Of the valiant knight and Margit his wife. —
His wife! [Wrings lier hands.
Oh God, what is this I say!
Forgive me, forgive me, and oh! let me feel
The peace that hath power both to soothe and to heal.
[Walks back and fur ward, brooding silently.
Signe, my sister — ? How hateful 'twere
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 275
To steal her glad young life from her !
But who can tell ? In very sooth
She may love him but with the light love of youth.
[Again silence; she takes out the little phial, looks
long at it and says under her breath:
This phial — were I its powers to try —
My husband would sleep for ever and aye !
\Horror-struck.
No, no! To the river's depths with it straight!
\In the act of throwing it out of the window, stops.
And yet I could — 'tis not yet too late. —
[With an expression of mingled horror and rapture,
whispers.
With what a magic resistless might
Sin masters us in our own despite!
Doubly alluring methinks is the goal
I must reach through blood, with the wreck of my soul.
[Bengt, with the empty beaker in his hand, comes in
from the passage-way; his face is red; he staggers
slightly.
Bengt.
[Flinging the beaker upon the table on the left.] My
faith, this has been a feast that will be the talk of the
country. [Sees Margit.] Eh, are you there ? You are
well again. Good, good.
Margit.
[Who in the meantime has concealed the phial.] Is the
door barred ?
Bengt.
[Seating himself at the table on the left.] I have seen to
everything. I went with the last guests as far as the
276 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
gates. But what became of Knut Gesling to-night? —
Give me mead, Margit! I am thirsty. Fill this cup.
[Margit fetches a flagon of -mead from, a cupboard.
and fills the goblet which is on the table in front of
him.
Margit.
[Crossing to the right with the flagon.] You asked
about Knut Gesling.
Bengt.
That I did. The boaster, the braggart! I have not
forgot his threats of yester-morning.
Margit.
He used worse words when he left to-night.
Bengt.
He did ? So much the better. I will strike him dead.
Margit.
[Smiling contemptuously.] H'm —
Bengt.
I will kill him, I say! I fear not to face ten such
fellows as he. In the store-house hangs my grandfather's
axe; its shaft is inlaid with silver; with that axe in my
hands, I tell you — ! [Thumps the table and drinks.]
To-morrow I shall arm myself, go forth with all my men,
and slay Knut Gesling. [Empties the beaker.
Margit.
[7^0 herself.] Oh, to have to live with him!
[Is in the act of leaving the room.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 277
Bengt.
Margit, come here! Fill my cup again. [She ap-
proaches; he tries to draw her doicn on to his knee.] Ha,
ha, ha ! You are right fair, Margit ! I love you well !
Margit.
{Freeing herself.'] Let me go!
\Crosses, with the goblet in her hand, to tJie left.
Bengt.
You are not in the humour to-night. Ha, ha, ha!
That means no great matter, I know.
Margit.
[Softly, as she fills the goblet.] Oh, that this might be
the last beaker I should fill for vou.
[She leaves tJie goblet on the table and is making Jier
way out to tJie left.
Bengt
Hark to me, Margit. For one thing you may thank
Heaven, and that is, that I made you my wife before
Gudmund Alfson came back.
Margit.
[Stops at the door.] Why so ?
Bengt.
Why, say you ? Am I not ten times the richer man ?
And certain I am that he would have sought you for
his wife, had 3'ou not been the mistress of Solhouij.
278 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
Margit.
[Drawing nearer and glancing at the goblet.] Say you
so ?
Bengt.
I could take my oath upon it. Bengt Gauteson has
two sharp eyes in his head. But he may still have Signe.
Margit.
And you think he will — ?
Bengt.
Take her? Ay, since he cannot have you. But had
you been free, — then — Ha, ha, ha! Gudmund is like
the rest. He envies me my wife. That is why I set
such store by you, Margit. Here with the goblet again.
And let it be full to the brim!
Margit.
[Goes unwillingly across to the right.] You shall have
it straightway.
Bengt.
Knut Gesling is a suitor for Signe, too, but him I am
resolved to slay. Gudmund is an honourable man; he
shall have her. Think, Margit, what good days we
shall have with them for neighbours. We will go a-visit-
ing each other, and then will we sit the live-long day,
each with his wife on his knee, drinking and talking of
this and of that.
Margit.
[Whose mental struggle is visibly becoming more severe,
involuntarily takes out the phial as she says:] No doubt,
no doubt!
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 279
Bengt.
Ha, ha, ha! it may be that at first Gudmund will
look askance at me when I take you in my arms; but
that, I doubt not, he will soon get over.
Margit.
This is more than woman can bear! [Pours the con-
tents of the phial into the goblet, goes to the window and
throws out the phial, then says, without looking at him.]
Your beaker is full.
Bengt.
Then bring it hither!
Margit.
[Battling in an agony of indecision, at last says:] I
pray you drink no more to-night!
Bengt.
[Leans back in his chair and laughs.] Oho! You are
impatient for my coming? Get you in; I will follow
you soon.
Margit.
[Suddenly decided.] Your beaker is full. [Points.]
There it is. [She goes quickly out to the left.
Bengt.
[Rising.] I like her well. It repents me not a whit
that I took her to wife, though of heritage she owned
no more than yonder goblet and the brooches of her
wedding gown.
[He goes to the table at the window and takes the goblet.
[A House-Carl enters hurriedly and loith scared looks,
from the back.
280 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act ni
House-Carl.
[Calls.] Sir Bengt, Sir Bengt! haste forth with all the
speed you can! Knut Gesling with an armed train is
drawing near the house.
Bengt.
[Putting down the goblet.] Knut Gesling? Who
brings the tidings?
House-Carl.
Some of your guests espied him on the road beneath,
and hastened back to warn you.
Bengt.
E'en so. Then will I—! Fetch me my grandfather's
battle-axe !
[He and the House-Carl go out at the hack.
[Soon after, Gudmund and Signe enter quietly and
cautiously by the door on the right.
Signe.
[In muffled tones.]
It must, then, be so!
Gudmund.
[Also softly.]
Necessity's might
Constrains us.
Signe.
Oh! thus under cover of night
To steal from the valley where I was born!
[Dries her eyes.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 281
Yet shalt thou hear no plaint forlorn.
'Tis for thy sake my home I flee;
Wert thou not outlawed, Gudmund dear,
I'd stay with my sister.
Gudmund.
Only to be
Ta'en by Knut Gesling, with bow and spear.
Swung on the croup of his battle-horse,
And made his wife by force.
SiGNE.
Quick, let us flee. But whither go ?
Gudmund.
Down by the fiord a friend I know;
He'll find us a ship. O'er the salt sea foam
We'll sail away south to Denmark's bowers.
There waits you there a happy home;
Right joyously will fleet the hours;
The fairest of flowers they bloom in the shade
Of the beech-tree glade.
SlGNIS.
[Bursts into tears.]
Farewell, my poor sister! Like mother tender
Thou hast guarded the ways my feet have trod.
Hast guided my footsteps, aye praying to God,
The Almighty, to be my defender, —
Gudmund — here is a goblet filled with mead;
Let us drink to her; let us wish that ere long
Her soul may again be calm and strong,
And that God may be good to her need.
[She takes tlie goblet into her hands.
282 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
GUDMUND.
Aye, let us drain it, naming her name! [Starts.
Stop! [Takes the goblet from her.
For meseems it is the same —
SiGNE.
'Tis Margit's beaker.
GuDMUND.
[Examining it carefully.]
By Heaven, 'tis so!
I mind me still of the red wine's glow
As she drank from it on the day we parted
To our meeting again in health and glad-hearted.
To herself that draught betided woe.
No, Signe, ne'er drink wine or mead
From that goblet. [Pours its contents out at the window.
We must away with all speed.
[Tumult and calls without, at the back.
Signe.
List, Gudmund! Voices and trampling feet!
GUDMUND.
Knut Gesling's voice!
Signe,
O save us. Lord!
Gudmund.
[Places himself in front of her.]
Nay, nay, fear nothing, Signe sweet —
I am here, and my good sword.
[Margit comes in in haste from the left.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 283
Margit.
[Listening to the noise.] What means this ? Is my
husband — ?
GUDMUND AND SiGNE.
Margit!
Margit.
[Catches sight of them.] Gudmund! And Signe! Are
you here ?
Signe.
[Going towards her.] Margit — dear sister!
Margit.
[Appalled, having seen the goblet which Gudmund still
holds in his haiid.] The goblet ! Who has drunk from it ?
Gudmund.
[Confused.] Drunk — ? I and Signe — we meant —
Margit.
[Screams.] O God, have mercy! Help! Help! They
will die!
Gudmund.
[Setting doivn the gohlet.] Margit — !
Signe.
What ails you, sister ?
Margit.
[Towards the back.] Help, help ! Will no one help ?
[A House-Carl rushes in from the passage-way.
284 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
House-Carl.
[Calls in a terrified voice.] Lady Margit! Your hus-
band — !
Margit.
He — has he, too, drunk — !
GUDMUND.
[To himself.] Ah! now I understand —
House-Carl.
Knut Gesling has slain him.
SiGNE.
Slain!
GuDMUND.
[Drawing his sword.] Not yet, I hope. [Whispers to
Margit.] Fear not. No one has drunk from your
goblet.
Margit.
Then thanks be to God, who has saved us all!
[She sinks down on a chair to the left. Gudmund
hastens toicards tlie door at the hack.
Another House-Carl.
[Enters, stoppirig him.] You come too late. Sir
Bengt is dead.
Gudmund.
Too late, then, too late.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 285
House-Carl.
The guests and your men have prevailed against the
murderous crew. Knut Gesling and his men are pris-
oners. Here they come.
[Gudmund's v^en, and a number of Guests and
House-Carls, lead in Knut Gesling, Erik of
Hegge, and several o/'Knut's men, hound.
Knut.
\Who is pale, says in a low voice.] Man-slayer, Gud-
mund. What say you to that?
GUDMUND.
Knut, Knut, what have you done?
Erik.
'Twas a mischance, of that I can take my oath.
Knut.
He ran at me swinging his axe; I meant but to defend
myself, and struck the death-blow unawares.
Erik.
Many here saw all that befell.
Knut.
Lady Margit, crave what fine you will. I am ready
to pay it.
Margit.
I crave naught. God will judge us all. Yet stay — one
thing I require. Forgo your evil design upon my sister.
286 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
Knut.
Never again shall I essay to redeem my baleful pledge.
From this day onward I am a better man. Yet would I
fain escape dishonourable punishment for my deed. [To
GuDMUND.] Should you be restored to favour and place
again, say a good word for me to the King!
GuDMUND.
I ? Ere the sun sets, I must have left the country.
[Astonishment amongst the Guests. Erik, in whis-
pers, explains the situation.
Margit.
[To GuDMUND.] You go ? And Signe with you ?
SiGNE.
[Beseechingly.^ Margit!
Margit.
Good fortune follow you both!
Signe.
[Flinging her arms round Margit's neck.] Dear sister!
GuDMUND.
Margit, I thank you. And now farewell. [Listening.]
Hush! I hear the tramp of hoofs in the court-yard.
Signe.
[Apprehensively.] Strangers have arrived.
[A House-Carl appears in the doorway at the back.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 287
House-Carl.
The King's men are without. They seek Gudmund
Alfson.
SiGNE.
Oh God!
Margit.
[In great alarm.] The King's men!
Gudmund.
All is at an end, then. Oh Signe, to lose you now —
could there be a harder fate ?
Knut.
Nay, Gudmund; sell your life dearly, man! Unbind
us; we are ready to fight for you, one and all.
Erik.
[Looks out.] 'Twould be in vain; they are too many
for us.
Signe.
Here they come. Oh Gudmund, Gudmund!
[The King's Messenger enters from the back, with
his escort.
Messenger.
In the King's name I seek you, Gudmund Alfson, and
bring you his behests.
Gudmund.
Be it so. Yet am I guiltless; I swear it by all that
is holy!
288 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
Messenger.
We know it.
GUDMUND.
What say you ? [Agitation amongst those present.
Messenger.
I am ordered to bid you as a guest to the King's house.
His friendship is yours as it was before, and along with
it he bestows on you rich fiefs.
Signe!
Gudmund!
But tell me — ?
Gudmund.
Signe.
Gudmund
Messenger.
Your enemy, the Chancellor Audun Hugleikson, has
fallen.
Gudmund.
The Chancellor!
Guests.
[To each other, in a half -whisper.] Fallen!
Messenger.
Three days ago he was beheaded at Bergen. [Low-
ering his voice.] His offence was against Norway's
Queen.
ACT III] THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG 289
Margit.
[Placing herself between Gudmund and SigneJ
Thus punishment treads on the heels of crime!
Protecting angels, loving and bright,
Have looked down in mercv on me to-nieht.
And come to my rescue while vet it was time.
Now know I that life's most precious treasure
Is nor worldly wealth nor earthly pleasure,
I have felt the remorse, the terror I know.
Of those who wantonly peril their soul.
To St. Sunniva's cloister forthwith I go. —
[Before Gudmund and Signe can speak.
Nay: think not to move me or control,
[Places Signe's hand in Gudmund's.
Take her then, Gudmund, and make her your bride.
Your union is holy; God's on your side.
[Waving farewell, she goes towards the doorway on
the left. Gudmund aTid Signe follow her, she
stops tJiem with a motion of her hand, goes out,
a7id shuts the door behind her. At this moment
the sun rises and sheds its light into the hull.
Gudmund.
Signe — my wife ! See, the morning glow !
'Tis the morning of our young love. Rejoice!
Signe.
All my fairest of dreams and of memories I owe
To the strains of thy harp and the sound of thy voice.
My noble minstrel, to joy or sadness
Tune thou that harp as seems thee best;
There are chords, believe me, within my breast
To answer to thine, or of woe or of gladness.
290 THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG [act hi
Chorus of Men and Women.
Over earth keeps watch the eye of Hght,
Guardeth lovingly the good man's ways,
Sheddeth round him its consoling rays; —
Praise be to the Lord in heaven's height!
LOVE'S COMEDY
LOVE'S COMEDY
INTRODUCTION
Kfrrlighedens Komedie was published at Christiania in
January, 1863. The polite world — so far as such a thing
existed at that time in the Northern capital — received it
with an outburst of indignation not now entirely easy to
understand. It has indeed faults enough. The char-
acter-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of
effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational
climax has little relation to human nature as exhibited in
Norway, or out of it, at that or any other time. But the
sting lay in the unflattering veracity of the piece as a
whole; in the merciless portrayal of the trivialities of per-
sons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in the unex-
ampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage.
All these have long since passed, in Scandinavia, into the
category of the things which people take with their Ibsen
as a matter of course, and the play is welcomed with de-
light by every Scandinavian audience. But in 1864 the
matter was serious, and Ibsen meant it to be so.
For they were years of ferment — those six or seven
which intervened between his return to Christiania from
Bergen in 1857, and his departure for Italy in 1864. He
was just entering on his intellectual prime. Ten years of
chequered, and mostly stern, experience had only ma-
233
294 LOVE'S COMEDY
tured and deepened the uncompromising sincerity which
had made the Grimstad apprentice an Ishmael in his
little community; had only turned the uncomfortable boy,
vrho tried to "waken Scandinavia" to the bitter need of
Hungary in 1849, into the man who was presently to
waken the civilised world to the yet more appalling verac-
ities of Ghosts. The atmosphere of Christiania in the
fifties was little calculated to assuage this temper, and
Ibsen's position brought with it fresh elements of prov-
ocation. The newly founded "Norwegian Theatre," of
which he had accepted the directorship, barely main-
tained itself, in the very capital of Norway, against
the ascendancy of Danish taste and acting, enthroned
then at the "Christiania" Theatre. A little band of
'nationalists' championed it valiantly in the press; but
the solid phalanx of well-to-do and official society looked
upon the nationalist movement, and especially upon the
nationalist drama, as a provincial heresy; and the Nor-
wegian Theatre, crippled for want of resources, found
itself unable to stage just the plays which would most
powerfully have vindicated the nationalist cause. Ibsen's
own Vikings in Helgeland, in particular, rejected as too
"Norwegian" by the Danish Theatre, was impracticable
for his own. The finances of the theatre improved
somewhat under Ibsen's management, but it finally be-
came bankrupt, and his position was throughout one of
discouragement and disillusion, added to the anxieties of
a very slender income.
It is likely enough that this state of things did not ren-
der the director of the Norwegian Theatre less alive to
the foibles of Christiania society. But the scathing ex-
INTRODUCTION 295
posure of some of them in Love's Comedy sprang from a
deeper root. Norse nationalism, in the patriotic sense,
had absolutely no part in inspiring or provoking the play;
Norse patriots, indeed, were to be among the loudest in
decrying it. Ibsen himself, always more " Scandinavian "
than Norwegian, was the least "Norse" of all his literary
associates, and, keenly as he recognised the inadequacy
of the Danish dramatic tradition, outgrew with extreme
slowness his early taste for the classic elegance of Danish
verse. As a student he had listened with delight to the
lectures of Welhaven, the most Danish of Norwegian
poets; Heiberg himself, the centre of Danish literary in-
fluence in Norway, and the director of the Christiania
Theatre, he admired as a poet; and the summary rejec-
tion of the Vikings by the autocratic Dane did not pre-
vent its author from commemorating him, upon his
death three years later, in a noble dirge. But even apart
from Ibsen, the soul of the nationalist movement in litera-
ture was something much more vital than a mere pitting
of Norwegian against Danish idiosyncrasy. It was an
attempt to vindicate for Scandinavian poetry the bold
grasp of realities, the energetic application of ideas to
life, the masculine and expressive beauty, which are
the birthright of every fresh and original literature, and
which the faded Romanticism of Denmark could no
longer offer. Vinje and Botten-Hansen, Ibsen's closest
literary associates, had drawn their literary sustenance
less from the "Norse" coryphaeus of the last generation,
Wergeland, than from Heine and from Hegel. And both
these influences left their mark on Ibsen himself. Heine's
brilliant paradoxes appealed to a poet whose grip upon
296 LOVE'S COMEDY
reality was immeasurably firmer, but who habitually
used truth to startle, not to persuade. And Hegel's con-
ception of spiritual advance as a process in which self is
slain in order that it may truly live, helped to define, if
not to generate, Ibsen's profoundly characteristic doctrine
that "nought abideth but the lost." The present drama,
saturated with these influences, is more deeply tinctured
with them than any of its successors. Falk, the young poet
who dazzles and outrages the philistine world, is a pal-
pably Heinesque figure; his lyric speech matches Heine's
own in brilliance and in its daring descents to prose, —
pointed out with disapproval at the outset by the pedant
of Romanticism, Miss Jay. And the conviction which
leads Falk and Svanhild to the far from "comic" climax
of this Comedy of Love, that only by renunciation can
Love survive, this Ibsenian philosophy of love, so strange,
so repelling to most readers, was at least matured under
the stimulus of Hegel. It was, from the vantage-ground
— or the dizzy pinnacle — of this conception of love that
Ibsen looked down upon the heterogeneous phenomena
current in society under that name and upon the uni-
versal assumption that marriage was its natural and
(for the respectable) only imaginable goal.
But at this point Ibsen's renunciatory idealism was
met by, and taken over into, another current of thought,
perhaps more fundamentally his own, and with which
Hegel in any case had nothing to do, for it ran utterly
counter to him. The spiritual ascetic who counselled
lovers to save their love by losing it, was doubled with
an almost fanatical individualist, for whom marriage,
like every other form of social nexus, was full of snares
Ilenrik Ibsen at llie ajre of thirtv
INTRODUCTION 297
and pitfalls to the soul, which only cool and circumspect
intelligence availed to avoid. Into the suburban draw-
ing-rooms, accordingly, where the manufacture of happy
pairs was so gaily and assiduously carried on, Ibsen pre-
pared to fling his double paradox that marriage is the
death of Love, and Love the ruin of marriage. An amaz-
ing, Protean thing this Ibsenian Love, which needs the
agony of eternal separation to be completely itself, and
yet at the touch of the routine of married life dribbles
away; which triumphs over death and absence by the
power of spiritual vision, and yet boggles and blunders
purblind in the management of a home!
These ideas were already simmering in Ibsen's mind
in 1858, a year after his arrival at Christiania. For the
present, however, nothing came of them; his own happy
marriage in the same year not improbably casting a little
unphilosophical glamour over the state of married lovers.^
But two years later he wrote four scenes of a comedy in
prose, Svanhild, which presents nearly all the motives of
the corresponding part of the complete play (the first forty
pages of Act I.) in a compact and summary form. Once
more the work was put by, and two years more passed
before he again took it up. But then, in 1862, he threw
himself upon it with exuberant energy, entirely rewrote
the fragment, and carried it through with unflagging verve
to the end. A French critic has called it "a lyric satur-
nalia," "a debauch of gaiety"; and if it is sometimes
only his personages who are gay, not the poet, yet none of
^ His wife however entered into his ideas; when the storm broke,
after the pubhcation of the play, she was, he afterwards wrote, the
one person who approved it.
298 LOVE'S COMEDY
his plays gives us a more vivid sense of having been writ-
ten with sustained deHght.
The secret of this swift and effortless execution of the
purpose he had so long dallied with lay in great part in
his having found a thoroughly congenial form. In prose
Ibsen was still laborious and uncertain ; the masterly free-
dom he later achieved in it, but hardly before the Pillars
of Society, was won slowly and at great cost. But in
verse he was born free; it was the native language of his
mind; in which he could "prance and curvet at will," as
he once said to the present writer, like a rider on a horse
that knows him. In verse all the exuberance of wit and
poetry which his earlier prose thwarted, and his later
sternly refused, had unstinted play. It was by their ac-
complished verse-craft, as has been said, that the Danish
poets retained his admiration, even when, in Peer Gijnt,
he was ruthlessly shattering all the academic proprieties
of their aesthetics. Prose had, nevertheless, been the
predominant form of his drama since early in his Bergen
time; he had designed it for this very play. In the Feast
at SolJioug (1856) he had been beguiled back into verse,
we can hardly doubt, by the charms of Hertz's Danish
Svend Dyring^s House. And his adoption of it here has
been plausibly ascribed to the impression made upon liim
by a brilliant piece of contemporary criticism which he is
known to have read, Moller's book On French and Dan-
ish Comedy (1858), — where the metrical and other excel-
lencies of the latter are set in a very persuasive light.
The mere change from prose to verse thus brought
with it a notable efflorescence of style. How the change
told may be illustrated by a few lines from the first pas-
INTRODUCTION 299
sage of arms between Falk and Guldstad, — the earlier
part a moderate, the later an extreme example. In the
Svanhild it takes this form:
Guld. As for the poetry of your song, let it be as it