"Ibsen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if she were only wiser, a linguist, a student of poetry or of history. Nearing twenty-five, she was as ignorant as she had been at fifteen! A remembered line from a carelessly read poem, a reference to some play by Ibsen or Maeterlinck or d'Annunzio, or the memory of some newspaper clipping that concerned the marriage of a famous singer or the power of a new anaesthetic,—this ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... dolls to give Ibsen's 'Doll's House.' She didn't know what it was about of course, or who wrote it. She just went by the name. The other classes have got hold of the joke and ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... matter as reading, for example. Every girl I asked was fond of reading. What kind of books? Good books. Yes, but the names. I got We Two out of Sarah, and Jean was reading Ibsen's Doll's House. It was a swell book, a play. After hours one night she told me the story. Together with Ada's concern over my grammar it can be seen that I left the dress factory in intellectual advance over the ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer's shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... case of the former, it has been necessary to present the views of a particular school of anarchism, more or less regardless of certain other schools. Proudhon, Stirner, Warren, and Tucker do not advocate violent measures, and Tolstoi, Ibsen, Spencer, Thoreau, and Emerson—although having the anarchist point of view—can hardly be conceived of as advocating violent measures. It will be obvious to the reader that I have not dealt with ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "Ibsen makes a strange impression on me; he foreshadows someone mightier than himself who is yet to come; he is like the light of dawn before the rising sun. And as regards the newest, over-praised and over-advertised ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... doing wonderful work; Miss Foster has that; she makes it very interesting. 'What English Literature Owes to Meredith,' 'Rossetti, the Man,'—you see I'm just skimming, to give you some idea. Then the Dramatic Section, every other Thursday; they give a play once a year; that's great fun! 'Ibsen—Did he Understand Women?' 'Please Explain—Mr. Shaw?'—Mrs. Moore makes that very amusing. Then alternate Thursdays the Civic and ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... you didn't go?" she suggested, and he perceived that she meant Ibsen's tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock, and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a second ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... right good thing." Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and you will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the living language of his country, had been one of the most skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in arguments which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed burglar. It needs more ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... these! What an extraordinary mixture the Germans are, brave, conceited, sentimental, prosaic, patriotic, and yet no people so soon lose their national characteristics, and become citizens of another country as Germans. Many of their intellectual poses are absolutely morbid. They adore Ibsen as a playwright and despise Goldsmith and Sheridan; they worship Gauguin, and the school of Impressionists, and have little appreciation nowadays for pre-Raphaelitism. They are intensely and truly musical, and it ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... remember in this connection, that up to the time in question no dramatic work of similar importance had ever been produced in Sweden. Its completion was more epoch-making for Sweden than that of Brand was for Norway in 1865—since the coming of Ibsen's first really great play was heralded by earlier works leading up to it, while Master Olof appeared where nobody had any reason to expect it. This very fact militated against its success, of course; it was too unexpected, and also too startlingly original, both ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... maid of four, Wide opened her eyes on Christmas morn, And looked the landscape o'er. "What is it inflates my bas de bleu?" She asked with dignity; "'Tis Ibsen in the ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Pillars of Society, and Other Plays. By Henrik Ibsen. Edited, with an Introduction, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... appearance of my head, even when prepared carefully for public appearance. It was at its best when it looked like a meadow of tall timothy that had been walked over by the cows on a wet day. Curry-combing would not disturb it. Herr Most, Ibsen, Old Hoss Hoey and I had a ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... mutterings finally jogged Parliament into inspecting his activities, the Lord Chamberlain was somewhat taken aback by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of hissing him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw and Ibsen plays, derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had not suppressed. And indeed, for every play which the Lord Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could point to five which, had he been more intelligent, he might more ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... to do that!" said Mother, hurrying away to get her magazine, which was never far away these last two or three days. "There's a whole long list here of books 'your young people will want to have in their library.' Wells and Shaw and Ibsen, and a lot of others I never heard of, but these first three I remembered because Stephen spoke of them in one of his first letters about college. Don't you know he was studying a course with those men's books in it? He said he didn't know as he was always going to agree with ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... of being always women." It flouts that external morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seem to be this and that," because her whole status in the world depended on the opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which anticipate Ibsen's Doll's House, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... like an Ibsen heroine," said Reid. "Take that woman out of this country and dress her right, and she'd be ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... blue moon. As a rule these persons know a good deal about Europe and very little about the country that gave them birth. The stock-talk of European literature is at their tongue's tip. They speak of Ibsen in the tone of one mourning the passing of a near, dear, personal friend, and as for Zola—ah, how they miss the influence of his compelling personality! But for the moment they cannot recall ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... McDonnells', which she had mentioned the night of their talk. Rather strangely, too, he had not received from either of the girls even a note of holiday greeting; to Imogene he had had sent from Denver an edition of Ibsen's plays, and to Ruth a splendid set of furs, both in care of Mrs. McDonnell, who had promised they should be delivered when Santa Claus came down the chimney. Odd, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... that her engagement at the Hudson Theater need not be unduly deplored. The Gloucester of John Blair was extremely amusing. Such a Richard, the most imaginative imaginer could never have dreamed of! He played the part as though the Duke of Gloucester were an Ibsen gentleman, battling with a dark green matinee. Mr. Loraine came from "Nancy Stair" to "The Lady Shore," and was Edward IV. It would be interesting to know which "heroine" he really preferred. The little princes in the tower seemed to deserve their fate. They were arguments ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration; in either case there is a good understanding between the author and the reader, or between the draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, for example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating pattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Lady Damp. No, no; IBSEN is the person there's been all this fuss about in the papers—he goes in for unconventionality and all that. I may be wrong, but I think it is such a mistake to have anything unconventional in an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for "The Pillars of Society"; I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Karl-Johans-gade. In this street, passing the Vor Frelsers Kirke (Church of our Saviour), the Storthings-Bygning (parliament-house, 1866) is seen, facing a handsome square planted with trees. Beyond this is the National theatre (1899), with colossal statues of the dramatists Ibsen and Bjoernsen. It faces the Fridericiana University, housed in three buildings dating from 1853, but founded by Frederick VI. of Denmark in 1811, embracing the five faculties of theology, law, medicine, history and philology, mathematics and natural sciences. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity," which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Morris on "Gothic Architecture" (replacing a lecture on Morris himself by Ernest Radford, who was absent through illness); Sergius Stepniak on "Tolstoi, Tchernytchevsky, and the Russian School"; Hubert Bland on "Socialist Novels"; and finally on July 18th Bernard Shaw on "Ibsen." This last may perhaps be regarded as the high-water mark in Fabian lectures. The minutes, which rarely stray beyond bare facts, record that "the paper was a long one," nearer two hours than one, if my memory is accurate, and add: "The meeting was a ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... father's side Swedish, on his mother's side Russian, and attended the Orthodox church. He knew Russian, Swedish, and German. He had read a good deal in those languages, and nothing one could do gave him greater pleasure than lending him some new book or talking to him, for instance, about Ibsen. ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... however, to make certain distinctions between the life work of Bjoernson and that of the two men whom a common age and common aims bring into inevitable association with him. These distinctions are chiefly two,—one of them is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen grew to be largely cosmopolitan in their outlook, Bjoernson has much more closely maintained throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently became, the one indifferent to artistic expression, and the ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... sayings may not be profound, but at least they are applicable to conduct. In the last few years scores of plays have been put upon the stage whose titles might be easily translated into proper headings for sociological lectures or sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Hauptmann, which deal so directly with moral issues that the moralists themselves wince under their teachings and declare them brutal. But it is this very brutality which the over-refined and complicated city dwellers often crave. Moral teaching has become ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... this strange quality of being offensive and engendering thought. Food for the mind if not food for the body—didactic if not delightful—a bit of modern literature, earnest and fundamentally real. I must try and understand you, Ibsen Ovarum. Possibly it is a profound parable I have stumbled upon. Though I scarcely reckoned on a parable with my bread and butter. Frankly, I must confess I bought it ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... banquet given in honor of Heinrik Ibsen by a Norwegian society known as the Woman's League, in response to a speech thanking him in the name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the poet, while disclaiming the honor of having ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the whole proceeding, Would have laughed but for good breeding. "Best join me," he cried, "Old Chappie! IBSEN read, be free, and happy! Who'll buy your love-knots? Who'll buy your love-knots? Have a spree—all shackles scorning, Come! We won't go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... Walkuere shows the irresistible passion of Siegmund and Sieglinde, brother and sister, from whose union sprang the mighty hero Siegfried; and in Gengangere (Ghosts), 1881, Ibsen threw, by the sickly craving of the fibreless Oswald Alving for Regina, a lurid light across that awesome tragedy of shadows, Nemesis, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... be blowed! Joy of life. Read Ibsen. [He goes into the pavilion to relieve his restlessness, and stares out with his hands ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... sweet letter from the Sphinx.[13] She gives me a delightful account of Ernest[14] subscribing to Romeike while his divorce suit was running, and not being pleased with some of the notices. Considering the growing appreciation of Ibsen I must say that I am surprised the notices were not better, but nowadays everybody is jealous of everyone else, except, of course, husband and wife. I think I shall keep this last remark of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... pugreed-solar-hatted-Europeans go through Egypt. We are pestered and plagued with guides and dragomans of every rank and shade;—social and political guides, moral and religious dragomans: a Tolstoy here, an Ibsen there, a Spencer above, a Nietzche below. And there thou art left in perpetual confusion and despair. Where wilt thou go? ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm with him. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts. The only way it would go, ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes. Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea."—IBSEN. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... position as the foremost man of letters Sweden has produced in modern times, the last representative of that distinguished group of Scandinavian writers which included Ibsen, Bjornson and Brandes, with a Continental reputation surpassing that of any one of them, Strindberg well may be entitled to ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi, Ibsen. The idols of an age are nearly always secondary men: they break no new ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants are already adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... to feel the same way even about Ibsen. Time was when he had an uncanny power over my imagination. He had the wand of a disenchanter. Here, I said, is one who has the gift of showing us the thing as it is. There is not a single one of these characters ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... contrasts. But surely no general indictment can lie against Schiller for taking advantage of a principle which is perfectly legitimate in itself and has been employed more or less freely by the dramatists of all ages, including realists like Ibsen and Hauptmann. After all life does really offer contrasts of character as glaring as any that poet ever imagined, only they are not apt to be found in juxtaposition. The artist, however, has a perfect right to juxtapose them if it suits his purpose; that is, if it will really enhance ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea"—wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era—wrote them there and then took ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... was a conviction that because they were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe; and, after being overwhelmed with admiration and affection through ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the literature most acceptable to us in the circumstances under which we did most of our reading, that is in Winter Quarters, was the best of the more recent novels, such as Barrie, Kipling, Merriman and Maurice Hewlett. We certainly should have taken with us as much of Shaw, Barker, Ibsen and Wells as we could lay our hands on, for the train of ideas started by these works and the discussions to which they would have given rise would have been a godsend to us in our isolated circumstances. The one type of book in which we were rich was Arctic and Antarctic travel. We had a library ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Liberal government had been persuaded to meddle at all with a question in which so many conflicting interests were involved, and which had probably no electoral value whatever. Many simple simple souls believed that it was because certain severely virtuous plays by Ibsen, by M. Brieux, by Mr Granville Barker, and by me, were suppressed by the censorship, whilst plays of a scandalous character were licensed without demur. No doubt this influenced public opinion; but those who imagine that it ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... as unto strife, breathed upon his mouth and filled his body—with ideas: Mr. Hind supplying the life. But this is not so: the ideas are all Mr. Hind's and the godfathers only supplied the name. What a name it is to be sure! It recalls one of Ibsen's plays: 'Claude Williamson Shaw was a miner's son—a Cornish miner's son, as you know; or perhaps you didn't know. He was always wanting plein-air.' Some one ought to say that in the book, but I must say it instead. At all events, Mr. Hind nearly always refers to him by his ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... conditions and dramatic taste. He will probably survive changes greater than those which separate the picture stage with its electric lights from the projecting open-air platform of his own day, or than those which separate the dramas of Ibsen, Shaw, and Barrie from those of Marlowe and Fletcher, or the cinematograph and comic opera from the bear-baiting and jugglery which rivaled the Globe. The visitor who scans, in the Stratford Museum, the curious collection of portraits of actors and ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... complains bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave and sincere as suicide. And I think there is an obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen's "Ghosts" and the popularity of some such joke as "Dear Old Charlie." Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popular preference. The joke of "Dear Old Charlie" is passed—because it is a joke. "Ghosts" are ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... romantic school, conspicuously, in having derived the suggestion or inspiration of many of his pieces from poetic suggestion. One of the most famous and best known of this kind is the first "Peer Gynt" suite. Peer Gynt is a ne'er-do-weel in Ibsen's poem. He had a variety of adventures in the course of his unprofitable life, a few of which are alluded to in the suite here under consideration. For example, it begins with a prelude in 6/8 time—a movement somewhat pastoral in character, designated ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... youth she had moved in literary circles, and now found her daily pleasure in the works of Schopenhauer, Kant, and other Germans. Her lightest reading was Sartor Resartus, and occasionally she would drop into Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the asparagus of her philosophic banquet. Her chosen mode of thought, far from leaving her inhuman or intolerant, gave her a social distinction which I had inherited from her. I could, if I had wished ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... interesting when we consider that they require huge volumes of paradoxical argument to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how much he ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Excursions. He himself describes them as "Prose Recreations of a Rhymer." "Prosy" would have been the truer epithet. The meeting of an Interviewer with Dr. JOHNSON is the best, and it is also the last. Poet WATSON'S criticism of Tess of the D'Urbevilles, his Essay on IBSEN'S Plays, and another on GEORGE MEREDITH, may have been recreations to the writer, but, like most of the other papers in this volume, they will never be so considered by the lightheaded and unbiassed reader. What ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... everything correct and conventional—musical advantages and oratorios and lectures on Emerson, and village improvement and associated charities and all that, but no vaudeville nor movies. I suppose if there were a theatre they'd only play Ibsen and Bernard Shaw." ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... it is to be feared, by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and Ibsen ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... imaginative splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its psychology reminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen. ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... dramatic work, no longer answer to the needs of a generation that has learned from younger singers and thinkers a more restless method, a more poignant and discontented thought. A literary world fed on Meredith and Henry James, on Ibsen or Bernard Shaw or Anatole France, or Synge or Yeats, rebels against the versified argument, however musical or skilful, built up in "In Memoriam," and makes mock of what it conceives to be the false history and weak sentiment of the "Idylls." All this, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stumbled over Ibsen humps And over Rembrandt rocks, I've got some fierce Debussy ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... who regard literary men merely as purveyors of amusement for people who have not wit enough to entertain themselves, Ibsen and Shaw, Maeterlinck and Gorky must remain enigmas. It is so much pleasanter to ignore than to face unpleasant realities—to take Riverside Drive and not Mulberry Street as the exponent of our life ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... modesty! How refreshing is it in this world-crisis of delirious vanity! Nevertheless Ibsen's fellow-countrymen are entitled to hold their heads high among their European brethren; for more than any other writer the great Norwegian recluse has stamped with his seal both the drama and modern thought. The eyes of Young France turned ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... find the spirit, through this world that he will find the next. The quest is ultimately the same as that of Marlowe, but the form of it is absolutely opposed to his. Goethe is as far from Marlowe's theological position as Peer Gynt is, and indeed there is a considerable similarity between Ibsen's great play and Goethe's. As the drama develops, it is true that the love of Faust becomes sensual and his curiosity morbid; but the tragedy lies no longer in the belief that sense and curiosity are in themselves wrong, but in the fact that Faust fails to distinguish their high phases from their ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... imitate and emulate and admire?" And he said that he almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names of the Norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: Ole Bull, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same question; over and over again he received the same answer: Ole Bull, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Nansen. A great musician, a great novelist, a ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so much as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the composition of "The League of Youth," his first social drama. At fifty he was almost as preoccupied; "A Doll's House" ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... putting decorative stitches into a frock for John. She had pushed aside a novel by George Moore and a volume of Ibsen's plays. She disliked Ibsen and disapproved of George Moore. Her firm, tight little character defended itself against every form of intellectual disturbance. A copy of the Times had fallen from her lap to her feet. Jane, the cat, had ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... epicality as the grandest. Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis. You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument is. For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for reality, come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so profound because so patient of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... House"?' he cried vehemently; 'why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house. Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house, and shrieks when a front door opens ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... So very kind of you to have waited, Professor. I expect Dr. Grimthorpe has explained the little difficulty we are in much better than I could. Nothing like the medical mind for a scientific statement. [Hazily.] Look at Ibsen. ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... though Vaudeville delight, Musical Comedy can bore me quite; One act of Ibsen from the Gallery caught, Better than Daly for a ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as they thought) emulate Ibsen. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... greatly over-estimated, in her opinion; she asked for invertebrate music, the free harmony of the passing wind. As for her moral views, they were enough to make one shudder. She had got past the argumentative amours of Ibsen's idiotic, rebellious heroines, and had now reached the theory of pure intangible beauty. She deemed Santerre's last creation, Anne-Marie, to be far too material and degraded, because in one deplorable passage the author remarked that Norbert's kisses had left their ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... well-known Critic, writing of a morning performance of The Doll's House on Tuesday, the 27th ult., at Terry's Theatre, "There is no need to discuss IBSEN's piece any more." I will go a little further, and say, not only should the play be spared discussion, but also performance. All that could be done for this miserable drama (if a work utterly devoid of dramatic interest can ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... and Jocasta.]—The technique of this wonderful scene, an intimate self-revealing conversation between husband and wife about the past, forming the pivot of the play, will remind a modern reader of Ibsen. ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... the nations are tired; and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest are not too tired to say that they are tired. It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and drink deep at the ancient banquet of pessimism. ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... doldrums of the English society drama, or we are sluggishly rolling along in a heavy ground swell, propelled by a passing cat's paw of revivals of old melodramas. Again we catch a very faint northerly breeze from Ibsen, or a southeaster from Maeterlinck and Hauptmann. Sometimes we set our sails to woo that ever-clearing breeze of Shakespeare, only to be forced out of our course by a sputter of rain, an Irish mist, and half a squall from George Bernard Shaw; but the greater part of the time the ship of the ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... the Flag Bill, they prepared to renew negotiations on the Consular Question, while, at the same time, they were busily engaged in strengthening their defence and raising on the boundaries rumoured fortresses against Sweden. The Under Secretary of State, Dr. SIGURD IBSEN, instituted an inquiry as to the feasibility of having a separate Consular Service in conjunction with the existing Foreign administration. It was on this point that the Minister for Foreign affairs, for the time being, Mr. LAGERHEIM, ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy of the world—according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an influence ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... alone, literature of wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... development. Beauty has been the genius of Evolution." Thus science has lent its authority to philosophy. The idea is charming. In its power it is irresistible. It certainly dominates modern literary art, being the principal dynamic of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw and all ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... filled with a packed throng over a mile long, being from six to eight in the morning. Here you may hear more languages spoken than the Tower of Babel could have echoed. Polish Jews and Russian princes, Chinese mandarins and Turkish pashas, Norwegians looking as if they had stepped out of Ibsen's plays, women from the Boulevards, Spanish grandees and English countesses, mountaineers from Montenegro and millionaires from Chicago, you will find every dozen yards. Every luxury in the world Carlsbad provides for its visitors, with the one exception ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... am the representative of the International Ibsen Society. You know who Ibsen was, ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... judgment of the mass of the people have been successfully moulded to suit the will of these dictators, and to serve as a good business basis for shrewd literary speculators? The number of Rip Van Winkles in life, science, morality, art, and literature is very large. Innumerable ghosts, such as Ibsen saw when he analyzed the moral and social conditions of our life, still keep the majority of the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... Their Lives and Works; with a commentary on "Faust." Essays on German Literature. Essays on Scandinavian Literature. A Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen. Literary and Social Silhouettes. The Story of Norway. Gunnar. Tales from Two Hemispheres. A Norseman's Pilgrimage. Falconberg. A Novel. Queen Titania. Ilka on the Hill-top, and Other Tales. A Daughter of the Philistines. The ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... difference is all the difference in the world" (p. 84). It is curious what a fascination this turn of phrase has exercised upon many and diverse intelligences. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, adopts it with enthusiasm. Henrik Ibsen—if it is ever possible to tie a true dramatist down to a doctrine—preaches in Peer Gynt that "to be thyself is to slay thyself." Mr. Wells has a cloud of witnesses to back him up; and yet it is very doubtful whether the turn of phrase is a really helpful one—whether it does not rather ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... easy, I know, to free oneself wholly from traditional interpretation, for it often succeeds in reasserting its sway upon us at the very moment we strain every nerve to escape from our bondage. So has it happened with Ibsen, who, in his search for a new and almost scientific form of fatality, erected the veiled, majestic, tyrannical figure of heredity in the centre of the very best of his dramas. But it is not the scientific mystery ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Ibsen drama of it!" interrupted the young man, flippantly. "Riddles—especially old Hildebrant's riddles—don't have to be worked out seriously. They are light themes such as Sim Ford and Harry Thurston Peck ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... happy hours together reading and discussing the books which he bought for her by the armful at a shop in Charing Cross Road, where, open to the street, were piles of books almost blatantly subversive of society—Nietsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured upon a special order.... It was a very fierce shop. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... a Danish magazine published a few chapters of an autobiographical novel which instantly created the greatest stir in literary circles throughout Europe. At that time Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, Strindberg, and other Scandinavian writers were at the height of their cosmopolitan fame, and it was only natural that the reading world should keep in close touch with the literary production of the North. But ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... her daughters was needed to carry supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a luminary. But he failed to carry out his purpose consistently. In spite of himself this apostle is unable to effect any good, too often does just the contrary. The action of this character reminds us of Gregor Werle in Ibsen's "Wild Duck." ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... the land of almost perpetual fogs and mists, there died not long ago an extraordinary man. Ibsen, by some called revolutionary, by others evolutionary, dreamed in all his works of a new day of peace and concord for all mankind. This dream did not exist in the poet's brain alone, for it has imbedded itself in the mind and heart of a great ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... equally the story of the Paris grisette and the story of the Manx deemster. In "Trilby" the blending of the novel and the romance, of the real and the fantastic, is as much of a stumbling-block to John Bull as it is, for example, in Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea." "The central idea," he might exclaim, "is utterly extravagant; the transformation by hypnotism of the absolutely tone-deaf girl into the unutterably peerless singer is unthinkable and absurd." The admirers of "Trilby" may very well grant ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... to the old traditions should stick together and form some kind of a phalanx. I was not sorry, therefore, to hear that you had expressed yourself freely about the craze of a noisy minority for formlessness and ugliness in realistic literature. Ibsen's style, regarded merely as style, bears the same relation to good writing that the Star newspaper does to a Greek statue. I don't myself much mind what morals a man teaches, so long as he preserves the morality of beautiful form, but at the rate we ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the little theatre was from a small town away on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still, with that profound, naive attention which children give. And after a few minutes I realized that I Spettri was Ibsen's Ghosts. The peasants and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat absorbed in watching as the Norwegian ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... ceased to peck at the liver of men's benefactors. All great and high art is purchased by suffering—it is not the mechanical product of dexterous craftsmanship. This is one part of the meaning of that mysterious Master Builder of Ibsen's. "Then I saw plainly why God had taken my little children from me. It was that I should have nothing else to attach myself to. No such thing as love and happiness, you understand. I was to be only a master builder—nothing else." And the tense strings that give the highest and sweetest ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... involve in lessening the friction due to primitive and obsolete tradition or in making society more reasonable and civilized. The source of the change is undoubtedly an enthusiasm which has been influenced by men and women of all nations. Ibsen has a place in the history of social transformation. And besides, the contact between nations has made it possible for the freer position of women in one group to affect ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of the scientific method" is not equivalent to the application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his purpose. Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not "see life steadily and see it whole," he has been enabled to invest his somber 'Ghosts' with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... interested in a man. I can never understand the attraction of this kind of symbolism. Unless it is allied to sublime powers of creation in metaphysics or morals—such as that possessed by a Goethe or an Ibsen—I do not see what such symbolism can add to life, though I see very well what it takes away from it. But it is, after all, a matter of taste; and, anyway, there is nothing in this story to astonish us greatly. This transition from realism to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... either so foolish or so wise; though indeed I've never quite known where our set begins and ends, and have had to content myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh it's bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent!" Mrs. Brash never sat to me; she absolutely declined; and when she declared that it was quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation invited her, I quite took this as she meant it; before we had gone very far our understanding, hers and mine, ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... once, as he wrote to Georg Brandes, the eminent Danish critic, "eyes that saw and ears that heard." Up to this time the poet in him had been predominant; now it was to be the social philosopher that held the reins. Just as Ibsen did, so Bjornson abandoned historical drama and artificial comedy for an attempt at prose drama which should have at all events a serious thesis. In this he anticipated Ibsen; for (unless we include the satirical political comedy, The League ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... return to Edinburgh proved more and more conclusively that he could not live in Scotch mists. He had made the acquaintance of a number of literary men, and he was consumed with a burning ambition to become a writer. Like Ibsen's Master-Builder, there was a troll in his blood, which drew him away to the continent on inland voyages with a canoe and lonely tramps with a donkey; these gave him material for books full of brilliant pictures, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ibsen is still the most formidable of obstinate individualists. Absolute self-reliance is the note he constantly strikes. He is obsessed by the psychology of moral problems; but for him there are no universal ethical laws—"the golden rule is that there is no golden ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... sincerity of it for he was being wearied to death by lion-hunters. Eminene men from the Old Country either get feted or cut in the Colonies. He was feted because he happened to arrive at a time when "culture" was fashionable, and Shakespeare Societies, Ibsen Evenings, History Saturday Afternoons and Science Sundays were the rage. Foreign legations and Government officials gave him dinners as deadly as any in England. He saw that he was to appear in character at these dinners. He was expected to wear a ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Goethe, and Ibsen,' said Harding, 'but I never heard him say anything new, anything personal. It seems to me that you mistake quotation for perception. He assimilates, but he originates nothing. He has read a great deal; he is ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... whole flotilla of stable-names. Henry, for example, is softened variously into Harry, Hen, Hank, Hal, Henny, Enery, On'ry and Heinie. Which did Ann Boleyn use when she cooed into the suspicious ear of Henry VIII.? To which did Henrik Ibsen answer at the domestic hearth? It is difficult to imagine his wife calling him Henrik: the name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did she make it Hen or Rik, or neither? What was Bismarck to the Fuerstin, and to the mother he so vastly feared? Ottchen? Somehow it seems impossible. What was Grant ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... not enter into the novels of Hamsun in the same manner as they did into the plays of Ibsen. Hamsun would seem to take life as it is, not with any pretense at its complete acceptability, but without hope or avowed intention of making it over. If his tolerance be never free from satire, his satire is on the other hand always ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... I'm not at all an Ibsen heroine," she declared. "I can't see my way like those wonderful ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little house in Eaton Row, the comparative merits of George Meredith and George R. Sims were not considered worth discussion. Both were regarded as persons who afforded a certain amount of amusement in return for a certain amount of cash. And on any Wednesday afternoon, Henrick Ibsen and Arthur Roberts would have been equally welcome, as adding piquancy to the small gathering. Had I been compelled to pass my life in such a house, this Philistine attitude might have palled upon me; but, under ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the processions of the two creeds into each other's churches singing the same song, made such an impression on Henrik Ibsen, the great Scandinavian poet, that again and again he returned in his conversations to this as one of the greatest and most beautiful experiences ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... exactly that way myself," responded John cheerfully, "so I did. I was like the man in the Ibsen parody, who said, 'I will not only make him feel, but be at home!'" He paused a moment, and looked graver. "Come here, ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... fine lines from Jean Ingelow that I had given him yesterday, I began to tremble. He seemed astonished when I asked vaguely—'What lines?' and remarked that he had never supposed me forgetful before. Then he began talking about Ibsen, and I gave up. 'Oh! for goodness' sake, stop!' I cried, 'I'm not Faith at all.' 'I knew it,' he said calmly, 'and thought I could soon make you own up. Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself?' And ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... recently had won the esteem only of the handful of people who think for themselves. I should say that no first-class modern French author is more perfectly unknown and uncared-for in England than Henri Becque. I once met a musical young woman who had never heard of Ibsen (she afterwards married a man with twelve thousand a year—such is life!), but I have met dozens and scores of enormously up-to-date persons who had never heard of Henri Becque. The most fantastic and the most exotic ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... one of his criticisms of the greatest modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... here dwell upon the aesthetic theories of men of letters, such as that of E. Zola, developing his thesis of natural science and history mixed, which is known as that of the human document or as the experimental theory, or of Ibsen and the moralization of the art problem, as presented by him and by the Scandinavian school. Perhaps no French writer has written more profoundly upon art than Gustave Flaubert. His views are contained in his Correspondence, which has been published. L. Tolstoi wrote his book on art while under the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... He shares in an eminent degree, with other members of the group known as Young Germany, a significance for the subsequent development of German literature, far transcending the artistic value of his works. People are just beginning to perceive his genetic importance for the student of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the recent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... precisely it. You see, we've just discovered that instead of committing suicide, as Ibsen made them do in the play, they eloped and were eventually married. You can't imagine how delighted we all are to discover that Hedda is still alive. As soon as we found that out, ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association—just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is—aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... regard to the importunities of numerous correspondents, the Baron has read IBSEN'S Master Builder, translated by two of the Ibsenitish cult. "Only fancy!" Of all the weak-knee'd, wandering, effeminate, unwholesome, immoral, dashed "rot," to quote Lord Arthur in the Pantomime Rehearsal, this is the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... variegated vision of the tragi-comedy of life in its height and its depth, its freedom, and its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen. Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even in Lear, an atmosphere of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... be made clear at once, however, and that is that Galds, with regard to social questions, was neither a radical nor an original thinker. When one considers the sort of ideas which had been bandied about Europe under the impulse of Ibsen, Tolstoy and others,—the Nietzschean doctrine of self-expression at any cost, the right of woman to live her own life regardless of convention, the new theories of governmental organization or lack of ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... relations between the sexes are searching for a new form, the old one is falling to pieces.' Among the manuscript 'remains' of Ibsen, that profound student of human nature, the following noteworthy passage occurs: '"Free-born men" is a phrase of rhetoric. They do not exist, for marriage, the relation between man and wife, has corrupted the race and impressed the mark of slavery upon ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... don't believe in the play. I would never think of producing it—it's not the sort of thing anybody is interested in. But Miss Lewis likes it; she's been reading Ibsen, and she wants to do a 'drama of ideas', and all that sort of thing, you know. And that's all right—she's the sort to make a success of whatever she does. But you must do your share, and give her a part she can ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... alike of her high argument and of the artisans, the bitter creature rails through a hundred pages of close print at the falsities of family life, the ineptitudes of marriage, the emptinesses of convention, in the spirit of an Ibsen or a Samuel Butler. Her fierce pen, shaking with intimate anger, depicts in biting sentences the fearful fate of an unmarried girl in a wealthy household. It is a cri du coeur; and then, as suddenly, she returns once more to instruct the artisans upon ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... This crude medieval psychology of heart and brain—Shakespear would have called it liver and wits—is really schoolboyish. Surely weve had enough of second-hand Schopenhauer. Even such a played-out old back number as Ibsen would have been ashamed of it. Heart ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... flattering guise of higher truth. All the impatience and playfulness in the world conspires with them. But as one of the demos of moral dullards, I get no little comfort from applying to Nietsche and Ibsen, and to certain prophet litterateurs of England, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... "I suppose Ibsen is responsible for a good deal," Mrs. Windsor said rather vaguely. Luncheon always rendered her rather vague, and after food her intellect struggled for egress, as the sun struggles to emerge from ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the world—a covetous scandal—so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... would practise it. I cannot imagine the plain man who, having a couple of hours to spare of a night, and having also the sincere desire but not the will-power to improve his taste and knowledge, would deliberately sit down and work sums by way of preliminary mental calisthenics. As Ibsen's puppet said: "People don't do these things." Why do they not? The answer is: Simply because they won't; simply because human nature will not run to it. "Esperance's" suggestion of learning poetry is ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would scream if we had the lecture on Ibsen—she had heard it three times already that winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in the lecturer's own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Portland, Ore., newspaper writer. Of Norwegian parentage; her family closely related to Henrik Ibsen. Graduate of Univ. of Ore. Took part in Lafayette Sq. meeting of Aug., 1918; sentenced to 15 days. Jan., 1919, arrested for participation in watchfire demonstration and sentenced to 5 days. For several months acted ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... perfect dunce! And he was always making a parade of Father Duvillard's millions, while pretending to disdain them, and act the revolutionist, for ever saying that he'd use his cigarette to fire the cartridge which was to blow up the world! He was Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, rolled into one! And you can see what he has become with it all: a humbug ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... literary fecundity in Great Britain and in France, and that each of these countries produced at least a score of authors whose names are known throughout the world. Even sparsely settled Scandinavia brought forth a triumvirate, Bjoernsen, Ibsen, and Brandes, without compeers in Germany. And from Russia the fame of Turgenef and of Tolstoy spread abroad a knowledge of the heart and mind of a great people who are denounced by ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... She studies Henrik Ibsen "to cultivate her mind," And reads Shakespeare and Browning through and through; Meanwhile she knits her brows—it is the only kind Of fancy work this modern ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... 1880 a new spirit was stirring in the intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was delivering his lectures on the Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and bitterness, of a conflict joined between the old and the new, both going to extremes, in which nearly every one ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... schools and universities. Paul's infallible instinct drew him into timid companionship with the last. He knew little of the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to learn. He reaped the advantage of having played "the sedulous ape" to his patrons of the studios. His tricks were somewhat exaggerated; his sweep of the hat when ladies passed him at the stage door entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... is in our favor. One would fancy you'd been reading Ibsen. Of all the bad taste—" Mrs. Gantry stopped short, to raise her lorgnette and stare at the flaccid form of Blake. "Hoity-toity! What have ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... above all else a realist; no more thoroughly natural dramas than his were ever composed. Yet as a master of realistic technique he must not be compared with Ibsen, or even with many less noted men among modern dramatists. His plays have not the neat, concise construction that we prize to-day. Pages of dialogue sometimes serve no purpose except to make a trifle clearer the character of the actors, ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... play of Peer Gynt was given in two theatres during each winter of the war. All of Ibsen's dramas played to crowded houses. Reinhardt, during the last winter I was in Berlin, produced Strindberg's "Ghost Sonata," in quite a wonderful way. The play was horrible and grewsome enough, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... my Lords Castlewood—Thomas, and Francis pere et fils—their creator has not taken so much trouble with them; but they are never "out". The least of a piece, I think, is Rachel's too fortunate or too unfortunate husband. The people who regard Ibsen's great triumph in the Doll's House as consisting in the conduct of the husband as to the incriminating documents, ought to admire Thackeray's management of the temporary loss of Rachel's beauty. They are certainly both touches of the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... repeated. "Why, I don't know; Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Longfellow, Joaquin Miller? Tolstoi had long straggly ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. True, there is no German Tolstoy, no German Ibsen, no German Zola—but then, is there a Russian Nietzsche, or a Norwegian Wagner, or a French Bismarck? Men like these, men of revolutionary genius, men who start new movements and mark new epochs, are necessarily rare and stand isolated in any people and at all times. The three names ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... what poetry will be; there is the question whether it will be, and I believe that society, being tired with Zola's realism and its caricature, not with the picturesqueness of Loti, but with catalogues of painter's colors; not with the depth of Ibsen, but the oddness of his imitators—it seems to me that society will hate the poetry which discusses and philosophizes, wishes to paint but does not feel, makes archeology but does not give impressions, and that people will turn to the poetry as it was in the beginning, what is in its ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the sardonic commentators upon modern life—Ibsen, Strindberg, and many others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had been the interpreters of women's hidden meanings, and that ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... something more difficult; something, moreover, that would appeal to the little group of thinking people about us—he would have "a little theatre of ideas," as he phrased it—and he had chosen for his first offering a play entitled "Ghosts" by the foreign dramatist Ibsen. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... not care to return to the old," she said. "There are plenty of women to do Beatrice and Viola and Lady Macbeth. I am modern. I believe in the modern and I believe in America. I don't care to start a fad for Ibsen or Shaw. I would like ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and exquisite, a protected piece of social art, etc." It is extraordinary what a difference the substitution seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of the Suffragettes say in their pamphlets and speeches, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought"—in order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended form: "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Ibsen makes two of his characters, a young man and woman who love each other, part voluntarily on the top of a high mountain in order that they may be enabled to keep their high ideals and uplifting love ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... afternoons all through the winter the playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of Hamlet or Egmont; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick |
