Henrik Ibsen | Page 9

Ibsen ever started an Olaf Trygvesön?
One of his poems had already been printed in a Christiania newspaper.
The call was overwhelming; he could endure Grimstad and the
gallipots no longer. In March, 1850, at the age of twenty-one, Ibsen
stuck a few dollars in his pocket and went off to try his fortune in the
capital.
CHAPTER II
EARLY INFLUENCES
In middle life Ibsen, who suppressed for as long a time as he could
most of his other juvenile works, deliberately lifted Catilina from the
oblivion into which it had fallen, and replaced it in the series of his
writings. This is enough to indicate to us that he regarded it as of
relative importance, and imperfect as it is, and unlike his later plays, it
demands some critical examination. I not know whether any one ever
happened to ask Ibsen whether he had been aware that Alexandre
Dumas produced in Paris a five-act drama of Catiline at the very
moment (October, 1848) when Ibsen started the composition of his. It is
quite possible that the young Norwegian saw this fact noted in a
newspaper, and immediately determined to try what he could make of
the same subject. In Dumas' play Catiline is presented merely as a
demagogue; he is the red Flag personified, and the political situation
in France is discussed under a slight veil of Roman history. Catiline is
simply a sort of Robespierre brought up to date. There is no trace of all

this in Ibsen.
Oddly enough, though the paradox is easily explained, we find much
more similarity when we compare the Norwegian drama with that
tragedy of Catiline which Ben Jonson published in 1611. Needless to
state, Ibsen had never read the old English play; it would be safe to lay
a wager that, when he died, Ibsen had never heard or seen the name of
Ben Jonson. Yet there is an odd sort of resemblance, founded on the
fact that each poet keeps very close to the incidents recorded by the
Latins. Neither of them takes Sallust's presentment of the character of
Catiline as if it were gospel, but, while holding exact touch with the
narrative, each contrives to add a native grandeur to the character of
the arch- conspirator, such as his original detractors denied him. In
both poems, Ben Jonson's and Ibsen's, Catiline is--
Armed with a glory high as his despair.
Another resemblance between the old English and the modern
Norwegian dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to
require lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben
Jonson's case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter
instance the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to
the stage.
This is a very curious example, among many which might be brought
forward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all his early
plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. This tendency
reached its height nearly twenty years later in Brand and Peer Gynt,
and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted for his
dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had quitted him, but
that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic expression, and
that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear it altogether off
his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in itself very
ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements.
The close of Ibsen's Catalina is, as we have said, composed entirely in
rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poet
could not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged to

start running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here
is a fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent for
dead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia has
stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speech
which ends thus:--
See, the pathway breaks, divided! I will wander, dumb, To the left
hand.
AURELIA (appearing, blood-stained, at the door of the tent). Nay! the
right hand! Towards Elysium.
CATILINE (greatly alarmed). O yon pallid apparition, how it fills me
with remorse. 'Tis herself! Aurelia! tell me, art thou living? not a
corse?
AURELIA. Yes, I live that I may full thy sea of sorrows, and may lie
With my bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then die.
CATILINE (bewildered). What? thou livest?
AURELIA. Death's pale herald o'er my senses threw a pall, But my
dulled eye tracked thy footsteps, and I saw, I saw it all, And my passion
a wife's forces to my wounded body gave; Breast to breast, my Catiline,
let us sink