The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-05-24
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II n writer's chance ~ remembrance
may be- measured by the degree in which
he Ia appreciated during his lifetime in
foreign countries. tho name Of Henrik
1BsEN II destined long Ia remain cspe-
cially illustrious IN Scandinavian litera-
ture, There ia no doubt that his writ
ings have been read or acted outside OF
Scandinavia to an extent unparalleled
even by his fellow Norwegian BJ0RSsoN,
much less by the Swedes TEGNER and
RUNEBERG, or by the Dane OEHLEN-
sCHLlGRR. The influence OF all the
other authors whom we have named
who alone might pretend to be his rivals,
was confined TO Scandinavian peoples.
OF IBsEN alone it may be said that the
whole Of central and western Europe
responded TO the impulse given by him,
as regards the point of view from which
modern life ought to be studied and as
regards the spirit in which it should be
portrayed.
HENRIK IBsEN was prominently the
man who, as playwright and poet, under
took TO interpret the effects of nineteenth
century civilization in general, and Of
Darwinism in particular, upon social
and domestic life. AS might have been
expected, he did not find himself, or, In
other words, did not awaken TO the full
scope Of his opportunities and capa-
bilities, until his adult life was well adj
vanced. Born in 1928, he was thirty
years old before the "Origin Of Species
was published, and some years elapsed
before the far reaching relations Of that
work to current popular conceptions of
religion, ethics and history were dis
tinotly felt. That his mind would be
peculiarly open to the purport Of scien-
tifc investigation and discovery might
have been inferred from the fact that he
took but a faint interest In the study Of
the Greek and Latin classics, whereas
he was ap~prenticed to a chemist from
the age of fourteen. The incisive and
unfinching realism for which he was
ultimately to be distinguished may be
attributed partly to a congenital apti-
tude for exact scientific observation,
and partly to the close and sometimes
poignant contact with realities which he
owed to some years of active Journal
istic work. He had reached his thirty
fourth year, however, before the specific
qualities which were to be associated
with his name and to bring about a kind
of revolution in dramatic composition
were Enthusiastically revealed. He was
a romanticist more or less of the Oehlen-
schlager type long before he invented
and exemplified the peculiar outgrowth
of Romanticism which we have learned
to describe IS Ibsenism. OF the five
romantic dramas which he wrote as
director of OLE BULLS theatre at Bergen,
only two have been published-"Lady
Inger. at Ostrat' and the Banquet at
Solhaug"-and neither Of these, taken
by itself, would have availed to give him
a conspicuous place i n Scandinavian or
even in Norwegian literature. In two
subsequent dramas, on the other hand
THE Warriors in Helgeland" and "The
Rival Kings"-it was evident that he had
fallen completely under the sway OF
OEHLENsCHLXGER, in whose hands the
old Scandinavian mythology had been
made to live again precisely as had the
classical Greek religion in the hands of
KEATS, The two plays last mentioned
reproduced the style and spirit of the
Morse sagas, and it was forthwith ac-
knowledged that they had placed IBsEN
in the front rank OF Scandinay Wan
dramatists.
His first characteristic piece, however,
was Loves Comedy produced in 1852,
This was an undeniable precursor of his
~ironical social dramas, and the views Of
human life disclosed in it set the whole
Philistine world Of Norway against him.
Partly for this reason, and partly be-
cause he was exasperated by his coun-
try's refusal to take part with the Danes
in their struggle against the German
Powers, he said good-by TO Norway in
1854, and thenceforward lived chiefly in
Rome, Dresden and Munich till 1892,
when he returned to Christiania. To
the broadening influence Of his en-
vironment during those thirty pro-
ductive years should doubtless be attrib-
uted the fact that most of his work
belonging to that period has a cosmo-
politan rather than a provincial flavor.
Thus the lyric dramas Brand" and
peer Gynt,' which appeared in 1865
and the following year, and which are
of a very high order of poetic workman
ship, reflect, and are intended to reflect,
phases of distinctively Norwegian char
acter, yet they are acknowledged to
possess universal validity. In Brand we
have an incarnation Of the controlling
of beauty, whose devotion to an
ideal and whose ~self-sacriice end, as in