Henrik Ibsen

Michael Egan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134722921
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

1. Edmund Gosse on Ibsen’s poetry

1872

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‘Ibsen’s New Poems’, an unsigned review of Digte (Copenhagen, 1871) by Edmund Gosse, Spectator (16 March 1872), xlv, 344–5 (not zz April 1872, as given in The Letters of Henrik Ibsen (New York, 1905), trans. John Laurvik and Mary Morison, p. 23on. Sir Edmund W. Gosse (1849–1928), the well-known critic and essayist, first became interested in Ibsen after a visit to Norway. This piece is his first published article on Ibsen and the first mention of Ibsen in England. On 2 April 1872, Ibsen wrote to Gosse: ‘I could not wish a better or more laudable introduction to a foreign nation than you have given me in your excellent review, nor is there any nation to whose reading public I should feel it a greater honour to be made known than yours. If it can be done through your friendly and capable intervention, I shall be ever lastingly indebted to you.’ The full text, and Ibsen’s other letters to Gosse, are in Laurvik’s and Morison’s edition.

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The distinguished Norwegian writer whose name stands at the head of this article has won his laurels almost exclusively in dramatic literature. His plays are highly esteemed among his countrymen, and have gained him a place in their estimation second to none of his contemporaries. At last he has gathered together the lyrical poems of his later years in the little volume now under review, and they are found to possess all the grace and vigour that his earlier work would lead one to expect. It is rarely that an excellent dramatist is without the singing gift, the merely lyrical faculty; for one Massinger there are ten Jonsons and Deckers; and the genius of the Danish language tends so naturally to the ballad and folk-song, that it would be a matter for wonder if so eminent a poet should write in it without exhibiting this tendency. Still there are signs here to show that Ibsen feels himself to be master of another style, and not wholly at home in this.

These poems consist of short songs of irregular measure, after the fashion of Heine’s Lieder, of political and festival poems, of verses of society, and of easy epistles to friends. They are the work of the leisure hours of a man of letters. The thoughts are rather fantastic than profound, and there is much that is only of passing local interest; but there are high excellencies of structure and workmanship, and over almost all there is thrown a mist of dreamy pathos and pensive feeling that is very charming, and highly characteristic of the nation. The Norwegians are a courtly, dignified, somewhat melancholy people; their mirth is harsh and their humour bitter, but it is in their quiet meditative moods that they have most attraction, when they seem to retire into a sphere of thought, and lose all sense of worldly things in a sort of half-sad Nirwana. This pensiveness is well reflected in such verses of Ibsen’s as Enfuglevise (‘A Bird’s Song’) and the exquisite Med en vandli je (‘With a Water-lily’). He is peculiarly happy, at least to an Englishman’s fancy, when he takes some scene or custom of his own picturesque land as the subject of his musings; but he is not always to be persuaded to look kindly at the actualities of his fatherland. With true Norse instinct, he gazes longingly at the South, and would fain write of palm-groves and desert fountains. Now and then the wildness of Norwegian scenery rouses him to a grotesque indignation:—

Stene har vort Norge nok af;

Vilddyr har vi og en flok af!

Stones our Norway has enough of,

Wild-beasts too we have a troop of,

he cries, with Hudibrastic force, in an ungracious little poem of this collection.

It may be well to glance at the literary influences which have been brought to bear on this man’s life. A poet is not a solitary thinker; he is moulded always by the bias of his age. To read a poet’s character fully, we must know who his teachers and who his friends have been. Henrick Ibsen was born in 1828 at Skien, an ancient town near the lowest of the great chain of lakes that run up to the Hardanger Fjeld. Here, among the glorious pinewoods and large spaces of gloomy water, the boy took in his first experiences of life.

It was a stirring time in Norsk history. The Danish yoke had been thrown off for fourteen years, and the energies of the nation, so long palsied, were quickening into vigorous life. A school of literature was in the very act of creation. Just twenty years before had been born in the two great western ports two children whose writings were to raise Norway to a fair station in the world of European letters. The one, Wergeland, was a poet full of ardour and fire, eccentric, outrageous, republican, an innovator by the very conditions of his existence, as full of clear light and sharp piercing air as is the atmosphere of his country; the other, Welhaven, was gracile and polished, delicate in taste, correct in execution, a satirist, a critic, a Pope and a Wordsworth in one. Wergeland was the first to usher in the new epoch in the most startling fashion possible. In 1830 he published his Skabelsen (‘The Creation’), a colossal drama to which our own Bailey’s Festus is child’s-play. This portentous poem was but the first of the multitudinous writings of a volcanic author, whose genius, perhaps, culminated in his Svalen (‘The Swallow’), a summer-morning story for mothers who have lost children, a poem full of brilliant audacities and ringing with aerial melody, a work worthy of him who sang upon the Euganean Hills. In 1841 Svalen was published, our Ibsen being then a school-boy. Meanwhile the large brain of Welhaven had not been idle. The extravagances of Wergeland were the subject-matter of his earliest writings; with exquisite keenness and sagacity he exposed the faults of the brother-poet, not so keen, alas! to appreciate his beauties. Soon he became known as himself a poet. In 1834 appeared his Norges Dæmring (‘Norway’s Twilight’), a brilliant satire in sonnets, sparkling with wit and polemical zeal. The dilettante patriotism of the young men, the exuberance of the poets, the vanity of the great cities were trenchantly attacked in this delightful poem. He had drawn a hornets’ nest about his ears. Wild was the discussion, frantic the indignation roused; but the satire struck home to the heart of the nation, and a new epoch began. This great struggle occupied the boyhood of H. Ibsen. When he reached manhood Wergeland was dead, and Welhaven was beginning to rest upon his oars. The crown of poetry was round the head of Andreas Munch, the lady-lover and pourer-forth of gentle rose-coloured pensées. But two young men were growing up in whose minds the seeds of new and advanced thought were springing into blossom,—Henrik Ibsen, the founder of the Norwegian drama, and Björnstjerne Björnson, the first Norsk novelist.

Ibsen, originally an apothecary, found himself full of enthusiasm for literature, and threw off the bondage of his profession for a student’s life at Bergen. The deplorable state of the stage interested him from the first, and as early as 1851 he became director of the theatre at Bergen. In 1856 his first important drama was published, Gildet paa Solhoug (The Feast at Solhoug’), and at once obtained him an audience. In consequence he threw up his position in favour of Bj örnson and came to Christiania. From that time forth his success was assured, and when in 1864 he produced his medieval drama of Kongs-Enrnerne (‘The Pretenders’), he rose at once in popular estimation to the highest rank among living writers. Since 1864 he has been a traveller in the South of Europe and Egypt, as some of these lyrics testify, and is lastly, with B. Björnson, the recipient of a grant of money from the Storthing, answering, in some measure, to that attendant on our own Laureateship.

The poet is remarkable above his predecessors for his desire to preserve and restore in an artistic form the Norsk language or dialect. He is not content to write in the Danish of Copenhagen, but he studiously introduces the words common among the people and the idioms of the earlier original Norse tongue. In his hands the Norsk differs very markedly from Danish. It will be interesting to watch whether this innovation will prove to be a mere affectation of the moment, or whether a chasm between the two literatures will absolutely be formed. We fancy the labours of Ibsen and his fellow poets are in vain; we notice that Copenhagen is every year attracting the Norwegian poets as a place of publication more and more, and we fear this movement will suffer the fate of that formerly made to separate the literature of Scotland from our own.

2. Edmund Gosse on Peer Gynt

1872

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‘A Norwegian Drama’, an unsigned review of Peer Gynt (Copenhagen, 1867) by Edmund Gosse, Spectator (zo July 1872), xlv, 922–3. Gosse followed this up with a long, signed article, ‘Norwegian Poetry Since 1814’, in Fraser’s Magazine (October 1872), n.s. vi, xxxiv, 435–50, in which he included about two and a half pages on Ibsen, ‘the name which stands highest among the poets of the new school, a star that is still in the ascendant’.

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It is not too much to say that within the green covers of this book the Norwegian language received a fuller and more splendid expression than in any previous work. It comes from the hand of Henrik Ibsen, a poet who is fast gaining for himself that European fame which nothing but the remoteness of his mother-tongue has hitherto denied him; his Brand, published in 1866, produced a great sensation in Scandinavia, and paved the way for this later drama, which surpasses it in vigour and fire, if it does not rival its spiritual sweetness.

Peer Gynt takes its name from its hero, and the germ of him is to be found in an old legend preserved by Asbjörnsen. Peer Gynt was an idle fellow, whose aim was to live his own life, and whose chief characteristics were a knack for story-telling and a dominant passion for lies. Out of this legendary waif Ibsen has evolved a character of wonderful subtlety and liveliness, and hung round it draperies of allegorical satire. Peer Gynt is an epigram on the Norway of today; it satirises, as in a nutshell, everything vapid, or maudlin, or febrile in the temper of the nation; in sparkling verse it lashes the extravagances of the various parties that divide the social world. It is the opposite of its predecessor, Brand, for while that poem strove to wake the nation into earnestness by holding up before it an ideal of stainless nobility, Peer Gynt idealises in the character of its hero the selfishness and mean cunning of the worst of ambitious men. In form, the poem is indebted to Faust; but the style and execution are original and masterly: it is written in a variety of lyrical measures, in short rhyming lines. With such a prelude, we proceed to examine it.

The first act opens with a briskness worthy of the famous opening scene in the Alchemist. Peer Gynt, a strong, lazy young peasant, is in high dispute with his mother, Aase, a credulous, irritable, affectionate little woman, whose character is finely drawn throughout the piece. Peer Gynt’s nature is one that needs the spur of ambition, or the pleasure of sinning, to rouse it from inaction. In this first scene, it is not till his mother, in the course of her angry rhetoric, tells him that Ingrid, an old flame of his, is going to be married, that he shakes off his sloth. He determines to stop the wedding at all events, and with that object goes off to the bride’s home, leaving his enraged mother on the top of the quern, where he has lifted her in a fit of droll mischief. He breaks in, an unwelcome guest, among the feasting and dancing, and manages at last to snatch up Ingrid, and dashes up the mountain-side with her. But not before Solvejg, a gipsy-girl, has seen and fallen in love with him. So far the first act. To say that Ibsen describes scenery in his plays would be to do his judgment and taste a great wrong; but it is one of his greatest powers, and a manifest mark of genius, that by small and imperceptible touches he enables the reader to see the surroundings of his dialogues, and gather a distinct and lovely impression. In this act it is strikingly so; the narrow green valley, the buttresses of pine, the cloudy mountain-ridges, are never distinctly alluded to, and yet one is fully conscious of their presence; in this act, too, the simple humour of the dialogue is not interrupted or overlaid by any allegorical writing.

It is not so with the second act. Peer, outlawed for his treatment of Ingrid, whom he had immediately deserted, lives in the hollows of the mountains, and adversity makes for him strange companions. For he slips into an atmosphere of the supernatural, and holds intercourse with trolls and phantom-girls. The finest scene in the act is one of trenchant satire. He rides into the cave of the Old Man of the Mountain, King of the Trolls, a person averse to anything foreign or modern; he is hospitably received, on condition that he conforms himself wholly to the ways of the mountain-people. There is a benighted party in Norway whose one cry is monopoly,—Isolation is their gospel; that an article is made at home is the same thing as saying it is good. They are the Trolls! These people bring Peer some mead. Ugh! it is sour. Never mind, it was brewed in the mountain! Everything must be old-fashioned, home-made, national; and Peer Gynt at first is attracted by their volubility and arguments, but soon he is shrewd enough to perceive how unnatural and constrained it all is, and in pure selfishness he does what others have done from patriotism,—he leaves the Trolls for a wider, free sphere. Before getting rid of them, however, he has a deadly battle in the dark with Böjgen, the spirit of sounding gloom, in whose name we may trace the origin of our old nursery foe, Bogey.

In the next act, Peer is living all alone in the forest, tormented with spiritual and physical afflictions. In this down-hearted condition, hunted by day and plagued by night, we almost forget his selfish cunning in pity, even as the woes of Caliban soften our hearts. In the midst of all this, Solvejg, the brave gipsy-girl, comes up into the forest to be with him, having left all for his sake. But the happiness of her love is not for him; the spirits plague him sevenfold, and he flies from her and them. Poor old Aase has become a pauper, and lives, as Norwegian paupers mostly do, as the charge of a farmer. Peer comes to see her at dead of night, and the meeting forms one of the most powerful passages in this strange book. Old Aase lies in bed alone; at her feet her old black cat lies coiled; the wasted fire is burning low on the hearth. While she yearns for her son, the door opens and he is with her, awed and subdued by suffering. They play one of the old baby-games together, that Aase taught Peer so many years ago; but strange sounds ring in her ears, strange lights flash in her eyes; the fire burns down, the cat has slunk away; there is silence, and Peer is alone with his mother’s dead body. With one kiss of the dear dead lips he is away to sea. All this evolves itself in short lines, alternately rhyming, a wild, ghostly metre; it is the death-scene of all sentiment and goodness in Peer; henceforth he cares only to live his own life and in his own way.

The fourth act takes us on twenty years, and reveals Peer as a middle-aged gentleman of fortune, who, having given up his business in America, that of sending heathen-gods to China and negro-slaves to Cuba, is enjoying himself with a few friends on the coast of Morocco. The friends, however, sail off with his yacht, and are blown up with all his property. Once more he is alone and penniless. He starts east, announces himself as the Prophet in an oasis of Sahara, is hailed as such by a choir of ecstatic girls in a magnificent lyrical passage; passes through a variety of grotesque adventures, clothed in dialogue of the most brilliant sarcasm on political and social matters; and finally is discovered in Egypt, conversing with the statue of Memnon, and meeting with the most extraordinary personages. The advent of each gives occasion to a separate lampoon. We will describe one, to give an idea of the poet’s manner. At Cairo he is introduced to a melancholy shadow that has travelled from Malabar. Everything is going wrong in Malabar. Of old, four hundred years ago, only orang-outangs lived in the woods; and all their language was shrieking and whining. But the Dutch came, and settled; and now the Malabarese, degenerate folk, use human language, and forget the apes. But the Shadow and his friends have made a league for the restoration of whining and shrieking; they have proved the people’s right to scream; they have screamed themselves, to point out its use in folk-song-making; but alas ! the people will not have them. The meaning of all this is plain. It is a harsh, but surely half-merited attack on the voluble party who are striving to divide the language of Norway from that of Denmark by the construction of a new-old tongue on the foundation of Aasen’s Norwegian Peasant Grammar. These men—Mr. Kristoffer Janson is the most talented of them—write poems and edit newspapers in a dialect crude and ugly enough to deserve Ibsen’s cruel taunt about the orang-outangs. Peer Gynt suggests that the Shadows should go west, a hint perhaps to the folk-poets to try a new field in the prairies of Minnesota.

In the fifth act two scenes of peculiar excellence stand out. One is the first, in which Peer, after twenty years more of hard work in California, returns to Norway with a new fortune. The mountain-peaks, swathed with lurid storm-cloud, lie ahead of them, and as the scene proceeds, a tempest drives the ship against the rocks, and no one but Peer is saved. The feeling of the storm is rendered magnificently. The other is a funeral sermon preached by a village-priest over an old man who has been the opposite of Peer, living honestly in a narrow sphere, without ambition. The rest of this act is too allegorical, too metaphysical, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Critical Heritge Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• General Editor' s Preface
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Note on the Text
• 1 EDMUND GOSSE on Ibsen's poetry, Spectator 1872
• 2 EDMUND GOSSE on Peer Gynt, Spectator 1872
• 3 EDMUND GOSSE on Ibsen's elaborate irony, Fortnightly Review 1873
• 4 CATHERINE RAY on the conflict in Ibsen's work 1876
• 5 Unsigned notice of Quicksands (The Pillars of Society), tHEATRE 1881
• 6 RASMUS B. ANDERSON on Ibsen's genius, American 1882
• 7 CLEMENS PETERSEN on Ibsen and Bjomson, Scandinavia 1882
• 8 HENRIETTA FRANCES LORD on A Doll's House 1882
• 9 WILLIAM ARCHER on Mrs Lord's imperfections and An Enemy of the People, Academy 1883
• 10 MRS LORD replies, Academy 1883
• 11 T. A. SCHOVELIN on Kongsemnerne (The Pretenders), Scandinavia 1884
• 12 WILLIAM ARCHER on Breaking a Butterjly (A Doll's House), Theatre 1884
• 13 HAVELOCK ELLIS on the importance of Ibsen 1888
• 14 EDMUND GOSSE on Ibsen's Social Dramas, Fortnightly Review 1889
• 15 HENRY JAMES becomes interested 1889
• 16 ARTHUR SYMONS on Ibsen's modemity, Universal Review 1889
• A Doll's House (Novelty 1889)
• The Pillars of Society (Opera Comique 1889)
• Rosmersholm (Vaudeville 1891)
• Ghosts (Royalty 1891)
• Hedda Gabler (Vaudeville 1891)
• The Lady from the Sea (Terry's 1891)
• Brand (1891)
• The Master Builder (Trafalgar Square 1893
• An Enemy of the People (Haymarket 1893)
• The Wild Duck (Royalty 1894)
• Little Eyolf (1894 and 1896)
• John Gabriel Borkman (1896)
• The Vikings at Helgeland (Imperial 1903)
• The Collected Letters of Henrik Ibsen
• The Wild Duck (Court 1905)
• An Enemy of the People (His Majesty's 1905)
• Lady Inger Östraat (Scala 1906)
• Obituaries (May 1906)
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography
• Index