Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 1).pdf/20

 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