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.

[1]. See Introduction to The Wild Duck, p. xxiii.

[2]. He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or thereabouts.

[3]. Preface to the second edition of Catilina, 1875.

[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.

[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.

[6]. Provost (“Provst”) is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent to Dean.

[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.

[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.

[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.