When questioning us as well as when volunteering an opinion which was not in direct reply to a query, he was not so painfully cautious.
The Norwegian had prepared a list of questions threateningly long, to put to the old gentleman, but he religiously went through it from beginning to end. He quizzed him about everything and everybody, it seemed, from Prohibition, the Kaiser, Bismarck, Scandinavia, Russia and general European politics, to family matters, his manner of writing, his forthcoming play, and about numberless obscure passages in his earlier dramas. Ibsen took the blows as they fell, dodging, as I have said, when he felt like it, but receiving them in the main quite stolidly. Many of the questions were killed almost before they were delivered, by a frown or a gesture. Speaking about the alleged obscure passages in his books, he said: "They may be there, but I did not mean them to be obscure. For a time I used to answer letters from persons who wanted me to explain this or that sentence, but I had to give up the job—it got so enervating. I make my words as plain as I know how. Most of my readers comprehend me, I trust."
Ibsen used Norwegian when fencing with my companion, but with me he very kindly resorted to German, asking me in quite a fatherly way about my family, my travels and studies and my opinion of Germany. Occasionally he would smile, and then we saw the man at his best. Crabbed and curt he might be at times, but behind that genial smile there was without doubt a very kind nature, and I was sure of it then and have been ever since. In the years that are to come much will be written about Ibsen, the writer, the pessimist, the sociological surgeon, and what not, but nothing that has been or is still to be written about him will ever succeed in revealing to me the man, as that friendly chat in his home in Munich. An experience, by the way, which may possibly prove that my friend, Mr. Arthur Symons, was correct in an argument we had some years ago in London, about personal interviews or "sittings" with famous people, particularly writers. At the time I advanced the opinion that writers, if they were worth while at all, proved their worth best in what they wrote, and not in what they said, that their books and not their physical presence were what ought to interest. Symons held that he had never read an author who would not have been more interesting to him (Symons) had he been able to meet and talk with him. More about Symons later on. His books and personal friendship are both valuable to me, but for very different reasons. I seldom think of Symons, the man, when I read his essays and verses, and I only infrequently think of his books, or of him as a literary man at all, when we are together.
[CHAPTER XII]
A VISIT TO LONDON
In the autumn of 1892 my university days were interrupted by a visit to London. Political economy, as taught and written in German, was becoming more and more of a puzzle to me, in spite of the fact that I had made valuable progress in picking up and using German colloquial expressions. I could berate a cabby, for instance, very forcefully, but somehow I could not accustom my ear to the academic language of Professors Schmoller and Wagner. I finally persuaded my people that if I was to continue to explore political economy I ought to be allowed to come to terms with it in my own vernacular, at least until I knew something about it separate from German, which, at that time, was quite as much a study to me as political economy itself. My arguments in this matter eventually prevailed, and I was sent off to London to read up on the subject in the British Museum. That this reading was a good thing in its way is doubtless true, and the six months spent in London at that time I have always counted among the Streber months of my career. Perhaps I devoted more time than was right to geography and the books of travelers and explorers, but I pegged away at my major too, after a fashion, at times covering my desk with books on the subject. If many volumes stacked up in front of a reader make a savant in the British Museum, then I deserved a place in the front rank.
But with all my good intentions, reading and note-taking, the main good that London did for me, was accomplished outside of the somber pile in Bloomsbury. The Museum was principally a place in which to retreat when the life in the streets seemed likely to unduly excite my Wanderlust. There I could also read about many of the things that interested me in London itself.
Colonization was the special subject I was supposed to be looking into, but Dr. Richard Garnett, the official at the Museum who gave me my reader's ticket, could never get over the notion that I meant "composition," when telling him the subject I was to take up. Three times I insisted that it was colonization, but whether the good man was deaf, or determined that I should tackle composition, I never found out. My friend, Arthur Symons, introduced me to him and distinctly heard me say colonization, but this did not help matters. The good doctor insisted on showing me about the reading room, pointing out the general reference books which he thought would facilitate my acquaintance with composition. We frequently greeted each other in the corridors afterwards, but the doctor kindly refrained from quizzing me concerning my reading, and probably had quite forgotten what it was all about anyhow—a matter of conjecture in my own mind on occasions.