Henrik Ibsen | Page 5

pounding drugs in a little apothecary's
shop in Grimstad. What Blackwood's so basely insinuated of
Keats--"Back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills and
ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the author of Endymion, was strictly
true of the author of Peer Gynt.
Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to
Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius.
For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the most
important of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of the most
original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for a
century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters.
Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing
at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it
looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked rocks.
No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect uniformity
of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything; in
Ibsen's time there are said to have been about five hundred of these
apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one of the
acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in fraying ipecacuanha
and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter.
For several years nothing is recorded, and there was probably very little
that demanded record, of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own interesting
notes, it is obvious, refer only to the closing months of the period. Ten
years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of Europe had
written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence such as
his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination
of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the
soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain,
the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness and a
thousand bitters."

It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his sixth to his twentieth year,
suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was at war--
the phrase is his own--with the little community in which he lived. And
yet it seems to have been, in its tiny way, a tolerant and even friendly
little community. It is difficult for us to realize what life in a remote
coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection with the
capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the capital was
as yet little more than we should call a village. There would, perhaps,
be a higher uniformity of education among the best inhabitants of
Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain graceful veneer of
culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected from Copenhagen,
would mark the more conservative citizens, male and female. A fierier
generation--not hot enough, however, to set the fjord on flame--would
celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the country in numerous
patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy like Ibsen would, on the
whole, prefer the former type, but he would despise them both.
He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a poverty that excluded all
indulgence, beyond the bare necessities, in food and clothes and books.
We can conceive the meagre advance of his position, first a mere
apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice of friends
to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some bright day,
himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know
this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he contrasted the
qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal," compounding
"beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the
world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have dreamed of
a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and strychnine and
the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the admirable inhabitants
of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies in their go-to-meeting
coats and dresses. He had in him that source of anger, against which all
arguments are useless, which bubbles up in the heart of youth who
vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, and knows not how
to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in manners,
unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us with
pathetic naïveté, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to the few
who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had

permitted it.
As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace.
By the respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its
little inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quite
nice." The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man, who did not
seem to