Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 9).djvu/29

 already pretty completely sketched. The group was also to have included Lyngstrand's "patron" and his patron's wife—a "stupid, uppish, and tactless woman, who wounds the patient sometimes without meaning it, sometimes on purpose." The patron's wife has entirely disappeared from the completed play, while the patron, though mentioned, has not even a name.

But the oddest fact which this sketch brings to light is that Arnholm and the Stranger were formed by the scission, so to speak, of one character, denominated the "Strange Passenger." Ellida[1] was originally to have been a pastor's daughter. She was to have engaged herself secretly to a "young and unprincipled mate"—a midshipman dismissed the navy. This engagement she broke off, partly at her father's command, partly of her own free will, because she could not forgive what she had learnt of the young sailor's past. Then, after her marriage, she came to feel that in her ignorance and prejudice she had been too hard on him, and to believe that "essentially—in her imagination—it was with him that she had led her married life." This is very like the feeling of Ellida in the play; but her story has become much more strange and romantic. It is not quite clear—the sketch being incomplete—whether the ex-midshipman was to have appeared in person. But there was to have been a "Strange Passenger" (so nicknamed by the other summer visitors) who had been in love with Ellida in the old days, and of whom she was now to make a confidant, very much as she does of Arnholm

1 The name originally assigned her was "Thora." Readers who know anything of Norway will probably realise how absolutely right was the substitution of "Ellida." It is a masterstroke in the art of nomenclature.