“I never write a single line of any of my dramas unless that tray and its occupants are before me on the table. I could not write without them. It may seem strange—perhaps it is—but I cannot write without them,” he repeated. “Why I use them is my own secret.” And he laughed quietly.
Are these little toys, these fetishes, and their strange fascination, the origin of those much-discussed dolls in The Master Builder? Who can tell? They are Ibsen’s secret.
In manner Henrik Ibsen is quiet and reserved; he speaks slowly and deliberately, so slowly as to remind one of the late Mr. Bayard, the former American Minister to the Court of St. James, when he was making a speech. Mr. Bayard appeared to pause between each word, and yet the report in the papers the following day read admirably. This slowness may with Ibsen be owing to age, for he was born in 1828 (although in manner and gait he appears at least ten years older), or it may be from shyness, for he is certainly shy. How men vary. Ibsen at seventy seemed an old man; General Diaz, the famous President of Mexico, young at the same age. The one drags his feet and totters along; the other walks briskly with head erect. Ibsen was never a society man in any sense of the word, a mug of beer and a paper at the club being his idea of amusement. Indeed, in Christiania, until 1902, he could be seen any afternoon at the chief hotel employed in this way, for after his dinner at two o’clock he strolled down town past the University to spend a few hours in the fashion which pleased him.
Norwegian life is much more simple than ours. The inhabitants dine early and have supper about eight o’clock. Entertainments are hospitable and friendly, but not as a rule costly, and although Ibsen is a rich man, the only hobby on which he appears to have spent much money is pictures. He loves them, and wherever he has wandered his little gallery has always gone with him.
Ibsen began to earn his own living at the age of sixteen, and for five or six years worked in an apothecary’s shop, amusing himself during the time by reading curious books and writing weird verses. Only twenty-three copies of his first book were sold, the rest were disposed of as waste paper to buy him food. Those long years of struggle doubtless embittered his life, but relief came when he was made manager of the Bergen Theatre with a salary of £67 a year. For seven years he kept the post, and learnt the stage craft which he later utilised in his dramas.
A strange comedy and tragedy was woven into the lives of Ibsen and Björnson. As young men they were great friends; then politics drove them apart; they quarrelled, and never met for years and years. Strange fate brought the children of these two great writers together, and Björnson’s daughter married Ibsen’s only child. The fathers met after years of separation at the wedding of their children.
Verily a real comedy and tragedy, woven into the lives of Scandinavia’s two foremost writers of tragedy and comedy.
I spent part of two winters in Norway, wandering about on snow-shoes (ski) or in sledges, and during various visits to Christiania tried hard to see some plays by Ibsen or Björnson acted; but, strange as it may seem, plays by a certain Mr. Shakespeare were generally in the bill, or else amusing doggerel such as The Private Secretary.
At last, however, there came a day when Peer Gynt was put on the stage. This play has never been produced in England, and yet it is one of Ibsen’s best, at all events one of his most poetic. The hero is supposed to represent the Norwegian character, vacillating, amusing, weak, bound by superstition, and lacking worldly balance. The author told me he himself thought it was his best work, though The Master Builder gave him individually most satisfaction.
In 1898 Ibsen declared, “My life seems to me to have slipped by like one long, long, quiet week”; adding that “all who claimed him as a teacher had been wrong—all he had done or tried to do was faithfully, closely, objectively to paint human nature as he saw it, leaving deductions and dogmatism to others.” He declared he had never posed as a reformer or as a philosopher; all he had attempted was to try and work out that vein of poetry which had been born in him. “Poetry has served me as a bath, from which I have emerged cleaner, healthier, freer.” Thus spoke of himself the man who practically revolutionised modern drama.