All through 1863 his condition was critical. He determined that his only hope was to exile himself definitely from Norway, which had become too hot to hold him. Various private friends generously helped him over this dreadful time of adversity, earning a grat.i.tude which, if it was not expansive, was lifelong. Very grudging recognition of his gifts was at length made by the Government in the shape of another trifling travelling grant (March, 1863), again a handsome sum being awarded to Bjornson, his popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair, to the King himself, who conferred upon him a small pension of 90 a year, which for the immediate future stood between this great poet and starvation. The news of it was received in Christiania by the press in terms of despicable insult.
But in June of this _annee terrible_ Ibsen had a flash of happiness.
He was invited down to Bergen to the fifth great "Festival of Song,"
a national occurrence, and he and his poems met with a warm reception.
Moreover, he found his brilliant antagonist, Bjornson, at Bergen on a like errand, and renewed an old friendship with this warm-hearted and powerful man of genius, destined to play through life the part of Hkon to Ibsen"s Skule. They spent much of the subsequent winter together.
As Halvdan Koht has excellently said: "Their intercourse brought them closer to each other than they had ever been before. They felt that they were inspired by the same ideas and the same hopes, and they suffered the same bitter disappointments. With anguish they watched the Danish brother-nation"s desperate struggle against the superior power of Germany, and save a province with a population of Scandinavian race and speech taken from Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom, whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in spite of solemn promises, refrained from yielding any a.s.sistance." An attack on Holstein (December 22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish War, to which a disastrous and humiliating termination was brought in the following August.
In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his native country. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Dupper alone stood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Lubeck and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the arms of its antique repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjornson, "there is blessed peace," and he settled himself down to the close contemplation of poetry.
The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter to the glow and splendor of Italy acted on the poet"s spirit like an enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome"s "azure sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music," and at first the contrast between the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almost intolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air and become as a little child. There has scarcely been another example of a writer of the first cla.s.s who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but debarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, has been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart of unclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Sh.e.l.ley and Keats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen broke free from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his life, was closing his romantic career.
Ibsen"s earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomed to at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The pa.s.sion of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered among the vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modern life, or their original significance. He missed the impress of the individual on cla.s.sic sculpture, as he had missed it--the parallel is strange, but his own--on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He liked a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt more at home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architects than with artists of a more archaic type. Sh.e.l.ley, we may remember, labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets the attractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavor of the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen"s admiration of a certain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worth recording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who made that might have made the moon in his leisure moments.
During the first few months of Ibsen"s life in Rome all was chaos in his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend.
In September, 1864, he tells Bjornson that he is at work on a poem of considerable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_, which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns call it, an "epic" poem; although a sketch for the _Julia.n.u.s Apostata_ was already forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would, sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife and little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that Michelangelo"s "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen"s nature were loosened. His soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the aching maladies of its youth.
He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress.
But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of his country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude and gloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded, sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, and already as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. But two things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm for their art, and a rebellious att.i.tude towards their immediate precursors in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. The friendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest of their lives, for it was founded on a common basis.
A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusing impression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, Christian Molbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wandering silently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets of his invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation by his sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering the ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries by a running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhat unsympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a more agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills, planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of these periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end of September he had completed it.
_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and the graceful wit of _Love"s Comedy_ was so great as to be startling.
Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations are powerless to tear away from n.o.ble verse, prevented this mastery from being perceived at once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not exist, for those who had eyes to see, and who were not blinded by prejudice, it was plain that a very great writer had arisen in Norway at last.
Bjornson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862) was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart in Scotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of clearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and some shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme, there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as manifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as it is surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpa.s.sed, but in its own peculiar province it has not been approached. It bears some remote likeness to _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in the literature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, of course, _Peer Gynt_.
For a long while it was supposed that the difficulties in the way of performing _Brand_ on the public stage were too great to be overcome.
But the task was attempted at length, first in Stockholm in 1895; and within the last few years this majestic spectacle has been drawn in full before the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow and elsewhere. In spite of the timid reluctance of managers, wherever this play is adequately presented, it captures an emotional public at a run. It is an appeal against moral apathy which arouses the languid. It is a clear and full embodiment of the gospel of energy which awakens and upbraids the weak. In the original, its rush of rhymes produces on the nerves an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as an oration, it is responded to as a great civic appeal; if as a sermon, it is sternly religious, and fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain air, with vague bells ringing high up among the glaciers, no one asks exactly what _Brand_ expounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent. Witnessed on the living stage, it takes the citadel of the soul by storm. When it is read, the critical judgment becomes cooler.
Carefully examined, _Brand_ is found to present a disconcerting mixture of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked, and it was asked at one, "Is _Brand_ the expression of Ibsen"s own nature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yet he was careful to remain outside. Ibsen, as we have already pointed out, was ready in later life to discuss his own writings, and what he said about them is often dangerously mystifying. He told Georg Brandes that the religious vocation of Brand was not essential. "I could have applied the whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest." (He was to deal with each of these alternations later on, but with what a difference!) "I could quite as well," he persisted, "have worked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for instance, as my hero--a.s.suming, of course, that Galileo should stand firm and never concede the fixity of the earth--or you yourself in your struggle with the Danish reactionaries." This is not to the point, since in fact neither Georg Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama, could have produced such a capacity for evolution as is presented by the stern priest whose absolute cert.i.tude, although founded, one admits, on no rational theory of theology, is yet of the very essence of religion.
Brand becomes intelligible when we regard him as a character of the twelfth century transferred to the nineteenth. He has something of Peter the Hermit in him. He ought to have been a crusading Christian king, fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city of G.o.d. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord, like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey in the desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any reference to accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religious conventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violent and incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants, but it must be an upheaval of all that exists, and it must bring Man into closer contact with G.o.d. Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is finally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church.
The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand with that extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbe Jules_ of Octave Mirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession of crises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weakness is the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developed what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception of such a rebel"s ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers or Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest of insurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track of his colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to the commentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, and endless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and a.n.a.lyze its forms.
There is, however, another than the priestly side. The poem contains a great deal of superficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporary Scandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing in Christiania, of a crafty court in Stockholm, and of Denmark stretching her bleeding hands to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with s.e.xton"s songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his motto "All or Nothing," persistently, almost tiresomely, like a modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea.
More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not white-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran theologians, a prototype of violent strength.
Yet Brand"s own mission remains undefined to him--if it ever takes exact shape--until Agnes reveals it to him:--
Choose thy endless loss or gain!
Do thy work and bear thy pain....
Now (he answers) I see my way aright.
In _ourselves_ is that young Earth, Ripe for the divine new-birth.
And it is in Agnes--as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience endures all the cruelties of her husband"s fanaticism--it is in Agnes that Ibsen"s genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure, Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are the delicate offspring of Italy.
Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which saw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen, and the poet"s audience was thus very considerably widened. The satire of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexels preached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _The Daughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were a.n.a.lyzed.
Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light and shade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of _Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it took its place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few books which continued, and still continue, steadily to sell. It has always been, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the most popular of all Ibsen"s writings.
This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniary fortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like _Brand_, in the conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not much exceed 100. Hardly had Ibsen become the object of universal discussion than he found himself a.s.sailed, as never before, by the paralysis of poverty. He could not breathe, he could not move; he could not afford to buy postage stamps to stick upon his business letters. He was threatened with the absolute extinction of his resources. At the very time when Copenhagen was ringing with his praise Ibsen was borrowing money for his modest food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome.
In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly nervous condition, in the midst of which he was a.s.sailed by a malarious fever which brought him within sight of the grave. To the agony of his devoted wife, he lay for some time between life and death, and the extreme poverty from which they suffered made it difficult, and even impossible, for her to provide for him the alleviations which his state demanded. He gradually recovered, however, thanks to his wife"s care and to his own magnificent const.i.tution, but the springs of courage seemed to have snapped within his breast.
In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote a letter to Bjornson, "my one and only friend," which is one of the most heart-rending doc.u.ments in the history of literature. Few great spirits have been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits" end to know what to advise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway, describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously came the manifest success of _Brand_, and, for the first time, the Norwegian press recognized the poet"s merit. There was a general movement in his favor; King Carl graciously received his pet.i.tion of April 15, and on May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a "poet"s pension," restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs.
The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where he found it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills.
He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo Gratiosi, two thousand feet above the sea. Thither he came, with his wife and his little son, and there he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him.
He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted himself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which he described as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of _modern_ Norway."
He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually composed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothly until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia. His own account was: "After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_, as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at Sorrento. So far away from one"s readers one becomes reckless. This poem contains much that has its origin in the circ.u.mstances of my own youth.
My own mother--with the necessary exaggeration--served as the model for Ase." _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen. None of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ now afflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published in November, 1867.
In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _Peer Gynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it made no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. "They have discovered," he said, "much more satire in _Peer Gynt_ than was intended by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I wrote it." It has been, however, the misfortune of Ibsen that he has particularly attracted the attention of those who prefer to see anything in a poem except its poetry, and who treat all tulips and roses as if they were cabbages for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it is surprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovely poem shaking the bauble of its fool"s cap at them, there can still be commentators who see nothing in _Peer Gynt_ but the "awful interest of the universal problems with which it deals." This obsession of the critic to discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has been one of the main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long black coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of the Nonconformist conscience.
Casting aside, therefore, the spurious "lessons" and supposit.i.tious "problems" of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above everything else which we see in _Peer Gynt_ we see its fun and its picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted admirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst of lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carried along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet"s genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boig, gigantic gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anything else written since the second part of _Faust_. The third act, culminating with the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of Ase, is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts Ibsen in the first rank of creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt and grotesque, we pa.s.s to a totally different and, I think, a lower order of imagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in the poem, often seems divided from it in tone, style and direction, and is more like a symbolic or mythical gloss upon the first three acts than a contribution to the growth of the general story.
Throughout this tangled and variegated scene the spirits of the author remain almost preposterously high. If it were all hilarity and sardonic laughter, we should weary of the strain. But physical beauty of the most enchanting order is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony.
It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere to the dramatic literature of the world, not by Shakespeare himself, is there introduced into a play so much loveliness of scenery, and such varied and exquisite appeal to the eyes, as there is in _Peer Gynt_. The fifth act contains much which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene so full of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing else in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter"s brush has contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls there is no parallel in plastic art but the most cla.s.sic of Norwegian paintings, Dahl"s "Birch in a Snow Storm." Pages might be filled with praise of the picturesqueness of tableau after tableau in each act of _Peer Gynt_.
The hero is the apotheosis of selfish vanity, and he is presented to us, somewhat indecisively, as the type of one who sets at defiance his own life"s design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or even a successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote the first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical cla.s.s of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen"s invention; he found it in those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjornson and Moe, in which he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Boig, a monster of Norse superst.i.tion, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_, which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to a justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen"s graver prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act, where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs and tears take corporeal form and a.s.sail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their reproaches.
_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment, and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as _Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it did not conform to the rules of poetic art, a.s.serted that the rules must be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book," he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry is shall be made to fit my book." There was a struggle at first against this a.s.sumption, but the drama has become a cla.s.sic, and it is now generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic intellectual caprices.
[Note.--By far the most exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has. .h.i.therto been given to the world is that published, as I send these pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_ all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.]
CHAPTER V
1868-75
Ibsen"s four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm.
The att.i.tude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other ill.u.s.trious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia dreaming of Italian liberty. _Casa Guidi Windows_ may be taken as the extreme type of the way in which Italy did not impress Ibsen. He sought there, and found, under the transparent azure of the Alban sky, in the harmonious murmurs of the sea, in the violet shadows of the mountains, above all in the gray streets of Rome, that rest of the brain, that ripening of the spiritual faculties, which he needed most after his rough and prolonged adolescence in Norway. In his att.i.tude of pa.s.sive appreciation he was, perhaps, more like Landor than like any other of the ill.u.s.trious exiles--Landor, who died in Florence a few days after Ibsen settled in Rome. There was a side of character, too, on which the young Norwegian resembled that fighting man of genius.
When, therefore, on September 8, 1867, Garibaldi, at Genoa, announced his intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet"s heart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill," but left Ibsen simply disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, it was the French who entered Rome. Of Ibsen, in these last months of his disturbed sojourn--for he soon determined that if there was going to be civil war in Italy that country was no home for him--we hear but little. This autumn, however, we find him increasingly observant of the career of Georg Brandes, the brilliant and revolutionary Danish critic, in whom he was later on to find his first great interpreter. And we notice the beginnings of a difference with Bjornson, lamentable and hardly explicable, starting, it would vaguely seem, out of a sense that Bjornson did not appreciate the poetry of _Peer Gynt_ at its due value.
Clemens Petersen, who, since the decease of Heiberg, had been looked upon as the _doyen_ of Danish critics--had p.r.o.nounced against the poetry of _Peer Gynt_, and Ibsen, in one of his worst moods, in a bearish letter, had thrown the blame of this judgment upon Bjornson.
All through these last months in Rome we find Ibsen in the worst of humors. If it be admissible to compare him with an animal, he seems the badger among the writers of his time, nocturnal, inoffensive, solitary, but at the rumor of disturbance apt to rush out of its burrow and bite with terrific ferocity. The bite of Ibsen was no joke, and in moments of exasperation he bit, without selection, friend and foe alike. Among other snaps of the pen, he told Bjornson that if he was not taken seriously as a poet, he should try his "fate as a photographer."
Bjornson, genially and wittily, took this up at once, and begged him to put his photography into the form of a comedy. But the devil, as Ibsen himself said, was throwing his shadow between the friends, and all the benefits and all the affection of the old dark days were rapidly forgotten. They quarrelled, too, rather absurdly, about decorations from kings and ministers; Bjornson having determined to reject all such gewgaws, Ibsen announced his intention of accepting (and wearing) every cross and star that was offered to him. At this date, no doubt, the temptation was wholly problematical in both cases, yet each poet acted on his determination to the end. But Bjornson"s hint about the comedy seems to have been, for some years, the last flicker of friendship between the two. On this Ibsen presently acted in a manner very offensive to Bjornson.
In March, 1868, Ibsen was beginning to be very much indeed incensed with things in general. "What Norway wants is a national disaster," he amiably snarled. It was high time that the badger should seek shelter in a new burrow, and in May we find him finally quitting Rome. There was a farewell banquet, at which Julius Lange, who was present, remarks that Ibsen showed a spice of the devil, but "was very witty and amiable." He went to Florence for June, then quitted Italy altogether, settling for three months at Berchtesgaden, the romantic little "sunbath" in the Salzburg Alps, then still very quiet and unfashionable. There he started his five-act comedy, _The League of Youth_. All September he spent in Munich, and in October, 1868, took root once more, this time at Dresden, which became his home for a considerable number of years. Almost at once he sank down again into his brooding mood of isolation and quietism, roaming about the streets of Dresden, as he hail haunted those of Rome, by night or at unfrequented hours, very solitary, seeing few visitors, writing few letters, slowly finishing his "photographic" comedy, which he did not get off his hands until March, 1869. Although he was still very poor, he refused all solicitations from editors to write for journals or magazines; he preferred to appear before the public at long intervals, with finished works of importance.
It is impossible for a critic who is not a Norwegian, or not closely instructed in the politics and manners of the North, to take much interest in _The League of Youth_, which is the most provincial of all Ibsen"s mature works. There is a cant phrase minted in the course of it, _de lokale forhold_, which we may awkwardly translate as "the local conditions" or "situation." The play is all concerned with _de lokale forhold_, and there is an overwhelming air of Little Pedlington about the intrigue. This does not prevent _The League of Youth_ from being, as Mr. Archer has said, "the first prose comedy of any importance in Norwegian literature," [Note: It is to be supposed that Mr. Archer deliberately prefers _The League of Youth_ to Bjornson"s _The Newly Married Couple_ (1865), a slighter, but, as it seems to me, a more amusing comedy.] but it excludes it from the larger European view. Oddly enough, Ibsen believed, or pretended to believe, that _The League of Youth_ was a "placable" piece of foolery, which could give no annoyance to the worst of offenders by its innocent and indulgent banter. Perhaps, like many strenuous writers, he underestimated the violence of his own language; perhaps, living so long at a distance from Norway and catching but faintly the reverberations of its political turmoil, he did not realize how sensitive the native patriot must be to any chaff of "de lokale forhold." When he found that the Norwegians were seriously angry, Ibsen bluntly told them that he had closely studied the ways and the manners of their "pernicious and lie-steeped clique." He was always something of a snake in the gra.s.s to his poetic victims.
Mr. Archer, whose criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent and hospitable Norwegians of that past epoch so difficult for an outsider--so difficult, in particular, for one coming freshly from the grace and sweetness, the delicate, cultivated warmth of Copenhagen. The political conditions which led to the writing of _The League of Youth_ are old history now. There was the "liberal" element in Norwegian politics, which was in 1868 becoming rapidly stronger and more hampering to the Government, and there was the increasing influence of Soren Jaabaek (1814-94), a peasant farmer of ultra-socialistic views, who had, almost alone, opposed in the Storthing the grant of any pensions to poets, and whose name was an abomination to Ibsen.
Now Bjornson, in the development of his career as a political publicist, had been flirting more and more outrageously with these extreme ideas and this truculent peasant party. He had even burned incense before Jaabaek, who was the accursed Thing. Ibsen, from the perspective of Dresden, genuinely believed that Bjornson, with his ardor and his energy and his eloquence, war, becoming a national danger. We have seen that Bjornson had piqued Ibsen"s vanity about _Peer Gynt_, and nothing exasperates a friendship more fatally than public principle grafted on a private slight. Moreover, the whole nature of Bjornson was gregarious, that of Ibsen solitary; Bjornson must always be leading the majority, Ibsen had scuples of conscience if ten persons agreed with him. They were doomed to disagreement. Meanwhile, Ibsen burned his ships by creating the figure of Stensgaard, in _The League of Youth_, a frothy and mischievous demagogue whose rhetoric irresistibly reminded every one of Bjornson"s rolling oratory. What Bjornson, not without dignity, objected to was not so much the personal attack, as that the whole play attempted "to paint our young party of liberty as a troop of pushing, phrase-mongering adventurers, whose patriotism lay solely in their words." Ibsen acknowledged that that was exactly his opinion of them, and what could follow for such a disjointed friendship but anger and silence?
The year 1869, which we now enter, is remarkable in the career of Ibsen as being that in which he travelled most, and appeared on the surface of society in the greatest number of capacities. He was enabled to do this by a considerable increase in his pension. First of all, he was induced to pay a visit of some months to Stockholm, being seized with a sudden strong desire to study conditions in Sweden, a country which he had hitherto professed to dislike. He had a delightful stay of two months, received from King Carl the order of the Wasa, was feted at banquets, renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bjornson were how beginning to be recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined.
It was doubtless Bjornson"s emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, if the Khedive had not invited him, in September, to be his guest at the opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l. This sudden incursion of an Oriental potentate into the narrative seems startling until we recollect that ill.u.s.trious persons were invited from all countries to this ceremony.
The interesting thing is to see that Ibsen was now so fatuous as to be naturally so selected; the only other Norwegian guest being Professor J.