PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
During the latest years of his life, which were spent as a wealthy and
prosperous citizen of Christiania, the figure of Ibsen took forms
of legendary celebrity which were equalled by no other living man of
letters, not even by Tolstoi, and which had scarcely been surpassed,
among the dead, by Victor Hugo. When we think of the obscurity of his
youth and middle age, and of his consistent refusal to advertise himself
by any of the little vulgar arts of self-exhibition, this extreme
publicity is at first sight curious, but it can be explained. Norway
is a small and a new country, inordinately, perhaps, but justly and
gracefully proud of those--an Ole Bull, a Frithjof Nansen, an Edvard
Grieg--who spread through the world evidences of its spiritual life. But
the one who was more original, more powerful, more interesting than any
other of her sons, had persistently kept aloof from the soil of Norway,
and was at length recaptured and shut up in a golden cage with more
expenditure of delicate labor than any perverse canary or escaped
macaw had ever needed. Ibsen safely housed in Christiania!--it was the
recovery of an important national asset, the resumption, after years of
vexation and loss, of the intellectual regalia of Norway.
Ibsen, then--recaptured, though still in a frame of mind which left the
captors nervous--was naturally an object of pride. For the benefit of
the hundreds of tourists who annually pass through Christiania, it was
more than tempting, it was irresistible to point out, in slow advance
along Carl Johans Gade, in permanent silence at a table in the Grand
Cafe, "our greatest citizen." To this species of demonstration Ibsen
unconsciously lent himself by his immobility, his regularity of habits,
his solemn taciturnity. He had become more like a strange physical
object than like a man among men. He was visible broadly and quietly,
not conversing, rarely moving, quite isolated and self-contained, a
recognized public spectacle, delivered up, as though bound hand and
foot, to the kodak-hunter and the maker of "spicy" paragraphs. That
Ibsen was never seen to do anything, or heard to say anything, that
those who boasted of being intimate with him obviously lied in their
teeth--all this prepared him for sacrifice. Christiania is a hot-bed
of gossip, and its press one of the most "chatty" in the world. Our
"greatest living author" was offered up as a wave-offering, and he
smoked daily on the altar of the newspapers.
It will be extremely rash of the biographers of the future to try to
follow Ibsen's life day by day in the Christiania press from, let
us say, 1891 to 1901. During that decade he occupied the reporters
immensely, and he was particularly useful to the active young men who
telegraph "chat" to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Berlin.
Snapshots of Ibsen, dangerous illness of the playwright, quaint habits
of the Norwegian dramatist, a poet's double life, anecdotes of Ibsen and
Mrs.----, rumors of the King's attitude to Ibsen--this pollenta, dressed
a dozen ways, was the standing dish at every journalist's table. If a
space needed filling, a very rude reply to some fatuous question might
be fitted in and called "Instance of Ibsen's Wit." The crop of fable was
enormous, and always seemed to find a gratified public, for whom nothing
was too absurd if it was supposed to illustrate "our great national
poet." Ibsen, meanwhile, did nothing at all. He never refuted a calumny,
never corrected a story, but he threw an ironic glance through his
gold-rimmed spectacles as he strolled down Carl Johan with his hands
behind his back.
His personal appearance, it must be admitted, formed a tempting
basis upon which to build a legend. His force of will had gradually
transfigured his bodily forms until he thoroughly looked the part which
he was expected to fill. At the age of thirty, to judge by the early
photographs, he had been a commonplace-looking little man, with a shock
of coal-black hair and a full beard, one of those hirsute types common
in the Teutonic races, which may prove, on inquiry, to be painter,
musician, or engraver, or possibly engineer, but less probably poet.
Then came the exile from Norway, and the residence in Rome, marked by a
little bust which stands before me now, where the beard is cut away into
two round whiskers so as to release the firm round chin, and the long
upper lip is clean-shaved. Here there is more liveliness, but still no
distinction. Then comes a further advance--a photograph (in which I feel
a tender pride, for it was made to please me) taken in Dresden (October
15, 1873), where the brow, perfectly smooth and white, has widened out,
the whiskers have become less chubby, and the small, scrutinizing eyes
absolutely sparkle with malice. Here, you say at last, is no poet,
indeed, but an unusually cultivated banker or surprisingly adroit
solicitor. Here the hair, retreating from the great forehead, begins to
curl and roll with a distinguished wildness; here the long mouth, like
a slit in the face, losing itself at each end in whisker, is a symbol of
concentrated will power, a drawer in some bureau, containing treasures,
firmly locked up.
Then came Munich, where Ibsen's character underwent very considerable
changes, or rather where its natural features became fixed and
emphasized. We are not left without precious indication of his gestures
and his looks at this time, when he was a little past the age of
fifty. Where so much has been extravagantly written, or described in
a journalistic key of false emphasis, great is the value of a quiet
portrait by one of those who has studied Ibsen most intelligently. It is
perhaps the most careful pen-sketch of him in any language.
Mr. William Archer, then, has given the following account of his first
meeting with Ibsen. It was in the Scandinavia Club, in Rome, at the
close of 1881:--
I had been about a quarter of an hour in the room, and was standing
close to the door, when it opened, and in glided an undersized man with
very broad shoulders and a large, leonine head, wearing a long black
frock-coat with very broad lapels, on one of which a knot of red ribbon
was conspicuous. I knew him at once, but was a little taken aback by his
low stature. In spite of all the famous instances to the contrary, one
instinctively associates greatness with size. His natural height was
even somewhat diminished by a habit of bending forward slightly from the
waist, begotten, no doubt, of short-sightedness, and the need to peer
into things. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his hands
behind his back--an unobtrusive personality, which would have been
insignificant had the head been strictly proportionate to the rest
of the frame. But there was nothing insignificant about the high and
massive forehead, crowned with a mane of (then) iron-gray hair, the
small and pale but piercing eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, or
the thin lipped mouth, depressed at the corners into a curve indicative
of iron will, and set between bushy whiskers of the same dark gray as
the hair. The most cursory observer could not but recognize power and
character in the head; yet one would scarcely have guessed it to be the
power of a poet, the character of a prophet. Misled, perhaps, by the
ribbon at the buttonhole, and by an expression of reserve, almost of
secretiveness, in the lines of the tight-shut mouth, one would rather
have supposed one's self face to face with an eminent statesman or
diplomatist.
With the further advance of years all that was singular in Ibsen's
appearance became accentuated. The hair and beard turned snowy white;
the former rose in a fierce sort of Oberland, the latter was kept square
and full, crossing underneath the truculent chin that escaped from it.
As Ibsen walked to a banquet in Christiania, he looked quite small
under the blaze of crosses, stars and belts which he displayed when he
unbuttoned the long black overcoat which enclosed him tightly. Never
was he seen without his hands behind him, and the poet Holger Drachmann
started a theory that as Ibsen could do nothing in the world but write,
the Muse tied his wrists together at the small of his back whenever they
were not actually engaged in composition. His regularity in all habits,
his mechanical ways, were the subject of much amusement. He must sit day
after day in the same chair, at the same table, in the same corner
of the cafe, and woe to the ignorant intruder who was accidentally
beforehand with him. No word was spoken, but the indignant poet stood
at a distance, glaring, until the stranger should be pierced with
embarrassment, and should rise and flee away.
Ibsen had the reputation of being dangerous and difficult of access.
But the evidence of those who knew him best point to his having
been phlegmatic rather than morose. He was "umbrageous," ready to be
discomposed by the action of others, but, if not vexed or startled,
he was elaborately courteous. He had a great dislike of any abrupt
movement, and if he was startled, he had the instinct of a wild animal,
to bite. It was a pain to him to have the chain of his thoughts suddenly
broken, and he could not bear to be addressed by chance acquaintances
in street or cafe. When he was resident in Munich and Dresden, the
difficulty of obtaining an interview with Ibsen was notorious. His wife
protected him from strangers, and if her defences broke down, and the
stranger contrived to penetrate the inner fastness, Ibsen might suddenly
appear in the doorway, half in a rage, half quivering with distress, and
say, in heartrending tones, "Bitte um Arbeitsruhe"--"Please let me work
in peace!" They used to tell how in Munich a rich baron, who was the
local Maecenas of letters, once bored Ibsen with a long recital of his
love affairs, and ended by saying, with a wonderful air of fatuity,
"To you, Master, I come, because of your unparalleled knowledge of
the female heart. In your hands I place my fate. Advise me, and I will
follow your advice." Ibsen snapped his mouth and glared through his
spectacles; then in a low voice of concentrated fury he said: "Get
home, and--go to bed!" whereat his noble visitor withdrew, clothed with
indignation as with a garment.
His voice was uniform, soft and quiet. The bitter things he said seemed
the bitterer for his gentle way of saying them. As his shape grew burly
and his head of hair enormous, the smallness of his extremities became
accentuated. His little hands were always folded away as he tripped upon
his tiny feet. His movements were slow and distrait. He wasted few words
on the current incidents of life, and I was myself the witness, in
1899, of his _sang-froid_ under distressing circumstances. Ibsen was
descending a polished marble staircase when his feet slipped and he fell
swiftly, precipitately, downward. He must have injured himself severely,
he might have been killed, if two young gentlemen had not darted forward
below and caught him in their arms. Once more set the right way up,
Ibsen softly thanked his saviours with much frugality of phrase--"Tak,
mine Herrer!"--tenderly touched an abraded surface of his top-hat, and
marched forth homeward, unperturbed.
His silence had a curious effect on those in whose company he feasted;
it seemed to hypnotise them. The great Danish actress, Mrs. Heiberg,
herself the wittiest of talkers, said that to sit beside Ibsen was to
peer into a gold-mine and not catch a glitter from the hidden treasure.
But his dumbness was not so bitterly ironical as it was popularly
supposed to be. It came largely from a very strange passivity which
made definite action unwelcome to him. He could never be induced to pay
visits, yet he would urge his wife and his son to accept invitations,
and when they returned he would insist on being told every
particular--who was there, what was said, even what everybody wore.
He never went to a theatre or concert-room, except on the very rare
occasions when he could be induced to be present at the performance of
his own plays. But he was extremely fond of hearing about the stage. He
had a memory for little things and an observation of trifles which was
extraordinary. He thought it amazing that people could go into a room
and not notice the pattern of the carpet, the color of the curtains,
the objects on the walls; these being details which he could not help
observing and retaining. This trait comes out in his copious and minute
stage directions.
Ibsen was simplicity itself; no man was ever less affected. But his
character was closed; he was perpetually on the defensive. He was seldom
confidential, he never "gave way"; his emotions and his affections
were genuine, but his heart was a fenced city. He had little sense of
domestic comfort; his rooms were bare and neat, with no personal objects
save those which belonged to his wife. Even in the days of his wealth,
in the fine house on Drammensvej, there was a singular absence of
individuality about his dwelling rooms. They might have been prepared
for a rich American traveller in some hotel. Through a large portion of
his career in Germany he lived in furnished rooms, not because he did
not possess furniture of his own, which was stored up, but because he
paid no sort of homage to his own penates. He had friends, but he did
not cultivate them; he rather permitted them, at intervals, to cultivate
him. To Georg Brandes (March 6, 1870) he wrote: "Friends are a costly
luxury; and when one has devoted one's self wholly to a profession and
a mission here in life, there is no place left for friends." The very
charming story of Ibsen's throwing his arms round old Hans Christian
Andersen's neck, and forcing him to be genial and amiable, [Note:
_Samliv med Ibsen._] is not inconsistent with the general rule of
passivity and shyness which he preserved in matters of friendship.
Ibsen's reading was singularly limited. In his fine rooms on Drammensvej
I remember being struck by seeing no books at all, except the large
Bible which always lay at his side, and formed his constant study. He
disliked having his partiality for the Bible commented on, and if, as
would sometimes be the case, religious people expressed pleasure at
finding him deep in the sacred volume, Ibsen would roughly reply: "It is
only for the sake of the language." He was the enemy of anything which
seemed to approach cant and pretension, and he concealed his own views
as closely as he desired to understand the views of others. He possessed
very little knowledge of literature. The French he despised and
repudiated, although he certainly had studied Voltaire with advantage;
of the Italians he knew only Dante and of the English only Shakespeare,
both of whom he had studied in translations. In Danish he read and
reread Holberg, who throughout his life unquestionably remained Ibsen's
favorite author; he preserved a certain admiration for the Danish
classics of his youth: Heiberg, Hertz, Schack-Steffelt. In German, the
foreign language which he read most currently, he was strangely ignorant
of Schiller and Heine, and hostile to Goethe, although _Brand_ and _Peer
Gynt_ must owe something of their form to _Faust_. But the German poets
whom he really enjoyed were two dramatists of the age preceding his
own, Otto Ludwig (1813-65) and Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63). Each of these
playwrights had been occupied in making certain reforms, of a realistic
tendency, in the existing tradition of the stage, and each of them
dealt, before any one else in Europe did so, with "problems" on the
stage. These two German poets, but Hebbel particularly, passed from
romanticism to realism, and so on to mysticism, in a manner fascinating
to Ibsen, whom it is possible that they influenced. [Note: It would
be interesting to compare _Die Niebelungen_, the trilogy which Hebbel
published in 1862, in which the struggle between pagan and Christian
ideals of conduct is analyzed, with Ibsen's _Emperor and Galilean_.] He
remained, in later years, persistently ignorant of Zola, and of Tolstoi
he had read, with contemptuous disapproval, only some of the polemical
pamphlets. He said to me, in 1899, of the great Russian: "Tolstoi?--he
is mad!" with a screwing up of the features such as a child makes at the
thought of a black draught.
If he read at all, it was poetry. His indifference to music was
complete; he had, in fact, no ear whatever, and could not distinguish
one tune from another. His efforts to appreciate the music which
Grieg made for _Peer Gynt_ were pathetic. But for verse his sense was
exceedingly delicate, and the sound of poetry gave him acute pleasure.
At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he was fatigued by the riot
of rhymes which pursued him through his dreams, and which his memory
vainly strove to recapture. For academic philosophy and systems of
philosophic thought he had a great impatience. The vexed question of
what he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher, Soeren Kierkegaard, has
never been solved. Brandes has insisted, again and again, on the
close relation between _Brand_ and other works of Ibsen and the famous
_Either-Or_ of Kierkegaard; "it actually seems," he says, "as though
Ibsen had aspired to the honor of being called Kierkegaard's poet."
Ibsen, however, aspired to no such honor, and, while he never actually
denied the influence, the relation between him and the philosopher seems
to be much rather one of parallelism than of imitation. Ibsen was a
poetical psychologist of the first order, but he could not bring himself
to read the prose of the professional thinkers.
In his attitude both to philosophical and poetical literature Ibsen is
with such apparently remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley; in
his realism and his mysticism he is unrelated to immediate predecessors,
and has no wish to be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest in
the observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosity
about what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects.
Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the same
as that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or
had even turned over the pages of the _Criticism of Pure Reason_. It is
not necessary to suppose that he had done so. The peculiar aspect of
the Ego as the principal and ultimately sole guide to truth was revealed
anew to the Norwegian poet, and references to Kant, or to Fichte, or to
Kierkegaard, seem, therefore, to be beside the mark. The watchword of
_Brand_, with his cry of "All or Nothing," his absolute repudiation of
compromise, was not a literary conception, but was founded, without the
help of books, on a profound contemplation of human nature, mainly, no
doubt, as Ibsen found it in himself. But in these days of the tyranny
of literature it is curious to meet with an author of the first rank who
worked without a library.
Ibsen's study of women was evidently so close, and what he writes about
them is usually so penetrating, that many legends have naturally sprung
up about the manner in which he gained his experience. Of these, most
are pure fiction. As a matter of fact, Ibsen was shy with women, and
unless they took the initiative, he contented himself with watching them
from a distance: and noting their ways in silence. The early flirtation
with Miss Rikke Hoist at Bergen, which takes so prominent a place in
Ibsen's story mainly because such incidents were extremely rare in it,
is a typical instance. If this young girl of sixteen had not taken
the matter into her own hands, running up the steps of the hotel and
flinging her posy of flowers into the face of the young poet, the
incident would have closed in his watching her down the street,
while the fire smouldered in his eyes. It was not until her fresh
field-blossoms had struck him on the cheek that he was emboldened to
follow her and to send her the lyrical roses and auriculas which live
forever in his poems. If we wish to note the difference of temperament,
we have but to contrast Ibsen's affair with Rikke Holst with Goethe's
attitude to Christiana Vulpius; in doing so, we bring the passive and
the active lover face to face.
Ibsen would gladly have married his flower of the field, a vision of
whose bright, untrammelled adolescence reappears again and again in
his works, and plainly in _The Master-Builder_. But he escaped a great
danger in failing to secure her as his wife, for Rikke Holst, when she
had lost her girlish freshness, would probably have had little character
and no culture to fall back upon. He waited, fortunately for his
happiness, until he secured Susannah Thoresen. Mrs. Ibsen, his faithful
guide, guardian and companion for half a century, will live among the
entirely successful wives of difficult men of genius. In the midst
of the spiteful gossip of Christiania she had to traverse her _via
dolorosa_, for it was part of the fun of the journalists to represent
this husband and wife as permanently alienated. That Ibsen was easy to
live with is not probable, but his wife not merely contrived to do it,
but by her watchfulness, her adroitness, and, when necessary, by her
firmness of decision, she smoothed the path for the great man whom
she adored, and who was to her a great wilful child to be cajoled and
circumvented. He was absolutely dependent on her, although he affected
amusing airs of independence; and if she absented herself, there were
soon cries in the house of "My Cat, My Cat!" the pet name by which he
called his wife. Of their domestic ways little is yet known in detail,
but everything can be imagined.
To the enigma of Ibsen's character it was believed that his private
correspondence might supply a key. His letters were collected and
arranged while he was still alive, but he was not any longer in a
mental condition which permitted him to offer any help in comment to
his editors. His son, Mr. Sigurd Ibsen, superintended the work, and two
careful bibliographers, Mr. Halvdan Koht and Mr. Julius Elias,
carried out the scheme in two volumes [Note: _Breve fra Henrik Ibsen_,
Gyldendalske Boghadel, 1904.], with the execution of which no fault can
be suggested. But the enigma remained unsolved; the sphinx spoke much,
but failed to answer the questions we had been asking. These letters,
in the first place, suffer from the fact that Ibsen was a relentless
destroyer of documents; they are all written by him; not one single
example had been preserved of the correspondence to which this is
the reply. Then Ibsen's letters, as revealers of the unseen mood, are
particularly unsatisfactory. With rare exceptions, he remains throughout
them tightly buttoned up in his long and legendary frock-coat. There is
no laughter and no tears in his letters; he is occasionally extremely
angry, and exudes drops of poison, like the captive scorpion which he
caught when he was in Italy, and loved to watch and tease. But there
is no self-abandonment, and very little emotion; the letters are
principally historical and critical, "finger-posts for commentators."
They give valuable information about the genius of his works, but they
tell almost less about his inner moral nature than do his imaginative
writings.
In his youth the scorpion in Ibsen's heart seems to have stung him
occasionally to acts which afterwards filled him with embarrassment. We
hear that in his Bergen days he sent to Lading, his fellow-teacher
at the theatre, a challenge of which, when the mood was over, he was
greatly ashamed. It is said that on another occasion, under the pressure
of annoyance, maddened with fear and insomnia, he sprang out of bed in
his shirt and tried to throw himself into the sea off one of the quays
in the harbor. Such performances were futile and ridiculous, and they
belong only to his youth. It seems certain that he schooled himself
to the suppression of such evidences of his anger, and that he did so
largely by shutting up within his breast all the fire that rose there.
The _Correspondence_--dark lantern as it is--seems to illuminate this
condition of things; we see before us Ibsen with his hands clenched, his
mouth tightly shut, rigid with determination not to "let himself go,"
the eyes alone blazing behind the gleaming spectacles.
An instance of his suppression of personal feeling may be offered. The
lengthiest of all Ibsen's published letters describes to Brandes (April
25, 1866) the suicide, at Rome, of a young Danish lawyer, Ludvig David,
of whom Ibsen had seen a good deal. The lad threw himself head-foremost
out of window, in a crisis of fever. Ibsen writes down all the minutest
details with feeling and refinement, but with as little sympathetic
emotion as if he was drawing up a report for the police. With this trait
may be compared his extreme interest in the detailed accounts of public
trials; he liked to read exactly what the prisoner said, and all the
evidence of the witnesses. In this Ibsen resembled Robert Browning,
whose curiosity about the small incidents surrounding a large event was
boundless. When Ibsen, in the course of such an investigation, found the
real purpose of some strange act dawn upon him, he exhibited an almost
childish pleasure; and this was doubled when the interpretation was one
which had not presented itself to the conventional legal authorities.
In everything connected with the execution of his own work there was
no limit to the pains which he was willing to take. His handwriting
had always been neat, but it was commonplace in his early years. The
exquisite calligraphy which he ultimately used on every occasion, and
the beauty of which was famous far and wide, he adopted deliberately
when he was in Rome in 1862. To the end of his life, although in the
latest years the letters lost, from the shakiness of his hand, some of
their almost Chinese perfection, he wrote his smallest notes in this
character. His zeal for elaboration as an artist led him to collect a
mass of consistent imaginary information about the personages in his
plays, who became to him absolutely real. It is related how, some one
happening to say that Nora, in _A Doll's House_, had a curious name,
Ibsen immediately replied, "Oh! her full name was Leonora; but that was
shortened to Nora when she was quite a little girl. Of course, you know,
she was terribly spoilt by her parents." Nothing of this is revealed in
the play itself, but Ibsen was familiar with the past history of all the
characters he created. All through his career he seems to have been long
haunted by the central notion of his pieces, and to have laid it
aside, sometimes for many years, until a set of incidents spontaneously
crystallized around it. When the medium in which he was going to work
became certain he would put himself through a long course of study in
the technical phraseology appropriate to the subject. No pains were too
great to prepare him for the final task.
When Mr. Archer visited Ibsen in the Harmonien Hotel at Saeby in 1887
he extracted some valuable evidence from him as to his methods of
composition:--
It seems that the _idea_ of a piece generally presents itself before
the characters and incidents, though, when I put this to him flatly, he
denied it. It seems to follow, however, from his saying that there is a
certain stage in the incubation of a play when it might as easily turn
into all essay as into a drama. He has to incarnate the ideas, as it
were, in character and incident, before the actual work of creation
can be said to have fairly begun. Different plans and ideas, he admits,
often flow together, and the play he ultimately produces is sometimes
very unlike the intention with which he set out. He writes and rewrites,
scribbles and destroys, an enormous amount before he makes the exquisite
fair copy he sends to Copenhagen.
He altered, as we have said, the printed text of his earlier works, in
order to bring them into harmony with his finished style, but he did not
do this, so far as I remember, after the publication of _Brand_. In the
case of all the dramas of his maturity he modified nothing when the work
had once been given to the world.