LIFE IN BERGEN (1852-57)
Ibsen's native biographers have not found much to record, and still less
that deserves to recorded, about his life during the next five years. He
remained in Bergen, cramped by want of means in his material condition,
and much harassed and worried by the little pressing requirements of the
theatre. It seems that every responsibility fell upon his shoulders, and
that there was no part of stage-life that it was not his duty to look
after. The dresses of the actresses, the furniture, the scene-painting,
the instruction of raw Norwegian actors and actresses, the selection of
plays, now to please himself, now to please the bourgeois of Bergen, all
this must be done by the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundred
years earlier, we may imagine Moliere, at Carcassonne or Albi, bearing
up in his arms, a weary Titan, all the frivolities and anxieties and
misdeeds of a whole company of comedians.
So far as our very scanty evidence goes, we find the poet isolated from
his fellows, so far as isolation was possible, during his long stay at
Bergen. He was not accused, and if there had been a chance he would have
been accused, of dereliction. No doubt he pushed through the work of
the theatre doggedly, but certainly not in a convivial spirit. The
Norwegians are a hospitable and festal people, and there is no question
that the manager of the theatre would have unusual opportunities of
being jolly with his friends. But it does not appear that Ibsen made
friends; if so, they were few, and they were as quiet as himself. Even
in these early years he did not invite confidences, and no one found
him wearing his heart upon his sleeve. He went through his work without
effusion, and there is no doubt that what leisure he enjoyed he spent in
study, mainly of dramatic literature.
His reading must have been limited by his insensibility to foreign
languages. All through his life he forgot the tongues of other countries
almost faster than he gained them. Probably, at this time, he had begun
to know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluency
which was, it appears, always ungrammatical. But, as is not unfrequent
with a man who is fond of reading but no linguist, Ibsen's French and
English came and went in a trembling uncertainty. As time passed on, he
gave up the effort to read, even a newspaper, in either language.
The mile-stones in this otherwise blank time are the original plays
which, perhaps in accordance with some clause in his agreement, he
produced at his theatre in the first week of January in each year. A
list of them cannot be spared in this place to the most indolent of
readers, since it offers, in a nutshell, a resume of what the busy
imagination of Ibsen was at work upon up to his thirtieth year. His
earliest new-year's gift to the play-goers of Bergen was _St. John's
Night_, 1853, a piece which has not been printed; in 1854 he revived
_The Warrior's Barrow_; in 1855 he made an immense although irregular
advance with _Lady Inger at Oestraat_; in 1856 he produced _The Feast at
Solhoug_; in 1857 a rewritten version of the early _Olaf Liljekrans_.
These are the juvenile works of Ibsen, which are scarcely counted in
the recognized canon of his writings. None of them is completely
representative of his genius, and several are not yet within reach of
the English reader. Yet they have a considerable importance, and must
detain us for a while. They are remarkable as showing the vigor of the
effort by which he attempted to create an independent style for himself,
no less than the great difficulties which he encountered in following
this admirable aim.
_Lady Inger at Oestraat_, written in the winter of 1854 but not published
until 1857, is unique among Ibsen's works as a romantic exercise in
the manner of Scribe. It is the sole example of a theme taken by him
directly from comparatively modern history, and treated purely for its
value as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this point of view it
curiously exemplifies a remark of Hazlitt: "The progress of manners
and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps
destroy both tragedy and comedy.... At last, there will be nothing left,
good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or in real life."
When Ibsen undertook to write about Inger Gyldenloeve, he was but little
acquainted with the particulars of her history. He conceived her, as he
found her in the incomplete chronicles he consulted, as a Matriarch,
a wonderful and heroic elderly woman around whom all the hopes of an
embittered patriotism were legitimately centred. Unfortunately, "the
progress of knowledge," as Hazlitt would say, exposed the falsity of
this conception. A closer inspection of the documents, and further
analysis of the condition of Norway in 1528, destroyed the fair
illusion, and showed Ibsen in the light of an indulgent idealist.
Here is what Jaeger [Note: In _En literaert Livsbillede_] has to give us
of the disconcerting results of research:
In real life Lady Inger was not a woman formed upon so grand a plan. She
was the descendant of an old and noble family which had preserved
its dignity, and she consequently was the wealthiest landowner in the
country. This, and this alone, gives her a right to a place in history.
If we study her life, we find no reason to suppose that patriotic
considerations ever affected her conduct. The motive power of her
actions was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly in
an amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and her status.
We find her, for instance, on one occasion seizing the estates of a
neighbor, and holding them till she was actually forced to resign them.
When she gave her daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it was
to secure direct advantage from alliance with the most high-born
sons-in-law procurable. When she took a convent under her protection,
she contrived to extort a rent which well repaid her. Even for a
good action she exacted a return, and when she offered harbor to the
persecuted Chancellor, she had the adroitness to be well rewarded by a
large sum in rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden.
All this could not fail to be highly exasperating to Ibsen, who had set
out to be a realist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of history
of having been an idealist of the rose-water class. No wonder that he
never touched the sequence of modern events any more.
There is some slight, but of course unconscious, resemblance to
_Macbeth_ in the external character of _Lady Inger_. This play has
something of the roughness of a mediaeval record, and it depicts a
condition of life where barbarism uncouthly mingles with a certain
luxury of condition. There is, however, this radical difference that in
_Lady Inger_ there is nothing preternatural, and it is, indeed, in this
play that Ibsen seems first to appreciate the value of a stiff attention
to realism. The romantic elements of the story, however, completely
dominate his imagination, and when we have read the play carefully what
remains with us most vividly is the picturesqueness and unity of
the scene. The action, vehement and tumultuous as it is, takes place
entirely within the walls of Oestraat castle, a mysterious edifice,
sombre and ancient, built on a crag over the ocean, and dimly lighted by
Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.
The action is exclusively nocturnal, and so large a place in it is taken
by huge and portable candlesticks that it might be called the Tragedy of
the Candelabra. Through the windows, on the landward side, a procession
of mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each fraught
with the solemnity of fate. The play is full of striking pictures,
groups in light and shade, pictorial appeals to terror and pity.
The fault of the drama lies in the uncertain conception of the
characters, and particularly of that of the Matriarch herself. Inger
is described to us as the Mother of the Norwegian People, as the one
strong, inflexible and implacable brain moving in a world of depressed
and irritated men. "Now there is no knight left in our land," says Finn,
but--and this is the point from which the play starts--there is Inger
Gyldenloeve. We have approached the moment of crisis when the fortunes
and the fates of Norway rest upon the firmness of this majestic woman.
Inger is driven forward on the tide of circumstance, and, however she
may ultimately fail, we demand evidence of her inherent greatness. This,
however, we fail to receive, and partly, no doubt, because Ibsen was
still distracted at the division of the ways.
Oehlenschlaeger, if he had attempted this theme, would have made no
attempt after subtlety of character painting and still less after
correctness of historic color. He would have given small shrift to Olaf
Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, the
Mother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had a
great simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen,
already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every
thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon and
the finished work.
Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress us with greatness. "The
deed no less than the attempt confounds" her. She displays, from the
opening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but excludes all evidence
of her energy. The ascendency of Nils Lykke, over herself and over her
singularly and unconvincingly modern daughter, Elima, in what does it
consist? In a presentation of a purely physical attractiveness; Nils
Lykke is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fortunes, with impudent
ease, in the home of his ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in his
only, the majestic Inger is reduced from a queen to a pawn. All manhood,
we are told, is dead in Norway; if this be so, then what a field is
cleared where a heroine like Inger, not young and a victim to her
passions, nor old and delivered to decrepit fears, may show us how a
woman of intellect and force can take the place of man. Instead of this,
one disguised and anonymous adventurer after another comes forth out of
the night, and confuses her with pretensions and traps her with deceits
against which her intellect protests but her will is powerless to
contend.
Another feature in the conduct of _Lady Inger_ portrays the ambitious
but the inexperienced dramatist. No doubt a pious commentator can
successfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but the spectator
demands that a play should be clearly and easily intelligible. The
audience, however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this awful third
night after Martinmas, and resents the obscurity of all this intrigue by
candlelight. Why do the various persons meet at Oestraat? Who sends
them? Whence do they come and whither do they go? To these questions,
no doubt, an answer can be found, and it is partly given, and very
awkwardly, by the incessant introduction of narrative. The confused and
melodramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils Lykke and Skaktavl
is of central importance, but what is it about? The business with
Lucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Webster or
of Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings are slurred over by the
enthusiastic critics of Scandinavia, yet they call for indulgence. The
fact is that _Lady Inger_ is a brilliant piece of romantic extravagance,
which is extremely interesting in illuminating the evolution of Ibsen's
genius, and particularly as showing him in the act of emancipating
himself from Danish traditions, but which has little positive value as a
drama.
The direct result of the failure of _Lady Inger_--for it did not please
the play-goers of Bergen and but partly satisfied its author--was,
however, to send him back, for the moment, more violently than ever to
the Danish tradition. Any record of this interesting phase in Ibsen's
career is, however, complicated by the fact that late in his life (in
1883) he did what was very unusual with him: he wrote a detailed account
of the circumstances of his poetical work in 1855 and 1856. He denied,
in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poet
whom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced the
movement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainder
of his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism,
and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted for
gospel. However, literary history must be built on the evidence
before it, and the actual text of _The Feast at Solhoug_, and of _Olaf
Liljekrans_ must be taken in spite of anything their author chose to say
nearly thirty years afterwards. Great poets, without the least wish to
mystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover their tracks." Tennyson, in
advanced years, denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley or
Keats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his style of the lyrical
dramas of Hertz. But we must appeal from the arrogance of old age to the
actual works of youth.
Henrik Hertz (1798-1870) was the most exquisite, the most delicate,
of the Danish writers of his age. He was deeply impressed with the
importance of form in drama, and at the height of his powers he began to
compose rhymed plays which were like old ballads put into dialogue.
His comedy of _Cupid's Strokes of Genius_ (1830) began a series of
tragi-comedies which gradually deepened in passion and melody, till they
culminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage,
_Svend Dyring's House_ (1837) and _King Rene's Daughter_ (1845). The
genius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in all
Europe there were not two authors less alike. Hertz would have pleased
Kenelm Digby, and if that romantic being had read Danish, the poet of
chivalry must have had a niche in _The Broad Stone of Honour_. Hertz's
style is delicate to the verge of sweetness; his choice of words is
fantastically exquisite, yet so apposite as to give an impression of the
inevitable. He cares very little for psychological exactitude or truth
of observation; but he is the very type of what we mean by a verbal
artist.
Ibsen made acquaintance with the works, and possibly with the person, of
Hertz, when he was in Copenhagen in 1852. There can be no doubt whatever
that, while he was anxiously questioning his own future, and conscious
of crude faults in _Lady Inger_, he set himself, as a task, to write in
the manner of Hertz. It is difficult to doubt that it was a deliberate
exercise, and we see the results in _The Feast at Solhoug_ and in _Olaf
Liljekrans_. These two plays are in ballad-rhyme and prose, like
Hertz's romantic dramas; there is the same determination to achieve the
chivalric ideal; but the work is that of a disciple, not of a master.
Where Hertz, with his singing-robes fluttering about him, dances without
an ungraceful gesture through the elaborate and yet simple masque that
he has set before him to perform, Ibsen has high and sudden flights of
metrical writing, but breaks down surprisingly at awkward intervals, and
displays a hopeless inconsistency between his own nature and the medium
in which he is forcing himself to write. As a proof that the similarity
between _The Feast at Solhoug_ and _Svend Dyring's House_ is accidental,
it has been pointed out that Ibsen produced his own play on the Bergen
stage in January, 1856, and revived Hertz's a month later. It might,
surely, be more sensibly urged that this fact shows how much he was
captivated by the charm of the Danish dramatist.
The sensible thing, in spite of Ibsen's late disclaimer, is to suppose
that, in the consciousness of his crudity and inexperience as a writer,
he voluntarily sat at the feet of the one great poet whom he felt had
most to teach him. On the boards at Bergen, _The Feast at Solhoug_ was
a success, while _Olaf Liljekrans_ was a failure; but neither incident
could have meant very much to Ibsen, who, if there ever was a poet who
lived in the future, was waiting and watching for the development of his
own genius. Slowly, without precocity, without even that joy in strength
of maturity which comes to most great writers before the age of thirty,
he toiled on in a sort of vacuum. His youth was one of unusual darkness,
because he had not merely poverty, isolation, citizenship of a remote
and imperfectly civilized country to contend against, but because his
critical sense was acute enough to teach him that he himself was still
unripe, still unworthy of the fame that he thirsted for. He had not
even the consolation which a proud confidence in themselves gives to the
unappreciated young, for in his heart of hearts he knew that he had as
yet done nothing which deserved the highest praise. But his imagination
was expanding with a steady sureness, and the long years of his
apprenticeship were drawing to a close.
Ibsen was now, like other young Norwegian poets, and particularly
Bjoernson, coming into the range of that wind of nationalistic
inspiration which had begun to blow down from the mountains and to
fill every valley with music. The Norwegians were discovering that they
possessed a wonderful hidden treasure in their own ancient poetry and
legend. It was a gentle, clerically minded poet--himself the son of a
peasant--Joergen Moe (1813-82), long afterwards Bishop of Christianssand,
who, as far back as 1834, began to collect from peasants the folk-tales
of Norway. The childlike innocence and playful humor of these stories
were charming to the mind of Moe, who was fortunately joined by a
stronger though less delicate spirit in the person of Peter Christian
Asbjoernsen. Their earliest collection of folk-lore in collaboration
appeared in 1841, but it was the full edition of 1856 which produced a
national sensation, and doubtless awakened Ibsen in Bergen. Meanwhile,
in 1853, M. B. Landstad had published the earliest of his collections
of the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M. Lindeman in the same
years (1853-59) was publishing, in installments, the peasant melodies of
Norway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Icelandic, was studying the ancient
sagas in the faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and all
combined to determine him to make an experiment in a purely national and
archaistic direction.
Ibsen, whose practice is always better than his theory, has given rather
a confused account of the circumstances that led to the composition
of his next play, _The Vikings at Helgeland_. But it is clear that in
looking through Petersen for a subject which would display, in broad and
primitive forms, the clash of character in an ancient Norwegian family,
he fell upon "Volsungasaga," and somewhat rashly responded to its
vigorous appeal. He thought that in this particular episode, "the
titanic conditions and occurrences of the 'Nibelungenlied'" and other
pro-mediaeval legends had "been reduced to human dimensions." He
believed that to dramatize such a story would lift what he called "our
national epic material" to a higher plane. There is one phrase in his
essay which is very interesting, in the light it throws upon the object
which the author had before him in writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_.
He says clearly--and this was intended as a revolt against the tradition
of Oehlenschlaeger--"it was not my aim to present our mythic world, but
simply our life in primitive times." Brandes says of this departure that
it is "indeed a new conquest, but, like so many conquests, associated
with very extensive plundering."
In turning to an examination of _The Vikings_, the first point which
demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the
arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing
of the lyrical triviality of the verse in _The Feast at Solhoug_ about
the trenchant prose of _The Vikings_, and the crepuscular dimness
of _Lady Inger_ is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness.
Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor
of the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do and
mean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent
presentation without which all other stage gifts are shorn of their
value. When we have, however, praised the limpidity of _The Vikings at
Helgeland_, we have, in honesty, to make several reservations in our
criticism of the author's choice of a subject. It is valuable to compare
Ibsen's treatment of Icelandic family-saga with that of William Morris;
let us say, in _The Lovers of Gudrun_. That enchanting little epic deals
with an episode from one of the great Iceland narratives, and follows
it much more closely than Ibsen's does. But we are conscious of a less
painful effort and of a more human result. Morris does successfully
what Ibsen unsuccessfully aimed at doing: he translates the heroic and
half-fabulous action into terms that are human and credible.
It was, moreover, an error of judgment on the part of the Norwegian
playwright to make his tragedy a mosaic of effective bits borrowed
hither and thither from the Sagas. Scandinavian bibliography has toiled
to show his indebtedness to this tale and to that, and he has been
accused of concealing his plagiarisms. But to say this is to miss the
mark. A poet is at liberty to steal what he will, if only he builds his
thefts up into a living structure of his own. For this purpose, however,
it is practically found that, owing perhaps to the elastic consistency
of individual human nature, it is safest to stick to one story,
embroidering and developing it along its own essential lines.
There is great vigor, however, in many of the scenes in _The Vikings_.
The appearance of Hioerdis on the stage, in the opening act, marks,
perhaps, the first occasion on which Ibsen had put forth his full
strength as a playwright. This entrance of Hioerdis ought to be extremely
effective; in fact, we understand, it rarely is. The cause of this
disappointment can easily be discovered. It is the misfortune of The
Vikings that it is hardly to be acted by mortal men. Hioerdis herself is
superhuman; she has eaten the heart of a wolf, she claims direct descent
from a race of fighting giants. There is a grandeur about the conception
of her form and character, but it is a grandeur which might well daunt
a human actress. One can faintly imagine the part being played by Mrs.
Siddons, with such an extremity of fierceness and terror that ladies and
gentlemen would be carried out of the theatre in hysterics, as in the
days of Byron. Where Hioerdis insults her guests, and contrives
the horrid murder of the boy Thorolf before their eyes, we have a
stage-dilemma presented to us-either the actress must treat the scene
inadequately, or else intolerably. _Ne pueros coram populo Medea
trucidet_, and we shrink from Hioerdis with a physical disgust. Her great
hands and shrieking mouth are like Bellona's, and they smell of blood.
What is true of Hioerdis is true in less degree of all the characters
in _The Vikings_. They are "great beautiful half-witted men," as Mr.
Chesterton would say:
Our sea was dark with dreadful ships
Full of strange spoil and fire,
And hairy men, as strange as sin,
With horrid heads, came wading in
Through the long low sea-mire.
This is the other side of the picture; this is how Oernulf and his seven
terrible sons must have appeared to Kaare the peasant, and this is how,
to tell the truth, they would in real life appear to us. The persons in
_The Vikings at Helgeland_ are so primitive that they scarcely appeal to
our sense of reality. In spite of all the romantic color that the poet
has lavished upon them, and the majestic sentiments which he has put
into their mouths, we feel that the inhabitants of Helgeland must have
regarded them as those of Surbiton regarded the beings who were shot
down from Mars in Mr. Wells' blood-curdling story.
_The Vikings at Helgeland_ is a work of extraordinary violence and
agitation. The personages bark at one another like seals and roar like
sea-lions; they "cry for blood, like beasts at night." Oernulf, the aged
father of a grim and speechless clan, is sorely wounded at the beginning
of the play, but it makes no difference to him; no one binds up his arm,
but he talks, fights, travels as before. We may see here foreshadowed
various features of Ibsen's more mannered work. Here is his favorite
conventional tame man, since, among the shouting heroes, Gunnar
whimpers like a Tesman. Here is Ibsen's favorite trick of unrequited
self-sacrifice; it is Sigurd, in Gunnar's armor, who kills the mystical
white bear, but it is Gunnar who reaps the advantage. It is only fair
to say that there is more than this to applaud in _The Vikings at
Helgeland_; it moves on a consistent and high level of austere
romantic beauty. Mr. William Archer, who admires the play more than any
Scandinavian critic has done, justly draws attention to the nobility of
Oernulf's entrance in the third act. Yet, on the whole, I confess myself
unable to be surprised at the severity with which Heiberg judged _The
Vikings_ at its first appearance, a severity which must have wounded
Ibsen to the quick.
The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in Ibsen's condition. The period
for which he had undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had now come
to a close, and he was not anxious to prolong it. He had had enough
of Bergen, to which only one chain now bound him. Those who read the
incidents of a poet's life into the pages of his works may gratify their
tendency by seeing in the discussions between Dagny and Hioerdis some
echo of the thoughts which were occupying Ibsen's mind in relation
to the married state. Since his death, the story has been told of his
love-affair with a very young girl, Rikke Holst, who had attracted his
notice by throwing a bunch of wild flowers in his face, and whom he
followed and desired to marry. Her father had rejected the proposal with
indignation. Ibsen had suffered considerably, but this was, after all,
an early and a very fugitive sentiment, which made no deep impression on
his heart, although it seems to have always lingered in his memory.
There had followed a sentiment much deeper and much more emphatic. A
charming, though fragmentary, set of verses, addressed in January, 1856,
to Miss Susannah Thoresen, show that already for a long while he had
come to regard this girl of twenty as "the young dreaming enigma," the
possible solution of which interested him more than that of any other
living problem. It was more than the conversation of a versifying lover
which made Ibsen speak of Miss Thoresen's "blossoming child-soul" as the
bourne of his ambitions. In his dark way, he was already violently in
love with her.
The household of her father, Hans Conrad Thoresen, was the most
cultivated in Bergen. He himself, the rector of Holy Cross, was a
bookish, meditative man of no particular initiative, but he had married,
as his third wife, Anna Maria Kragh, a Dane by birth, and for a long
time, with the possible exception of Camilla Collett, Wergeland's
sister, the most active woman of letters in Norway. Mrs. Thoresen was
the step-mother of Susannah, the only child of her husband's second
marriage. Between Magdalene Thoresen and Ibsen a strong friendship had
sprung up, which lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's
best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked
hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French,
and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her
own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which
her name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long as
Ibsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on the
stage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine years
his senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must have
been a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet. And
now the wise Magdalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating to
him the best treasure of the family circle, the gay and yet mysterious
Susannah.
While he was writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_, and courting Susannah
Thoresen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settle
in Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned,
thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence of
six years. Now began another period of six years more, these the most
painful in Ibsen's life, when, as Halvorsen has said, he had to fight
not merely for the existence of himself and his family, but for the very
existence of Norwegian poetry and the Norwegian stage. This struggle was
an excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled with
debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with further
responsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondary
house, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink of
bankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in the
country that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to court
starvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The
only published volume of Ibsen's which had (up to 1863) sold at all was
_The Warriors_, by which he had made in all 227 specie dollars (or about
L25).
The Christiania he had come to, however, was not that which he had left.
In many directions it had developed rapidly. From an intellectual point
of view, the labors of the nationalists had made themselves felt;
the folk-lore of Landstad, Moe and Asbjoernsen had impressed young
imaginations. In some of its forms the development was unpleasing and
discouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies of
Andreas Munch (_Salomon de Caus_, 1855; _Lord William Russell_, 1857)
was, for instance, an irritating step in the wrong direction. The
new-born school of prose fiction, with Bjoernson as its head (_Synnoeve
Solbakken_, 1857; _Arne_, 1858), with Camilla Collett's _Prefect's
Daughters_, 1855, as its herald; with Oestgaard's sketches of peasant
life and humors in the mountains (1852)--all this was a direct menace
to the popularity of the national stage, offering an easy and alluring
alternative for home-loving citizens. Was it certain that the classic
Danish, which alone Ibsen cared to write, would continue to be the
language of the cultivated classes in Norway? Here was Ivar Aasen (in
1853) showing that the irritating landsmaal could be used for prose and
verse.
Wherever he turned Ibsen saw increased vitality, but in shapes that were
either useless or antagonistic to himself, and all that was harsh and
saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of his
life, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortune
and men's eyes," unappreciated and ready to doubt the reality of his own
genius; and murmuring to himself:--
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
With what I most enjoy contented least.
How little his greatness was perceived in the Christiania literary
coteries may be gathered from the little fact that the species of
official anthology of _Modern Norwegian Poets_, published in 1859,
though it netted the shallows of national song very closely, contained
not a line by the author of the lovely lyrics in _The Feast at Solhoug_.
It was at this low and miserable moment that Ibsen's talent suddenly
took wings; he conceived, in the summer of 1858, what finally became,
five years later, his first acknowledged masterpiece, and perhaps
the most finished of all his writings, the sculptural tragedy of _The
Pretenders_.
_The Pretenders_ (_Kongsemnerne_, properly stuff from which Kings can be
made) is the earliest of the plays of Ibsen in which the psychological
interest is predominant, and in which there is no attempt to disguise
the fact. Nothing that has since been written about this drama, the
very perfection of which is baffling to criticism, has improved upon the
impression which Georg Brandes received from it when he first read it
forty years ago. The passage is classic, and deserves to be cited, if
only as perhaps the very earliest instance in which the genius of
Ibsen was rewarded by the analysis of a great critic. Brandes wrote (in
1867):--
What is it that The Pretenders treats of? Looked at simply, it is an old
story. We all know the tale of Aladdin and Nureddin, the simple
legend in the Arabian Nights, and our great poet's [Oehlenschlaeger's]
incomparable poem. In _The Pretenders_ two figures again stand opposed
to one another as the superior and the inferior being, an Aladdin and
a Nureddin nature. It is towards this contrast that Ibsen has hitherto
unconsciously directed his endeavors, just as Nature feels her way in
her blind preliminary attempts to form her types. Hakon and Skule are
pretenders to the same throne, scions of royalty out of whom a king may
be made. But the first is the incarnation of fortune, victory, right and
confidence; the second--the principal figure in the play, masterly in
its truth and originality--is the brooder, a prey to inward struggle and
endless distrust, brave and ambitious, with perhaps every qualification
and claim to be king, but lacking the inexpressible, impalpable somewhat
that would give a value to all the rest--the wonderful Lamp. "I am a
king's arm," he says, "mayhap a king's brain as well; but Hakon is the
whole king." "You have wisdom and courage, and all noble gifts of the
mind," says Hakon to him; "you are born to stand nearest a king, but not
to be a king yourself."
To a poet the achievements of his greatest contemporaries in their
common art have all the importance of high deeds in statesmanship and
war. It is, therefore, by no means extravagant to see in the noble
emulation of the two dukes in _The Pretenders_ some reflection of
Ibsen's attitude to the youthful and brilliant Bjoernson. The
luminous self-reliance, the ardor and confidence and good fortune of
Bjoernson-Hakon could not but offer a violent contrast with the gloom and
hesitation, the sick revulsions of hope and final lack of conviction,
of Ibsen-Skule. It was Bjoernson's "belt of strength," as it was Hakon's,
that he had utter belief in himself, and with this his rival could not
yet girdle himself. "The luckiest man is the greatest man," says Bishop
Nicholas in the play, and Bjoernson seemed in these melancholy years as
lucky as Ibsen was unlucky. But the Bishop's views were not wide enough,
and the end was not yet.