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Updated: May 2, 2025
Sargent might paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her cultivated physical beauty.
I hope it will be remembered, when I am spoken of by the youngest critics after my death as a "Victorian" actress, lacking in enterprise, an actress belonging to the "old school," that I produced a spectacular play of Ibsen's in a manner which possibly anticipated the scenic ideas of the future by a century, of which at any rate the orthodox theater managers of the present age would not have dreamed.
He denied, in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poet whom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced the movement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainder of his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism, and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted for gospel.
I was not sorry, therefore, to hear that you had expressed yourself freely about the craze of a noisy minority for formlessness and ugliness in realistic literature. Ibsen's style, regarded merely as style, bears the same relation to good writing that the Star newspaper does to a Greek statue.
The year 1857 was one of unsettlement in Ibsen's condition. The period for which he had undertaken to manage the theatre at Bergen had now come to a close, and he was not anxious to prolong it. He had had enough of Bergen, to which only one chain now bound him.
In several of Ibsen's very roughest drafts, we find short passages of dialogue sketched out even before the names have been assigned to the characters, showing that some of his earliest ideas came to him, as it were, ready dramatized. One would be tempted to hope much of an author who habitually and unaffectedly thus "lisped in dialogue for the dialogue came."
Another resemblance between the old English and the modern Norwegian dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson's case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to the stage.
The effect on Ibsen's character was sudden and it was final: Then he stood up, and trod to dust Fear and desire, mistrust and trust, And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet, And bound for sandals on his feet Knowledge and patience of what must And what things maybe, in the heat And cold of years that rot and rust And alter; and his spirit's meat Was freedom, and his staff was wrought Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.
These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic."
From Edinburgh came out the familiar furniture he had been brought up among, which had been the stage scenery of his chimney-corner days, when the back bed-room chairs became a ship, and the sofa-back was his hunter's camp. At Vailima he, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, received "a race gift from his childhood's home."
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