The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

IBSEN.

The Scandinavian peoples hold to-day a position not unlike that held at the beginning of the century by Germany. They speak, in various modified forms, a language which the rest of the world have regarded as little more than barbarous, and are looked upon generally as an innocent and primitive folk. Yet they contain centres of intense literary activity; they have produced novels of a peculiarly fresh and penetrating realism; and they possess, moreover, a stage on which great literary works may be performed, and the burning questions of the modern world be scenically resolved. It is natural that Norway, with its historical past and literary traditions, should be the chief centre of this activity, and that a Norwegian should stand forth to-day as the chief figure of European significance that has appeared in the Teutonic world of art since Goethe.

To understand Norwegian art—whether in its popular music, with its extremes of melancholy or hilarity, or in its highly-developed literature—we must understand the peculiar character of the land which has produced this people. It is a land having, in its most characteristic regions, a year of but one day and night—the summer a perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma of trees and plants, and the rest of the year a night of darkness and horror; a land which is the extreme northern limit of European civilization, on the outskirts of which the great primitive gods still dwell; and where elves and fairies and mermaids are still regarded, according to the expression of Jonas Lie, as tame domestic animals. Such an environment must work mightily on the spirit and temper of the race. As one of the persons in Björnson’s “Over Ævne” observes—“There is something in Nature here which challenges whatever is extraordinary in us. Nature herself here goes beyond all ordinary measure. We have night nearly all the winter; we have day nearly all the summer, with the sun by day and by night above the horizon. You have seen it at night half-veiled by the mists from the sea; it often looks three, even four, times larger than usual. And then the play of colours on sky, sea, and rock, from the most glowing red to the softest and most delicate yellow and white! And then the colours of the Northern Lights on the winter sky, with their more suppressed kind of wild pictures, yet full of unrest and forever changing! Then the other wonders of Nature! These millions of sea-birds, and the wandering processions of fish, stretching for miles! These perpendicular cliffs that rise directly out of the sea! They are not like other mountains, and the Atlantic roars round their feet. And the ideas of the people are correspondingly unmeasured. Listen to their legends and stories.”

So striking are the contrasts in the Norwegian character that they have been supposed to be due to the mingling of races; the fair-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian of the old Sagas, silent and deep-natured, being modified, now (especially in the north) by the darker, brown-eyed Lapp, with his weakness of character, vivid imagination, and tendency to natural mysticism, and, again (especially in the east), by the daring, practical, energetic Finn.

However this may be, among the Norwegian poets and novelists various qualities often meet together in striking opposition; wild and fantastic imagination stands beside an exact realism and a loving grasp of nature; a tendency to mysticism and symbol beside a healthy naturalism. We find these characteristics variously combined in Ibsen; in Björnson, with his virile strength and generous emotions, amid which a mystic influence now and then appears; in Jonas Lie, with his subtle and delicate spirit, so intimately national; in Kielland, a realistic novelist of most dainty and delicate art, beneath which may be heard the sombre undertone of his sympathy with the weak and the oppressed. Of these writers, and others only less remarkable, one alone is at all well known in England, and even he is known exclusively by his early work, especially by that most delightful of peasant stories, “Arne.” In Germany the Scandinavian novelists and dramatists have received much attention, and are widely known through excellent and easily accessible translations. Yet our English race and speech are even more closely allied to the northern; our land is studded with easily recognizable Scandinavian place-names and Scandinavian colonies, whose dialects are full of genuine Scandinavian words unknown to literary English. It is not likely that this indifference to the social, political, and literary history of our northern kinsmen can last much longer.

About 1720 a Danish skipper, one Peter Ibsen, came over from Moen[8] to Bergen and settled there. He married the daughter of a German who had likewise emigrated from his own country: these were the poet’s great-great-grandparents. Peter Ibsen had a son, Henrik Petersen Ibsen, who was also a ship’s captain. He married a lady whose name is given as Wenche Dischington, the daughter of a Scotchman naturalized in Norway. This Henrik Ibsen settled in Skien, and had a son of the same name who married a German wife. All these Ibsens were sailors. Henrik Ibsen’s son, Knud Ibsen, the dramatist’s father, like his father married a wife of German extraction, Maria Cornelia Altenburg, the daughter of a merchant who had begun life as a sailor.

This ancestry is very significant. It will be seen that Ibsen is on both sides predominantly German, and that in his German and Danish blood there is an interesting Scotch strain. The tendency to philosophic abstraction and the strenuous earnestness, mingling with the more characteristically northern imaginative influences, are explained by this German and Scotch ancestry; it explains also the peculiarly isolated and yet cosmopolitan attitude which marks Ibsen—why it is that his works have been so enthusiastically received and so easily naturalized in Germany, and why, now that they are beginning to be known, they promise to make so deep an impression in our own land.

Ibsen’s mother possessed a shy, silent, and solitary nature, which she imparted to her son. One of her daughters thus describes her: “She was a quiet, lovable woman, the soul of the house, devoted to her husband and children. She was always sacrificing herself. There was no bitterness or reproach in her.” The father was of cheerful disposition, a man of sociable tastes, popular in his circle, but also feared, for he had a keen wit, and, like his son, he could use it unmercifully.

Knud Ibsen’s eldest son, Henrik,[9] was born at Skien, a busy little town of some 3,000 inhabitants occupied in the timber trade, on the 20th March, 1828. “I was born,” the dramatist writes in some reminiscences published by Mr. Jaeger for the first time, “in a house in the market-place, Stockmann’s house it was then called. The house lay right opposite the church with its high steps and large tower. To the right, in front of the church, stood the town pillory, and to the left the town-hall, the lock-up, and the ‘madhouse.’ The fourth side of the market-place was occupied by the Latin school and the town school. The church lay free in the middle. This prospect was the first view of the earth that presented itself to my eyes. All buildings; no green, no rural open landscape.” It was in the church tower that the baby Henrik received his first conscious and deep impression. The nursemaid took him up and held him out (to the horror of his mother below), and he never forgot that new and strange vision of the world from above. Ibsen goes on to describe the attractions which were held for him in the gloomy town-hall and the pillory, unused for many years, a red-brown post of about a man’s height, with a great round knob which had originally been painted black, but which then looked like a human face. In front of the post hung an iron chain, and in that an iron ring which seemed like two small arms ready to clasp the child’s neck on the least provocation. And then there was the town-hall. That, too, had high steps like the church, and underneath it was the gaol with its barred windows: “inside the bars I have seen many pale and dark faces.” And then there was the “madhouse,” which in its time had really been used to confine lunatics. That also was barred, but inside the bars the little window was filled by a massive iron plate with small round holes like a sieve. This place was said to have been the abode of a famous criminal who had been branded.