production of _The Feast at Solhoug_. It seems doubtful whether
this was actually his first meeting with her; 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 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.

*Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons.
**_Ibsen and Bjornson_. London, Heinmann, 1899, p.88

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG (1856)

THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PREFACE

I wrote _The Feast at Solhoug_ in Bergen in the summer of 1855--that
is to say, about twenty-eight years ago.

The play was acted for the first time on January 2, 1856, also at
Bergen, as a gala perfor