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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

VOLUME I

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

LOVE'S COMEDY

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition. Complete in 11 Volumes.

Crown 8vo, price 4s. each.

ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

21 Bedford Street, W.C.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition

VOLUME I

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

LOVE'S COMEDY

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

AND

C. H. HERFORD, Litt.D., M.A.

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1910

First printed (Collected Edition) 1908

Second Impression 1910

Copyright 1908 by William Heinemann

CONTENTS

GENERAL PREFACE

The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature, tragedy, Catilina, first published in 1850, and republished in 1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the poet’s later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style, which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation. Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a translator choose? To go back to the original would seem a deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand, the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary to include The Warrior’s Barrow and Olaf Liliekrans, two early plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work was over. They have even less intrinsic value than Catilina, and ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, St. John’s Night, remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged it to light.

With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order. The exceptions are Love’s Comedy, which ought by rights to come between The Vikings and The Pretenders, and Emperor and Galilean, which ought to follow The League of Youth instead of preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into one volume; while as for Emperor and Galilean, it could not have been placed between The League of Youth and Pillars of Society save by separating its two parts, and assigning Caesar’s Apostasy to Volume V., The Emperor Julian to Volume VI.

For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except Love’s Comedy and Brand, I am ultimately responsible, in the sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others, the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough.

In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has met all the objections of those critics who have found them blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural, colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet, in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one instance. Writing of The Master Builder, a very competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in it “a curious example of perhaps inevitable inadequacy.... ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit, the “perhaps” which qualifies “inevitable.” For the term used by Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle; and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible without a footnote.

In the Introductions to previous editions I have always confined myself to the statement of biographical and historic facts, holding criticism no part of my business. Now that Henrik Ibsen has passed away, and his works have taken a practically uncontested place in world-literature, this reticence seemed no longer imposed upon me. I have consequently made a few critical remarks on each play, chiefly directed towards tracing the course of the poet’s technical development. Nevertheless, the Introductions are still mainly biographical, and full advantage has been taken of the stores of new information contained in Ibsen’s Letters, and in the books and articles about him that have appeared since his death. I have prefixed to Lady Inger of Östråt a sketch of the poet’s life down to the date of that play; so that the Introductions, read in sequence, will be found to form a pretty full record of a career which, save for frequent changes of domicile, and the issuing of play after play, was singularly uneventful.

The Introductions to Loves Comedy and Brand, as well as the translations, are entirely the work of Professor Herford.

A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a word, thus, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends. The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an indication which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases, a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced in 1897, in the translation of John Gabriel Borkman. It has no longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by other dramatists.

Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, Pillars of Society reached me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or six times as much work in revision as it originally did in translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These “helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt thanks.

The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen. People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly parts of David Copperfield or Pendennis may have some inkling of my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts, the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the glorious country that gave him birth.

William Archer.

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

INTRODUCTION

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, at the little seaport of Skien, situated at the head of a long fiord on the south coast of Norway. His great-great-grandfather was a Dane who settled in Bergen about 1720. His great-grandmother, Wenche Dischington, was the daughter of a Scotchman, who had settled and become naturalised in Norway; and Ibsen himself was inclined to ascribe some of his characteristics to the Scottish strain in his blood. Both his grandmother (Plesner by name) and his mother, Maria Cornelia Altenburg, were of German descent. It has been said that there was not a drop of Norwegian blood in Ibsen’s composition; but it is doubtful whether this statement can be substantiated. Most of his male ancestors were sailors; but his father, Knud Ibsen, was a merchant. When Henrik (his first child) was born, he seems to have been prosperous, and to have led a very social and perhaps rather extravagant life. But when the poet was eight years old financial disaster overtook the family, and they had to withdraw to a comparatively small farmhouse on the outskirts of the little town, where they lived in poverty and retirement.

As a boy, Ibsen appears to have been lacking in animal spirits and the ordinary childish taste for games. Our chief glimpses of his home life are due to his sister Hedvig, the only one of his family with whom, in after years, he maintained any intercourse, and whose name he gave to one of his most beautiful creations.[^[1]] She relates that the only out-door amusement he cared for was “building”—in what material does not appear. Among indoor diversions, that to which he was most addicted was conjuring, a younger brother serving as his confederate. We also hear of his cutting out fantastically-dressed figures in pasteboard, attaching them to wooden blocks, and ranging them in groups or tableaux. He may be said, in short, to have had a toy theatre without the stage. In all these amusements it is possible, with a little goodwill, to divine the coming dramatist—the constructive faculty, the taste for technical legerdemain (which made him in his youth so apt a disciple of Scribe), and the fundamental passion for manipulating fictitious characters. The education he received was of the most ordinary, but included a little Latin. The subjects which chiefly interested him were history and religion. He showed no special literary proclivities, though a dream which he narrated in a school composition so impressed his master that he accused him (much to the boy’s indignation) of having copied it out of some book.

His chief taste was for drawing, and he was anxious to become an artist; but his father could not afford to pay for his training.[^[2]] At the age of fifteen, therefore, he had to set about earning his living, and was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a town on the south-west coast of Norway, between Arendal and Christianssand. He was here in even narrower social surroundings than at Skien. His birthplace numbered some 3000 inhabitants, Grimstad about 800. That he was contented with his lot cannot be supposed; and the short, dark, taciturn youth seems to have made an unsympathetic and rather uncanny impression upon the burghers of the little township. His popularity was not heightened by a talent which he presently developed for drawing caricatures and writing personal lampoons. He found, however, two admiring friends in Christopher Lorentz Due, a custom-house clerk, and a law student named Olë Schulerud.

The first political event which aroused his interest and stirred him to literary expression was the French Revolution of 1848. He himself writes:[^[3]] “The times were much disturbed. The February revolution, the rising in Hungary and elsewhere, the Slesvig War—all this had a strong and ripening effect on my development, immature though it remained both then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of encouragement to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom and humanity, not to falter in their righteous war against ‘the tyrants’; and I composed a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, mainly, so far as I remember, urging him to set aside all petty considerations, and march without delay, at the head of his army, to the assistance of our Danish brothers on the Slesvig frontier.” These effusions remained in manuscript, and have, for the most part, perished. About the same time he was reading for his matriculation examination at Christiania University, where he proposed to study medicine; and it happened that the Latin books prescribed were Sallust’s Catiline and Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations. “I devoured these documents,” says Ibsen, “and a few months later my drama [Catilina] was finished.” His friend Schulerud took it to Christiania, to offer it to the theatre and to the publishers. By both it was declined. Schulerud, however, had it printed at his own expense; and soon after its appearance, in the early spring of 1850, Ibsen himself came to Christiania.[^[4]]

For the most part written in blank verse, Catilina towards the close breaks into rhyming trochaic lines of thirteen and fifteen syllables. It is an extremely youthful production, very interesting from the biographical point of view, but of small substantive merit. What is chiefly notable in it, perhaps, is the fact that it already shows Ibsen occupied with the theme which was to run through so many of his works—the contrast between two types of womanhood, one strong and resolute, even to criminality, the other comparatively weak, clinging, and “feminine” in the conventional sense of the word.

In Christiania Ibsen shared Schulerud’s lodgings, and his poverty. There is a significant sentence in his preface to the re-written Catilina, in which he tells how the bulk of the first edition was sold as waste paper, and adds: “In the days immediately following we lacked none of the first necessities of life.” He went to a “student-factory,” or, as we should say, a “crammer’s,” managed by one Heltberg; and there he fell in with several of the leading spirits of his generation—notably with Björnson, A. O. Vinje, and Jonas Lie. In the early summer of 1850 he wrote a one-act play, Kiæmpehöien (The Warrior’s Barrow), entirely in the sentimental and somewhat verbose manner of the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It was accepted by the Christiania Theatre, and performed three times, but cannot have put much money in the poet’s purse. With Paul Botten-Hansen and A. O. Vinje he co-operated in the production of a weekly satirical paper, at first entitled Manden (The Man), but afterwards Andhrimner, after the cook of the gods in Valhalla. To this journal, which lasted only from January to September 1851, he contributed, among other things, a satirical “music-tragedy,” entitled Norma, or a Politician’s Love. As the circulation of the paper is said to have been something under a hundred, it cannot have paid its contributors very lavishly. About this time, too, he narrowly escaped arrest on account of some political agitation, in which, however, he had not been very deeply concerned.

Meanwhile a movement had been going forward in the capital of Western Norway, Bergen, which was to have a determining influence on Ibsen’s destinies.

Up to 1850 there had been practically no Norwegian drama. The two great poets of the first half of the century, Wergeland and Welhaven, had nothing dramatic in their composition, though Wergeland more than once essayed the dramatic form. Danish actors and Danish plays held entire possession of the Christiania Theatre; and, though amateur performances were not uncommon in provincial towns, it was generally held that the Norwegians, as a nation, were devoid of all talent for acting. The very sound of Norwegian (as distinct from Danish) was held by Norwegians themselves to be ridiculous on the stage. Fortunately Olë Bull, the great violinist, was not of that opinion. With the insight of genius, he saw that the time had come for the development of a national drama; he set forth this view in a masterly argument addressed to the Storthing; and he gave practical effect to it by establishing, at his own risk, a Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. How rightly he had judged the situation may be estimated from the fact that among the raw lads who first presented themselves for employment was Johannes Brun, afterwards one of the greatest of comedians; while the first “theatre-poet” engaged by the management was none other than Henrik Ibsen.

The theatre was opened on January 2, 1850; Ibsen entered upon his duties (at a salary of less than £70 a year) in November 1851.[^[5]]

Incredibly, pathetically small, according to our ideas, were the material resources of Bull’s gallant enterprise. The town of Bergen numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. Performances were given only twice, or, at the outside, three times, a week; and the highest price of admission was two shillings. What can have been attempted in the way of scenery and costumes it is hard to imagine. Of a three-act play, produced in 1852, we read that “the mounting, which cost £22 10s., left nothing to be desired.”

Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre lasted from November 6, 1851, until the summer of 1857—that is to say, from his twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year. He was engaged in the first instance “to assist the theatre as dramatic author,” but in the following year he received from the management a “travelling stipend” of £45 to enable him to study the art of theatrical production in Denmark and Germany, with the stipulation that, on his return, he should undertake the duties of “scene instructor”—that is to say, stage-manager or producer. In this function he seems to have been—as, indeed, he always was—extremely conscientious. A book exists in the Bergen Public Library containing (it is said) careful designs by him for every scene in the plays he produced, and full notes as to entrances, exits, groupings, costumes, accessories, &c. But he was not an animating or inspiring producer. He had none of the histrionic vividness of his successor in the post, Björnstjerne Björnson, who, like all great producers, could not only tell the actors what to do, but show them how to do it. Perhaps it was a sense of his lack of impulse that induced the management to give him a colleague, one Herman Låding, with whom his relations were none of the happiest. Ibsen is even said, on one occasion, to have challenged Låding to a duel.

One of the duties of the “theatre-poet” was to have a new play ready for each recurrence of the “Foundation Day” of the theatre, January 2. On that date, in 1853, Ibsen produced a romantic comedy, St. John’s Night. This is the only one of his plays that has never been printed. From the accounts of those who have seen the manuscript, it would appear to be a strange jumble of fantastic fairy-lore with modern comedy or melodrama. Perhaps it is not quite fanciful to regard it as a sort of half-way house between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Peer Gynt. In one of its scenes there appears to be an unmistakable foreshadowing of the episode in the Troll-King’s palace (Peer Gynt, Act II., Sc. 6). The play had no success, and was performed only twice. For the next Foundation Day, January 2, 1854, Ibsen prepared a revised version of The Warrior’s Barrow, already produced in Christiania. A year later, January 2, 1855, Lady Inger of Östråt was produced—a work still immature, indeed, but giving, for the first time, no uncertain promise of the master dramatist to come.

In an autobiographical letter to the Danish critic Peter Hansen, written from Dresden in 1870, Ibsen says: “Lady Inger of Östråt is the result of a love-affair—hastily entered into and violently broken off—to which several of my minor poems may also be attributed, such as Wild-flowers and Pot-plants, A Bird-Song, &c.” The heroine of this love-affair can now be identified as a lady named Henrikke Holst, who seems to have preserved through a long life the fresh, bright spirit, the overflowing joyousness, which attracted Ibsen when she was only in her seventeenth year. Their relation was of the most innocent. It went no further than a few surreptitious rambles in the romantic surroundings of Bergen, usually with a somewhat older girl to play propriety, and with a bag of sugar-plums to fill up pauses in the conversation. The “violent” ending seems to have come when the young lady’s father discovered the secret of these excursions, and doubtless placed her under more careful control. What there was in this episode to suggest, or in any way influence, Lady Inger, I cannot understand. Nevertheless the identification seems quite certain. The affair had a charming little sequel. During the days of their love’s young dream, Ibsen treated the “wild-flower” with a sort of shy and distant chivalry at which the wood-gods must have smiled. He avoided even touching her hand, and always addressed her by the “De” (you) of formal politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the “Du” (thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she replied: “I really don’t know, unless it be in the parson’s wife in Love’s Comedy, with her eight children and her perpetual knitting.” “Ibsen protested,” says Herr Paulsen, in whose Samliv med Ibsen a full account of the episode may be read. It is interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.

It must have been less than a year after the production of Lady Inger that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second marriage) of Provost[^[6]] Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife, Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It is recorded that Ibsen’s first visit to the Thoresen household took place on January 7, 1856,[^[7]] and that on that occasion, speaking to Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: “You are now Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger.” Twenty years later, at Christmas 1876, he gave his wife a copy of the German translation of Lady Inger, with the following inscription on the fly-leaf:

“This book is by right indefeasible thine,

Who in spirit art born of the Östråt line.”

In Lady Inger Ibsen has chosen a theme from the very darkest hour of Norwegian history. King Sverre’s democratic monarchy, dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century, had paralysed the old Norwegian nobility. One by one the great families died out, their possessions being concentrated in the hands of the few survivors, who regarded their wealth as a privilege unhampered by obligations. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, then, patriotism and public spirit were almost dead among the nobles, while the monarchy, before which the old aristocracy had fallen, was itself dead, or rather merged (since 1380) in the Crown of Denmark. The peasantry, too, had long ago lost all effective voice in political affairs; so that Norway lay prone and inert at the mercy of her Danish rulers. It is at the moment of deepest national degradation that Ibsen has placed his tragedy; and the degradation was, in fact, even deeper than he represents it, for the longings for freedom, the stirrings of revolt, which form the motive-power of the action, are invented, or at any rate idealised, by the poet. Fru Inger Ottisdatter Gyldenlöve was, in fact, the greatest personage of her day in Norway. She was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the ablest woman in the land. At the time when Ibsen wrote, little more than this seems to have been known of her; so that in making her the victim of a struggle between patriotic duty and maternal love, he was perhaps poetising in the absence of positive evidence, rather than in opposition to it. Subsequent research, unfortunately, has shown that Fru Inger was but little troubled with patriotic aspirations. She was a hard and grasping woman, ambitious of social power and predominance, but inaccessible, or nearly so, to national feeling. It was from sheer social ambition, and with no qualms of patriotic conscience, that she married her daughters to Danish noblemen. True, she lent some support to the insurrection of the so-called “Dale-junker,” a peasant who gave himself out as the heir of Sten Sture, a former regent of Sweden; but there is not a tittle of ground for making this pretender her son. He might, indeed, have become her son-in-law, for, speculating on his chances of success, she had betrothed one of her daughters to him. Thus the Fru Inger of Ibsen’s play is, in her character and circumstances, as much a creation of the poet’s as though no historic personage of that name had ever existed. Olaf Skaktavl, Nils Lykke, and Eline Gyldenlöve are also historic names; but with them, too, Ibsen has dealt with the utmost freedom. The real Nils Lykke was married in 1528 to the real Eline Gyldenlöve. She died four years later, leaving him two children; and thereupon he would fain have married her sister Lucia. Such a union, however, was regarded as incestuous, and the lovers failed in their effort to obtain a special dispensation. Lucia then became her brother-in-law’s mistress, and bore him a son. But the ecclesiastical law was in those days not to be trifled with; Nils Lykke was thrown into prison for his crime, condemned, and killed in his dungeon, in the year of grace 1535. Thus there was a tragedy ready-made in Ibsen’s material, though it was not the tragedy he chose to write.

The Bergen public did not greatly take to Lady Inger, and it was performed, in its novelty, only twice. Nor is the reason far to seek. The extreme complexity of the intrigue, and the lack of clear guidance through its mazes, probably left the Bergen audiences no less puzzled than the London audiences who saw the play at the Scala Theatre in 1906.[^[8]] It is a play which can be appreciated only by spectators who know it beforehand. Such audiences it has often found in Norway, where it was revived at the Christiania Theatre in 1875; but in Denmark and Germany, though it has been produced several times, it has never been very successful. We need go no further than the end of the first act to understand the reason. On an audience which knows nothing of the play, the sudden appearance of a “Stranger,” to whose identity it has not the slightest clue, can produce no effect save one of bewilderment. To rely on such an incident for what was evidently intended to be a thrilling “curtain,” was to betray extreme inexperience; and this single trait is typical of much in the play. Nevertheless Lady Inger marks a decisive advance in Ibsen’s development. It marks, one may say, the birth of his power of invention. He did not as yet know how to restrain or clarify his invention, and he made clumsy use of the stock devices of a bad school. But he had once for all entered upon that course of technical training which it took him five-and-twenty years to complete. He was learning much that he was afterwards to unlearn; but had he not undergone this apprenticeship, he would never have been the master he ultimately became.

When Ibsen entered upon his duties at the Bergen Theatre, the influence of Eugène Scribe and his imitators was at its very height. Of the 145 plays produced during his tenure of office, more than half (seventy-five) were French, twenty-one being by Scribe himself, and at least half the remainder by adepts of his school, Bayard, Dumanoir, Mélesville, &c. It is to this school that Ibsen, in Lady Inger, proclaims his adherence; and he did not finally shake off its influence until he wrote the Third Act of A Doll’s House in 1879. Although the romantic environment of the play, and the tragic intensity of the leading character, tend to disguise the relationship, there can be no doubt that Lady Inger is, in essence, simply a French drama of intrigue, constructed after the method of Scribe, as exemplified in Adrienne Lecouvreur, Les Contes de la Reine de Navarre,[^[9]] and a dozen other French plays, with the staging of which the poet was then occupied. It might seem that the figure of Elina, brooding over the thought of her dead sister, coffined in the vault below the banqueting-hall, belonged rather to German romanticism; but there are plenty of traces of German romanticism even in the French plays with which the good people of Bergen were regaled. For the suggestion of grave-vaults and coffined heroines, for example, Ibsen need have gone no further than Dumas’s Catherine Howard, which he produced in March 1853. I do not, however, pretend that his romantic colouring came to him from France. It came to him, doubtless, from Germany, by way of Denmark. My point is that the conduct of the intrigue in Lady Inger shows the most unmistakable marks of his study of the great French plot-manipulators. Its dexterity and its artificiality alike are neither German nor Danish, but French. Ibsen had learnt the great secret of Scribe—the secret of dramatic movement. The play is full of those ingenious complications, mistakes of identity, and rapid turns of fortune by which Scribe enchained the interest of his audiences. Its central theme—a mother plunging into intrigue and crime for the advancement of her son, only to find that her son himself has been her victim—is as old as Greek tragedy. The secondary story, too—that of Elina’s wild infatuation for the betrayer and practically the murderer of her sister—could probably be paralleled in the ballad literature of Scotland, Germany, or Denmark, and might, indeed, have been told, in verse or prose, by Sir Walter Scott. But these very un-Parisian elements are handled in a fundamentally Parisian fashion, and Ibsen is clearly fascinated, for the time, by the ideal of what was afterwards to be known as the “well-made play.” The fact that the result is in reality an ill-made play in no way invalidates this theory. It is perhaps the final condemnation of the well-made play that in nine cases out of ten—and even in the hands of far more experienced playwrights than the young Bergen “theatre-poet”—it is apt to prove ill-made after all.

Far be it from me, however, to speak in pure disparagement of Lady Inger. With all its defects, it seems to me manifestly the work of a great poet—the only one of Ibsen’s plays prior to The Vikings at Helgeland of which this can be said. It may be that early impressions mislead me; but I still cannot help seeing in Lady Inger a figure of truly tragic grandeur; in Nils Lykke one of the few really seductive seducers in literature; and in many passages of the dialogue, the touch of a master hand.

W. A.

[1]. See Introduction to The Wild Duck, p. xxiii.

[2]. He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or thereabouts.

[3]. Preface to the second edition of Catilina, 1875.

[4]. This is his own statement of the order of events. According to Halvdan Koht (Samlede Værker, vol. x. p. i) he arrived in Christiania in March 1850, and Catilina did not appear until April.

[5]. The history of Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre is written at some length in an article by me, entitled “Ibsen’s Apprenticeship,” published in the Fortnightly Review for January 1904. From that article I quote freely in the following pages.

[6]. Provost (“Provst”) is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent to Dean.

[7]. See article by Dr. Julius Elias in Die neue Rundschau, December 1906, p. 1463. Dr. Brahm, in the same magazine (p. 1414), writes as though this were Ibsen’s first meeting with his wife; and a note by Halvdan Koht, in the Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s Letters, seems to bear out this view. But it would appear that what Fru Ibsen told Dr. Elias was that on the date mentioned Ibsen for “the first time visited at her father’s house.” The terms of the anecdote almost compel us to assume that he had previously met her elsewhere. It seems almost inconceivable that Ibsen, of all people, should have made such a speech to a lady on their very first meeting.

[8]. Stage Society performances, January 28 and 29, 1906. Lady Inger was played by Miss Edyth Olive, Elina by Miss Alice Crawford, Nils Lykke by Mr. Henry Ainley, Olaf Skaktavl by Mr. Alfred Brydone, and Nils Stenssön by Mr. Harcourt Williams.

[9]. These two plays were produced, respectively, in March and October 1854, at the very time when Ibsen must have been planning and composing Lady Inger.

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

INTRODUCTION

Exactly a year after the production of Lady Inger of Östråt—that is to say on the “Foundation Day” of the Bergen Theatre, January 2, 1856—The Feast at Solhoug was produced. The poet himself has written its history in full in the Preface to the second edition (see p. [183]). The only comment that need be made upon his rejoinder to his critics has been made, with perfect fairness as it seems to me, by George Brandes in the following passage:[^[10]] “No one who is unacquainted with the Scandinavian languages can fully understand the charm that the style and melody of the old ballads exercise upon the Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn have perhaps had a similar power over German minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has ever succeeded in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet retained the mediæval ballad’s sonorous swing and rich aroma. The explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik Hertz’s Svend Dyring’s House is to be found in the fact that in it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as great mobility as the verse of the Niebelungenlied, along with a dramatic value not inferior to that of the iambic pentameter. Henrik Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the mutual relations of the principal characters, Svend Dyring’s House owes more to Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn than The Feast at Solhoug owes to Svend Dyring’s House. But the fact remains that the versified parts of the dialogue of both The Feast at Solhoug and Olaf Liliekrans are written in that imitation of the tone and style of the heroic ballad, of which Hertz was the happily-inspired originator. There seems to me to be no depreciation whatever of Ibsen in the assertion of Hertz’s right to rank as his model. Even the greatest must have learnt from some one.”

The question is, to put it in a nutshell: Supposing Hertz had never adapted the ballad measures to dramatic purposes, would Ibsen have written The Feast at Solhoug, at any rate in its present form? I think we must answer: Almost certainly, no.

But while the influence of Danish lyrical romanticism is apparent in the style of the play, the structure, as it seems to me, shows no less clearly that influence of the French plot-manipulators which we found so unmistakably at work in Lady Inger. Despite its lyrical dialogue, The Feast at Solhoug has that crispness of dramatic action which marks the French plays of the period. It may indeed be called Scribe’s Bataille de Dames writ tragic. Here, as in the Bataille de Dames (one of the earliest plays produced under Ibsen’s supervision), we have the rivalry of an older and a younger woman for the love of a man who is proscribed on an unjust accusation, and pursued by the emissaries of the royal power. One might even, though this would be forcing the point, find an analogy in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and determined character) has in Scribe’s comedy a cowardly suitor, while in Ibsen’s tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband. In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of the Bataille de Dames may have contributed to the shaping of The Feast at Solhoug in Ibsen’s mind. But more significant than any resemblance of theme is the similarity of Ibsen’s whole method to that of the French school—the way, for instance, in which misunderstandings are kept up through a careful avoidance of the use of proper names, and the way in which a cup of poison, prepared for one person, comes into the hands of another person, is, as a matter of fact, drunk by no one, but occasions the acutest agony to the would-be poisoner. All this ingenious dovetailing of incidents and working-up of misunderstandings, Ibsen unquestionably learned from the French. The French language, indeed, is the only one which has a word—quiproquo—to indicate the class of misunderstanding which, from Lady Inger down to The League of Youth, Ibsen employed without scruple.

Ibsen’s first visit to the home of his future wife took place five days after the production of The Feast at Solhoug. It seems doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her;[^[11]] but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the previous summer, when he was writing his play. It is a curious coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had occupied him in his first dramatic effort, Catilina, and which had formed the main subject of the play he had just produced. It is less wonderful that the same contrast should so often recur in his later works, even down to John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen was greatly attached to his gentle and retiring sister-in-law, who died unmarried in 1874.

The Feast at Solhoug has been translated by Miss Morison and myself, only because no one else could be found to undertake the task. We have done our best; but neither of us lays claim to any great metrical skill, and the light movement of Ibsen’s verse is often, if not always, rendered in a sadly halting fashion. It is, however, impossible to exaggerate the irregularity of the verse in the original, or its defiance of strict metrical law. The normal line is one of four accents; but when this is said, it is almost impossible to arrive at any further generalisation. There is a certain lilting melody in many passages, and the whole play has not unfairly been said to possess the charm of a northern summer night, in which the glimmer of twilight gives place only to the gleam of morning. But in the main (though much better than its successor, Olaf Liliekrans) it is the weakest thing that Ibsen admitted into the canon of his works. He wrote of it in 1870 as “a study which I now disown”; and had he continued in that frame of mind, the world would scarcely have quarrelled with his judgment. At worst, then, my collaborator and I cannot be accused of marring a masterpiece; but for which assurance we should probably have shrunk from the attempt.

W. A.

[10]. Ibsen and Björnson. London, Heinemann, 1899, p. 88.

[11]. See [note], p. xxv.

LOVE'S COMEDY

INTRODUCTION

Kærlighedens Komedie was published at Christiania in 1862. The polite world—so far as such a thing existed at that time in the Northern capital—received it with an outburst of indignation not 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 materfamilias 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 “comic” 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 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 a poet, ardent, brilliant, and young, and himself, what is more, quite recently and beyond question happily, married. The truth is that there are two men—in Ibsen an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his “social philosophy” is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating “marriage for love”; but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter in blinded with love. In the latter dramas the tragedy of married life is commonly generated by other forms of blindness—the childish innocence of Nora, the maidenly ignorance of Helena Alving, neither of whom married precisely “for love”; here it is blind Love alone who, to the jealous eye of the critic, plays the part of the Serpent in the Edens of wedded bliss. There is, it is clear, an element of unsolved contradiction in Ibsen’s thought;—Love is at once so precious and so deadly, a possession so glorious that all other things in life are of less worth, and yet capable of producing only disastrously illusive effects upon those who have entered into the relations to which it prompts. But with Ibsen—and it is a grave intellectual defect—there is an absolute antagonism between spirit and form. An institution is always, with him, a shackle for the free life of souls, not an organ through which they attain expression; and since the institution of marriage cannot but be, there remains as the only logical solution that which he enjoins—to keep the soul’s life out of it. To “those about to marry,” Ibsen therefore says in effect, “Be sure you are not in love!” And to those who are in love he says, “Part!”

It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of love contemplated the business of “love-making,” and the ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him unconscious actors in a world-comedy of Love’s contriving—naïve fools of fancy, passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle passion. Comedy like this cannot be altogether gay; and as each fresh romance decays into routine, and each aspiring passion goes out under the spell of a vulgar environment, or submits to the bitter salvation of a final parting, the ringing laughter grows harsh and hollow, and notes of ineffable sadness escape from the poet’s Stoic self-restraint.

Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic, piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school for a dramatist, nor can Love’s Comedy be regarded, in the matter of style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through. As it is, there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner; the realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with little warning from the barest colloquial prose to strains of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen’s hands a singularly plastic medium of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined for ideal sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit, exuberant as it is, does not coruscate indiscriminately upon all lips; and it has many shades and varieties—caustic, ironical, imaginative, playful, passionate—which take their temper from the speaker’s mood.

The present version of the play retains the metres of the original, and follows it in general line for line. For a long passage, occupying substantially the first twenty pages, the translator is indebted to the editor of the present work; and two other passages—Falk’s tirades on pp. [58] and [100]—result from a fusion of versions made independently by us both.

C. H. H.

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
(1855)

CHARACTERS

• Lady Inger Ottisdaughter Römer, widow of High Steward Nils Gyldenlöve.
• Elina Gyldenlöve, her daughter.
• Nils Lykke, Danish knight and councillor.
• Olaf Skaktavl, an outlawed Norwegian noble.
• Nils Stensson.
• Jens Bielke, Swedish commander.
• Biörn, majordomo at Östråt.
• Finn, a servant.
• Einar Huk, bailiff at Östråt.
• Servants, peasants, and Swedish men-at-arms.

The action takes place at Östråt Manor, on the Trondhiem Fiord, in the year 1528.

[Pronunciation of Names.—Östråt = Östrot; Elina (Norwegian, Eline) = Eleena; Stensson = Staynson; Biörn = Byörn; Jens Bielke = Yens Byelke; Huk = Hook. The g's in “Inger” and in “Gyldenlöve” are, of course, hard. The final e's and the ö's pronounced much as in German.]

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT | DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS

ACT FIRST

A room at Östråt. Through an open door in the back, the Banquet Hall is seen in faint moonlight, which shines fitfully through a deep bow-window in the opposite wall. To the right, an entrance-door; further forward, a curtained window. On the left, a door leading to the inner rooms; further forward a large open fireplace, which casts a glow over the room. It is a stormy evening.

Biörn and Finn are sitting by the fireplace. The latter is occupied in polishing a helmet. Several pieces of armour lie near them, along with a sword and shield.

Finn.

[After a pause.] Who was Knut[^[12]] Alfson?

Biörn.

My Lady says he was the last of Norway’s knighthood.

Finn.

And the Danes killed him at Oslo-fiord?

Biörn.

If you know not that, ask any child of five.

Finn.

So Knut Alfson was the last of our knighthood? And now he’s dead and gone! [Holds up the helmet.] Well, thou must e’en be content to hang scoured and bright in the Banquet Hall; for what art thou now but an empty nut-shell? The kernel—the worms have eaten that many a winter agone.

What say you, Biörn—may not one call Norway’s land an empty nut-shell, even like the helmet here; bright without, worm-eaten within?

Biörn.

Hold your peace, and mind your task!—Is the helmet ready?

Finn.

It shines like silver in the moonlight.

Biörn.

Then put it by.—See here; scrape the rust off the sword.

Finn.

[Turning the sword over and examining it.]

Is it worth while?

Biörn.

What mean you?

Finn.

The edge is gone.

Biörn.

What’s that to you? Give it me.—Here, take the shield.

Finn.

[As before.] There is no grip to it!

Biörn.

[Mutters.] Let me get a grip on you——

[Finn hums to himself for a while.

Biörn.

What now?

Finn.

An empty helmet, a sword with no edge, a shield with no grip—so it has all come to that. Who can blame Lady Inger if she leaves such weapons to hang scoured and polished on the walls, instead of rusting them in Danish blood?

Biörn.

Folly! Is there not peace in the land?

Finn.

Peace? Ay, when the peasant has shot away his last arrow, and the wolf has reft the last lamb from the fold, then is there peace between them. But ’tis a strange friendship. Well, well; let that pass. ’Tis fitting, as I said, that the harness hang bright in the hall; for you know the old saw: “Call none a man but the knightly man.” So now that we have never a knight in the land, we have never a man; and where no man is, there must women order things; therefore——

Biörn.

Therefore—therefore I bid you hold your foul prate!

[Rises.

The evening wears on. Enough; you may hang the helmet and armour in the hall again.

Finn.

[In a low voice.] Nay, best let it be till to-morrow.

Biörn.

What, do you fear the dark?

Finn.

Not by day. And if so be I fear it at even, I am not the only one. Ah, you may look; I tell you in the housefolk’s room there is talk of many things. [Lower.] They say that, night by night, a tall figure, clad in black, walks the Banquet Hall.

Biörn.

Old wives’ tales!

Finn.

Ah, but they all swear ’tis true.

Biörn.

That I well believe.

Finn.

The strangest of all is that Lady Inger thinks the same——

Biörn.

[Starting.] Lady Inger? What does she think?

Finn.

What Lady Inger thinks? I warrant few can tell that. But sure it is that she has no rest in her. See you not how day by day she grows thinner and paler? [Looks keenly at him.] They say she never sleeps—and that it is because of the black figure——

[While he is speaking, Elina Gyldenlöve has appeared in the half-open door on the left. She stops and listens, unobserved.

Biörn.

And you believe such follies?

Finn.

Well, half and half. There be folk, too, that read things another way. But that is pure malice, I’ll be bound.—Hearken, Biörn—know you the song that is going round the country?

Biörn.

A song?

Finn.

Ay, ’tis on all folks’ lips. ’Tis a shameful scurril thing, for sure; yet it goes prettily. Just listen:

[Sings in a low voice.

Dame Inger sitteth in Östråt fair,

She wraps her in costly furs—

She decks her in velvet and ermine and vair,

Red gold are the beads that she twines in her hair—

But small peace in that soul of hers.

Dame Inger hath sold her to Denmark’s lord.

She bringeth her folk ’neath the stranger’s yoke—

In guerdon whereof—

[Biörn enraged, seizes him by the throat. Elina Gyldenlöve withdraws without having been seen.

Biörn.

I will send you guerdonless to the foul fiend, if you prate of Lady Inger but one unseemly word more.

Finn.

[Breaking from his grasp.] Why—did I make the song?

[The blast of a horn is heard from the right.

Biörn.

Hark—what is that?

Finn.

A horn. Then there come guests to-night.

Biörn.

[At the window.] They are opening the gate. I hear the clatter of hoofs in the courtyard. It must be a knight.

Finn.

A knight? Nay, that can scarce be.

Biörn.

Why not?

Finn.

Did you not say yourself: the last of our knighthood is dead and gone?

[Goes out to the right.

Biörn.

The accursed knave, with his prying and peering! What avails all my striving to hide and hush things? They whisper of her even now—; soon all men will be shouting aloud that——

Elina.

[Comes in again through the door on the left; looks round her, and says with suppressed emotion:] Are you alone, Biörn?

Biörn.

Is it you, Mistress Elina?

Elina.

Come, Biörn, tell me one of your stories; I know you can tell others than those that-—-

Biörn.

A story? Now—so late in the evening——?

Elina.

If you count from the time when it grew dark at Östråt, then ’tis late indeed.

Biörn.

What ails you? Has aught crossed you? You seem so restless.

Elina.

May be so.

Biörn.

There is something amiss. I have hardly known you this half year past.

Elina.

Bethink you: this half year past my dearest sister Lucia has been sleeping in the vault below.

Biörn.

That is not all, Mistress Elina—it is not that alone that makes you now thoughtful and white and silent, now restless and ill at ease, as you are to-night.

Elina.

Not that alone, you think? And wherefore not? Was she not gentle and pure and fair as a summer night? Biörn,—I tell you, Lucia was dear to me as my life. Have you forgotten how many a time, when we were children, we sat on your knee in the winter evenings? You sang songs to us, and told us tales——

Biörn.

Ay, then you were blithe and gay.

Elina.

Ah, then, Biörn! Then I lived a glorious life in fable-land, and in my own imaginings. Can it be that the sea-strand was naked then as now? If it was so, I knew it not. ’Twas there I loved to go weaving all my fair romances; my heroes came from afar and sailed again across the sea; I lived in their midst, and set forth with them when they sailed away. [Sinks on a chair.] Now I feel so faint and weary; I can live no longer in my tales. They are only—tales. [Rising, vehemently.] Biörn, know you what has made me sick? A truth; a hateful, hateful truth, that gnaws me day and night.

Biörn.

What mean you?

Elina.

Do you remember how sometimes you would give us good counsel and wise saws? Sister Lucia followed them; but I—ah, well-a-day!

Biörn.

[Consoling her.] Well, well—-!

Elina.

I know it—I was proud, overweening! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the wisest! I know it!

Biörn.

That is true.

Elina.

Once you took me by the hand and looked earnestly at me, and said: “Be not proud of your fairness, or your wisdom; but be proud as the mountain eagle as often as you think: I am Inger Gyldenlöve’s daughter!”

Biörn.

And was it not matter enough for pride?

Elina.

You told me so often enough, Biörn! Oh, you told me many a tale in those days. [Presses his hand.] Thanks for them all!—Now, tell me one more; it might make me light of heart again, as of old.

Biörn.

You are a child no longer.

Elina.

Nay, indeed! But let me dream that I am.—Come, tell on!

[Throws herself into a chair. Biörn sits on the edge of the high hearth.

Biörn.

Once upon a time there was a high-born knight——

Elina.

[Who has been listening restlessly in the direction of the hall, seizes his arm and breaks out in a vehement whisper.] Hush! No need to shout so loud; I can hear well!

Biörn.

[More softly.] Once upon a time there was a high-born knight, of whom there went the strange report——

[Elina half rises, and listens in anxious suspense in the direction of the hall.

Biörn.

Mistress Elina,—what ails you?

Elina.

[Sits down again.] Me? Nothing. Go on.

Biörn.

Well, as I was saying—did this knight but look straight in a woman’s eyes, never could she forget it after; her thoughts must follow him wherever he went, and she must waste away with sorrow.

Elina.

I have heard that tale.—Moreover, ’tis no tale you are telling, for the knight you speak of is Nils Lykke, who sits even now in the Council of Denmark——

Biörn.

May be so.

Elina.

Well, let it pass—go on!

Biörn.

Now it happened once on a time——

Elina.

[Rises suddenly.] Hush; be still!

Biörn.

What now? What is the matter?

Elina.

[Listening.] Do you hear?