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poet
could not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged to
start running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here is
a fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent for
dead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia
has stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speech
which ends thus:--
See, the pathway breaks, divided! I will wander, dumb, To the left hand.
AURELIA
(appearing, blood-stained, at the door of the tent).
Nay! the right hand! Towards Elysium.
CATILINE
(greatly alarmed).
O yon pallid apparition, how it fills me with remorse. 'Tis herself!
Aurelia! tell me, art thou living? not a corse?
AURELIA.
Yes, I live that I may full thy sea of sorrows, and may lie With my
bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then die.
CATILINE
(bewildered).
What? thou livest?
AURELIA.
Death's pale herald o'er my senses threw a pall,
But my dulled eye tracked thy footsteps, and I saw, I saw it all,
And my passion a wife's forces to my wounded body gave;
Breast to breast, my Catiline, let us sink into our grave.
[Note: In 1875 Ibsen practically rewrote the whole of this part of
_Catilina_, without, however, improving it. Why will great authors
confuse the history of literature by tampering with their early texts?]
He had slipped far out of the sobriety of Sallust when he floundered,
in this way, in the deep waters of romanticism. In the isolation of
Grimstad he had but himself to consult, and the mind of a young poet who
has not yet enjoyed any generous communication with life is invariably
sentimental and romantic. The critics of the North have expended a
great deal of ingenuity in trying to prove that Ibsen exposed his own
temperament and character in the course of _Catilina_. No doubt there
is a great temptation to indulge in this species of analysis, but it is
amusing to note that some of the soliloquies which have been pointed out
as particularly self-revealing are translated almost word for word
out of Sallust. Perhaps the one passage in the play which is really
significant is that in which the hero says:--
If but for one brief moment I could flame And blaze through space, and
be a falling star; If only once, and by one glorious deed, I could
but knit the name of Catiline With glory and with deathless high
renown,--Then should I blithely, in the hour of conquest, Leave all, and
hie me to an alien shore, Press the keen dagger gayly to my heart, And
die; for then I should have lived indeed.
This has its personal interest, since we know, on the evidence of his
sister, that such was the tenor of Ibsen's private talk about himself at
that precise time.
Very imperfect as _Catilina_ is in dramatic art, and very primitive as
is the development of plot in it, it presents one aspect, as a literary
work, which is notable. That it should exist at all is curious, since,
surprising as it seems, it had no precursor. Although, during the
thirty-five years of Norwegian independence, various classes of
literature had been cultivated with extreme diligence, the drama had
hitherto been totally neglected. With the exception of a graceful opera
by Bjerregaard, which enjoyed a success sustained over a quarter of a
century, the only writings in dramatic form produced in Norway between
1815 and 1850 were the absurd lyrical farces of Wergeland, which were
devoid of all importance. Such a thing as a three-act tragedy in blank
verse was unknown in modern Norway, so that the youthful apothecary in
Grimstad, whatever he was doing, was not slavishly copying the fashions
of his own countrymen.
The principal, if not the only influence which acted upon Ibsen at this
moment, was that of the great Danish tragedian, Adam Oehlenschlaeger.
It might be fantastically held that the leading romantic luminary
of Scandinavia withdrew on purpose to make room for his realistic
successor, since Oehlenschlaeger's latest play, _Kiartan and Gudrun_,
appeared just when Ibsen was planning _Catilina_, while the death of the
Danish poet (January 20, 1850) was practically simultaneous with Ibsen's
arrival in Christiania. In later years, Ibsen thought that Holberg and
Oehlenschlaeger were the only dramatists he had read when his own
first play was written; he was sure that he knew nothing of Schiller,
Shakespeare or the French. Of the rich and varied dramatic literature of
Denmark, in the generation between Oehlenschlaeger's and his own, he must
also for the present have known nothing. The influence of Heiberg and of
Hertz, presently to be so potent, had evidently not yet begun. But it
is important to perceive that already Norway, and Norwegian taste and
opinion, were nothing to him in his selection of themes and forms.
It is not to be supposed that the taste for dramatic performances did
not exist in Norway, because no Norwegian plays were written. On the
contrary, in most of the large towns there were, and had long been,
private theatres or rooms which could be fitted up with a stage, at
which wandering troupes of actors gave performances that were eagerly
attended by "the best people." These actors, however, were exclusively
Danes, and there was an accepted tradition that Norwegians could
not act. If they attempted to do so, their native accents proved
disagreeable to their fellow-citizens, who demanded, as an imperative
condition, the peculiar intonation and pronunciation cultivated at
the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, as well as an absence of all native
peculiarities of language. The stage, therefore--and this is very
important in a consideration of the career of Ibsen--had come to be the
symbol of a certain bias in political feeling. Society in Norway was
divided into two classes, the "Danomaniacs" and the "Patriots." Neither
of these had any desire to alter the constitutional balance of power,
but while the latter wished Norway to be intellectually self-productive,
and leaned to a further isolation in language, literature, art and
manners, the former thought that danger of barbarism lay in every
direction save that of keeping close to the tradition of Denmark, from
which all that was witty, graceful and civilized had proceeded.
Accordingly the theatre, at which exclusively Danish plays were acted,
in the Danish style, by Danish actors and actresses, was extremely
popular with the conservative class, who thought, by attendance on these
performances, to preserve the distinction of language and the varnish of
"high life" which came, with so much prestige, from Copenhagen. By the
patriotic party, on the other hand, the stage was looked upon with grave
suspicion as likely to undermine the purity of national feeling.
The earliest attempt at the opening of a National Theatre had been made
at Christiania by the Swede, J. P. Stroemberg, in 1827; this was not
successful, and his theatre was burned down in 1835. In it some effort
had been made to use the Norwegian idiom and to train native actors, but
it had been to no avail. The play-going public liked their plays to be
Danish, and even nationalists of a pronounced species could not deny
that dramas, like the great historical tragedies of Oehlenschlaeger,
many of which dealt enthusiastically with legends that were peculiarly
Norwegian, were as national as it was possible for poems by a foreign
poet to be. All this time, it must be remembered, Christiania was to
Copenhagen as Dublin till lately was to London, or as New York was
half a century ago. It is in the arts that the old colonial instinct of
dependence is most loath to disappear.
The party of the nationalists, however, had been steadily increasing in
activity, and the universal quickening of patriotic pulses in 1848 had
not been without its direct action upon Norway.
Nevertheless, for various reasons of internal policy, there was perhaps
no country in Europe where this period of seismic disturbance led to
less public turmoil than precisely here in the North. The accession of
a new king, Oscar I, in 1844, had been followed by a sense of renewed
national security; the peasants were satisfied that the fresh reign
would be favorable to their rights and liberties; and the monarch showed
every inclination to leave his country of Norway as much as possible to
its own devices. The result of all this was that '48 left no mark on the
internal history of the country, and the fever which burned in youthful
bosoms was mainly, if not entirely, intellectual and transcendental. The
young Catiline from Grimstad, therefore, met with several sympathetic
rebels, but found nobody willing to conspire. But what he did find is
so important in the consideration of his future development that it is
needful briefly to examine it.
Norway had, in 1850, been independent of Denmark for thirty-six years.
During the greater part of that time the fiery excitements of a struggle
for politic existence had fairly exhausted her mental resources, and had
left her powerless to inaugurate a national literature. Meanwhile, there
was no such discontinuity in the literary and scientific relations of
the two countries as that which had broken their constitutional union. A
tremendous effort was made by certain patriots to discover the basis of
an entirely independent intellectual life, something that should start
like the phoenix from the ashes of the old regime, and should offer no
likeness with what continued to flourish south of the Skagarak. But all
the efforts of the University of Christiania were vain to prevent the
cultivated classes from looking to Copenhagen as their centre of light.
Such authors as there were, and they were few indeed, followed humbly in
the footsteps of their Danish brethren.
Patriotic historians of literature are not always to be trusted, and
those who study native handbooks of Norwegian criticism must be on their
guard when these deal with the three poets who "inaugurated in song the
young liberties of Norway." The writings of the three celebrated lyric
patriots, Schwach, Bjerregaard and Hansen, will not bear to have the
blaze of European experience cast upon them; their tapers dwindle to
sparks in the light of day. They gratified the vanity of the first
generation after 1815, but they deserve no record in the chronicles of
poetic art. If Ibsen ever read these rhymes of circumstance, it must
have been to treat them with contempt.
Twenty years after the Union, however, and in Ibsen's early childhood,
an event occurred which was unique in the history of Norwegian
literature, and the consequences of which were far-reaching. As is often
the case in countries where the art of verse is as yet little exercised,
there grew up about 1830 a warm and general, but uncritical, delight in
poetry. This instinct was presently satisfied by the effusion of a vast
quantity of metrical writing, most of it very bad, and was exasperated
by a violent personal feud which for a while interested all educated
persons in Norway to a far greater degree than any other intellectual
or, for the time being, even political question. From 1834 to 1838 the
interests of all cultivated people centred around what was called
the "Twilight Feud" (_Daemringsfejden_), and no record of Ibsen's
intellectual development can be complete without a reference to
this celebrated controversy, the results of which long outlived the
popularity of its skits and pamphlets.
Modern Norwegian literature began with this great fight. The
protagonists were two poets of undoubted talent, whose temperaments
and tendencies were so diametrically opposed that it seemed as
though Providence must have set them down in that raw and inflammable
civilization for the express purpose of setting the standing corn of
thought on fire. Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) was a belated son of the
French Revolution; ideas, fancies, melodies and enthusiasms fermented
in his ill-regulated brain, and he poured forth verses in a violent
and endless stream. It is difficult, from the sources of Scandinavian
opinion, to obtain a sensible impression of Wergeland. The critics of
Norway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglect
and ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as
_himmelstraevende sublim_ ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); the
Danes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither view
commends itself to a foreign reader of the poet.
The fact, internationally stated, seems rather to be this. In Wergeland
we have a typical example of the effects of excess of fancy in a
violently productive but essential uncritical nature. He was ecstatic,
unmeasured, a reckless improvisatore. In his ideas he was preposterously
humanitarian; a prodigious worker, his vigor of mind seemed never
exhausted by his labors; in theory an idealist, in his private life he
was charged with being scandalously sensual. He was so much the victim
of his inspiration that it would come upon him like a descending wind,
and leave him physically prostrate. In Wergeland we see an instance of
the poetical temper in its most unbridled form. A glance through the
enormous range of his collected works is like an excursion into chaos.
We are met almost at the threshold by a colossal epic, _Creation, Man
and the Messiah_ (1830); by songs that turn into dithyrambic odes, by
descriptive pieces which embrace the universe, by all the froth and roar
and turbidity of genius, with none of its purity and calm. The genius is
there; it is idle to deny it; but it is in a state of violent turmoil.
It is when the ruling talent of an age is of the character of
Wergeland's--
Thundering and bursting,
In torrents, in waves,
Carolling and shouting
Over tombs, over graves--
that delicate spirits, as in Matthew Arnold's poem, sigh for the silence
and the hush, and rise at length in open rebellion against Iacchus and
his maenads, who destroy all the quiet of life and who madden innocent
blood with their riot. Johan Sebastian Welhaven (1807-73) was a student
at the University with Wergeland, and he remained silent while the
latter made the welkin ring louder and louder with his lyric shrieks.
Welhaven endured the rationalist and republican rhetoric of Wergeland
as long as he could, although with growing exasperation, until the
rhapsodical author of _Creation_, transgressing all moderation, accused
those who held reasonable views in literature and politics of being
traitors. Then it became necessary to deal with this raw and local
parody of Victor Hugo. When, in the words of _The Cask of Amontillado_,
Wergeland "ventured upon insult," Welhaven "vowed he would be avenged."
Welhaven formed as complete a contrast to his antagonist as could be
imagined. He was of the class of Sully Prudhomme, of Matthew Arnold, of
Lowell, to name three of his younger contemporaries. In his nature all
was based upon equilibrium; his spirit, though full of graceful and
philosophical intuitions, was critical rather than creative. He wrote
little, and with difficulty, and in exquisite form. His life was as
blamelessly correct as his literary art was harmonious. Wergeland
knew nothing of the Danish tradition of his day, which he treated with
violent and bitter contempt. Welhaven, who had moved in the circle of
the friends of Rahbek, instinctively referred every literary problem to
the tribunal of Danish taste. He saw that with the enthusiasm with which
the poetry of Wergeland was received in Norway was connected a suspicion
of mental discipline, a growing worship of the peasant and a hatred and
scorn of Denmark, with all of which he had no sympathy. He thought the
time had come for better things; that the national temper ought to be
mollified with the improved economic situation of the country; that the
students, who were taking a more and more prominent place, ought to be
on the side of the angels. It was not unnatural that Welhaven should
look upon the corybantic music of Wergeland as the source and origin
of an evil of which it was really the symptom; he gathered his powers
together to crush it, and he published a thunderbolt of sonnets.
The English reader, familiar with the powerlessness of even the best
verse to make any impression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile to
think of a great moral and ethical attack conducted with no better
weapon than a paper of sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small,
intensely local, easily agitated society of persons, all keenly
though narrowly educated, and all accustomed to be addressed in verse.
Welhaven's pamphlet was entitled _The Twilight of Norway_ (1834), and
the sonnets of which it consisted were highly polished in form, filled
with direct and pointed references to familiar persons and events and
absolutely unshrinking in attack. No poetry of equal excellence had
been produced in Norway since the Union. It is not surprising that
this invective against the tendencies of the youthful bard over whose
rhapsodies all Norway was growing crazy with praise should arrest
universal attention, although in the _Twilight_ Welhaven adroitly
avoided mentioning Wergeland by name. Fanaticism gathered in an angry
army around the outraged standard of the republican poet, but the lovers
of order and discipline had found a voice, and they clustered about
Welhaven with their support. Language was not minced by the assailants,
and still less by the defenders. The lovers of Wergeland were told that
politics and brandy were their only pleasures, but those of Welhaven
were warned that they were known to be fed with bribes from Copenhagen.
Meanwhile Welhaven himself, in successive publications, calmly analyzed
the writings of his antagonist, and proved them to be "in complete
rebellion against sound thought and the laws of beauty." The feud raged
from 1834 to 1838, and left Norway divided into two rival camps of
taste.
Although the "Twilight Feud" had passed away before Ibsen ceased to be a
boy, the effect of it was too widely spread not to affect him. In point
of fact, we see by the earliest of his lyric poems that while he was
at Grimstad he had fully made up his mind. His early songs and
complimentary pieces are all in the Danish taste, and if they show
any native influence at all, it is that of Welhaven. The extreme
superficiality of Wergeland would naturally be hateful to so arduous a
craftsman as Ibsen, and it is a fact that so far as his writings
reveal his mind to us, the all-popular poet of his youth appears to be
absolutely unknown to him. What this signifies may be realized if we say
that it is as though a great English or French poet of the second half
of the nineteenth century should seem to have never heard of Tennyson
or Victor Hugo. On the other hand, at one crucial point of a late play,
_Little Eyolf_, Ibsen actually pauses to quote Welhaven.
In critical history the absence of an influence is sometimes as
significant as the presence of it. The looseness of Wergeland's style,
its frothy abundance, its digressions and parentheses, its slipshod
violence, would be to Ibsen so many beacons of warning, to be viewed
with horror and alarm. A poem of three stanzas, "To the Poets of
Norway," only recently printed, dates from his early months in
Christiania, and shows that even in 1850 Ibsen was impatient with the
conventional literature of his day. "Less about the glaciers and the
pine-forests," he cries, "less about the dusty legends of the past, and
more about what is going on in the silent hearts of your brethren!" Here
already is sounded the note which was ultimately to distinguish him from
all the previous writers of the North.
No letters have been published which throw light on Ibsen's first two
years in the capital. We know that he did not communicate with his
parents, whose poverty was equalled by his own. He could receive no help
from them, nor offer them any, and he refrained, as they refrained, from
letter writing. This separation from his family, begun in this way, grew
into a habit, so that when his father died in 1877 no word had passed
between him and his son for nearly thirty years. When Ibsen reached
Christiania, in March, 1850, his first act was to seek out his friend
Schulerud, who was already a student. For some time he shared the room
of Schulerud and his thrifty meals; later on the two friends, in company
with Theodor Abildgaard, a young revolutionary journalist, lived in
lodgings kept by a certain Mother Saether.
Schulerud received a monthly allowance which was "not enough for one,
and starvation for two"; but Ibsen's few dollars soon came to an end,
and he seems to have lived on the kindness of Schulerud to their great
mutual privation. Both young men attended the classes of a celebrated
"crammer" of that day, H. A. S. Heltberg, who had opened in 1843 a Latin
school where elder pupils came for a two-years' course to prepare them
for taking their degree. This place, known familiarly as "the Student
Factory," holds quite a prominent place in Norwegian literary history,
Ibsen, Bjoernson, Vinje and Jonas Lie having attended its classes and
passed from it to the University.
Between these young men, the leading force of literature in the coming
age, a generous friendship sprang up, despite the disparity in their
ages. Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-two; he had been a
village schoolmaster and had only now, in 1850, contrived to reach
the University. With Vinje, the founder of the movement for writing
exclusively in Norwegian patois, Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy,
while he gave no intellectual adherence to his theories. Between the
births of Vinje and Bjoernson there stretched a period of fourteen years,
yet Bjoernson was a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That Ibsen
immediately formed Bjoernson's acquaintance seems to be proved from the
fact that they both signed a protest against the deportation of a Dane
called Harring on May 29, 1850. It was a fortunate chance which threw
Ibsen thus suddenly into the midst of a group of those in whom the
hopes of the new generation were centred. But we are left largely to
conjecture in what manner their acquaintanceship acted upon his mind.
His material life during the next year is obscure. Driven by the
extremity of need, it is plain that he adopted every means open to him
by which he could add a few dollars to Schulerud's little store. He
wrote for the poor and fugitive journals of the day, in prose and verse;
but the payment of the Norwegian press in those days was almost nothing.
It is difficult to know how he subsisted, yet he continued to exist.
Although none of his letters of this period seem to have been preserved,
a few landmarks are left us. The little play called _Kaempehoeien_
(The Warrior's Barrow), which he had brought unfinished with him from
Grimstad, was completed and put into shape in May, 1850, accepted at the
Christiania Theatre, and acted three times during the following autumn.
Perhaps the most interesting fact connected with this performance
was that the only female part, that of Blanka, was taken by a young
debutante, Laura Svendsen; this was the actress afterwards to rise to
the height of eminence as the celebrated Mrs. Gundersen, no doubt the
most gifted of all Ibsen's original interpreters.
It was a matter of course that the poet was greatly cheered by the
acceptance of his play, and he immediately set to work on another,
_Olaf Liljekrans_; but this he put aside when _Kaempehoeien_ practically
failed. He wrote a satirical comedy called _Norma_. He endeavored to get
certain of his works, dramatic and lyric, published in Christiania, but
all the schemes fell through. It is certain that 1851 began darkly for
the young man, and that his misfortunes encouraged in him a sour and
rebellious temper. For the first and only time in his life he meddled
with practical politics. Vinje and he--in company with a charming
person, Paul Botten-Hansen (1824-69), who flits very pleasantly
through the literary history of this time--founded a newspaper called
_Andhrimner_, which lasted for nine months.
One of the contributors was Abildgaard, who, as we have seen, lived
in the same house with Ibsen. He was a wild being, who had adopted the
republican theories of the day in their crudest form. He posed as the
head of a little body whose object was to dethrone the king, and to
found a democracy in Norway. On July 7, 1851, the police made a raid
upon these childish conspirators, the leaders being arrested and
punished with a long imprisonment. The poet escaped, as by the skin of
his teeth, and the warning was a lifelong one. He never meddled with
politics any more. This was, indeed, as perhaps he felt, no time for
rebellion; all over Europe the eruption of socialism had spent itself,
and the docility of the populations had become wonderful.
The discomfort and uncertainty of Ibsen's position in Christiania made
him glad to fill a post which the violinist, Ole Bull, offered him
during autumn. The newly constituted National Theatre in Bergen (opened
Jan. 2, 1850) had accepted a prologue written for an occasion by the
young poet, and on November 6, 1851, Ibsen entered into a contract by
which he bound himself go to Bergen "to assist the theatre as dramatic
author." The salary was less than L70 a year, but it was eked out by
travelling grants, and little as it might be, it was substantially more
than the nothing-at-all which Ibsen had been enjoying in Christiania.
It is difficult to imagine what asset could be bought to the treasuries
of a public theatre by a youth of three and twenty so ill-educated, so
empty of experience and so ill-read as Ibsen was in 1851. His crudity,
we may be sure, passed belief. He was the novice who has not learned his
business, the tyro to whom the elements of his occupation are unknown.
We have seen that when he wrote _Catilina_ he had neither sat through
nor read any of the plays of the world, whether ancient or modern. The
pieces which belong to his student years reveal a preoccupation with
Danish dramas of the older school, Oehlenschlaeger and (if we may guess
what _Norma_ was) Holberg, but with nothing else. Yet Ole Bull, one of
the most far-sighted men of his time, must have perceived the germs
of theatrical genius in him, and it is probable that Ibsen owed his
appointment more to what this wise patron felt in his future than what
Ole Bull or any one else could possibly point to as yet accomplished.
Unquestionably, a rude theatrical penetration could already he divined
in his talk about the stage, vague and empirical as that must have been.
At all events, to Bergen he went, as a sort of literary manager, as a
Claretie or Antoine, to compare a small thing with great ones, and the
fact was of inestimable value. It may even be held, without fear of
paradox, that this was the turning-point of Ibsen's life, that this
blind step in the dark, taken in the magnificent freedom of youth, was
what made him what he became. No Bergen in 1851, we may say, and no
_Doll's House_ or _Hedda Gabler_ ultimately to follow. For what it did
was to force this stubborn genius, which might so easily have slipped
into sinister and abnormal paths, and have missed the real humanity of
the stage, to take the tastes of the vulgar into due consideration and
to acquaint himself with the necessary laws of play-composition.
Ibsen may seem to have little relation with the drama of the world, but
in reality he is linked with it at every step. There is something of
Shakespeare in _John Gabriel Borkman_, something Moliere in _Ghosts_,
something of Goethe in _Peer Gynt_. We may go further and say, though
it would have made Ibsen wince, that there is something of Scribe in _An
Enemy of the People_. Is very doubtful whether, without the discipline
which forced him to put on the stage, at Bergen and in Christiania,
plays evidently unsympathetic to his own taste, which obliged him to do
his best for the popular reception of those plays, and which forced
him minutely to analyze their effects, he would ever have been the
world-moving dramatist which, as all sane critics must admit, he at
length became.
He made some mistakes at first; how could he fail to do so? It was the
recognition of these blunders, and perhaps the rough censure of them the
local press, which induced the Bergen theatre to scrape a few dollars
together and send him, in charge of some of the leading actors and
actresses, to Copenhagen and Dresden for instruction. To go from Bergen
to Copenhagen was like travelling from Abdera to Athens, and to find
a species of Sophocles in J. A. Heiberg, who had since 1849 been sole
manager of the Royal Theatre. Here the drama of the world, all the
salutary names, all the fine traditions, burst upon the pilgrims from
the North. Heiberg, the gracious and many-sided, was the centre of light
in those days; no one knew the stage as he knew no one interpreted it
with such splendid intelligence, and he received the crude Norwegian
"dramatist-manager" with the utmost elegance of cordiality. Among the
teachers of Ibsen, Heiberg ranks as the foremost. We may farther and say
that he was the last. When Ibsen had learned the lesson of Heiberg,
only nature and his own genius had anything more to teach him. [See Note
below] In August, 1852, rich with the spoils of time, but otherwise poor
indeed, Ibsen made his way back to his duties in Bergen.
[Note: Perhaps no author, during the whole of his career, more deeply
impressed Ibsen with reverence and affection than Johan Ludvig Heiberg
did. When the great Danish poet died (at Bonderup, August 25, 1860),
Ibsen threw on his tomb the characteristic bunch of bitter herbs called
_Til de genlevende_--"To the Survivors," in which he expressed the
faintest appreciation of those who lavished posthumous honor on Heiberg
in Denmark:
In your land a torch he lifted;
With its flame ye scorched his forehead.
How to swing the sword he taught you,
And,--ye plunged it in his bosom.
While he routed trolls of darkness,--
With your shields you tripped and bruised him.
But his glittering star of conquest
Ye must guard, since he has left you:
Try, at least, to keep it shining,
While the thorn-crowned conqueror slumbers.]