Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 9).djvu/28

 past tarnished by an indiscretion. His career thereby cut short. The disreputable signboard-painter with the artist-dreams, happy in his imaginings. The old, married clerk. Has written a play in his youth, which was only once acted.[1] Is for ever touching it up, and lives in the illusion that it will be published and will make a great success. Takes no steps, however, to bring this about. Nevertheless, accounts himself one of the 'literary' class. His wife and children believe blindly in the play. (Perhaps a private tutor, not a clerk.) Tailor Fresvik, the man-midwife of radicalism, who shows his 'emancipation' in ludicrous attempts at debauchery—affairs with other men's wives—talks of divorce and so forth."

We see that, in the course of elaboration, not only the profession, but the character of Wangel was entirely altered. It is noteworthy, by the way, that, with Ibsen, lawyers are always more or less unsympathetic characters (Stensgård, Helmer, Krogstad, Brack) while doctors are more or less sympathetic (Fieldbo, Rank, Stockmann, Relling, Wangel, Herdal). We see, too, how he saved up for seventeen years the character of the clerk-dramatist. Found superfluous in The Lady from the Sea, he became the delightful Foldal of John Gabriel Borkman. The radical tailor was destined never to come to life; and the characteristics of the "signboard-painter" were divided between Ballested and Lyngstrand.

In the second group, however—that of the summer visitors—the consumptive sculptor Lyngstrand is

1 I met in Rome, in 1881-82, when Ibsen was living there, a minor official of the Vatican Library, then a middle-aged man, who had written eighteen or twenty tragedies, all of which I saw in exquisite manuscript. One of them, Coriolano, had been acted once, on the day, I think, before the Italian troops entered Rome in 1870. Is it possible that Ibsen, too, had come across this rival dramatist?