“How well you bring out the poetry of winter in your Norway book! I think you are more of a poet than you know of yourself. I think, too, that you are a born story-teller. I never knew anyone seize so quickly and unerringly the spirit of those Icelandic tales. I believe you could modernise one of the Sagas so as to make it as interesting to a modern reader as a novel. I have an unbounded belief in you.
“Yours truly,
“J. Stefansson.”
Even as I write, the vision of Ibsen’s simple home, his plebeian wife, and the old man seated at his desk with his little dolls laid out before him, comes floating over the space of years.
A most unromantic figure, surely! though at the end of his life Ibsen formed an attachment for a young girl which was tenfold returned by her. He was, notwithstanding the rough exterior, an amorous old gentleman, fond of squeezing ladies’ hands and whispering pretty things into their ears, so I was not so surprised as some of his admirers on this side seem to have been.
He was hardly dead before a little book appeared in German, its title being Ibsen. With Unpublished Letters to a Friend, by Georg Brandes. The friend was the girl. There were twelve letters, including a set of album verses and the dedication of a photograph. The romance came about in this wise.
In the late summer of 1889 Ibsen and his family spent a holiday in the Tyrolese watering-place Gossensass, where they made the acquaintance of a young Viennese girl who was also staying there. She was eighteen years of age, the poet sixty-one; but that wide disparity did not prevent a warm friendship springing up between them, which apparently was cultivated more assiduously on her side than on his, and was eventually brought to a close, as far as overt manifestations were concerned at any rate, by his decision. On separating, the dramatist gave her a copy of his photograph, on the back of which was written:
“To the May sun of a September life—in the Tyrol; 27-9-89.—Henrik Ibsen.”
By the following February Ibsen was already troubled in his mind over the development which the friendship was taking. He wrote:
“Long, very long, have I let your last dear letter lie, read it and read it again, without sending you an answer. Please accept my most heartfelt thanks in a few words. And henceforward, till we see one another personally, you will hear from me by letter little and seldom. Believe me—it is better so. It is the only right thing to do. I feel it a matter of conscience to put a stop to this correspondence with you, or, at any rate, to restrict it.... You will understand all this as I have meant it. And if we meet again I will explain exactly. Till then and for ever you remain in my thoughts. And that all the more if this troublesome letter-writing causes no disturbance. A thousand greetings.