was to Norway what Valera was to Spain, Carducci to Italy, Swinburne or
Rossetti to England, and Leconte de Lisle to France. These were mainly
lyrical poets, but it must not be forgotten that Ibsen, down at least
till 1871, was prominently illustrious as a writer in metrical form. If,
in the second portion of his career, he resolutely deprived himself
of all indulgence in the ornament of verse, it was a voluntary act of
austerity. It was Charles V at Yuste, wilfully exchanging the crown of
jewels for the coarse brown cowl of St. Jerome. And now, after a year
or two of prayer and fasting, Ibsen began a new intellectual career.
CHAPTER VI

1875-82

While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his
career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to
him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival.
These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Bjoernson suddenly
swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid
modern life. This was his first attempt at that "photography by comedy"
which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded
what was Ibsen's comment on these two plays, and particularly on _A
Bankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next
work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bjoernson had carried a very
spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to
drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities.

Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen
upon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a year
he gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, he
was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems
to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of
inanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_,
which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique in
the fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all.

Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the exteriors of character. With
his fiftieth year he presents himself as no more the Poet, but the Man
of Business. Molbech told me that at this time the velveteen jacket,
symbol of the dear delays of art, was discarded in favor of a
frock-coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rather
shyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself