"Ibsen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "natural" and what is cultural. In the widest sense everything is natural; in the narrowest very few things are natural. Cooked food, clothing, houses, marriages, education, etc., are not found in a state of nature, any more than clocks and plays by Ibsen are. Our judgment as to what is good and bad is mainly instinctive leaning directed or ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... also it hath been thought a 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
... it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal. The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's The League of Youth, but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you sometimes noticed that ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... 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 ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... on June 29, 1890, Ibsen wrote to the Swedish poet, Count Carl Soilsky: "Our intention has all along been to spend the summer in the Tyrol again. But circumstances are against our doing so. I am at present engaged upon a new dramatic work, which for several reasons has made ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... had heard nothing more from Imogene of the plan for him to spend the day at the 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
... warnings. All the great figures are ominous. If they do not belong to the new order, they make impossible the old. Carlyle and Dickens and Victor Hugo, the products and lovers of the age, scold it. Flaubert points a contemptuous finger. Ibsen, a primitive of the new world, indicates the cracks in the walls of the old. Tolstoi is content to be nothing but a primitive until he becomes little better than a bore. By minding his own business, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... perhaps intellectually more remote from Europe than in its earlier days. The contact of its romanticism with that of Europe was, as has been seen, imperfect, but its touch with the later developments and reactions of the movement in Europe is far more imperfect. With Tolstoy, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, Zola, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Sudermann, the American people can have no effectual touch; their social tradition and culture make them impenetrable to the present ideas of Europe as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Let Ibsen be a great poet and dramatist, or a literary fraud, there are one or two things which he says which strike men with the force of a revelation; and when he speaks of the love-life which is given to every man and woman, and calls him and her a murderer who kills it, he speaks ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... had to face life as it is, and this she found very trying. She suffered from her marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and from her abortive grapplings both with the abstract problems of her soul and the concrete mischiefs of her female friends. The influence of IBSEN and a militant Suffragette didn't help her meditations, and when her husband died she had the mortification to find that the first man of her own age who professed love to her was no man but a series of artistic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... saw 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 home ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... satisfactory to take the two Father Brown books together. In the first of these and Manalive, a change can be distinctly felt. It is not a simple weakening of the power of employing instruments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing The Lady from the Sea, he could no longer keep his symbols and his characters apart. It is a more subtle change, a combination of several small changes, which cannot be studied fairly in relation only to one side of Chesterton's work. In the last ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... of Oedipus 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 vintage 1704. How much of the vintage of 1898 will stand, equally well, the uncorking process if applied in a century or two from now? How many plays in vogue at present will be read with pleasure at that distant period? Will they be the gruesome affairs of Ibsen, still tainted with their putrid air of unhealthy mentality, or the clever performances of Henry Arthur Jones; the dramas of Bronson Howard or the farcical skits of ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... excellent as a means of humanising and making anarchists of refined people, but how could you appeal to the rebellious workers with such books as these? For instance, my father, do you think he could read Ibsen or any of the others? Indeed not; but let him go to a meeting where he can hear Emma Goldman speak, or let him read Jean Grave, or Bakunin, or some other writer of 'crude' pamphlets, and he might become interested, he might be able to understand. But since it seems that ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... 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 easily tolerant. ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... important bearing upon the relation between these intellectual currents and Weltschmerz—these minds were lacking in the discipline implied in our modern scientific training. Scientific exactness of thinking had not become an integral part of education. Hence the difference between the pessimism of Ibsen and the romantic Weltschmerz of ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... peradventure of a doubt, so 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 ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... is visibly on the wane." Now whoever told him that was mistaken. The public interest in poetry and in poets has visibly wox, to use Mr. Watson's word. It is always true that an original genius, like Browning, like Ibsen, like Wagner, must wait some time for public recognition, although these three all lived long enough to receive not only appreciation, but idolatry; but the "reading public" has no difficulty in recognizing immediately first-rate work, when it is produced in the ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... are incapable of. It is true that too much of this domestic virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule: both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end; and though Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the mischief he does do is of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarme and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place of ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... "Had Ibsen been a novelist, and had he chosen Mr. Herrick's theme in 'The Healer,' he might have written much the same sort of a ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... man Jack, of the Lout and his Mother, been developed, by 1890, to a drama as finished as that of Congreve or Goldsmith, Sheridan or Wilde, those who would have their plays abreast of our time would have gone, just as, with the conditions as they are, the dramatists of the Renaissance did go, to Ibsen and M. Maeterlinck, like all the rest of the world. It is a matter of reproach, in the estimation of many patriotic Irishmen, that Mr. Martyn learned his art of Ibsen, and Mr. Yeats a part of his of M. Maeterlinck, but that attitude is as unreasonable as that which would reproach ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... appeared—he is not positively ugly, but he has a way of staring at one that is rather ill-bred.... There is a gold band around his left wrist and a scar upon his right cheek.... I am sure he is the SAME man I met at one of Sadakichi-Hartmann's readings from Ibsen's Ghosts.... He may recall the time.... It was in an abandoned palace on Russian Hill, somewhere in America; the lady at his left was discussing the difficulties of getting her motor car into Ragiz; the younger one on his right was known as Alma and gave her address as East 61st Street, ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... Japanese girlhood which teaches the submission of women and the superiority of men. It was a type which was becoming rare in her own country. Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin. Asako must be a fool. She exasperated her Japanese cousin, who at the same time was envious of her, envious above all of her independent wealth. As she observed to her own mother, it was most improper that a woman, and a young ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... article for the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post. Miss Wellington referred to this mysterious Regina Miriam Bloch who had stunned everybody by her early articles written under the name of one of Ibsen's most formidable heroines; but unfortunately Miss West wrote a letter in disclaimer. She cannot help Mr. Ibsen. It may be a collision in names, but it is not a collusion. The truth about Rebecca West, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... or golf or sailing or fishing. He believed that he ought to read up in the summer, too, and he had the very best of the recent books, in fiction and criticism, and the new drama. He had all of the translations of Ibsen, and several of Maeterlinck's plays in French; he read a good deal in his books, and he lent them about in the hotel even more. Among the ladies there he had the repute of a very modern intellect, and of a person you would never take ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the technical side, 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 were his archprophets. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... carefully handled and however clever the setting—the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all—tinting it with strange and even outre colours. Much the same has to be said of most of what are problem-plays—several of Ibsen's among ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... hypnotists, book-writing hypnotists, newspaper-writing hypnotists, are at us all. This sugar you are eating, they tell us, is ink, and forthwith we reject it with infinite disgust. This black draught of unrequited toil is True Happiness, and down it goes with every symptom of pleasure. This Ibsen, they say, is dull past believing, and we yawn and stretch beyond endurance. Pardon! they interrupt, but this Ibsen is deep and delightful, and we vie with one another in an excess of entertainment. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... with a past, like the Ibsen woman; it also has a future; but at present it is in the transmigratory period between the two, and is in consequence odious. The place is chiefly interesting because it is the oldest town in the archipelago settled by Europeans, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... leadership of Willisen, a former Prussian general and distinguished theoretical strategist, engaged a superior Danish army at Idstedt. They were beaten. Their defeat had so discouraging an effect that Prussia abandoned the struggle in their behalf. In Norway, about this time, Henrik Ibsen came into prominence with a publication of his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... popular in their day, and almost all, indeed, of the narrative and 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, of course, is true, and has ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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, made a proposal, the consequences ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... House Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Darwins, the Bunsens, the Pasteurs. In the place of God we see Law, and the old concept of rewards and punishments has been re-stated as 'the survival of the fittest.' If, on the other hand, you need emotions, and the inspiration of concrete teaching, you must go to Balzac, to Turgenief, and to Ibsen...." ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... had been reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ingenue suddenly to become the heroine—but I like it. As to the cause——" and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night, twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... its appeal to us outside of Norway because of its more general intelligibility. Bjornson and Jonas Lie in this way have secured places in literature in no small part because of their characteristic Norwegianism; Kielland to some little extent has secured his place because of the want of it. Ibsen is here left out of the discussion. He is quite sui generis, and apart from the mere choice of environment, for his work ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... the lady, "I don't see much in him; at first I thought he was rather interesting. He reminded me somewhat of Brand in Ibsen's play, or something of that sort; but really, how tiresome he is, with his short, cutting remarks, which come plump into the middle of a conversation like so ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... no doubt, with the after-effects of her dip into Ibsen that, on her sitting down to write the work that was to form her passport to the Society, her mind should incline to the most romantic of romantic themes. Not altogether, though: Laura's taste, such as it was, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... living and writing for the stage with youth on his side and the future before him, it is John Synge, whose four plays.... represent accomplishment of the highest order. It is true that these dramas do deal only with peasants, but they are handled in the universal way that Ibsen used when he made the bourgeois of slow Norwegian towns representative of the human race everywhere.... it is not only in the avoidance of joyless and pallid words that Mr. Synge has chosen the better part. He has experienced ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... Swedish capital in the fall of 1872; and let us 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, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... 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 human ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... were busy now 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, ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain extremes of his teaching, represents the other. Nietzsche, I suppose, should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with their splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... 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 of pepper. That ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... an ordinary novel. A writer who dares to show up the hollowness of social conventions must have the courage of her convictions and be willing to accept the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine Ibsen or Tolstoy writing under a false name?" Mrs. Fetherel lifted a tragic eye to her cousin. "You don't know, Bella, how often I've envied you since I began to write. I used to wonder sometimes—you won't mind ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... 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
... will 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... me in connection with this subject: the praise of Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist, is abroad in England; and again, as so often before, mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the direction of Boston. But some of the loudest worshippers of this truly great man in both countries either wilfully ignore, ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... writing in a language like the Danish, intelligible to only a small public, can expect only small returns for his labor in either influence, fame, or fortune. The return may be so small that it is prohibitive. Hence we find the Danish Hans Christian Andersen and the Norwegian Ibsen writing in German, as do also many Scandinavian scientists. Georg Brandes abandons his native Danish and seeks a larger public by making English the language of his books. The incentive to follow a literary career, especially if it includes making a living, is relatively weak among ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... that Edmond de Goncourt should have ended by disliking the form of the novel, which he came to regard as an exhausted convention. His pessimism was universal. Art was dying, literature was perishing daily. The almost universal acceptance of Ibsen and of Tolstoi was in itself a convincing symptom of degeneration, if the vogue of the latter writer were not indeed the result of a cosmopolitan plot against the native realistic school. It was some consolation to reflect that, after all, there was more "philosophy" in ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... Thas, and Messalina have been held up to the admiring views of the Parisians clothed in more or less gorgeous sound—and little else. There is no parallel between this movement on the part of opera and the contemporary tendency of the spoken drama. Those diligent regenerators of society, Ibsen, Pinero & Co., affect a moral purpose to conceal an obvious aim from the simpleminded; the French makers of opera are franker, for they seek to glorify impudicity in the persons of its greatest historical representatives by lavishing upon the subject the most gorgeous pictures, the most ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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 ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and of—er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the mistake we both made—and all that sort of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... not at all an Ibsen heroine," she declared. "I can't see my way like those wonderful ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis. They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they were radicals,—"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young persons. They were not willing to accept the current morality, not even that part of it engraved in law; but so ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... 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
... very little, but what she did say was magnificent. In her 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 it, have attended with success the tea-drinkings, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... telling yet what the new attitude may 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 domestic slavery ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... decade from 1870 to 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 had a share. How many of the works ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... universal and particular. He liked O. Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four—flusher. Edgar Saltus' Anatomy of Negation was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen's Ghosts was the stuff, though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. John ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... I 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 ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... modern 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, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... of modern life in New York City, in which a poet shows his skill of playwrighting... he brings to the American drama to-day a thing it sadly lacks, and that is character." In manner and technique Mr. Robinson's new play, "The Porcupine", recalls some of the work of Ibsen. Written adroitly and with the literary cleverness exhibited in "Van Zorn", it tells a story of a domestic entanglement in a dramatic fashion well calculated to ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... 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 consciously worked for the woman's ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... apart from society, often in violent opposition to it, though they have always conquered in the end. When any great person has stood alone against the world it has always been the world that lost. The strongest man, as Ibsen argued in his Enemy of the People, is the man who stands most alone. "He will be the greatest," says Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, "who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent." Every great and vitally organized person is hostile to the rigid and narrow ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... trifles that do not amount to much. Among these are: "The Bear," "The Asking in Marriage," and others. Then come the more serious plays, where one feels for a moment the influence of Ibsen. We find here again the same heroes, each of whom talks about his own particular case, and acts only in starts. These are specimens of "failures" belonging to ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... that the story was only about a mere entity when I had been getting 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 ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... to insist that there's nothing to retribute," ran a passage in one of the letters, "but the poor fellow is saying one thing with his lips and another in his soul. What's the play in which the ghosts come back? Is it "Hamlet," or "Macbeth," or one of Ibsen's? Well, it's like that. He's seeing ghosts. He wants us to be on hand because we persuade him that they're not there—that they can't be there, so long as we're all on friendly terms, and that we're not laying up anything against him. The very fact that he pays our ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... best known to the English-speaking world for his relations with Bjornson and Ibsen, reviewed[11] the eleventh installment of Lembcke's translation of Shakespeare. The article does not venture into criticism, but is almost entirely a resume of Shakespeare translation in Norway and Denmark. It is less well informed than we should expect, ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... partaken freely of these comestibles, we made the adjournment to a luxuriously upholstered parlour, circled with plush-seated chairs and adorned with countless mirrors, and there we began to beg the question at issue, to-whit, "To what extent has Ibsen (if any) contributed towards the cause of Female Emancipation?" which was opened by a weedy, tall male gentleman, with a lofty and a shining forehead, and round, owlish spectacle-glasses. He read a very voluminous paper, from which ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... oldish men are so 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; ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... wanted the 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
... 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 Germans ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... 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 Entertainment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... modern ethics, the absence of 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 ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... those 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
... 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 foreign plays have been performed in England, but I doubt ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... written in Christiania during 1894, and published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one of ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... enthusiasms, but there is not the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into the field with his own contemporaries. Reviewers who had been extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner attacking landmarks in the world of letters, venturing to detest Ibsen and to ask William Archer whether he hung up his stocking on Ibsen's birthday, accusing Kipling of lack of patriotism. It is, said one angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his contemporaries." "His ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 exorcised—because ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the drama and of music is not past, and he who knows how to handle these mighty suggestive expedients can turn the course of humanity. The herd will follow him though he lead them into the wilderness or the desert. Wagner and Ibsen have proved it. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... have not 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 ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... family. This accounted for the trod-grass 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 ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... 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 weak-knee'dest, effeminatest, and all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... are embedded —indistinguishably, I hope—in the text. I have tried, wherever it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason, among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... 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 ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... holding in his hands a walking stick, a pair of dove colored gloves, a two-quart hat, a cup of tea with a slice of lemon peel in it, a tea spoon, a lump of sugar, a seed cookie, an olive, and the hand of a lady with whom he is discussing the true meaning of the message of the late Ibsen but these gifted mortals are not common. They are rare and exotic. There are also some few who can do ushing at a church wedding with a pair of white kids on and not appear overly self-conscious. These are also the ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... public school and also enjoyed the advantages of private instruction, customary in middle class life; French and music lessons played an important part in the curriculum. The future interpreter of Ibsen and Shaw was then a little German Gretchen, quite at home in the German atmosphere. Her special predilections in literature were the sentimental romances of Marlitt; she was a great admirer of the good Queen Louise, whom the bad Napoleon Buonaparte treated with so marked a lack of knightly chivalry. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... incipient malady; and every 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, shrewd observations, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I went to a tea, and then I stopped in to hear Madame Ruvier read a paper on the Ethics of Ibsen, and she—" ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... when it has the grotesque inspiration, makes for 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
... on receiving a request for his assistance in raising a monument to IBSEN, is reported to have replied cautiously that he would like to know more about this writer before ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... it in secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal 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," ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 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 ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... cordially. "It's really awfully good of you to devote so much time to my entertainment. And so original of you to think of a circus! I haven't attended a circus for years. It's really refreshing after such a dose of Shakespeare and Ibsen as the theaters have been ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... notorious that men by themselves at lunch or dinner usually shun grave topics and indulge in persiflage, and even descend to talk about wine and the made dishes. The women's lunch of this summer takes higher ground. It will give Mr. Browning his final estimate; it will settle Mr. Ibsen; it will determine the suffrage question; it will adjudicate between the total abstainers and the halfway covenant of high license; it will not hesitate to cut ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the times! Ladies and gentlemen Who once before my cage in thronging crescents Crowded, now honor operas, and then Ibsen, with their so highly valued presence. My boarders here are so in want of fodder That they reciprocally devour each other. How well off at the theater is a player, Sure of the meat upon his ribs, albeit His frightful hunger may tear him and he it And colleagues' ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... in the Country Club district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, a lamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some of it was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love for Henry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen, Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, and Bernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record as organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state three years ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... gifted little actress said to me only yesterday, "We want something a bit meatier than the dry old bones of IBSEN'S ghosts." Well, I am out to provide that something; my present success certainly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... frequently applied to the few dramatists who have been content to work in this way. It has been applied, among others, to Euripides, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen; it will be applied to many in the future. Nothing, however, is more dubious than the way in which these two words "pessimist" and "optimist" are used; for the optimist appears to be he who cannot bear the world as it is, and is forced by his nature to picture it as it ought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... So by strict analogy, sour books—the kind that bite the temper and snarl upon your better moods—should be in a small minority. Do not mistake me! I shall find a place, maybe, for a volume or two of Nietzsche, and all of Ibsen surely. I would admit uplift too, for my taste is catholic. And there will be other books of a kind that never rouse a chuckle in you. For these are necessary if for no more than as alarm clocks ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared and said, "How Russian!" They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen's intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature, ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Bengal Civil servant. He drew his chair over by Hilda's, and began discussing Mrs. Ogilvy's eyes and the first officer's flirtations. Hilda hated gossip, and took refuge in generalities. In three minutes the talk had wandered off to Ibsen's influence on the English drama, and we had forgotten the very existence of the Isle ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... in view—an English translation of a French play about the patient Griselda, and a comedy by Miss Clo Graves among them. Finally, I settled upon Ibsen's "Vikings." ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... show to the Scandinavians of Finland that newspapers are useless, petitions inadmissible, constitutions a fetish, banishment a blessing, and the use of their native language a superfluity. The only sad thing in this fair prospect is that it is not the objurgatory Bjornson, the philosophic Ibsen, and the impulsive Nansen, with their compatriots, now groaning under what they are pleased to call "Swedish tyranny," who would enjoy this Russian liberty, but their children, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that in it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as great mobility as the verse of the Niebelungenlied, along with a dramatic value not inferior to that of the pentameter. Henrik Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the mutual relations of the principal characters, Svend Dyring's House owes more to Kleist's Kathchen von Heubronn than The Feast at Solhoug owes to Svend Dyring's House. But the fact remains that the versified parts of the ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... generous fairy in as many pleasant ways as they would permit. The theatre continued to be her delight, as well as her school of life, and a box-party followed nearly every dinner. She was like a child in the catholicity of her appetite, for she devoured Shakespearian bread, Ibsen roasts, and comic opera cream-puffs with almost equal gusto—and mentally thrived upon the mixture. To the outsider she seemed one of the most fortunate ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... if you scorn the Commonplace, Why wear a Nose upon your Face? And since Pythagoras is mute on Sex Hygiene and Cosmic Law, Is your Blonde Beast as Bland a Brute, As Blind a Brute, as Bernard Shaw? No doubt, when drilling through the parks, With Ibsen's Ghost and Old Doc Marx, You've often seen two Golden Souls Drink Suds and Sobs ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... 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 enlarging and ...
— 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 organization—one ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievement of Mr. Squire as a poet. He laboured under the disadvantage of being also a wit. It used to be said of Ibsen that a Pegasus had once been shot under him, and one was alarmed lest the reverse of this was about to happen to Mr. Squire, and lest a writer who began in the gaiety of the comic spirit should end soberly astride Pegasus. When, in Tricks of the Trade, he announced that ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... studied something, 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
... curtain, I caught the poetry of the commonplace, I had my first unconscious lesson in literary and dramatic fidelity. And I ended my college days, a much more sophisticated person, championing Pinero and Jones, rushing eagerly to special performances of Ibsen, and ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two of which, Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple, had been acted in America by Richard Mansfield before the end ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton |
