Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 2).djvu/26

 poet, and employed his own growing influence in efforts to his advantage. In representing himself as standing quite alone, Ibsen probably forgets, for the moment, his relation to his great contemporary.

Yet the relation to Björnson lay at the root of the character-contrast on which The Pretenders is founded. Ibsen always insisted that each of his plays gave poetic form to some motive gathered from his own experience or observation; and this is very clearly true of the present play. Ever since Synnöve Solbakken had appeared in 1857, Björnson, the expansive, eloquent, lyrical Björnson, had been the darling child of fortune. He had gone from success to success unwearied. He was recognised throughout Scandinavia (in Denmark no less than in Norway) as the leader of the rising generation in almost every branch of imaginative literature. He was full, not only of inspiration and energy, but of serene self-confidence. Meanwhile Ibsen, nearly five years older than he, had been pursuing his slow and painful course of development in comparative obscurity, in humiliating poverty, and amid almost complete lack of appreciation. "Mr. Ibsen is a great cipher" (or "nullity") wrote a critic in 1858; another, in 1863, laid it down that "Ibsen has a certain technical and artistic talent, but nothing of what can be called 'genius.'" The scoffs of the critics, however, were not the sorest trials that he had to bear. What was hardest to contend against was the doubt as to his own poetic calling and election that constantly beset him. This doubt could not but be generated by the very tardiness of his mental growth. We see him again and again (in the case of Olaf Liliekrans, of The Vikings, of Love's Comedy, and of The Pretenders itself), conceiving a plan and then abandoning it for years—no doubt because he found himself, in one respect or