Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much more similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that tragedy of Catiline which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to state, Ibsen had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay a wager that, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of Ben Jonson. Yet there is an odd sort of resemblance, founded on the fact that each poet keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the Latins. Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of Catiline as if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the narrative, each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of the arch- conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In both poems, Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is—
Armed with a glory high as his despair.
Another resemblance between the old English and the modern Norwegian dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson's case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to the stage.
This is a very curious example, among many which might be brought forward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all his early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. This tendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in Brand and Peer Gynt, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted for his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had quitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic expression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear it altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in itself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements.
The close of Ibsen's Catalina is, as we have said, composed entirely in rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poet could not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged to start running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here is a fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent for dead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia has stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speech which ends thus:—
See, the pathway breaks, divided! I will wander, dumb, To the left hand.
AURELIA (appearing, blood-stained, at the door of the tent). Nay! the right hand! Towards Elysium.
CATILINE (greatly alarmed). O yon pallid apparition, how it fills me with remorse. 'Tis herself! Aurelia! tell me, art thou living? not a corse?
AURELIA. Yes, I live that I may full thy sea of sorrows, and may lie With my bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then die.
CATILINE (bewildered). What? thou livest?