|
HENRIK IBSEN
HENRIK IBSEN EDMUND GOSSE PREFACE
Numerous and varied as have been the analyses of Ibsen's works
published in all languages since the completion of his writings there
exists no biographical study which brings together on a general plan
what has been recorded of his adventures as an author. Hitherto the only
accepted Life of Ibsen has been _Et literaert Livsbillede_ published in
1888 by Henrik Jaeger; of this an English translation was issued in
1890. Henrik Jaeger (who must not be confounded with the novelist Hans
Henrik Jaeger) was a lecturer and dramatic critic residing near Bergen
whose book would possess little value had he not succeeded in persuading
Ibsen to give him a good deal of valuable information respecting his
early life in that city. In its own day principally on this account
Jaeger's volume was useful supplying a large number of facts which were
new to the public. But the advance of Ibsen's activity and the increase
of knowledge since his death have so much extended and modified the
poet's history that _Et literaert Livsbillede_ has become obsolete.
The principal authorities of which I have made use in the following
pages are the minute bibliographical _Oplysninger_ of J. B. Halvorsen
marvels of ingenious labor continued after Halvorsen's death by Sten
Konow (1901); the _Letters of Henrik Ibsen_ published in two volumes
by H. Koht and J. Elias in 1904 and now issued in an English
translation (Hodder & Stoughton); the recollections and notes of various
friends published in the periodicals of Scandinavia and Germany after
his death; T. Blanc's _Et Bidrag til den Ibsenskte Digtnings
Scenehistorie_ (1906); and most of all the invaluable _Samliv med
Ibsen_ (1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned writer aspires in
measure to be Ibsen's Boswell and his book is a series of chapters
reminiscent of the dramatist's talk and manners chiefly during those
central years of his life which he spent in Germany. It is a trivial
naive and rather thin production but it has something of the true
Boswellian touch and builds up before us a lifelike portrait.
From the materials too collected for many years past by Mr. William
Archer I have received important help. Indeed of Mr. Archer it is
difficult for an English student of Ibsen to speak with moderation. It
is true that thirty-six years ago some of Ibsen's early metrical
writings fell into the hands of the writer of this little volume and
that I had the privilege in consequence of being the first person to
introduce Ibsen's name to the British public. Nor will I pretend for a
moment that it is not a gratification to me after so many years and
after such surprising developments to know that this was the fact. But
save for this accident of time it was Mr. Archer and no other who was
really the introducer of Ibsen to English readers. For a quarter of a
century he was the protagonist in the fight against misconstruction and
stupidity; with wonderful courage with not less wonderful good temper
and persistency he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place of
the false and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius.
Mr. William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attached
to the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in England
and America.
In these pages where the space at my disposal was so small I have not
been willing to waste it by repeating the plots of any of those plays of
Ibsen which are open to the English reader. It would please me best if
this book might be read in connection with the final edition of _Ibsen's
Complete Dramatic Works_ now being prepared by Mr. Archer in eleven
volumes (W. Heinemann 1907). If we may judge of the whole work by those
volumes of it which have already appeared I have little hesitation in
saying that no other foreign author of the second half of the nineteenth
century has been so ably and exhaustively edited in English as Ibsen has
been in this instance.
The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further be
recommended to the study of Carl Naerup's _Norsk Litteraturhistories
siste Tidsrum_ (1905) a critical history of Norwegian literature since
1890 which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modern
ideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway scarcely one of
whom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the tyranny
of Ibsen's personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen in England
and France has often missed something of its historical value by not
taking into consideration that movement of intellectual life in Norway
which has surrounded him and which he has stimulated. Perhaps I may be
allowed to say of my little book that this side of the subject has been
particularly borne in mind in the course of its composition.
E. G.
KLOBENSTEIN.
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish
skipper Peter Ibsen who in the beginning of the eighteenth century
made his way over from Stege the capital of the island of Moeen and
became a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the family
all following the sea in their youth jovial men of a humorous
disposition continued to haunt the coasts of Norway marrying sinister
and taciturn wives who by the way were always it would seem Danes
or Germans or Scotswomen so that positively the poet had after a
hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation not one drop of pure
Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather Henrik was
wrecked in 1798 in his own ship which went down with all souls lost on
Hesnaes near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's animated poem
of Terje Viken. His father Knud who was born in 1797 married in 1825
a German Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg of the same town of Skien;
she was one year his senior and the daughter of a merchant. It was in
1771 that the Ibsens leaving Bergen had settled in Skien which was
and still is an important centre of the timber and shipping trades on
the south-east shore of the country.
It may be roughly said that Skien in the Danish days was a sort of
Poole or Dartmouth existing solely for purposes of marine merchandise
and depending for prosperity and life itself on the sea. Much of a
wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the probable strains of
heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to do more than to
recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism which kept all his
forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian home; and to
insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain common sense which
marked their movements by sea and shore. The stock was intensely
provincial intensely unambitious; it would be difficult to find
anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more consistent than the
Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead level. Even in that
inability to resist the call of the sea generation after generation if
there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of the
conventional citizen. It is in fact a vain attempt to detect elements
of his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son who
was born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months after
their marriage.
This son who was baptized Henrik Johan although he never used the
second name was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann House
in the centre of the town of Skien on March 20 The house stood on one
side of a large open square; the town pillory was at the right of and
the mad-house the lock-up and other amiable urban institutions to the
left; in front was Latin school and the grammar school while the church
occupied the middle of the square. Over this stern prospect the tourist
can no longer sentimentalize for the whole of this part of Skien was
burned down in 1886 to the poet's unbridled satisfaction. "The
inhabitants of Skien" he said with grim humor "were quite unworthy to
possess my birthplace."
He declared that the harsh elements of landscape mentioned above were
those which earliest captivated his infant attention and he added that
the square space with the church in the midst of it was filled all day
long with the dull and droning sound of many waterfalls while from dawn
to dusk this drone of waters was constantly cut through by a sound that
was like the sharp screaming and moaning of women. This was caused by
hundreds of saws at work beside the waterfalls taking advantage of that
force. "Afterwards when I read about the guillotine I always thought
of those saws" said the poet whose earliest flight of fancy seems to
have been this association of womanhood with the shriek of the sawmill.
In 1888 just before his sixtieth birthday Ibsen wrote out for Henrik
Jaeger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It is
from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is
taken and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories
many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting however to find
that his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimistic
character. "Skien" he says "in my young days was an exceedingly
lively and sociable place quite unlike what it afterwards became.
Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself
or close by on their estates. Most of these families were more or less
closely related and dances dinners and music parties followed each
other winter and summer in almost unbroken sequence. Many travellers
too passed through the town and as there were as yet no regular inns
they lodged with friends or connections. We almost always had guests in
our large roomy house especially at Christmas and Fair-time when the
house was full and we kept open table from morning till night." The
mind reverts to the majestic old wooden mansions which play so prominent
a part in Thomas Krag's novels or to the house of Mrs. Solness'
parents the burning down of which started the Master-Builder's
fortunes. Most of these grand old timber houses in Norway have indeed
by this time been so burned down.
We may speculate on what the effect of this genial open-handedness might
have been had it lasted on the genius of the poet. But fortune had
harsher views of what befitted the training of so acrid a nature. When
Ibsen was eight years of age his father's business was found to be in
such disorder that everything had to be sold to meet his creditors. The
only piece of property left when this process had been gone through was
a little broken-down farmhouse called Venstoeb in the outskirts of
Skien. Ibsen afterwards stated that those who had taken most advantage
of his parents' hospitality in their prosperous days were precisely
those who now most markedly turned a cold shoulder on them. It is likely
enough that this may have been the case but one sees how inevitably
Ibsen would in after years be convinced that it was. He believed
himself to have been personally much mortified and humiliated in
childhood by the change in the family status. Already by all accounts
he had begun to live a life of moral isolation. His excellent sister
long afterwards described him as an unsociable child never a pleasant
companion and out of sympathy with all the rest of the family.
We recollect in _The Wild Duck_ the garret which was the domain of
Hedvig and of that symbolic bird. At Venstoeb the infant Ibsen possessed
a like retreat a little room near the back entrance which was sacred
to him and into the fastness of which he was accustomed to bolt himself.
Here were some dreary old books among others Harrison's folio _History
of the City of London_ as well as a paint-box an hour-glass an
extinct eight-day clock properties which were faithfully introduced
half a century later into _The Wild Duck_. His sister says that the
only outdoor amusement he cared for as a boy was building and she
describes the prolonged construction of a castle in the spirit of _The
Master-Builder_.
Very soon he began to go to school but to neither of the public
institutions in the town. He attended what is described as a "small
middle-class school" kept by a man called Johan Hansen who was the
only person connected with his childhood except his sister for whom
the poet retained in after life any agreeable sentiment. "Johan Hansen"
he says "had a mild amiable temper like that of a child" and when he
died in 1865 Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien who helped in the
lessons described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of
wonderful eyes but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual gift
for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology gently
perseveringly without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards
boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in
itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when at
the age of about fifteen he composed a rather melodramatic description
of a dream the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily and said he must
have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence of
the author "passive at the nadir of dismay."
No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more
ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done
its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with
anecdotes yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only
talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. A
little while before he left school he was found to have been working
hard with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of
the young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum a view
from the windows at Venstoeb a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock
the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid"
overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must have been
founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann a far-away
following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy "patriot-
painters" of the school of Dahl.
It is interesting to remember that Pope who had considerable
intellectual relationship with Ibsen also nourished in childhood the
ambition to be a painter and drudged away at his easel for weeks and
months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied so
Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In
neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for
the National Gallery but it is highly significant that such earnest
students of precise excellence in another art should first of all have
schooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color.
In 1843 being fifteen years of age Ibsen was confirmed and taken away
from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with a
young middle-class Norwegian of those days for whom the future proposed
no task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the local
schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be a professional
artist but that was one which could not be indulged. Until a later date
than this every artist in Norway was forced abroad for the necessary
technical training: as a rule students went to Dresden because J. C.
Dahl was there; but many settled in Duesseldorf where the teaching
attracted them. In any case the adoption of a plastic profession meant
a long and serious expenditure of money together with a very doubtful
prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley who had seemed the very
genius of Norwegian art had just (1842) died having scarcely begun to
sell his pictures at the age of forty. It is not surprising that Knud
Ibsen whose to were in a worse condition than ever refused even to
consider a course of life which would entail a heavy and long-continued
expense.
Ibsen hung about at home for a few months then shortly before his
sixteenth birthday he apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of Mann
at the little town of Grimstad between Arendal and Christianssand on
the extreme south-east corner of the Norwegian coast. This was his home
for more than five years; here he became a poet and here the peculiar
color and tone of his temperament were developed. So far as the genius
of a very great man is influenced by his surroundings and by his
physical condition in those surroundings it was the atmosphere of
Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen.
Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit of
clothes. He left his parents whom he scarcely knew the town which he
hated the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly
dunce. We find him next with an apron round his middle and a pestle in
his hand pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. What
Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats--"Back to the shop Mr. John
stick to plasters pills and ointment-boxes" inappropriate to the
author of _Endymion_ was strictly true of the author of _Peer Gynt_.
Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to
Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius.
For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850) and those years the most
important of all in the moulding of character and talent one of the
most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for a
century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes pills and plasters.
Grimstad is a small isolated melancholy place connected with nothing
at all visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it and it
looks out into the east wind over a dark bay dotted with naked rocks.
No industry no objects of interest in the vicinity a perfect
uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything;
in Ibsen's time there are said to have been about five hundred of these
apathetic inhabitants. Here then for six interminable years one of
the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in fraying
ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter.
For several years nothing is recorded and there was probably very
little that demanded record of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own
interesting notes it is obvious refer only to the closing months of
the period. Ten years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of
Europe had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence
such as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between
in which the soul is in a ferment the character undecided the way of
life uncertain the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness
and a thousand bitters."
It is easy to discover that Ibsen from his sixth to his twentieth year
suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was at war--
the phrase is his own--with the little community in which he lived. And
yet it seems to have been in its tiny way a tolerant and even friendly
little community. It is difficult for us to realize what life in a
remote coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection with
the capital would be rare and difficult and when achieved the capital
was as yet little more than we should call a village. There would
perhaps be a higher uniformity of education among the best inhabitants
of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain graceful veneer
of culture an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected from Copenhagen
would mark the more conservative citizens male and female. A fierier
generation--not hot enough however to set the fjord on flame--would
celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the country in numerous
patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy like Ibsen would on the
whole prefer the former type but he would despise them both.
He was poor excruciatingly poor with a poverty that excluded all
indulgence beyond the bare necessities in food and clothes and books.
We can conceive the meagre advance of his position first a mere
apprentice then an assistant finally buoyed up by the advice of
friends to study medicine and pharmacy in the hope of being some
bright day himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr.
Anstey know this or was it the sheer adventure of genius when he
contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal"
compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real
grip on the world"? Ibsen it is allowable to think may sometimes have
dreamed of a pill "with arsenic in it Hilda and digitalis too and
strychnine and the best beetle-killer" which would decimate the
admirable inhabitants of Grimstad strewing the rocks with their bodies
in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of
anger against which all arguments are useless which bubbles up in the
heart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy and
knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in
manners unprepossessing in appearance and as he himself has told us
with pathetic naivete unable to express the real gratitude he felt to
the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had
permitted it.
As he advanced in age he does not seem to have progressed in grace. By
the respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its little
inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quite
nice." The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man who did not seem
to realize his menial position. He was certainly intelligent and
Grimstad would have overlooked the pills and ointments if his manners
had been engaging but he was rude truculent and contradictory. The
youthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of its
elders in this respect and many a juvenile Orson has in such
conditions enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not a
favorite even with the girls whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One of
the young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe the
effect which the poet made upon them. They had none of them liked him
she said "because"--she hesitated for the word--"because he was so
_spectral_." This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to us for
a moment the distempered youth almost incorporeal displayed wandering
about at twilight and in lonely places held in common esteem to be
malevolent and expressing by gestures rather than by words sentiments
of a nature far from complimentary or agreeable.
Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his
twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the
passage of time was deliberate and the development of hard-worked
apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious
and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society it is
unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature.
The actual waking up when it came at last seems to have been almost an
accident. There had been some composing of verses now happily lost and
some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" to
the vexation of various worthy persons. The earliest trace of talent
seems to been in this direction in the form of lampoons or
"characters" as people called them in the seventeenth century
sarcastic descriptions of types in which certain individuals could be
recognized. No doubt if these could be recovered we should find them
rough and artless but containing germs of the future keenness of
portraiture. They were keen enough it seems to rouse great resentment
in Grimstad.
There is evidence to show that the lad had docility enough at all
events to look about for some aid in the composition of Norwegian
prose. We should know nothing of it but for a passage in Ibsen's later
polemic with Paul Jansenius Stub of Bergen. In 1848 Stub was an invalid
schoolmaster who it appears eked out his income by giving
instruction by correspondence in style. How Ibsen heard of him does
not seem to be known but when in 1851 Ibsen entered with needless
acrimony into a controversy with his previous teacher about the
theatre Stub complained of his ingratitude since he had "taught the
boy to write." Stub's intervention in the matter doubtless was limited
to the correction of a few exercises.
Ibsen's own theory was that his intellect and character were awakened by
the stir of revolution throughout Europe. The first political event
which really interested him was the proclamation of the French Republic
which almost coincided with his twentieth birthday. He was born again a
child of '48. There were risings in Vienna in Milan in Rome. Venice
was proclaimed a republic the Pope fled to Gaeta the streets of Berlin
ran with the blood of the populace. The Magyars rose against Jellalic
and his Croat troops; the Czechs demanded their autonomy; in response to
the revolutionary feeling in Germany Schleswig-Holstein was up in arms.
Each of these events and others like them and all occurring in the
rapid months of that momentous year smote like hammers on the door of
Ibsen's brain till it quivered with enthusiasm and excitement. The old
brooding languor was at an end and with surprising clearness and
firmness he saw his pathway cut out before him as a poet and as a man.
The old clouds vanished and though the social difficulties which hemmed
in his career were as gross as ever he himself no longer doubted what
was to be his aim in life. The cry of revolution came to him of
revolution faint indeed and broken the voice of a minority appealing
frantically and for a moment against the overwhelming forces of a
respectable majority but it came to him just at the moment when his
young spirit was prepared to receive it with faith and joy. The effect
on Ibsen's character was sudden and it was final:
...
|
Unpublished Work 
