CHAPTER VI
1875-82
While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were The Editor and A Bankruptcy, in which Björnson suddenly swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid modern life. This was his first attempt at that “photography by comedy” which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded what was Ibsen’s comment on these two plays, and particularly on A Bankruptcy, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next work. It is obvious that he perceived that Björnson had carried a very spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities.
Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen upon Ibsen. His
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