Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 1).pdf/25

Rh apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a town on the south-west coast of Norway, between Arendal and Christianssand. He was here in even narrower social surroundings than at Skien. His birthplace numbered some 3000 inhabitants, Grimstad about 800. That he was contented with his lot cannot be supposed; and the short, dark, taciturn youth seems to have made an unsympathetic and rather uncanny impression upon the burghers of the little township. His popularity was not heightened by a talent which he presently developed for drawing caricatures and writing personal lampoons. He found, however, two admiring friends in Christopher Lorentz Due, a custom-house clerk, and a law student named Olë Schulerud.

The first political event which aroused his interest and stirred him to literary expression was the French Revolution of 1848. He himself writes: "The times were much disturbed. The February revolution, the rising in Hungary and elsewhere, the Slesvig War—all this had a strong and ripening effect on my development, immature though it remained both then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of encouragement to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom and humanity, not to falter in their righteous war against 'the tyrants'; and I composed a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, mainly, so far as I remember, urging him to set aside all petty considerations, and march without delay, at the head of his army, to the assistance of our Danish brothers on the Slesvig frontier." These effusions remained in manuscript, and have, for the most part, perished. About the same time he was reading for his matriculation examination at Christiania University, where he proposed to study medicine; and it happened that