Henrik Ibsen | Page 4

Edmund Gosse
"small
middle-class school," kept by a man called Johan Hansen, who was the
only person connected with his childhood, except his sister, for whom
the poet retained in after life any agreeable sentiment. "Johan Hansen,"
he says, "had a mild, amiable temper, like that of a child," and when he
died, in 1865, Ibsen mourned him. The sexton at Skien, who helped in
the lessons, described the poet afterwards as "a quiet boy with a pair of
wonderful eyes, but with no sort of cleverness except an unusual gift
for drawing." Hansen taught Ibsen Latin and theology, gently,
perseveringly, without any striking results; that the pupil afterwards
boasted of having successfully perused Phaedrus in the original is in
itself significant. So little was talent expected from him that when, at
the age of about fifteen, he composed a rather melodramatic description
of a dream, the schoolmaster looked at him gloomily, and said he must
have copied it out of some book! One can imagine the shocked silence
of the author, "passive at the nadir of dismay."
No great wild swan of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more
ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has
done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with
anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only talent
which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. A little
while before he left school, he was found to have been working hard
with water-colors. Various persons have recalled finished works of the
young Ibsen--a romantic landscape of the ironworks at Fossum, a view
from the windows at Venstöb, a boy in peasant dress seated on a rock,
the latter described by a dignitary of the church as "awfully splendid,"
overmaade praegtigt. One sees what kind of painting this must have
been, founded on some impression of Fearnley and Tidemann, a
far-away following of the new "national" art of the praiseworthy
"patriot- painters" of the school of Dahl.

It is interesting to remember that Pope, who had considerable
intellectual relationship with Ibsen, also nourished in childhood the
ambition to be a painter, and drudged away at his easel for weeks and
months. As he to the insipid Jervases and Knellers whom he copied, so
Ibsen to the conscientious romantic artists of Norway's prime. In
neither case do we wish that an Ibsen or a Pope should be secured for
the National Gallery, but it is highly significant that such earnest
students of precise excellence in another art should first of all have
schooled their eyes to exactitude by grappling with form and color.
In 1843, being fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken
away from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence
with a young middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the
future proposed no task in life demanding a more elaborate education
than the local schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be
a professional artist, but that was one which could not be indulged.
Until a later date than this, every artist in Norway was forced abroad
for the necessary technical training: as a rule, students went to Dresden,
because J. C. Dahl was there; but many settled in Düsseldorf, where the
teaching attracted them. In any case, the adoption of a plastic
profession meant a long and serious expenditure of money, together
with a very doubtful prospect of ultimate remuneration. Fearnley, who
had seemed the very genius of Norwegian art, had just (1842) died,
having scarcely begun to sell his pictures, at the age of forty. It is not
surprising that Knud Ibsen, whose to were in a worse condition than
ever, refused even to consider a course of life which would entail a
heavy and long-continued expense.
Ibsen hung about at home for a few months, then, shortly before his
sixteenth birthday, he apprenticed to an apothecary of the name of
Mann, at the little town of Grimstad, between Arendal and
Christianssand, on the extreme south-east corner of the Norwegian
coast. This was his home for more than five years; here he became a
poet, and here the peculiar color and tone of his temperament were
developed. So far as the genius of a very great man is influenced by his
surroundings, and by his physical condition in those surroundings, it
was the atmosphere of Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded

the character of Ibsen. Skien and his father's house dropped from him
like an old suit of clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew,
the town which he hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom
he seemed a surly dunce. We find him next, with an apron round his
middle and a pestle in his hand,
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