theatre. It seems that every responsibility fell upon his shoulders, and
that there was no part of stage-life that it was not his duty to look
after. The dresses of the actresses, the furniture, the scene-painting,
the instruction of raw Norwegian actors and actresses, the selection of
plays, now to please himself, now to please the bourgeois of Bergen, all
this must be done by the poet or not done at all. Just so, two hundred
years earlier, we may imagine Moliere, at Carcassonne or Albi, bearing
up in his arms, a weary Titan, all the frivolities and anxieties and
misdeeds of a whole company of comedians.

So far as our very scanty evidence goes, we find the poet isolated from
his fellows, so far as isolation was possible, during his long stay at
Bergen. He was not accused, and if there had been a chance he would have
been accused, of dereliction. No doubt he pushed through the work of the
theatre doggedly, but certainly not in a convivial spirit. The
Norwegians are a hospitable and festal people, and there is no question
that the manager of the theatre would have unusual opportunities of
being jolly with his friends. But it does not appear that Ibsen made
friends; if so, they were few, and they were as quiet as himself. Even
in these early years he did not invite confidences, and no one found him
wearing his heart upon his sleeve. He went through his work without
effusion, and there is no doubt that what leisure he enjoyed he spent in
study, mainly of dramatic literature.

His reading must have been limited by his insensibility to foreign
languages. All through his life he forgot the tongues of other countries
almost faster than he gained them. Probably, at this time, he had begun
to know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluency
which was, it appears, always ungrammatical. But, as is not unfrequent
with a man who is fond of reading but no linguist, Ibsen's French and