The Works of Henrik Ibsen

The Works of Henrik Ibsen Synopsis

Excerpt from The Works of Henrik Ibsen: The League of Youth; Pillars of Society; Rosmersholm; The Lady From the Sea

While the comedy was still in process of conception, Ibsen had written to his publisher: This new, peaceable work is giving me great pleasure. It thus appears that he considered it less polemical in its character than the poems which had immediately preceded it. If his in tentions-were pacific, they were entirely frustrated. The play was regarded as a violent and wanton attack on the Norwegian Liberal party, while Stensgard was taken for a personal lampoon on Bjornson. Its first performance at the Christiania Theatre (october 18, 1869) passed quietly enough; but at the second and third performances an organised Opposition took the field, and disturbances amounting almost to a riot Occurred. Public feeling soon calmed down, and the play (the first prose comedy of any importance in Norwegian literature) became one of the most popular pieces in the repertory of the theatre. But it led to an estrangement from Bjornson and the Liberal party which was not healed for many a day - not, indeed, until Ghosts had shown the Norwegian public the folly of attempting to make party capital out of the works of a poet who stood far above party.

The estrangement from Bjornson had begun some time before the play appeared. A certain misunderstanding had followed the appearance of Peer Gynt,1 and had been deepened by political differences. Bjornson had become an ardent National Liberal, with leanings towards Re publicanism; Ibsen was not at all a Republican (he deeply offended Bjornson by accepting orders and decora tions), and his political sympathies, while not of a parti san nature, were mainly Scandinavian - that is to say, directed towards a closer union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. Distance, and the evil offices of gossiping friends, played their part in begetting dissension. Ih sen's last friendly letter to Bjornson (of these years) was written in the last days of 1867; in the first days of 1869, while he was actually busied with The League of Youth, we find him declining to contribute to a Danish magazine for the reason (among others) that Bjornson was to be one of its joint editors.

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