Loves Comedy

Love's Comedy, by Henrik Ibsen,
Translated by

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Translated by C. H. Hereford
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Title: Love's Comedy
Author: Henrik Ibsen

Release Date: June 22, 2006 [eBook #18657]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE'S
COMEDY***
E-text prepared by Douglas Levy

The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume I

LOVE'S COMEDY
Translation by C. H. Hereford

INTRODUCTION*
Koerlighedens Komedie was published at Christiania in 1862. The
polite world--so far as such a thing existed at the time in the Northern
capital--received it with an outburst of indignation now entirely easy to
understand. It has indeed faults enough. The character-drawing is often
crude, the action, though full of effective by-play, extremely slight, and
the sensational climax has little relation to human nature as exhibited in
Norway, or out of it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the
unflattering veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless portrayal
of the trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in the
unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage. All
these have long since passed in Scandinavia, into the category of the
things which people take with their Ibsen as a matter of course, and the
play is welcomed with delight by every Scandinavian audience. But in
1862 the matter was serious, and Ibsen meant it to be so.
For they were years of ferment--those six or seven which intervened
between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his
departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded
"Norwegian Theatre," Ibsen was a prominent member of the little knot
of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt against Danish
literary tradition, then still dominant in well-to-do, and especially in
official Christiania. Well-to-do and official Christiania met the revolt
with contempt. Under such conditions, the specific literary battle of the
Norwegian with the Dane easily developed into the eternal warfare of
youthful idealism with "respectability" and convention. Ibsen had
already started work upon the greatest of his Norse Histories--The
Pretenders. But history was for him little more than material for the
illustration of modern problems; and he turned with zest from the task
of breathing his own spirit into the stubborn mould of the thirteenth
century, to hold up the satiric mirror to the suburban drawing-rooms of

Christiania, and to the varied phenomena current there,--and in
suburban drawing-rooms elsewhere,--under the name of Love.
Yet Love's Comedy is much more than a satire, and its exuberant
humour has a bitter core; the laughter that rings through it is the harsh,
implacable laughter of Carlyle. His criticism of commonplace
love-making is at first sight harmless and ordinary enough. The
ceremonial formalities of the continental Verlobung, the shrill raptures
of aunts and cousins over the engaged pair, the satisfied smile of
enterprising mater-familias as she reckons up the tale of daughters or of
nieces safely married off under her auspices; or, again, the
embarrassments incident to a prolonged Brautstand following a hasty
wooing, the deadly effect of familiarity upon a shallow affection, and
the anxious efforts to save the appearance of romance when its zest has
departed--all these things had yielded such "comedy" as they possess to
many others before Ibsen, and an Ibsen was not needed to evoke it. But
if we ask what, then, is the right way from which these "cosmic"
personages in their several fashions diverge; what is the condition
which will secure courtship from ridicule, and marriage from
disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts company with all his predecessors. "'Of
course,' reply the rest in chorus, 'a deep and sincere love';-- 'together,'
add some, 'with prudent good sense.'" The prudent good sense Ibsen
allows; but he couples with it the startling paradox that the first
condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first
condition of an enduring love is the absence of marriage.
The student of the latter-day Ibsen is naturally somewhat taken aback to
find the grim poet of Doubt, whose task it seems to be to apply a
corrosive criticism to modern institutions in general and to marriage in
particular, gravely defending the "marriage of convenience." And his
amazement is not diminished by the sense that the author of this plea
for the loveless marriage, which poets have at all times scorned and
derided, was himself beyond question happily, married. The truth is
that there are two men in Ibsen--an idealist, exalted