Henrik Ibsen | Page 7

and his staff was wrought Of strength, and his
cloak woven of thought.
We are not left to conjecture on the subject; in a document of extreme
interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his
commentators, the preface to the second (1876) edition of Catilina, he
has described what the influences were which roused him out of the
wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution of
February, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a
series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to
take up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, when all his duties
were over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret
where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world,
instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his first
drama, the opening lines of which,
"I must, I must; a voice is crying to me From my soul's depth, and I
will follow it,"
might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole life's work.
In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has noted, with that
clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the
"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of
mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of
his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its
ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its
intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded
sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent in
the poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which
were burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over
again to his readers.

But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now
presented itself. He was so busily engaged in the shop that he had, as he
says, to steal his hours for study. He still inhabited the upper room,
which he calls a garret; it would not seem that the alteration in his
status, assistant now and no longer apprentice, had increased his social
conveniences. He was still the over-worked apothecary, pounding
drugs with a pestle and mortar from morning till night. Someone has
pointed out the odd circumstance that almost every scene in the drama
of Catilina takes place in the dark. This was the unconscious result of
the fact that all the attention which the future realist could give to the
story had to be given in the night hours. When he emerged from the
garret, it was to read Latin with a candidate in theology, a Mr. Monrad,
brother of the afterwards famous professor. By a remarkable chance,
the subject given by the University for examination was the Conspiracy
of Catiline, to be studied in the history of Sallust and the oration of
Cicero.
No theme could have been more singularly well fitted to fire the
enthusiasm of Ibsen. At no time of his life a linguist, or much interested
in history, it is probable that the difficulty of concentrating his attention
on a Latin text would have been insurmountable had the subject been
less intimately sympathetic to him. But he tells us that he had no sooner
perceived the character of the man against whom these diatribes are
directed than he devoured them greedily (jeg slugte disse skrifter). The
opening words of Sallust, which every schoolboy has to read--we can
imagine with what an extraordinary force they would strike upon the
resounding emotion of such a youth as Ibsen. Lucius Catilina nobili
genere natus, magna vi et animi et corporis, sed ingenio malo
pravoque--how does this at once bring up an image of the arch-rebel, of
Satan himself, as the poets have conceived him, how does it attract,
with its effects of energy, intelligence and pride, the curiosity of one
whose way of life, as Keats would say, is still undecided, his ambition
still thick-sighted!
It was Sallust's picture more than Cicero's that absorbed Ibsen.
Criticism likes to trace a predecessor behind every genius, a Perugino
for Raffaelle, a Marlowe for Shakespeare. If we seek for the

master-mind that started Ibsen, it is not to be found among the writers
of his age or of his language. The real master of Ibsen was Sallust.
There can be no doubt that the cold and bitter strength of Sallust; his
unflinching method of building up his edifice of invective, stone by
stone; his close, unidealistic, dry penetration into character; his clinical
attitude, unmoved at the death-bed of a reputation; that all these
qualities were directly operative on the mind and intellectual character
of Ibsen, and went a long way to mould it while moulding was still
possible.
There is no evidence to