and its press one of the most “chatty” in the world. Our “greatest living author” was offered up as a wave-offering, and he smoked daily on the altar of the newspapers.
It will be extremely rash of the biographers of the future to try to follow Ibsen’s life day by day in the Christiania press from, let us say, 1891 to 1901. During that decade he occupied the reporters immensely, and he was particularly useful to the active young men who telegraph “chat” to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Berlin. Snapshots of Ibsen, dangerous illness of the playwright, quaint habits of the Norwegian dramatist, a poet’s double life, anecdotes of Ibsen and Mrs. , rumors of the King’s attitude to Ibsen—this pollenta, dressed a dozen ways, was the standing dish at every journalist’s table. If a space needed filling, a very rude reply to some fatuous question might be fitted in and called “Instance of Ibsen’s Wit.” The crop of fable was enormous, and always seemed to find a gratified public, for whom nothing was too absurd if it was supposed to illustrate “our great national poet.” Ibsen, meanwhile, did nothing at all. He never refuted a calumny, never corrected a story, but he threw an ironic glance through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he strolled down Carl Johan with his hands behind his back.
