less in a society still more rudimentary than his own, such, for instance, as that of Russia. Ibsen was a product of civilization, which Tolstoi was not, but he was the product of an impoverished and remote civilization, of a people suffering from that radical inaptitude for receiving the truth which comes from knowing too much and yet not enough. Before 1870, - when the war in Europe, with its vast reverberations, revolutionized the spiritual life of Norway, it was a country of timid thoughts and vapid appreciations. There could have been no odder irony than that such a man as Ibsen should come out of such a country as was the unreformed Norway, the country of moral and intellectual twilight, even as we see it portrayed in Welhaven's despairing sonnets. There the spiritual soil was dense and dry; nothing could be done to vitalize it until, as Ibsen said so late as 1879, the ploughshare ran deep into its substance, and let in light and air by breaking up the old conventions and smashing the hypocrisies to bits. But what a strain, to the temper and to the heart, to believe one's self created to be the plough to till that harsh field from dawn to dark!

He felt it to be absolutely necessary to put a sensible distance between Norway and himself, and this is the secret of that voluntary exile of so many years, which is such a curious element in Ibsen's biography. Like Dante and Byron and Alfieri, he contemplates his country from a distance, unable to breathe the air of what he counts its moral dejection. Ibsen could not, at the height of his passion, conceive that other spirits, no less free than his, could endure an atmosphere in which he was blighted. "Come out from among them, carissimo!" he wrote from Rome in 1867 to Björnson in Norway; "to be at a distance is to get everything in focus." And he compared the people of Christiania to the inhabitants of Weimar, "Goethe's worst public." He writes in almost exactly the same tone to Magdalene Thoresen, the

aged novelist, and to Kristian Elster, the youthful poet. It is like the cry of an evangelist, warning the few just dwellers in a City of the Plain to come out quickly and be separate. When at last he was persuaded to return to the North, he could not endure being watched by "cold and stupid Norwegian eyes gazing out of the windows" in the streets of Christiania. There is something painfully sensitive, like the wincing of a wounded animal that growls, in Ibsen's attitude to Norway during these long years; and it is curious that, if he is severe in his dramas, he is far more so in his more private utterances, those, namely, in his poems and his letters.

Ibsen was directly hostile to all that made up popular feeling in the third quarter of the century. That was an epoch in which all things were looked for from the State, when the individual was expected to shrink back into the ranks and be lost, when the combinations of politics, the extension of trade, the development and discipline of military systems, were of paramount interest to Europe. In the midst of all this rarification, Ibsen, the most impassioned of individualists, found it impossible to breathe. He wrote to Magdalene Thoresen, in 1868, that nothing but a great national disaster would make Norway a country. in which a man could live in happiness. He compared such an one as himself to a hunted creature, fleeing from its enemies and asking for nothing more than a solitary place in which to lie down and die. If he had not Rome to shelter him, he had said in 1865, Rome with its "unspeakable sense of peace," - Rome "that has no political ambition, no commercial spirit, no military dreams," Rome where alone on earth "there is beauty and health and truth and quietude,' he knew not where in this troubled Europe he could hide his head and endure the wickedness of men.

Against this he was steadily fighting all the time. When Rome became the capital of Italy, and so no longer a place

for him, Ibsen folded his tents and went over the Alps to Dresden. Here, in his Saxon refuge, he took up, as before, his unceasing battle against all the political and social conditions which were then acceptable in Norway, carrying on with vigor his self-constituted duty as statssatyrikus, or public hangman, consistently and vigorously lashing those who were in power. In 1872, reviewing what he had accomplished, he admitted a faint satisfaction in having made the political leaders of his country a little ashamed of themselves and Norway not a little ashamed of them. But he was then only on the threshold of his activity; if he had Brand and Peer Gynt behind him, Ghosts and The Enemy of the People and A Doll's House were still undreamed of. Until, in 1891, he made his peace with Norway, he continued indefatigable in attack. It was the form his patriotism took, the bitterness of one who loves and sees the beloved descending into paths unworthy of her fame and glory.

Like Euripides, with whom it will be found that Ibsen had curious affinities, the Norwegian poet was essentially an "agitator of the people." He was born to stir the pools, to trouble the sleeping waters. But his attitude of revolt was one which was so marked that it could not preclude some manifestations of character which laid themselves open to reproach. If Christiania, in the seventies, had possessed an Aristophanes, a brilliant and unsparing defender of the old ideas in new forms, it is easy to suppose that the emphasis and subtlety of Ibsen would have offered him matchless opportunities of ridicule. The intense personal individualism of the dramatist offered an easy bait to satire, for it expressed itself in a wide variety of ways. A man does not conceive all his contemporaries to be in the wrong, without himself straining, at various points, the code of what is graceful and becoming. The fierceness of Ibsen took all manner of literary forms; it ran the whole gamut between the lofty rage of Brand's

sermons, and the shrill note of private pique which animates At Port Saïd. His Muse speaks now like a sibyl and now like a slighted nursery governess. In the world of spiritual matters Ibsen was a martyr, but he was also a tyrant, and he was too confident that everybody else was wrong not to trample upon his opponents when he found they were beginning to agree with him. We shall not do justice to Ibsen, as the supreme poetical "agitator" of his age, unless we give a glance to this aspect of his career.

In the absence of an Aristophanes, the comic press in Scandinavia did what justice it could to certain phases of the character of Ibsen, particularly as it was manifested after his misunderstandings with Norway were at an end, and he had become the cynosure of every curious eye in his daily stroll along Carl Johansgade. I believe that the caricatures of Ibsen will be eagerly collected one of these days by those who are anxious to comprehend the effect he produced on his contemporaries. He "lent himself," as people say, to caricature, and this is an art which has had brilliant proficients in each of the three Scandinavian countries. Ibsen, glum and surly amid the frenzied plaudits of his admirers at a banquet; Ibsen, dressed in the height, and beyond the height, of fashion, brushing up his whiskers by the help of a top-hat like a mirror; Ibsen, turning his back on a deputation of adoring ladies, leaving them planted, in short, upon their knees; these and a hundred more, in their amusing exaggeration, testified to the violence of his individuality, to the public consistency of his self-esteem. But, above all others, there recurs to my memory a caricature of some fifteen years ago, in a Danish paper, professing to give a picture of the king of Denmark granting an audience to the Norwegian poet. Christian IX, languid, affable, and immensely tall, bends graciously to receive Ibsen, who, represented as not more than three feet high, struts toward him through two files of flunkies, his bushy head set high in air,

and every inch of his body, from the topmost crest of hair to the tips of the tiny varnished boots, vibrating with gratified importance. In these absurd and entertaining designs future critics will find valuable material for completing their investigation into the real nature of this extraordinary man of genius, who felt strong enough, in the might of his enormous self-consciousness, to take the civilization of his country in his teeth, and to shake it as a terrier shakes a rat.

II

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If we set ourselves to see what external circumstances had to do with the development of this unique temperament, we are struck by the unity of the design of Providence. Everything combined to make Ibsen what he became. The forces which surrounded his early years were of a nature to destroy an individuality less vigorous than his, but they led and strengthened him. The spirit of Ibsen throve upon hardship as Mithridates was said to have flourished and grown fat on poison. In reviewing the life of Ibsen, the first point which strikes us is that he proceeded from a severe puritanical family. The house in Skien, where he was born in 1828, was burned down a few years ago. I once expressed to Ibsen my sympathy for the inhabitants of Skien, thus deprived of their only hostage to immortality. He replied, "Don't pity them for losing my birthplace; they did n't deserve to have it." (Somewhat the same sentiment was expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, about his own birthplace in Cambridge.) To this house, so properly destroyed, to this town of Skien, so predisposed for humiliation, Ibsen was always a stranger. He left the father and mother whom he scarcely knew, the town which he hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly dunce, in his fifteenth year. We find him next, with an apron round his middle, and a pestle in his hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. VOL. 98 NO. 1

What Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats, "back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills, and ointmentboxes," inappropriate to the author of Endymion, was strictly true of the author of Peer Gynt.

Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to Grimstad. It is a marvelous object-lesson on the development of genius. For six whole years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the most important of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of the most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for a century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills, and plasters. Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay, dotted with naked rocks. No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything; in Ibsen's time there are said to have been about three hundred of these apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one of the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in braying ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter. In a document of extreme interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his commentators, -the preface to the second (1876) edition of Catilina, Ibsen has described what the external influences were which found him in the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were the revolution of February, 1848, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to take up arms for the help of Denmark; and of nights, when all his duties were over at last and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world, instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his first drama, the opening lines of which,

"I must, I must; a voice is crying to me From my soul's depth, and I will follow it," might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole lifework. In one of his letters to Georg Brandes, he has noted, with that clairvoyance which marks all his utterances about himself, the "full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his years of mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of his satiric dramas, we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its intolerable laws and ordinances, modified a little, expanded sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always there. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to his readers.

What began in darkness at Skien, and went on in humiliation at Grimstad, only took fresh forms of distress when he broke away in 1850 to Christiania. When some one asked him, long afterwards, what elements had supported his youth, Ibsen answered, "Doubt and despondency," -tvivl og mismod, tvivl og mismod! This is remarkable as being the exact opposite of the ordinary poetic philosophy, as we find it laid down, for instance, in Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence, where the "happy Child of Earth" collects in youth a store of joy and genial faith, to serve against that inevitable winter when he must be invaded by "solitude, distress, and pain of heart.” The idea that the Poet, as a species of dormouse, stores nuts of joy against a chilly day, is common to the optimism of modern literature. Ibsen, preeminently, is not the dupe of it, and it is to a youth of despondency and privation that he felt he owed a manhood of independent vigor. His childhood oppressed by poverty and the absence of affection, his youth by a vain struggle for recognition and the burden of debts, his manhood by solitude in exile and bitter detraction at home,

the lot of Ibsen seems at first sight one of

the least enviable in literary history. But all these deadly troubles proved merely cordials and elixirs upon which his genius flourished, spreading through their darkness into the light and air. It is an instance which may well cause a determinist to question the wisdom of his formula, since, if ever there was presented to us a character which throve in unceasing resistance to the motives acting upon it, it was surely that of Ibsen.

In the history of Danish literature, which had up to the close of the eighteenth century been the literature of Norway also, Ibsen found a prototype for many of his revolts against convention and for much of his temper of resistance. This was the encyclopædic genius Holberg, who represents at its highest point of development the Scandinavian mind during the eighteenth century. The relation of Ibsen to Holberg was not unlike that of M. Anatole France to Voltaire. Holberg had striven to create a sentiment of personal freedom in the society of his day. Like Ibsen, he had hated a political liberty which was not the outward and visible sign of a liberty of heart and brain. He held that it was in isolation, in defiance, that a man learned to preserve all that was noblest and best in his individual nature. Between Holberg and Ibsen there lay a hundred years of what was called, and what no doubt deserved to be called, progress of a material and economical kind; but the advance had been made in the interests of the citizen as a unit in the mass, not in those of a man as such. Ibsen was no assiduous reader, and at no time a great lover of books, but he could break off his meditations at any time to reread, with rapture, the rich comedies of Holberg. In that writer he found characteristics which appealed to him as did none others in modern literature. It is unfortunate that this theme can hardly be pursued with much profit to Anglo-Saxon readers, for no interpretation of the works of the great Danish writer has hitherto been attempted in English.

Ibsen agreed with La Rochefoucauld in seeing the love of self to be the fundamental principle of all activity. The long and weary years in Skien, in Grimstad, in Bergen, while they seemed to pass over his character without moulding it in any way, had this eminent result: they emphasized and deepened his extreme intellectual reliance on himself. No one has felt less than Ibsen did the need of having a helper, a spirit of sympathy, walking at his side. When he was twenty-one, on his arrival in Christiania, he formed a close friendship with a peasantschoolmaster, Aasmund Vinje, who was ten years Ibsen's senior. Vinje, who was a poet of independent merit and a vigorous ironical thinker, was the first person of cultivated intellect whom Ibsen had met. He was a revolutionist, a skeptic, he, too, an "agitator of the people," and it is said that in Peer Gynt we have a portrait of him. They became close friends for a while, and the biographers of the greater poet have labored to discover why Ibsen, so youthful, so inexperienced, at the most malleable age, did not succumb to the fascination of Vinje. They overlook the fact that, from the very first, it was impossible for Ibsen to succumb to any influence. He could accompany Vinje, he could enjoy his conversation and his society, but the moment that there was a difference of opinion between them, it was Vinje whose attitude was modified, not Ibsen.

Again, in the very interesting and important matter of Ibsen's lifelong relations with Björnson, a subject of which there was practically nothing comprehensible until the publication of Ibsen's Letters in 1904, we see the natural result of the vicinity of a straight line to an undulating one. In private amiability, Björnson is shown to have exceeded Ibsen; his generosity of spirit and of act is charming. But Björnson, forever altering his immediate point of view, forever yielding to new spiritual attractions and grasping at new public aims, crosses and recrosses the path of Ibsen, with the

result that shock upon shock of private emotion follows. It is very interesting and this matter is sure to occupy more and more closely the attention of literary historians that both these men, the summits of intellectual attainment in their time and country, had the same desire to analyze and create "a royal soul" in which the ideal of Norwegian manhood should culminate. The place which the idea of a king takes in the works of Ibsen and Björnson is highly interesting to us, who have just seen Haakon VII, amid the frenzied shouts of a nation united as it was never united before, take his seat on the throne of a wholly independent Norway. But Björnson's private friendship with Ibsen throughout all this period of their striving toward a common point depended, with meteorological precision, on Björnson's agreement with Ibsen. Ibsen never budged, never resigned a point. If Pollux started on a new tack, he lost the friendship of his mighty twin; but it was no part of the business of Castor to pursue him on his course, or to persuade him back to unity.

III

The temperament which we have attempted to indicate, absolutely self-convinced, nourished upon questioning and despondency, led forth slowly into unflinching exposure of what it deems to be error, feebleness, want of consistent activity, is one which is likely in no case to develop quickly, and which, translated into the field of literature, depends for its ultimate reception on the degree to which its attitude is accepted by the most liberated spirits of the next age as being just and honest and wholesome. As late as 1879, Ibsen, no whit moved to suppose that his own position was a false one, still despaired of the redemption of Norway. His words are striking enough to awaken the most indifferent. To a generation absolutely wrapped up in moral and religious Podsnapery, to whom a new thought