The mirror. (Stillwater, Minn.) 1894-1925, 1907-05-23
6linpses at Henrik 1bsen:
11is Life and fills morks.

~..~e~
these Introductory remarks about the
great EDglishman and the great Ger
man before 1 proceed to cast few
glimpses at the life and works of the
great and illustrious Norwegian author
and dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. Because
men who seem to know whereof they
speak and write, men of eminent
knowledge and profound learning in
art, in science and in literature, in fact
the most eminent and greatest minds
OF our age, have agreed upon this fact
as consensus of the opinion of all,
that Shakespeare, Goethe and Henrik
1bsen combines the great and only trim
ity OF the greatest dramatists of the
human race. The world has never
produced three greater dramatic au-
thors; and there is very serious doubt
in many leading minds of today, that
she never will be able to produce the
like Of them any more, no matter if
Gabriel should tarry to sound his
trumpet until millions of generations
have passed away.
Henrik Ibsen was born some eighty
years ago il, one of the southern towns
OF Norway. He was very poor boy
from the start, as far as the financial
part is concerned; for altho born of
one of the leading families of the coun-
try, his family was very poor; and to
make the circumstances surrounding
him still worse and his struggle for
life and existence still more intense
and strenuous, his father died while he
was yet very young boy. He hated
1t and objected to it, but he was never
theless forced at the age of fourteen
to start as an apprentice in modest
little drugstore at Skien in order to
help support his mother and himself.
Of his early boyhood not much is
known, except that his teachers con-
sidered him to be very dull boy who
did not possess even ordinary faculties
for following the teachings in any
branch of common school learning.
The boy did not care, seemingly, for
the sneers aud chastisings of his teach
ers. He never said much to any one.
But he revenged himself in way that
made everyone laugh at the unhappy
Individual whom he chose to select as
an object for his satirical gift. He
made caricatures, satirical cartoons,
and wrote biting epigrams of everyone
he took dislike to and who had not
treated him right according to his
opinion. The cartoons and epigrams
were distributed among the pupils of
the schools he frequented and among
the people in the neighborhood. And
they never failed to accomplish what
their author waited them 20, to awak-
en- laughter and sarcastic merriment
among the public st the cost of his ad-
versaries. 10 certain degree he was
both feared and hated, because of this
gift of his, at this early stage of his
life, something he did not care much
about, at least so it seemed.
He appeared to be entirely void of
feeling or of sentiments of any kind.
For that reason no one sought him as
friend among his schoolmates; and
it Was the same when he became a
young man. He was lonesome, no
doubt, but he did not say anything
about it. He appeared to everybody as
an out-and-out egotist. Even his own
mother thought him to be an unsympa-
thetic and egotistical boy. But the rea-
son for this was. that not one of those
he lived among at that time understood
him. He was, in measure, the cause
of it himself, because, being of very
meditative and interpretive mind, he
never seemed to have time to talk or
make explanations of the thousand and
one minor details of theevery day life
and its routine. But, nevertheless, the
boy and the lonesome young man wept
many silent tear, and sighed many q
sad and heavy sigh on his pillow when
he lay alone in his bedchamber, be-
cause nobody cared for him.
But then came the visions Of his
brain: the murmers Of those that speak
in their silence to the. creative mind;
the voices Of those that craved for ma: