1868-75
Ibsen's four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm.
The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other
illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from
Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought
with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had
roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia
dreaming of Italian liberty. _Casa Guidi Windows_ may be taken as the
extreme type of the way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He sought
there, and found, under the transparent azure of the Alban sky, in the
harmonious murmurs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the mountains,
above all in the gray streets of Rome, that rest of the brain, that
ripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after his
rough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his attitude of passive
appreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like any other of
the illustrious exiles--Landor, who died in Florence a few days after
Ibsen settled in Rome. There was a side of character, too, on which the
young Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius.
When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Garibaldi, at Genoa, announced
his intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet's
heart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill," but left Ibsen simply
disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no
longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which
the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral
hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal
frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the French
who entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed
sojourn--for he soon determined that if there was going to be civil
war in Italy that country was no home for him--we hear but little. This
autumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career of
Georg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whom
he was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we notice
the beginnings of a difference with Bjoernson, lamentable and hardly
explicable, starting, it would vaguely seem, out of a sense that
Bjoernson did not appreciate the poetry of _Peer Gynt_ at its due value.
Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Heiberg, had been looked
upon as the _doyen_ of Danish critics--had pronounced against the poetry
of _Peer Gynt_, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods, in a bearish
letter, had thrown the blame of this judgment upon Bjoernson.
All through these last months in Rome we find Ibsen in the worst of
humors. If it be admissible to compare him with an animal, he seems the
badger among the writers of his time, nocturnal, inoffensive, solitary,
but at the rumor of disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and bite
with terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen was no joke, and in moments
of exasperation he bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Among
other snaps of the pen, he told Bjoernson that if he was not taken
seriously as a poet, he should try his "fate as a photographer."
Bjoernson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him to
put his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsen
himself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and all
the benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidly
forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorations
from kings and ministers; Bjoernson having determined to reject all such
gewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of accepting (and wearing) every
cross and star that was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, the
temptation was wholly problematical in both cases, yet each poet acted
on his determination to the end. But Bjoernson's hint about the comedy
seems to have been, for some years, the last flicker of friendship
between the two. On this Ibsen presently acted in a manner very
offensive to Bjoernson.
In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be very much indeed incensed
with things in general. "What Norway wants is a national disaster," he
amiably snarled. It was high time that the badger should seek shelter in
a new burrow, and in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There was a
farewell banquet, at which Julius Lange, who was present, remarks that
Ibsen showed a spice of the devil, but "was very witty and amiable." He
went to Florence for June, then quitted Italy altogether, settling for
three months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath" in the
Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he started
his five-act comedy, _The League of Youth_. All September he spent in
Munich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden,
which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at once
he sank down again into his brooding mood of isolation and quietism,
roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he hail haunted those of Rome,
by night or at unfrequented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors,
writing few letters, slowly finishing his "photographic" comedy, which
he did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although he was still
very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write for
journals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at long
intervals, with finished works of importance.
It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely
instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much
interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all
Ibsen's mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of
it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the local
conditions" or "situation." The play is all concerned with _de lokale
forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about
the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being,
as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in
Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer
deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Bjoernson's _The Newly
Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more
amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly
enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of
Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance
to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps,
like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own
language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching
but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not
realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de
lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry,
Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the
manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always
something of a snake in the grass to his poetic victims.
Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant,
does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I
read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the
stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn
society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in
the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the
sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with
the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult
for an outsider--so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly
from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of
Copenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of _The
League of Youth_ are old history now. There was the "liberal" element in
Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and more
hampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence of
Soeren Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views,
who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any
pensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen.
Now Bjoernson, in the development of his career as a political publicist,
had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideas
and this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense before
Jaabaek, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of
Dresden, genuinely believed that Bjoernson, with his ardor and his energy
and his eloquence, war, becoming a national danger. We have seen that
Bjoernson had piqued Ibsen's vanity about _Peer Gynt_, and nothing
exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on
a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bjoernson was gregarious,
that of Ibsen solitary; Bjoernson must always be leading the majority,
Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. They
were doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by
creating the figure of Stensgaard, in _The League of Youth_, a frothy
and mischievous demagogue whose rhetoric irresistibly reminded every
one of Bjoernson's rolling oratory. What Bjoernson, not without dignity,
objected to was not so much the personal attack, as that the whole play
attempted "to paint our young party of liberty as a troop of pushing,
phrase-mongering adventurers, whose patriotism lay solely in their
words." Ibsen acknowledged that that was exactly his opinion of them,
and what could follow for such a disjointed friendship but anger and
silence?
The year 1869, which we now enter, is remarkable in the career of Ibsen
as being that in which he travelled most, and appeared on the surface of
society in the greatest number of capacities. He was enabled to do this
by a considerable increase in his pension. First of all, he was induced
to pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being seized with a sudden
strong desire to study conditions in Sweden, a country which he had
hitherto professed to dislike. He had a delightful stay of two months,
received from King Carl the order of the Wasa, was feted at banquets,
renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with
the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bjoernson were how beginning to be
recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance
as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined.
It was doubtless Bjoernson's emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this
moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such
clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely,
if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest at
the opening of the Suez Canal. This sudden incursion of an Oriental
potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that
illustrious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony.
The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be
naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian guest being Professor J.
D. C. Lieblein, the Egyptologist.
The poet started for Egypt, by Dresden and Paris, on September 28.
_The League of Youth_ was published on the 29th, and first performed on
October 18; Ibsen, therefore, just missed the scandal and uproar caused
by the play in Norway. In company with eighty-five other people, all
illustrious guests of the Khedive, and under the care of Mariette Bey,
Ibsen made a twenty-four days' expedition up the Nile into Nubia, and
then back to Cairo and Port Said. There, on November 17, in the company
of an empress and several princes of the blood, he saw the Canal
formally opened and graced a grand processional fleet that sailed out
from Port Said towards Ismaila. But on the quay at Port Said Ibsen's
Norwegian mail was handed to him, and letters and newspapers alike were
full of the violent scenes in the course of which _The League of Youth_
had been hissed down at Christiania. Then and there he sent his defiance
back to Norway in _At Port Said_, one of the most pointed and effective
of all his polemical lyrics. A version in literal prose must suffice,
though it does cruel injustice to the venomous melody of the original:
The dawn of the Eastern Land
Over the haven glittered;
Flags from all corners of the globe
Quivered from the masts.
Voices in music
Bore onward the cantata;
A thousand cannon
Christened the Canal.
The steamers passed on
By the obelisk.
In the language of my home
Came to me the chatter of news.
The mirror-poem which I had polished
For masculine minxes
Had been smeared at home
By splutterings from penny whistles.
The poison-fly stung;
It made my memories loathsome.
Stars, be thanked!--
My home is what is ancient!
We hailed the frigate
From the roof of the river-boat;
I waved my hat
And saluted the flag.
To the feast, to the feast,
In spite of the fangs of venomous reptiles!
A selected guest
Across the Lakes of Bitterness!
At the close of day
Dreaming, I shall slumber
Where Pharaoh was drowned--
And when Moses passed over.
In this mood of defiance, with rage unabated, Ibsen returned home by
Alexandria and Paris, and was in Dresden again in December.
The year of 1870 drove him out of Dresden, as the French occupation had
driven him out of Rome. It was essential for him to be at rest in the
midst of a quiet and alien population. He was drawn towards Denmark,
partly for the sake of talk with Brandes, who had now become a factor
in his life, partly to arrange about the performance of one of his early
works, and in particular of _The Pretenders_. No definite plan, however,
had been formed, when, in the middle of June, war was declared between
Germany and France; but a fortnight later Ibsen quitted Saxony,
and settled for three months in Copenhagen, where his reception was
charmingly sympathetic. By the beginning of October, after the fall of
Strasburg and the hemming in of Metz, however, it was plain on which
side the fortunes of the war would lie, and Ibsen returned "as from
a rejuvenating bath" of Danish society to a Dresden full of French
prisoners, a Dresden, too, suffering terribly from the paralysis of
trade, and showing a plentiful lack of enthusiasm for Prussia.
Ibsen turned his back on all such vexatious themes, and set himself to
the collecting and polishing of a series of lyrical poems, the _Digte_
of 1871, the earliest, and, indeed, the only such collection that he
published. We may recollect that, at the very same moment, with far less
cause to isolate himself from the horrors of war, Theophile Gautier was
giving the last touches to _Emaux et Camees_. In December, 1870, Ibsen
addressed to Fru Limnell, a lady in Stockholm, his "Balloon-Letter," a
Hudibrastic rhymed epistle in nearly 400 lines, containing, with a good
deal that is trivial, some striking symbolical reminiscences of his trip
through Egypt, and some powerful ironic references to the caravan of
German invaders, with its Hathor and its Horus, which was then rushing
to the assault of Paris under the doleful colors of the Prussian flag.
Ibsen's sarcasms are all at the ugliness and prosaic utilitarianism of
the Germans; "Moltke," he says, "has killed the poetry of battles."
Ibsen was now greatly developing and expanding his views, and forming
a world-policy of his own. The success of German discipline deeply
impressed him, and he thought that the day had probably dawned which
would be fatal to all revolt and "liberal rebellion" for the future.
More than ever he dreaded the revolutionary doctrines of men like
Jaabaek and Bjoernson, which would lead, he thought, to bloodshed and
national disaster. The very same events were impressing Goldwin Smith at
the very same moment with his famous prophecy that the abolition of all
dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquil
inauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world.
So history moves doggedly on, _propheten rechts, propheten links_, a
perfectly impassive _welt-kind_ in the middle of them. In Copenhagen
Ibsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long and
dangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with this
still unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. To
Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely than to any one else about the great
events which were shaking the face of Europe and occupying so much of
both their thoughts:--
The old, illusory France has collapsed [he wrote to Brandes on December
20, 1870, two days after the engagement at Nuits]; and as soon as the
new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new
age. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high
time they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs
from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all
nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new
meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no
longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented Guillotine.
This is what the politicians will not understand, and therefore, I hate
them. They want their own special revolutions--revolutions in externals,
in politics and so forth. But all this is mere trifling. What is
all-important is the revolution of the Spirit of Man.
This revolution, as exemplified by the Commune in Paris, did not satisfy
the anticipations which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took advantage of
this to tell him that he had not yet studied politics minutely enough
from the scientific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did not
possess as knowledge came to him, to a certain degree, as intuition or
instinct. "Let this be as it may, the poet's essential task is to see,
not to reflect. For me in particular there would be danger in too much
reflection." Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame of
mind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of which
his imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; at
another time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, and
to represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presents
them to him. In neither attitude, however, is there discernible any
trace of the moral physician, and this is the central distinction
between Tolstoi and Ibsen, whose methods, at first sight, sometimes
appear so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition, but always
with the purpose, if he can, of curing it; Ibsen gives it even closer
clinical attention, but he leaves to others the care of removing a
disease which his business is solely to diagnose.
The _Poems_, after infinite revision, were published at length, in a
very large edition, on May 3, 1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad to
get this book off his hands was that it enabled him to concentrate his
thoughts on the great drama he had been projecting, at intervals, for
seven years past, the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story of
Julian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) and
found the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss,
Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the
autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by
the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to
reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen's early and insufficiently protected
writings. This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own country, where
the very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subject
he used language of tiresome over-emphasis. "From Sweden, from Denmark,
from Germany, I hear nothing but what gives me pleasure; it is from
Norway that everything bad comes upon me." It was indicated to would-be
Norwegian visitors that they were not welcome at Dresden. Norwegian
friends, he said, were "a costly luxury" which he was obliged to deny
himself.
The First Part of _Julian_ was finished on Christmas Day, but it took
over a year more before the entire work, as we now possess it, was
completed. "A Herculean labor," the author called it, when he finally
laid down a weary pen in February, 1873. The year 1872 had been very
quietly spent in unremitting literary labor, tempered by genial visits
from some illustrious Danes of the older generation, as particularly
Hans Christian Andersen and Meyer Aron Goldschmidt, and by more formal
intercourse with a few Germans such as Konrad Maurer and Paul Heyse; all
this time, let us remember, no Norwegians--"by request." The summer was
spent in long rambles over the mountains of Austria, ending up with a
month of deep repose in Berchtesgaden. The next year was like unto this,
except that its roaming, restless summer closed with several months in
Vienna; and on October 17, 1873, _nonum in annum_, after the Horatian
counsel, the prodigious masterpiece, _Emperor and Galilean_, was
published in Copenhagen at last.
Of all the writings of Ibsen, his huge double drama on the rise and
fall of Julian is the most extensive and the most ambitious. It is not
difficult to understand what it was about the most subtle and the most
speculative of the figures which animate the decline of antiquity
that fascinated the imagination of Ibsen. Successive historians have
celebrated the flexibility of intelligence and firmness of purpose which
were combined in the brain of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty
and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship.
There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple
convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him
to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he
offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern
world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of
character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet.
His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case,
in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and
melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity.
But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the
difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming
a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to
the theme, and when it was too late to recede, he found himself baffled
by the paradoxes which he encountered, and by the contradictions of a
figure seen darkly through a mist of historical detraction.
He met these difficulties as well as he could, and as a prudent dramatic
poet should, by close and observant study of the document. He endeavored
to reconcile the evident superiority of Julian with the absurd
eccentricities of his private manners and with the futility of his
public acts. He noted all the Apostate's foibles by the side of his
virtues and his magnanimities. He traced without hesitation the course
of that strange insurrection which hurled a coarse fanatic from the
throne, only to place in his room a literary pedant with inked fingers
and populous beard. He accepted everything, from the parasites to the
purple slippers. The dangers of so humble an attendance upon history
were escaped with success in the first instalment of his "world drama."
In the strong and mounting scenes of _Caesar's Apostacy_, the
rapidity with which the incidents succeed one another, their inherent
significance, the innocent splendor of Julian's mind in its first
emancipation from the chains of false faith, combine to produce an
effect of high dramatic beauty. Georg Brandes, whose instinct in such
matters was almost infallible, when he read the First Part shortly
after its composition, entreated Ibsen to give this, as it stood, to the
public, and to let _The Emperor Julian's End_ follow independently.
Had Ibsen consented to do this, _Caesar's Fall_ would certainly take a
higher place among his works than it does at present, when its effect
is somewhat amputated and its meaning threatened with incoherence by the
author's apparent _volteface_ in the Second Part.
It was a lifelong disappointment to Ibsen that _Emperor and Galilean_,
on which he expended far more consideration and labor than on any other
of his works, was never a favorite either with the public or among the
critics. With the best will in the world, however, it is not easy to
find full enjoyment in this gigantic work, which by some caprice
of style defiant of analysis, lacks the vitality which is usually
characteristic of Ibsen's least production. The speeches put into the
mouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid;
as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You
feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some
dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's drama was
too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt.
What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here
and there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramatic
representation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius far
better to have abandoned any attempt to write a conclusive history,
and have selected some critical moment in the life of Julian. He should
rather have concentrated his energies, independent of the chroniclers,
on the resuscitation of that episode, and in the course of it have
trembled less humbly under the uplifted finger of Ammianus.
Of _Emperor and Galilean_ Ibsen afterwards said: "It was the first" (but
he might have added "the only") "poem which I have written under the
influence of German ideas." He was aware of the danger of living too
long away from his own order of thought and language. But it was always
difficult for him, once planted in a place, to pull up his roots. A
weariness took possession of him after the publication of his double
drama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks a
central joint in the structure of his career, what the architects call
a "channel" in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen's work an
aspect of solidity and resource. During these years he revised some of
his early writings, made a closer study of the arts of sculpture and
painting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a very brief sojourn in
Norway. In the spring of 1875 he definitely moved with his family from
Dresden to Munich.
The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved very unfortunate. Ibsen
was suspicious, the Norwegians of that generation were constitutionally
stiff and reserved; long years among Southern races had accustomed him
to a plenitude in gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief time
he was in Norway, from an intolerable _malaise_. Ten years afterwards,
in writing to Bjoernson, the discomfort of that experience was still
unallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly enough," he said, "to support
myself and my family in the case of my discontinuing my literary work.
And I should be obliged to discontinue it if I lived in Christiania....
This simply means that I should not write at all. When, ten years ago,
after an absence of ten years, I sailed up the fjord, I felt a weight
settling down on my breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression. And
this feeling lasted all the time I was at home; I was not myself under
the stare of all those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the
windows and in the streets."
Ibsen had now been more than ten years am exile from Norway, and his
sentiments with regard to his own people were still what they were when,
in July, 1872, he had sent home his _Ode for the Millenary Festival_.
That very striking poem, one of the most solid of Ibsen's lyrical
performances, had opened in the key of unmitigated defiance to popular
opinion at home. It was intended to show Norwegians that they must
alter their attitude towards him, as he would never change his behavior
towards them. "My countrymen," he said:--
My countrymen, who filled for me deep bowls
Of wholesome bitter medicine, such as gave
The poet, on the margin of his grave,
Fresh force to fight where broken twilight rolls,--
My countrymen, who sped me o'er the wave,
An exile, with my griefs for pilgrim-soles,
My fears for burdens, doubts for staff, to roam,--
From the wide world I send you greeting home.
I send you thanks for gifts that help and harden,
Thanks for each hour of purifying pain;
Each plant that springs in my poetic garden
Is rooted where your harshness poured its rain;
Each shoot in which it blooms and burgeons forth
It owes to that gray weather from the North;
The sun relaxes, but the fog secures!
My country, thanks! My life's best gifts were yours.
In spite of these sardonic acknowledgments. Ibsen's fame in Norway,
though still disputed, was now secure. In Denmark and Sweden it was
almost unchallenged, and he was a name, at least, in Germany. In
England, since 1872, he had not been without a prophet. But in Italy,
Russia, France--three countries upon the intelligence of which he was
presently to make a wide and durable impression--he was still quite
unknown.
Meanwhile, in glancing over the general literature of Europe, we see
his figure, at the threshold of his fiftieth year, taking greater
and greater prominence. He had become, in the sudden exinction of the
illustrious old men of Denmark, the first living writer of the North. He
was to Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne or
Rossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly
lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at least
till 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If,
in the second portion of his career, he resolutely deprived himself
of all indulgence in the ornament of verse, it was a voluntary act of
austerity. It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging the crown of
jewels for the coarse brown cowl of St. Jerome. And now, after a year
or two of prayer and fasting, Ibsen began a new intellectual career.