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.