Page:A Doll's House and two other Plays by Henrik Ibsen.djvu/18

viii INTRODUCTION still-born from the press. The efforts of friends, however, procured him an appointment as "stage-poet" to the Bergen theatre; and after five years there (during which time one or two immature plays of his own were performed) he returned to Christiania to be "artistic director" of the new Norwegian theatre that had been established in rivalry with the old house. Except for the fact that his duties brought him some valuable experience of the technical side of the drama, the Christiania venture was disastrous to him. Ill luck and rebuffs pursued him; his theatre went bankrupt; and he was driven often back upon his painting to earn the price of a meal. Eventually he was forced to accept an offer of employment at the old theatre. He made repeated efforts to obtain a civil-list pension, but this was for a long time refused him, owing to the soreness produced in official quarters by the freedom with which Ibsen had, in his writings, satirised officialdom.

Having, by his uncompromising independence of temperament, made Norway too hot to hold him, Ibsen became a voluntary exile in 1864, and did not return to his own country (save for two brief visits) till some five and twenty years afterwards. The first four of these years were spent in Italy, the others mainly in Germany. The effect of a wider life was not long in making itself evident. From Italy Brand and Peer Gynt, two magnificent "dramatic poems," came in successive years to astonish Ibsen’s com- patriots and make him famous. The long demanded pension could no longer be withheld, and Ibsen’s time of penury was over. In 1877 he began to write the series of prose plays on which his wider reputation rests, the last of them being published in 1900, when their author was an old man of seventy-two.

Ibsen returned to his own people in 1891 and settled in Christiania. Returning with a European reputation, he somewhat grimly enjoyed the hero-worship showered upon him by a people who had formerly made an outcast of him.