Henrik Ibsen | Page 2

stupidity; with
wonderful courage, with not less wonderful good temper and
persistency, he insisted on making the true Ibsen take the place of the
false, and on securing for him the recognition due to his genius. Mr.
William Archer has his reward; his own name is permanently attached
to the intelligent appreciation of the Norwegian playwright in England
and America.
In these pages, where the space at my disposal was so small, I have not
been willing to waste it by repeating the plots of any of those plays of
Ibsen which are open to the English reader. It would please me best if
this book might be read in connection with the final edition of Ibsen's
Complete Dramatic Works, now being prepared by Mr. Archer in
eleven volumes (W. Heinemann, 1907). If we may judge of the whole
work by those volumes of it which have already appeared, I have little
hesitation in saying that no other foreign author of the second half of
the nineteenth century has been so ably and exhaustively edited in
English as Ibsen has been in this instance.
The reader who knows the Dano-Norwegian language may further be
recommended to the study of Carl Naerup's Norsk Litteraturhistories
siste Tidsrum (1905), a critical history of Norwegian literature since
1890, which is invaluable in giving a notion of the effect of modern
ideas on the very numerous younger writers of Norway, scarcely one of
whom has not been influenced in one direction or another by the
tyranny of Ibsen's personal genius. What has been written about Ibsen
in England and France has often missed something of its historical
value by not taking into consideration that movement of intellectual life
in Norway which has surrounded him and which he has stimulated.
Perhaps I may be allowed to say of my little book that this side of the
subject has been particularly borne in mind in the course of its
composition.
E. G.
KLOBENSTEIN.
CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
The parentage of the poet has been traced back to a certain Danish
skipper, Peter Ibsen, who, in the beginning of the eighteenth century,
made his way over from Stege, the capital of the island of Möen, and
became a citizen of Bergen. From that time forth the men of the family,
all following the sea in their youth, jovial men of a humorous
disposition, continued to haunt the coasts of Norway, marrying sinister
and taciturn wives, who, by the way, were always, it would seem,
Danes or Germans or Scotswomen, so that positively the poet had, after
a hundred years and more of Norwegian habitation, not one drop of
pure Norse blood to inherit from his parents. His grandfather, Henrik,
was wrecked in 1798 in his own ship, which went down with all souls
lost on Hesnaes, near Grimstad; this reef is the scene of Ibsen's
animated poem of Terje Viken. His father, Knud, who was born in
1797, married in 1825 a German, Marichen Cornelia Martie Altenburg,
of the same town of Skien; she was one year his senior, and the
daughter of a merchant. It was in 1771 that the Ibsens, leaving Bergen,
had settled in Skien, which was, and still is, an important centre of the
timber and shipping trades on the south-east shore of the country.
It may be roughly said that Skien, in the Danish days, was a sort of
Poole or Dartmouth, existing solely for purposes of marine
merchandise, and depending for prosperity, and life itself, on the sea.
Much of a wire-drawn ingenuity has been conjectured about the
probable strains of heredity which met in Ibsen. It is not necessary to
do more than to recognize the slight but obstinate exoticism, which
kept all his forbears more or less foreigners still in their Norwegian
home; and to insist on the mixture of adventurousness and plain
common sense which marked their movements by sea and shore. The
stock was intensely provincial, intensely unambitious; it would be
difficult to find anywhere a specimen of the lower middle class more
consistent than the Ibsens had been in preserving their respectable dead
level. Even in that inability to resist the call of the sea, generation after
generation, if there was a little of the dare-devil there was still more of
the conventional citizen. It is, in fact, a vain attempt to detect elements
of his ancestors in the extremely startling and unprecedented son who

was born to Knud and Marichen Ibsen two years and three months after
their marriage.
This son, who was baptized Henrik Johan, although he never used the
second name, was born in a large edifice known as the Stockmann
House, in the centre of the town of Skien, on March 20, The house
stood on one side of a large, open square; the