Early Plays | Page 4

literary career, was
written during the winter of 1848-49, that is in my twenty-first year.
I was at the time in Grimstad, under the necessity of earning with my
hands the wherewithal of life and the means for instruction preparatory

to my taking the entrance examinations to the university. The age was
one of great stress. The February revolution, the uprisings in Hungary
and elsewhere, the Slesvig war,--all this had a great effect upon and
hastened my development, however immature it may have remained for
some time after. I wrote ringing poems of encouragement to the
Magyars, urging them for the sake of liberty and humanity to hold out
in the righteous struggle against the "tyrants"; I wrote a long series of
sonnets to King Oscar, containing particularly, as far as I can remember,
an appeal to set aside all petty considerations and to march forthwith at
the head of his army to the aid of our brothers on the outermost borders
of Slesvig. Inasmuch as I now, in contrast to those times, doubt that my
winged appeals would in any material degree have helped the cause of
the Magyars or the Scandinavians, I consider it fortunate that they
remained within the more private sphere of the manuscript. I could not,
however, on more formal occasions keep from expressing myself in the
impassioned spirit of my poetic effusions, which meanwhile brought
me nothing--from friends or non-friends--but a questionable reward;
the former greeted me as peculiarly fitted for the unintentionally droll,
and the latter thought it in the highest degree strange that a young
person in my subordinate position could undertake to inquire into
affairs concerning which not even they themselves dared to entertain an
opinion. I owe it to truth to add that my conduct at various times did
not justify any great hope that society might count on an increase in me
of civic virtue, inasmuch as I also, with epigrams and caricatures, fell
out with many who had deserved better of me and whose friendship I in
reality prized. Altogether,--while a great struggle raged on the outside, I
found myself on a war-footing with the little society where I lived
cramped by conditions and circumstances of life.
Such was the situation when amid the preparations for my
examinations I read through Sallust's Catiline together with Cicero's
Catilinarian orations. I swallowed these documents, and a few months
later my drama was complete. As will be seen from my book, I did not
share at that time the conception of the two ancient Roman writers
respecting the character and conduct of Catiline, and I am even now
prone to believe that there must after all have been something great and
consequential in a man whom Cicero, the assiduous counsel of the
majority, did not find it expedient to engage until affairs had taken such

a turn that there was no longer any danger involved in the attack. It
should also be remembered that there are few individuals in history
whose renown has been more completely in the hands of enemies than
that of Catiline.
My drama was written during the hours of the night. The leisure hours
for my study I practically had to steal from my employer, a good and
respectable man, occupied however heart and soul with his business,
and from those stolen study hours I again stole moments for writing
verse. There was consequently scarcely anything else to resort to but
the night. I believe this is the unconscious reason that almost the entire
action of the piece transpires at night.
Naturally a fact so incomprehensible to my associates as that I busied
myself with the writing of plays had to be kept secret; but a
twenty-year old poet can hardly continue thus without anybody being
privy to it, and I confided therefore to two friends of my own age what
I was secretly engaged upon.
The three of us pinned great expectations on Catiline when it had been
completed. First and foremost it was now to be copied in order to be
submitted under an assumed name to the theater in Christiania, and
furthermore it was of course to be published. One of my faithful and
trusting friends undertook to prepare a handsome and legible copy of
my uncorrected draft, a task which he performed with such a degree of
conscientiousness that he did not omit even a single one of the
innumerable dashes which I in the heat of composition had liberally
interspersed throughout wherever the exact phrase did not for the
moment occur to me. The second of my friends, whose name I here
mention since he is no longer among the living, Ole C. Schulerud, at
that time a student, later a lawyer, went to Christiania with the
transcript. I still remember one of his