IBSEN, HENRIK JOHAN (1828-1906) Norwegian poet and dramatist, was born at Skien on March 20, 1828. His father, Knud Henriksen Ibsen, a merchant, was of mixed Danish, Ger man and Scotch blood ; his mother, Maria Cornelia Altenburg was a Norwegian, of German descent. When Ibsen was eight years old, his father failed in business, and recollections of the penury which followed can be found in Peer Gynt.
He read widely and deeply, especially in poetry and theology, and in 185o he went to Christiania as a student; this year also saw the publication of his first play, a blank-verse tragedy, Cataline, which was followed, not many months after, by The Viking's Barrow, which was performed at the Christiania theatre, but not published. For a few months he co-operated in the pro duction of a weekly satirical newspaper; but in November 1851, when in September the paper's brief life of nine months had ended, he was appointed as "theatre-poet" to the new theatre at Bergen, established for the encouragement of Norwegian drama, by the violinist Ole Bull. This position Ibsen held until the summer of 1857, and this intimate connection with the theatre—he combined the duties of producer, manager, adviser and designer with that of a poet—confirmed him in his nascent desire to be a dramatist. The plays which he wrote for this the atre were St. John's Night (1853), Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), The Feast. of Solhaug (1856) and Olaf Liljekrans (1857). He left Bergen for Christiania in 1857; and his next two plays reflect the influence of his engagement and marriage to Susanna Thore sen; The Vikings of Helgeland (1858) and Love's Comedy (1862) are the first plays—earlier signs may be found in the lyric poems —in which the unmistakable voice of Ibsen is heard clearly. Both plays were misunderstood; and the fierce anti-romantic, idealistic satire of Love's Comedy caused a storm of indignation in Denmark and Norway : it is Ibsen's earliest protest on behalf of the inalienable rights of the individual, his first stroke in the life-long battle against the stupidity, the weight of the majority. There is in it not a little of the spirit which we find in the satiric poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough whose lines "0 let me love my love unto myself alone And know my knowledge to the world unknown," might well have been Henrik Ibsen's motto. He had accepted the position of manager of a new theatre in Christiania; but he could not get The Vikings produced there, and it was not acted until 1861. The next year his theatre failed, and Ibsen became adviser in aesthetics at the opposition house. In spite of his disappointment and the disgust he felt at the reception of Love's Comedy he wrote for this theatre The Pretenders (1864), the best drama of his saga period. It was a popular success; but the of the Christiania theatre were shy of its strange ness, and it was not until Ibsen's reputation was secure—after the publication of Brand and Peer Gynt—that it took its place as one of the masterpieces of the new theatre.
Ibsen had applied to the Storthing for a poet's pension, which had been recently given to Bjornson; but it was refused and in indignation he went into exile; for his departure to Italy in 1864 was not an ordinary tour to the sun and the south. It was under taken with a deep sense of injustice, which was partly respon sible for the two magnificent poetic dramas—Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) . After the issue of Brand he was granted a poet's pension and Ibsen had no longer to fear actual penury.
Plays.—In 1869 he wrote the earliest of his modern prose dramas The League of Youth, a political satire that roused as much animosity as did Love's Comedy; he was now settled in Dresden, but he returned to Norway for a short time after the publication of one of the most ambitious dramas ever composed —the huge double play Emperor and Galilean (1873), an ela borate historical study of the character of Julian the Apostate, which shows wide reading and a remarkable power of re-creating familiar figures of history. It is of great interest as one of the first attempts to free the study of Greek history from that smooth, neoclassical veneer by which it was falsified ; it is far nearer in spirit to the Greece of Gilbert Murray and Jane Harrison than the Hellas of Winckelmann or Shelley. These years also mark the end of Ibsen's work as a poet ; his collected lyrics were pub lished in 1871, and the occasionally exalted prose of Emperor and Galilean does not again reappear in his work, except in brief snatches in some of the later prose dramas. His deep interest in politics was made intenser by the growing power of Germany, and when the days of the Commune came in Paris he felt strong in him something of the hopes that had awakened in 1848, when there was promise of revolution in Europe. His only persistent political principle, to be found in every play from The Pretenders to When We Dead Awaken, was the necessity of a society which should give the amplest possible opportunity for the free growth of the individual, and he was naturally and inevitably disappointed with all movements of reform—liberal, radical, socialist--as con ducted. He found that they all tended in time to subordinate the individual to the state—and to Ibsen the state, the great compact majority, was always the enemy. In 1877 he published The Pillars of Society—a title which might be taken to cover all the social dramas which succeeded that play.
Later Life.—Ibsen's life presents few points of interest ex cept the steady production of his plays ; he never had the inclina tion nor the necessary social exuberance for such public and political appearances as were enjoyed by his rival and contem porary Bjornson. From 1868 to 1891 his permanent home was Germany, first in Dresden, later in Munich; in 1891 he settled in Christiania where he lived till his death on May 28th, 1906; for the four years previously he had suffered from an almost complete physical and mental collapse, and was unaware of the world without. Of his marriage (1858) there was one son, Sigurd, to whose education Ibsen devoted no little care and thought. When he left his home in 185o, he ceased to communicate with any of his family except his sister Hedvig; and although he had friends in journalism and in the theatre there is little evidence that any one had any real or permanent influence on the develop ment of his character and his genius; he was grateful to Bjornson, he was grateful to Brandes, for the support each gave him at different periods of his career, but he never showed the slightest inclination to accommodate his own thought to their ideas. No other dramatist of so immensely creative a genius has ever been so lonely : he did not need long or continuous intercourse with society. A chance word, a chance meeting, a sudden memory were enough to fertilize that powerful imagination which then, feeding on itself and nourishing the germ, gave birth, every two years, to a play which brought into the world entirely new char acters, owing only an infinitesimal part of their life to any power outside the mind and spirit of the dramatist. Ibsen was first and last a great poet, and a great mystic—one of the greatest poets and the greatest mystics who ever devoted himself to the drama; the "lyrical Pegasus" may as Brandes said, "have been killed under him," but his poetic inspiration burned all the more fiercely because of the severe limits which Ibsen forced on its expression, limits which are unfortunately very much exaggerated in the best-known English versions of his social dramas. His inter est in his characters, real as they are, intense as it is, is always dependent on his poetic vision of life; his vision of life is never dependent, as was B jornson's, Strindberg's or even Goethe's, on circumstances either of his own choosing or of chance. Ibsen was never afraid that facts, however obstinate, or persons, however powerful, could detract from the truth and his grasp of it. In this he showed signs of affinity to the theological outlook on the world. He knew, mystically, that his conception of life and of mankind could explain and express all the facts with which he came in contact; and if ever he met apparent contradictions, he was ready to dismiss them as irrelevant or worthless. His con summate skill as a dramatist, his influence in the making of a new European theatre must not allow us to forget that he was never of the movement which he caused, and of which he was acclaimed the leader. He was always in advance and always detached.
The same mistake was made, and is still made occasionally, by interpreters of William Blake, in whose thought may be found not a little which would have won Ibsen's sympathy and under standing. In Brand Ibsen preached his first and most defiant proclamation of the need of wholeheartedness in the personality; the prophet-priest of the play with his cry of "All or nothing," is a projection of Ibsen's own character, with its stern refusal to be diverted from his work. Balancing that play is Peer Gynt, the richest, the most imaginative and fantastic of Ibsen's works: as Brand stands for singleness of purpose, Peer Gynt is the embodiment of distraction and dreaming—a parody in some sense of Ibsen's own gospel that facts do not matter, anticipat ing the bitterer parody of The Wild Duck.
In A Doll's House (1879) we have the first emphatic statement of Ibsen's individualistic creed. It is not a feminist play. Ibsen was at the moment pre-occupied with the struggle between society and the individual, and he chose a woman as his protagonist because he knew that, on the whole, women were more likely to take a personal view of life than men. There are two dramas in the play—one consists in Nora's discovery that she has lived for years with a strange man; but this depends on the more essential drama that for Torvald a crime against society is more important than a sin against love. The same motive inspired, in a more terrible form, Ghosts (I 881) ; and when Ghosts roused fury throughout Europe, Ibsen retorted on his critics with An Enemy of the People (1882) in which he attacks the stupid majority who prefer disease to the confession of their disgrace. One of the loveliest of his plays, one in which the poet breaks out again, is The Wild Duck (1884). It has a tenderness and a lyrical beauty which stand out all the more strongly beside the fierce satire against those who have misinterpreted him. This play, with its quiet charm, its ironic humour and its devastating satire, is the record of Ibsen's discovery that it takes two people to tell the truth, one to speak and one to understand what is spoken—the last lesson to be learned by all prophets.
The intense reality of Ibsen's characters, while evident at a first reading or a first hearing of any play, can only be properly appreciated by continuous study of his complete theatre. It was his habit to make more or less complete histories of the lives of his people up to the moment of the opening of the first act ; and in the drafts and first version of many plays (available in the volume called Ibsen's Workshop) can be seen the care with which he worked, the fierceness with which he sacrificed anything, however entertaining, that was not essential, and his amazing power of getting the utmost out of a character or a situation. He made his people work for him ; and there is no dramatist in whose work it would be so hard to find a single speech out of character. He could not bear either to discuss, or to disclose, the idea of a new play until it was completed. He retired into his own world with his own people, and agonized until they be came and did exactly what he knew was right. When, as in The Lady from the Sea, he relaxes a little, the change in atmosphere is startling. This severity might be lamented as a defect did we not know from Peer Gynt that it was a deliberate sacrifice. The author of that supremely diverting and supremely mobile play cannot be accused of any incapacity for exuberance.
Ibsen's later abstinence from humour, from divagations and those extravagances which charm us in Peer Gynt was the abstin ence not of impotence but a deliberately self-imposed control. It may be that he sometimes regretted his choice, for in 1900 he wrote to Count Prozor (after the publication of When We Dead Awaken) that, if he comes back to the old battlefields, "it will be with new weapons and in new armour"; there was, how ever, to be no reappearance, and it would indeed be ungracious for the world to complain of any lack of variety in the drama of the man who left us Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken.
(R. E. R.)