Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 2).djvu/27

 another, unripe for its execution. Every such experience must have involved for him days and weeks of fruitless effort and discouragement. To these moods of scepticism as to his own powers he gave expression in a series of poems (for the most part sonnets) published in 1859 under the title of In the Picture Gallery. In it he represents the "black elf" of doubt, whispering to him: "Your soul is like the dry bed of a mountain stream, in which the singing waters of poetry have ceased to flow. If a faint sound comes rustling down the empty channel, do not imagine that it portends the return of the waters—it is only the dry leaves eddying before the autumn wind, and pattering among the barren stones." In those years of struggle and stress, of depressing criticism, and enervating self-criticism, he must often have compared his own lot and his own character with Björnson's, and perhaps, too, wondered whether there were no means by which he could appropriate to himself some of his younger and more facile brother-poet's kingly self-confidence. For this relation between two talents he partly found and partly invented a historic parallel in the relation between two rival pretenders to the Norwegian throne, Håkon Håkonsson and Skule Bårdsson.

Dr. Brandes, who has admirably expounded the personal element in the genesis of this play, compares Håkon-Björnson and Skule-Ibsen with the Aladdin and Nureddin of Oehlenschläger's beautiful dramatic poem. Aladdin is the born genius, serene, light-*hearted, a trifle shallow, who grasps the magic lamp with an unswerving confidence in his right to it. ("It is that which the Romans called ingenium" says Bishop Nicholas, "truly I am not strong in Latin; but 'twas called ingenium.") Nureddin, on the other hand, is the far profounder, more penetrating, but sceptical