------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note:
This version of the text cannot represent certain typographical effects.
Italics are delimited with the ‘_’ character as _italic_. In the printed
original, emphasis is indicated by gesperrt (spaced) text, but is here
also delimited as the italic.
Footnotes have been collected at the end of each section or act in which
they are referenced.
Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please
see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding
the handling of any other textual issues encountered during its
preparation.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
VOLUME I
LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG
LOVE'S COMEDY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
_Copyright Edition. Complete in 11 Volumes._
_Crown 8vo, price 4s. each._
=ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY=
=WILLIAM ARCHER=
Vol. I. Lady Inger, The Feast at Solhoug, Love’s
Comedy
Vol. II. The Vikings, The Pretenders
Vol. III. Brand
Vol. IV. Peer Gynt
Vol. V. Emperor and Galilean (2 parts)
Vol. VI. The League of Youth, Pillars of Society
Vol. VII. A Doll’s House, Ghosts
Vol. VIII. An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck
Vol. IX. Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea
Vol. X. Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder
Vol. XI. Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When
We Dead Awaken
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
COPYRIGHT EDITION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VOLUME I
LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG
LOVE'S COMEDY
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY
WILLIAM ARCHER
AND
C. H. HERFORD, LITT.D., M.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: title page]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1910
_First printed (Collected Edition)_ 1908
_Second Impression_ 1910
_Copyright_ 1908 _by William Heinemann_
CONTENTS
PAGE
GENERAL PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION TO “LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT” xvii
INTRODUCTION TO “THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG” xxxiii
INTRODUCTION TO “LOVE’S COMEDY” xxxvii
“LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT” 1
_Translated by_ CHARLES ARCHER
“THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG” 181
_Translated by_
WILLIAM ARCHER and MARY MORISON
“LOVE’S COMEDY” 285
_Translated by_ C. H. HERFORD
GENERAL PREFACE
The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the
dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his
works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature,
tragedy, _Catilina_, first published in 1850, and republished in
1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the
poet’s later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A
great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style,
which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation.
Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely
rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or
attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected
its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a
translator choose? To go back to the original would seem a
deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand,
the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed
advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this
edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary
to include _The Warrior’s Barrow_ and _Olaf Liliekrans_, two early
plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet
himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the
Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work
was over. They have even less intrinsic value than _Catilina_, and
ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired
to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, _St. John’s Night_,
remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged
it to light.
With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order.
The exceptions are _Love’s Comedy_, which ought by rights to come
between _The Vikings_ and _The Pretenders_, and _Emperor and
Galilean_, which ought to follow _The League of Youth_ instead of
preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these
departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly
desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into
one volume; while as for _Emperor and Galilean_, it could not have
been placed between _The League of Youth_ and _Pillars of Society_
save by separating its two parts, and assigning _Caesar’s Apostasy_
to Volume V., _The Emperor Julian_ to Volume VI.
For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except
_Love’s Comedy_ and _Brand_, I am ultimately responsible, in the
sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This
means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others,
the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the
original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and
must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or
otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough.
In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good
deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has
rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has
met all the objections of those critics who have found them
blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections
proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely
divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could
disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the
difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic
prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to
translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his
meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural,
colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially
fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet,
in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely
impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different
contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which
encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my
collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of
our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our
task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the
turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the
difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one
instance. Writing of _The Master Builder_, a very competent, and
indeed generous, critic finds in it “a curious example of perhaps
inevitable inadequacy.... ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in
a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The
epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries
out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I
submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit,
the “perhaps” which qualifies “inevitable.” For the term used by
Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible
English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or
less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the
audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and
assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its
sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to
the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip
lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom
which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right
of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible
to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the
prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we
have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle;
and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a
little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even
that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which
manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible
without a footnote.
In the Introductions to previous editions I have always confined
myself to the statement of biographical and historic facts, holding
criticism no part of my business. Now that Henrik Ibsen has passed
away, and his works have taken a practically uncontested place in
world-literature, this reticence seemed no longer imposed upon me. I
have consequently made a few critical remarks on each play, chiefly
directed towards tracing the course of the poet’s technical
development. Nevertheless, the Introductions are still mainly
biographical, and full advantage has been taken of the stores of new
information contained in Ibsen’s Letters, and in the books and
articles about him that have appeared since his death. I have
prefixed to _Lady Inger of Östråt_ a sketch of the poet’s life down
to the date of that play; so that the Introductions, read in
sequence, will be found to form a pretty full record of a career
which, save for frequent changes of domicile, and the issuing of
play after play, was singularly uneventful.
The Introductions to _Loves Comedy_ and _Brand_, as well as the
translations, are entirely the work of Professor Herford.
A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and
German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a
word, _thus_, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for
various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one
thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that
the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly
effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount
suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends.
The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape
the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should
be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any
obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a
doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended
to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by
looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an
indication which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases,
a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the
original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis
peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced
in 1897, in the translation of _John Gabriel Borkman_. It has no
longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been
adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by
other dramatists.
* * * * *
Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a
translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, _Pillars of Society_ reached
me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a
translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or
six times as much work in revision as it originally did in
translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more
than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it
slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s
works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been
one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or
thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable
portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or
another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking
public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself
done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not
merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following
pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These
“helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be
individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who
has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won
leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt
thanks.
The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer
drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I
should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the
cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced
no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with
which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the
excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets
in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen.
People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly
parts of _David Copperfield_ or _Pendennis_ may have some inkling of
my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at
intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen
the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen
the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts,
the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by
diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I
have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the
glorious country that gave him birth.
WILLIAM ARCHER.
LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
INTRODUCTION
Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, at the little seaport
of Skien, situated at the head of a long fiord on the south coast of
Norway. His great-great-grandfather was a Dane who settled in Bergen
about 1720. His great-grandmother, Wenche Dischington, was the
daughter of a Scotchman, who had settled and become naturalised in
Norway; and Ibsen himself was inclined to ascribe some of his
characteristics to the Scottish strain in his blood. Both his
grandmother (Plesner by name) and his mother, Maria Cornelia
Altenburg, were of German descent. It has been said that there was
not a drop of Norwegian blood in Ibsen’s composition; but it is
doubtful whether this statement can be substantiated. Most of his
male ancestors were sailors; but his father, Knud Ibsen, was a
merchant. When Henrik (his first child) was born, he seems to have
been prosperous, and to have led a very social and perhaps rather
extravagant life. But when the poet was eight years old financial
disaster overtook the family, and they had to withdraw to a
comparatively small farmhouse on the outskirts of the little town,
where they lived in poverty and retirement.
As a boy, Ibsen appears to have been lacking in animal spirits and
the ordinary childish taste for games. Our chief glimpses of his
home life are due to his sister Hedvig, the only one of his family
with whom, in after years, he maintained any intercourse, and whose
name he gave to one of his most beautiful creations.[1] She relates
that the only out-door amusement he cared for was “building”—in what
material does not appear. Among indoor diversions, that to which he
was most addicted was conjuring, a younger brother serving as his
confederate. We also hear of his cutting out fantastically-dressed
figures in pasteboard, attaching them to wooden blocks, and ranging
them in groups or tableaux. He may be said, in short, to have had a
toy theatre without the stage. In all these amusements it is
possible, with a little goodwill, to divine the coming dramatist—the
constructive faculty, the taste for technical legerdemain (which
made him in his youth so apt a disciple of Scribe), and the
fundamental passion for manipulating fictitious characters. The
education he received was of the most ordinary, but included a
little Latin. The subjects which chiefly interested him were history
and religion. He showed no special literary proclivities, though a
dream which he narrated in a school composition so impressed his
master that he accused him (much to the boy’s indignation) of having
copied it out of some book.
His chief taste was for drawing, and he was anxious to become an
artist; but his father could not afford to pay for his training.[2]
At the age of fifteen, therefore, he had to set about earning his
living, and was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a town on
the south-west coast of Norway, between Arendal and Christianssand.
He was here in even narrower social surroundings than at Skien. His
birthplace numbered some 3000 inhabitants, Grimstad about 800. That
he was contented with his lot cannot be supposed; and the short,
dark, taciturn youth seems to have made an unsympathetic and rather
uncanny impression upon the burghers of the little township. His
popularity was not heightened by a talent which he presently
developed for drawing caricatures and writing personal lampoons. He
found, however, two admiring friends in Christopher Lorentz Due, a
custom-house clerk, and a law student named Olë Schulerud.
The first political event which aroused his interest and stirred him
to literary expression was the French Revolution of 1848. He himself
writes:[3] “The times were much disturbed. The February revolution,
the rising in Hungary and elsewhere, the Slesvig War—all this had a
strong and ripening effect on my development, immature though it
remained both then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of
encouragement to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom
and humanity, not to falter in their righteous war against ‘the
tyrants’; and I composed a long series of sonnets to King Oscar,
mainly, so far as I remember, urging him to set aside all petty
considerations, and march without delay, at the head of his army, to
the assistance of our Danish brothers on the Slesvig frontier.”
These effusions remained in manuscript, and have, for the most part,
perished. About the same time he was reading for his matriculation
examination at Christiania University, where he proposed to study
medicine; and it happened that the Latin books prescribed were
Sallust’s _Catiline_ and Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations. “I devoured
these documents,” says Ibsen, “and a few months later my drama
[_Catilina_] was finished.” His friend Schulerud took it to
Christiania, to offer it to the theatre and to the publishers. By
both it was declined. Schulerud, however, had it printed at his own
expense; and soon after its appearance, in the early spring of 1850,
Ibsen himself came to Christiania.[4]
For the most part written in blank verse, _Catilina_ towards the
close breaks into rhyming trochaic lines of thirteen and fifteen
syllables. It is an extremely youthful production, very interesting
from the biographical point of view, but of small substantive merit.
What is chiefly notable in it, perhaps, is the fact that it already
shows Ibsen occupied with the theme which was to run through so many
of his works—the contrast between two types of womanhood, one strong
and resolute, even to criminality, the other comparatively weak,
clinging, and “feminine” in the conventional sense of the word.
In Christiania Ibsen shared Schulerud’s lodgings, and his poverty.
There is a significant sentence in his preface to the re-written
_Catilina_, in which he tells how the bulk of the first edition was
sold as waste paper, and adds: “In the days immediately following we
lacked none of the first necessities of life.” He went to a
“student-factory,” or, as we should say, a “crammer’s,” managed by
one Heltberg; and there he fell in with several of the leading
spirits of his generation—notably with Björnson, A. O. Vinje, and
Jonas Lie. In the early summer of 1850 he wrote a one-act play,
_Kiæmpehöien_ (_The Warrior’s Barrow_), entirely in the sentimental
and somewhat verbose manner of the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It
was accepted by the Christiania Theatre, and performed three times,
but cannot have put much money in the poet’s purse. With Paul
Botten-Hansen and A. O. Vinje he co-operated in the production of a
weekly satirical paper, at first entitled _Manden_ (_The Man_), but
afterwards _Andhrimner_, after the cook of the gods in Valhalla. To
this journal, which lasted only from January to September 1851, he
contributed, among other things, a satirical “music-tragedy,”
entitled _Norma, or a Politician’s Love_. As the circulation of the
paper is said to have been something under a hundred, it cannot have
paid its contributors very lavishly. About this time, too, he
narrowly escaped arrest on account of some political agitation, in
which, however, he had not been very deeply concerned.
Meanwhile a movement had been going forward in the capital of
Western Norway, Bergen, which was to have a determining influence on
Ibsen’s destinies.
Up to 1850 there had been practically no Norwegian drama. The two
great poets of the first half of the century, Wergeland and
Welhaven, had nothing dramatic in their composition, though
Wergeland more than once essayed the dramatic form. Danish actors
and Danish plays held entire possession of the Christiania Theatre;
and, though amateur performances were not uncommon in provincial
towns, it was generally held that the Norwegians, as a nation, were
devoid of all talent for acting. The very sound of Norwegian (as
distinct from Danish) was held by Norwegians themselves to be
ridiculous on the stage. Fortunately Olë Bull, the great violinist,
was not of that opinion. With the insight of genius, he saw that the
time had come for the development of a national drama; he set forth
this view in a masterly argument addressed to the Storthing; and he
gave practical effect to it by establishing, at his own risk, a
Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. How rightly he had judged the situation
may be estimated from the fact that among the raw lads who first
presented themselves for employment was Johannes Brun, afterwards
one of the greatest of comedians; while the first “theatre-poet”
engaged by the management was none other than Henrik Ibsen.
The theatre was opened on January 2, 1850; Ibsen entered upon his
duties (at a salary of less than £70 a year) in November 1851.[5]
Incredibly, pathetically small, according to our ideas, were the
material resources of Bull’s gallant enterprise. The town of Bergen
numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. Performances were given only
twice, or, at the outside, three times, a week; and the highest
price of admission was two shillings. What can have been attempted
in the way of scenery and costumes it is hard to imagine. Of a
three-act play, produced in 1852, we read that “the mounting, which
cost £22 10s., left nothing to be desired.”
Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre lasted from November 6,
1851, until the summer of 1857—that is to say, from his
twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year. He was engaged in the first
instance “to assist the theatre as dramatic author,” but in the
following year he received from the management a “travelling
stipend” of £45 to enable him to study the art of theatrical
production in Denmark and Germany, with the stipulation that, on his
return, he should undertake the duties of “scene instructor”—that is
to say, stage-manager or producer. In this function he seems to have
been—as, indeed, he always was—extremely conscientious. A book
exists in the Bergen Public Library containing (it is said) careful
designs by him for every scene in the plays he produced, and full
notes as to entrances, exits, groupings, costumes, accessories, &c.
But he was not an animating or inspiring producer. He had none of
the histrionic vividness of his successor in the post, Björnstjerne
Björnson, who, like all great producers, could not only tell the
actors what to do, but show them how to do it. Perhaps it was a
sense of his lack of impulse that induced the management to give him
a colleague, one Herman Låding, with whom his relations were none of
the happiest. Ibsen is even said, on one occasion, to have
challenged Låding to a duel.
One of the duties of the “theatre-poet” was to have a new play ready
for each recurrence of the “Foundation Day” of the theatre, January
2. On that date, in 1853, Ibsen produced a romantic comedy, _St.
John’s Night_. This is the only one of his plays that has never been
printed. From the accounts of those who have seen the manuscript, it
would appear to be a strange jumble of fantastic fairy-lore with
modern comedy or melodrama. Perhaps it is not quite fanciful to
regard it as a sort of half-way house between _A Midsummer Night’s
Dream_ and _Peer Gynt_. In one of its scenes there appears to be an
unmistakable foreshadowing of the episode in the Troll-King’s palace
(_Peer Gynt_, Act II., Sc. 6). The play had no success, and was
performed only twice. For the next Foundation Day, January 2, 1854,
Ibsen prepared a revised version of _The Warrior’s Barrow_, already
produced in Christiania. A year later, January 2, 1855, _Lady Inger
of Östråt_ was produced—a work still immature, indeed, but giving,
for the first time, no uncertain promise of the master dramatist to
come.
In an autobiographical letter to the Danish critic Peter Hansen,
written from Dresden in 1870, Ibsen says: “_Lady Inger of Östråt_ is
the result of a love-affair—hastily entered into and violently
broken off—to which several of my minor poems may also be
attributed, such as _Wild-flowers and Pot-plants_, _A Bird-Song_,
&c.” The heroine of this love-affair can now be identified as a lady
named Henrikke Holst, who seems to have preserved through a long
life the fresh, bright spirit, the overflowing joyousness, which
attracted Ibsen when she was only in her seventeenth year. Their
relation was of the most innocent. It went no further than a few
surreptitious rambles in the romantic surroundings of Bergen,
usually with a somewhat older girl to play propriety, and with a bag
of sugar-plums to fill up pauses in the conversation. The “violent”
ending seems to have come when the young lady’s father discovered
the secret of these excursions, and doubtless placed her under more
careful control. What there was in this episode to suggest, or in
any way influence, _Lady Inger_, I cannot understand. Nevertheless
the identification seems quite certain. The affair had a charming
little sequel. During the days of their love’s young dream, Ibsen
treated the “wild-flower” with a sort of shy and distant chivalry at
which the wood-gods must have smiled. He avoided even touching her
hand, and always addressed her by the “De” (you) of formal
politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous
poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the “Du”
(thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked
her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she
replied: “I really don’t know, unless it be in the parson’s wife in
_Love’s Comedy_, with her eight children and her perpetual
knitting.” “Ibsen protested,” says Herr Paulsen, in whose _Samliv
med Ibsen_ a full account of the episode may be read. It is
interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline
Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.
It must have been less than a year after the production of _Lady
Inger_ that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be
his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second
marriage) of Provost[6] Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife,
Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It
is recorded that Ibsen’s first visit to the Thoresen household took
place on January 7, 1856,[7] and that on that occasion, speaking to
Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: “You are now
Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger.” Twenty years later,
at Christmas 1876, he gave his wife a copy of the German translation
of _Lady Inger_, with the following inscription on the fly-leaf:
“This book is by right indefeasible thine,
Who in spirit art born of the Östråt line.”
In _Lady Inger_ Ibsen has chosen a theme from the very darkest hour
of Norwegian history. King Sverre’s democratic monarchy, dating from
the beginning of the thirteenth century, had paralysed the old
Norwegian nobility. One by one the great families died out, their
possessions being concentrated in the hands of the few survivors,
who regarded their wealth as a privilege unhampered by obligations.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, then, patriotism and
public spirit were almost dead among the nobles, while the monarchy,
before which the old aristocracy had fallen, was itself dead, or
rather merged (since 1380) in the Crown of Denmark. The peasantry,
too, had long ago lost all effective voice in political affairs; so
that Norway lay prone and inert at the mercy of her Danish rulers.
It is at the moment of deepest national degradation that Ibsen has
placed his tragedy; and the degradation was, in fact, even deeper
than he represents it, for the longings for freedom, the stirrings
of revolt, which form the motive-power of the action, are invented,
or at any rate idealised, by the poet. Fru Inger Ottisdatter
Gyldenlöve was, in fact, the greatest personage of her day in
Norway. She was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the
ablest woman in the land. At the time when Ibsen wrote, little more
than this seems to have been known of her; so that in making her the
victim of a struggle between patriotic duty and maternal love, he
was perhaps poetising in the absence of positive evidence, rather
than in opposition to it. Subsequent research, unfortunately, has
shown that Fru Inger was but little troubled with patriotic
aspirations. She was a hard and grasping woman, ambitious of social
power and predominance, but inaccessible, or nearly so, to national
feeling. It was from sheer social ambition, and with no qualms of
patriotic conscience, that she married her daughters to Danish
noblemen. True, she lent some support to the insurrection of the
so-called “Dale-junker,” a peasant who gave himself out as the heir
of Sten Sture, a former regent of Sweden; but there is not a tittle
of ground for making this pretender her son. He might, indeed, have
become her son-in-law, for, speculating on his chances of success,
she had betrothed one of her daughters to him. Thus the Fru Inger of
Ibsen’s play is, in her character and circumstances, as much a
creation of the poet’s as though no historic personage of that name
had ever existed. Olaf Skaktavl, Nils Lykke, and Eline Gyldenlöve
are also historic names; but with them, too, Ibsen has dealt with
the utmost freedom. The real Nils Lykke was married in 1528 to the
real Eline Gyldenlöve. She died four years later, leaving him two
children; and thereupon he would fain have married her sister Lucia.
Such a union, however, was regarded as incestuous, and the lovers
failed in their effort to obtain a special dispensation. Lucia then
became her brother-in-law’s mistress, and bore him a son. But the
ecclesiastical law was in those days not to be trifled with; Nils
Lykke was thrown into prison for his crime, condemned, and killed in
his dungeon, in the year of grace 1535. Thus there was a tragedy
ready-made in Ibsen’s material, though it was not the tragedy he
chose to write.
The Bergen public did not greatly take to _Lady Inger_, and it was
performed, in its novelty, only twice. Nor is the reason far to
seek. The extreme complexity of the intrigue, and the lack of clear
guidance through its mazes, probably left the Bergen audiences no
less puzzled than the London audiences who saw the play at the Scala
Theatre in 1906.[8] It is a play which can be appreciated only by
spectators who know it beforehand. Such audiences it has often found
in Norway, where it was revived at the Christiania Theatre in 1875;
but in Denmark and Germany, though it has been produced several
times, it has never been very successful. We need go no further than
the end of the first act to understand the reason. On an audience
which knows nothing of the play, the sudden appearance of a
“Stranger,” to whose identity it has not the slightest clue, can
produce no effect save one of bewilderment. To rely on such an
incident for what was evidently intended to be a thrilling
“curtain,” was to betray extreme inexperience; and this single trait
is typical of much in the play. Nevertheless _Lady Inger_ marks a
decisive advance in Ibsen’s development. It marks, one may say, the
birth of his power of invention. He did not as yet know how to
restrain or clarify his invention, and he made clumsy use of the
stock devices of a bad school. But he had once for all entered upon
that course of technical training which it took him five-and-twenty
years to complete. He was learning much that he was afterwards to
unlearn; but had he not undergone this apprenticeship, he would
never have been the master he ultimately became.
When Ibsen entered upon his duties at the Bergen Theatre, the
influence of Eugène Scribe and his imitators was at its very height.
Of the 145 plays produced during his tenure of office, more than
half (seventy-five) were French, twenty-one being by Scribe himself,
and at least half the remainder by adepts of his school, Bayard,
Dumanoir, Mélesville, &c. It is to this school that Ibsen, in _Lady
Inger_, proclaims his adherence; and he did not finally shake off
its influence until he wrote the Third Act of _A Doll’s House_ in
1879. Although the romantic environment of the play, and the tragic
intensity of the leading character, tend to disguise the
relationship, there can be no doubt that _Lady Inger_ is, in
essence, simply a French drama of intrigue, constructed after the
method of Scribe, as exemplified in _Adrienne Lecouvreur_, _Les
Contes de la Reine de Navarre_,[9] and a dozen other French plays,
with the staging of which the poet was then occupied. It might seem
that the figure of Elina, brooding over the thought of her dead
sister, coffined in the vault below the banqueting-hall, belonged
rather to German romanticism; but there are plenty of traces of
German romanticism even in the French plays with which the good
people of Bergen were regaled. For the suggestion of grave-vaults
and coffined heroines, for example, Ibsen need have gone no further
than Dumas’s _Catherine Howard_, which he produced in March 1853. I
do not, however, pretend that his romantic colouring came to him
from France. It came to him, doubtless, from Germany, by way of
Denmark. My point is that the conduct of the intrigue in _Lady
Inger_ shows the most unmistakable marks of his study of the great
French plot-manipulators. Its dexterity and its artificiality alike
are neither German nor Danish, but French. Ibsen had learnt the
great secret of Scribe—the secret of dramatic movement. The play is
full of those ingenious complications, mistakes of identity, and
rapid turns of fortune by which Scribe enchained the interest of his
audiences. Its central theme—a mother plunging into intrigue and
crime for the advancement of her son, only to find that her son
himself has been her victim—is as old as Greek tragedy. The
secondary story, too—that of Elina’s wild infatuation for the
betrayer and practically the murderer of her sister—could probably
be paralleled in the ballad literature of Scotland, Germany, or
Denmark, and might, indeed, have been told, in verse or prose, by
Sir Walter Scott. But these very un-Parisian elements are handled in
a fundamentally Parisian fashion, and Ibsen is clearly fascinated,
for the time, by the ideal of what was afterwards to be known as the
“well-made play.” The fact that the result is in reality an ill-made
play in no way invalidates this theory. It is perhaps the final
condemnation of the well-made play that in nine cases out of ten—and
even in the hands of far more experienced playwrights than the young
Bergen “theatre-poet”—it is apt to prove ill-made after all.
Far be it from me, however, to speak in pure disparagement of _Lady
Inger_. With all its defects, it seems to me manifestly the work of
a great poet—the only one of Ibsen’s plays prior to _The Vikings at
Helgeland_ of which this can be said. It may be that early
impressions mislead me; but I still cannot help seeing in Lady Inger
a figure of truly tragic grandeur; in Nils Lykke one of the few
really seductive seducers in literature; and in many passages of the
dialogue, the touch of a master hand.
W. A.
-----
Footnote 1:
See Introduction to _The Wild Duck_, p. xxiii.
Footnote 2:
He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or
thereabouts.
Footnote 3:
Preface to the second edition of _Catilina_, 1875.
Footnote 4:
This is his own statement of the order of events. According to
Halvdan Koht (_Samlede Værker_, vol. x. p. i) he arrived in
Christiania in March 1850, and _Catilina_ did not appear until
April.
Footnote 5:
The history of Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre is
written at some length in an article by me, entitled “Ibsen’s
Apprenticeship,” published in the _Fortnightly Review_ for January
1904. From that article I quote freely in the following pages.
Footnote 6:
Provost (“Provst”) is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent
to Dean.
Footnote 7:
See article by Dr. Julius Elias in _Die neue Rundschau_, December
1906, p. 1463. Dr. Brahm, in the same magazine (p. 1414), writes
as though this were Ibsen’s first meeting with his wife; and a
note by Halvdan Koht, in the Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s Letters,
seems to bear out this view. But it would appear that what Fru
Ibsen told Dr. Elias was that on the date mentioned Ibsen for “the
first time visited at her father’s house.” The terms of the
anecdote almost compel us to assume that he had previously met her
elsewhere. It seems almost inconceivable that Ibsen, of all
people, should have made such a speech to a lady on their very
first meeting.
Footnote 8:
Stage Society performances, January 28 and 29, 1906. Lady Inger
was played by Miss Edyth Olive, Elina by Miss Alice Crawford, Nils
Lykke by Mr. Henry Ainley, Olaf Skaktavl by Mr. Alfred Brydone,
and Nils Stenssön by Mr. Harcourt Williams.
Footnote 9:
These two plays were produced, respectively, in March and October
1854, at the very time when Ibsen must have been planning and
composing _Lady Inger_.
-----
THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG
INTRODUCTION
Exactly a year after the production of _Lady Inger of Östråt_—that
is to say on the “Foundation Day” of the Bergen Theatre, January 2,
1856—_The Feast at Solhoug_ was produced. The poet himself has
written its history in full in the Preface to the second edition
(see p. 183). The only comment that need be made upon his rejoinder
to his critics has been made, with perfect fairness as it seems to
me, by George Brandes in the following passage:[10] “No one who is
unacquainted with the Scandinavian languages can fully understand
the charm that the style and melody of the old ballads exercise upon
the Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and songs of _Des
Knaben Wunderhorn_ have perhaps had a similar power over German
minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has ever succeeded
in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet
retained the mediæval ballad’s sonorous swing and rich aroma. The
explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik
Hertz’s _Svend Dyring’s House_ is to be found in the fact that in
it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a
metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as
great mobility as the verse of the _Niebelungenlied_, along with a
dramatic value not inferior to that of the iambic pentameter. Henrik
Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the
mutual relations of the principal characters, _Svend Dyring’s House_
owes more to Kleist’s _Käthchen von Heilbronn_ than _The Feast at
Solhoug_ owes to _Svend Dyring’s House_. But the fact remains that
the versified parts of the dialogue of both _The Feast at Solhoug_
and _Olaf Liliekrans_ are written in that imitation of the tone and
style of the heroic ballad, of which Hertz was the happily-inspired
originator. There seems to me to be no depreciation whatever of
Ibsen in the assertion of Hertz’s right to rank as his model. Even
the greatest must have learnt from some one.”
The question is, to put it in a nutshell: Supposing Hertz had never
adapted the ballad measures to dramatic purposes, would Ibsen have
written _The Feast at Solhoug_, at any rate in its present form? I
think we must answer: Almost certainly, no.
But while the influence of Danish lyrical romanticism is apparent in
the style of the play, the structure, as it seems to me, shows no
less clearly that influence of the French plot-manipulators which we
found so unmistakably at work in _Lady Inger_. Despite its lyrical
dialogue, _The Feast at Solhoug_ has that crispness of dramatic
action which marks the French plays of the period. It may indeed be
called Scribe’s _Bataille de Dames_ writ tragic. Here, as in the
_Bataille de Dames_ (one of the earliest plays produced under
Ibsen’s supervision), we have the rivalry of an older and a younger
woman for the love of a man who is proscribed on an unjust
accusation, and pursued by the emissaries of the royal power. One
might even, though this would be forcing the point, find an analogy
in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and
determined character) has in Scribe’s comedy a cowardly suitor,
while in Ibsen’s tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband.
In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet
it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of
the _Bataille de Dames_ may have contributed to the shaping of _The
Feast at Solhoug_ in Ibsen’s mind. But more significant than any
resemblance of theme is the similarity of Ibsen’s whole method to
that of the French school—the way, for instance, in which
misunderstandings are kept up through a careful avoidance of the use
of proper names, and the way in which a cup of poison, prepared for
one person, comes into the hands of another person, is, as a matter
of fact, drunk by no one, but occasions the acutest agony to the
would-be poisoner. All this ingenious dovetailing of incidents and
working-up of misunderstandings, Ibsen unquestionably learned from
the French. The French language, indeed, is the only one which has a
word—_quiproquo_—to indicate the class of misunderstanding which,
from _Lady Inger_ down to _The League of Youth_, Ibsen employed
without scruple.
Ibsen’s first visit to the home of his future wife took place five
days after the production of _The Feast at Solhoug_. It seems
doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her;[11]
but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the
previous summer, when he was writing his play. It is a curious
coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and
her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had
occupied him in his first dramatic effort, _Catilina_, and which had
formed the main subject of the play he had just produced. It is less
wonderful that the same contrast should so often recur in his later
works, even down to _John Gabriel Borkman_. Ibsen was greatly
attached to his gentle and retiring sister-in-law, who died
unmarried in 1874.
_The Feast at Solhoug_ has been translated by Miss Morison and
myself, only because no one else could be found to undertake the
task. We have done our best; but neither of us lays claim to any
great metrical skill, and the light movement of Ibsen’s verse is
often, if not always, rendered in a sadly halting fashion. It is,
however, impossible to exaggerate the irregularity of the verse in
the original, or its defiance of strict metrical law. The normal
line is one of four accents; but when this is said, it is almost
impossible to arrive at any further generalisation. There is a
certain lilting melody in many passages, and the whole play has not
unfairly been said to possess the charm of a northern summer night,
in which the glimmer of twilight gives place only to the gleam of
morning. But in the main (though much better than its successor,
_Olaf Liliekrans_) it is the weakest thing that Ibsen admitted into
the canon of his works. He wrote of it in 1870 as “a study which I
now disown”; and had he continued in that frame of mind, the world
would scarcely have quarrelled with his judgment. At worst, then, my
collaborator and I cannot be accused of marring a masterpiece; but
for which assurance we should probably have shrunk from the attempt.
W. A.
-----
Footnote 10:
_Ibsen and Björnson._ London, Heinemann, 1899, p. 88.
Footnote 11:
See note, p. xxv.
-----
LOVE'S COMEDY
INTRODUCTION
_Kærlighedens Komedie_ was published at Christiania in 1862. The
polite world—so far as such a thing existed at that time in the
Northern capital—received it with an outburst of indignation not now
entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough. The
character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of
effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax has
little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or out of
it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the unflattering
veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless portrayal of the
trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in
the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage.
All these have long since passed in Scandinavia, into the category
of the things which people take with their Ibsen as a matter of
course, and the play is welcomed with delight by every Scandinavian
audience. But in 1862 the matter was serious, and Ibsen meant it to
be so.
For they were years of ferment—those six or seven which intervened
between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his
departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded
“Norwegian Theatre,” Ibsen was a prominent member of the little knot
of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt against
Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in well-to-do, and
especially in official, Christiania. Well-to-do and official
Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such conditions, the
specific literary battle of the Norwegian with the Dane easily
developed into the eternal warfare of youthful idealism with
“respectability” and convention. Ibsen had already started work upon
the greatest of his Norse Histories—_The Pretenders_. But history
was for him little more than material for the illustration of modern
problems; and he turned with zest from the task of breathing his own
spirit into the stubborn mould of the thirteenth century, to hold up
the satiric mirror to the suburban drawing-rooms of Christiania, and
to the varied phenomena current there,—and in suburban drawing-rooms
elsewhere,—under the name of Love.