Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 3).djvu/15

 that colossal drama on the Emperor Julian which eight years later saw the light.

But the genius of the North held him in too strong a grip. "Never have I seen the Home and its life so fully, so clearly, so near by," he told the Christiania students in 1873, "as precisely from a distance and in absence." Under the Italian sky, among the myrtles and aloes of the "Paradise of exiles," there rose before him more vividly than ever the vision of the stern and rugged Norwegian landscape, the solemn twilight of the fjord, the storm-swept glacier, the peasant-folk absorbed in the desperate struggle for bread, officialdom absorbed in material progress, "intelligence" growing refined, "humane," and somewhat effeminate; and, emerging here and there, glimpses somewhat futile and forlorn of heroic manhood. A summer tour which he had made among the western fjords in July 1862, on a commission from Government to collect popular legends, supplied a crowd of vivid local and personal reminiscences; a ruined parsonage under a precipice, a little mouldering church, a wild march across Jotunheim in storm and snow, and then the dizzy plunge down into one of those deep lowland valleys that strike up like huge rocky rifts from the fjord-head into the heart of the mountains. A few months of intense labour sufficed to organise these scattered images into a moving world of drama, penetrated through and through with Ibsen's individuality, and clothed in rich and many-coloured poetry. He had as yet written nothing at once so original, so kindling, and so profusely strewn with the most provocative brilliances of style; nothing