1828

The greatest Scandinavian man of letters was born, just a century ago, the son of a bankrupt merchant in the small Norwegian town of Skien. As a boy Henrik Ibsen was apprenticed to an apothecary and helped to grind powders, make pills and mix possets. Because he did not stick to that trade, but became a great poet and a greater dramatist, all Norway united, last week, to honor his birth-cen tenary with impressive ceremonies and revivals of his greatest plays at Oslo, Norwegian capital, and in Bergen, the sea port where he lived and labored for the theatre in his early years.

The U. S. was represented in Oslo by 75-year-old Robert Underwood Johnson, onetime editor of the Century Magazine, onetime U. S. Ambassador to Italy (1920-21). He bore illuminated parchment scrolls of greeting from various literary societies and hobnobbed with 98 other delegates from 19 countries. All were bounteously entertained by King Haakon VII of Norway.

Between banquets and lectures, at Oslo, the delegates and His Majesty and Crown Prince Olaf attended gala performances at the National Theatre of six Ibsen plays: 1) Brand (1866), the tragic story of a clergyman who places duty to God majestically above earthly love but is killed by an earthly avalanche; 2) The League of Youth (1869), one of Ibsen's few boisterous comedies; 3) Ghosts (1881), in which a son is smitten by Fate in the guise of inherited venereal disease; 4) An Enemy of the People (1882), wherein the honesty of one man makes him the enemy of ordinary folk; 5) The Wild Duck (1884), a play about a sensitive girl who commits suicide when she learns that she is illegitimate; 6) Rosmersholm (1886) in which a husband and wife and "other woman" hound each other until they all commit suicide.

After this heroic dose of pills and possets for the intellect, the delegates climbed aboard a special train and sped across the Norwegian Alps to Bergen.

There at the State Theatre they saw a rollicking performance of Peer Gynt (1867), the play which takes its name from a hero who typifies the convivial weaknesses which Ibsen thought that he detected in many of his countrymen.

The peculiar significance of Ibsen in Norway cannot be realized unless it is remembered that he was of Danish, not Norwegian, stock and chose to pass much of his manhood and old age away from Norway on the Continent of Europe. Thus he came more readily to achieve international fame, but lost touch with Norwegians who were then flocking in rapturous admiration around a playwright-demagogue who is scarcely known outside of Norway, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, "The Old Bear."

To this day nine Norwegians out of ten still emotionally prefer Bjornson to Ibsen, while recognizing with gratitude that the fame of Ibsen has "put Norway on the map," for ignorant millions would otherwise scarcely differentiate it from Denmark or Sweden. Perhaps the most familiar tradition of Ibsen is that of an old man who would sit for hours at a bay window of the Grand Cafe in Oslo (then Christiania) staring with unseeing eyes at the bodies of his countrymen but piercing their souls with uncanny insight. His reward is that the theatre-goers of today, who constitute for him "posterity," have already witnessed a greater number of showings of each of his major plays than the sum total of productions of Abie's Irish Rose.