Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 1).pdf/26

 the Latin books prescribed were Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's Catilinarian Orations. "I devoured these documents," says Ibsen, "and a few months later my drama [Catilina] was finished." His friend Schulerud took it to Christiania, to offer it to the theatre and to the publishers. By both it was declined. Schulerud, however, had it printed at his own expense; and soon after its appearance, in the early spring of 1850, Ibsen himself came to Christiania.

For the most part written in blank verse, Catilina towards the close breaks into rhyming trochaic lines of thirteen and fifteen syllables. It is an extremely youthful production, very interesting from the biographical point of view, but of small substantive merit. What is chiefly notable in it, perhaps, is the fact that it already shows Ibsen occupied with the theme which was to run through so many of his works—the contrast between two types of womanhood, one strong and resolute, even to criminality, the other comparatively weak, clinging, and "feminine" in the conventional sense of the word.

In Christiania Ibsen shared Schulerud's lodgings, and his poverty. There is a significant sentence in his preface to the re-written Catilina, in which he tells how the bulk of the first edition was sold as waste paper, and adds: "In the days immediately following we lacked none of the first necessities of life." He went to a "student-factory," or, as we should say, a "crammer's," managed by one Heltberg; and there he fell in with several of the leading spirits of his generation—notably with Björnson, A. O. Vinje, and Jonas Lie. In the early summer of 1850 he wrote a one-act