"Ibsen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 of that period ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... be that all 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 ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... "Why, I don't know; Walt Whitman, Ibsen, Longfellow, Joaquin Miller? Tolstoi had long straggly ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter, 'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a response from a certain number who thus cluster into a self-selected union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... subtlety of the feelings and fancies of the common people. But Shakespear was not satisfied with this. What is the use of being Shakespear if you are not allowed to express any notions but those of Autolycus? Shakespear did not see the world as Autolycus did: he saw it, if not exactly as Ibsen did (for it was not quite the same world), at least with much of Ibsen's power of penetrating its illusions and idolatries, and with all Swift's horror of its cruelty ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 of pepper. That ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... been computing the amount of pills taken in England annually. He has omitted "Club-Pilling." The severe committee men are, pace IBSEN, the real ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 12, 1890 • Various
... simple still As in the dear old days; Don't prate of Matter and Free Will, And IBSEN's nasty plays, A girl should ne'er, it seems to me, Have notions so pedantic; 'Twere better far once more to be Impulsive ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... 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
... said 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, the tennis-playings, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... "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 ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... century, Germany produced but little of 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... 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 and the expression of our civilization. These men are the sappers and ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... 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, in saying ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... 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
... "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 Germans: Suderman and Company they are merely a loud prating about small ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... is 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 to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... who 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... 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 ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... cause any capable woman with double parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... by a 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 ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... in 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 ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... There's Ibsen,[4] puckering up his lips, Squirming at Nature and Society, Drawing with tingling finger-tips The clothes off naked Impropriety! So nice, so nasty, and so grim, He hugs his gloomy bottled thunder; To summon up one smile from him Would ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 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 even the professional star-gazers, who maintained a ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... soon 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
... wider than Voltaire's—Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr. Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a Catiline, and in later life seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the Emperor and Galilean, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi begins, and ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... 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, New York.... ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... had said had been unfortunate. He had praised the Cove enthusiastically, and Robin had been contemptuous. He had never heard of Pater and had confounded Ibsen with Jerome K. Jerome. He had praised cricket and met with no reply. Twice he had seen Robin's mouth curl contemptuously, and it had ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... hero is an embodied protest against the poverty of spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen rebelled against in his countrymen. In Peer Gynt the hero is himself the embodiment of that spirit. In Brand the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as its central theme, the drama is constructed, is the contrast between the spirit of compromise on the one hand, and the motto ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 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 ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... 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 could influence British governments little know ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... be blowed! Joy of life. Read Ibsen. [He goes into the pavilion to relieve his restlessness, and stares out with his hands thrust deep in ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... should 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
... 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 ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... development of society and civilization is a mistake not only of the learned, but of the pseudo-learned, of the men and women of more or less education whose mental development has not progressed beyond an appreciation of Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and H.G. Wells. Most of them are estimable people, but the difficulty is that they are so idealistic that, so to speak, they never have both feet upon the ground at the same time. This is especially true of our esteemed contemporaries, the Socialists. These cheerful ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... no one dressed the part more perfectly in tennis 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 ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... her calm superiority. It was very trying to him. No girl had a right to act as if she thought herself the superior of any man. Just to show her how inferior she was he dropped the subject of the tariff entirely and began a conversation on Ibsen. He did not know much about Ibsen but he knew a little and he could lead her beyond her depths and make her feel her inferiority that way. Kitty listened to him with an amused smile, and then told him a few things about Ibsen, quoted a few enlightening pages from Hauptmann, routed ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... blatant uxoriousness. So do I. And I fear the Most Wonderful Man on Earth is blatantly uxorious. I honour him for a certain sadness in his voice when he speaks of unrequited love. But his constant reference to Ibsen's motif in the "Wild Duck," though it fails in its primary object of convincing me that he is familiar with Ibsen's plays, does in truth tell me that some fair one gave ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... How easily and how naturally he lives in the pose, the body bent forward, the elbows on the table! Fine as the Orchardson undoubtedly is, it seems fatigued and explanatory by the side of this wonderful rendering of life; thin and restless—like Dumas fils' dialogue when we compare it with Ibsen's. The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Elysee Montmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the ratmort and had a soupe aux choux; she lives in the Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up till half-past eleven; ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... American castle 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 ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... 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. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... father's insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams' wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded—Tolstoi—Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,—but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... anything but pointless and childless, since it has 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
... 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 ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Mr. Ellis Roberts mention Cezanne on the fourth page of a book about Ibsen? One cannot think so. Similarities in the work and circumstances of the two men can hardly have escaped him. Born within a dozen years of each other (Ibsen was born in 1828), both matured in a period ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... background and the Latin traditions forming such a conspicuous part of it. The Latin peoples have shown that they can die as bravely as the men of any other race or clime, but their attitude toward death in general is widely different from the attitude illustrated by Ibsen or Strindberg, for instance. A certain gloom, having kinship with death, seems ingrained in the Northern temperament, put there probably by the pressure of the Northern winter. The man of the sunlit South, on the other hand, seems always to retain the child's simple ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... always individuals standing 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." ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... was deep in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement, "The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledged my first sneeze with ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... 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
... 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. ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... relating facts without commenting upon them. Dramatists and novelists are compelled by the nature of their art to be objective in this sense of the word (though Fielding and Thackeray in the one field, and Ibsen and Shaw in the other, manage to make their comments with their own lips, not those of their characters). But such a writer would not of necessity be more truthful or impartial than any one else. He can distort truth as thoroughly by selecting certain facts and ignoring others as by making ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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 transition from realism to symbolism is ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... she would try to run the talk into literary lines and Ibsen and Gorky, where I would have been swamped in a minute, but she didn't, and, although I had wondered how to break the subject of money when conversing with one who must be thinking of nobler things, I found she was less shy when on that subject than when talking ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... 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
... 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 rule"—thus ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... 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 ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... 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, Darwin ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... singspiels, all that matters is a number of songs, ballads or arias—call them what you will—entirely disconnected and quite destructive to the continuity that must be the essence of every drama. This continuity is an absolute necessity to every spoken play; imagine the effect if Shakespeare or Ibsen had written little pieces of rhyming verse joined up by any jumble of nonsensical prose! Neglect of this fact led every opera composer before Wagner astray. We can imagine a pre-Wagner composer telling his librettist, "Now, mind you arrange that in certain parts the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Peer Gynt (not Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is sophisticated, but the original Peter) is a lonely deer-stalker on the fells, who is asked by his neighbour to come and keep his house for him, which is infested with trolls. Peer Gynt clears them out,[43] and goes back to his deer-stalking. The ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... repeat again, in that charming manner I knew so well, those 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 ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... England entered the fray wholeheartedly in behalf of the emancipation of woman. In France it was Michelet and George Sand that came to their aid. In Germany it was Max Sterner, Buechner, Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht. In Scandinavia it was Ibsen and Bjoernson. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... put the masked man down to Quamina's vivid imagination," declares Eleanor, "if you had not personally encountered him, Carol. He is like a sort of 'troll,' one of Ibsen's 'helpers and servers.'" ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... why. It's a very gloomy play by Ibsen, and whenever it's simply more than I can bear, I look up and see Mentone on the left, Monte Carlo on the right—I mean, I see all the loveliness round me, and then I know the world isn't so bad after all." She put her ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... know: though Vaudeville delight, Musical Comedy can bore me quite; One act of Ibsen from the Gallery caught, Better than Daly for ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... 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
... 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 if the ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... from whom 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 to ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... what you mean," said the lady, "and I don't know why you are so curious about them. They all read the same books at the same time, and they sacrifice wild asses at the altar of the Hyperborean Apollo, IBSEN, you know." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... 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 offering ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... Street, (1919). The Department of Oratory has also interested itself in the drama and is responsible for several well-considered presentations of such plays as Galsworthy's Silver Box; Kennedy's The Servant in the House, (1916); Ibsen's Pillars of Society, (1917); and Masefield's ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... by The Innocence of Father Brown. It will, however, be more 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 ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... which he would apologize to public meetings in a 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 ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... a 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
... works of Multatuli (E. Douwes Dekker), Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution, the works of Nietzsche, Emerson, W. Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, Alexander Herzen, Edward Carpenter and so on; and in the domain of fiction, the dramas of Ibsen, the poetry of Walt Whitman, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Zola's Paris and Le travail, the latest works of Merezhkovsky, and an infinity of works of less known authors,—are full of ideas which show how closely Anarchism is interwoven with the work that is going on in modern ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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
... great writers who have, more than any others, made it possible for Norway to share in the comity of intellectual intercourse so characteristic of the modern literary movement, it must be granted that Bjoernson is, more distinctly than Ibsen, the representative of their common nationality. Both are figures sufficiently commanding to belong, in a sense, to the literature of the whole world, and both have had a marked influence upon the ideals of other peoples than that from which they sprung; but the wider intellectual scope of Ibsen ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... knowledge of life and books, like that of her husband, is self-acquired, but I have met few people in any walk of life with the same wide and thorough range of thought. In their home oft-quoted volumes of Spencer, Darwin, Fiske, Carlyle, Ibsen, Valdes, Howells, give evidence that they not only keep abreast but ahead of the current thought of the day. Spencer is their philosopher, and Howells is their novelist, but Dickens and Scott have large space on their shelves. All this does not prevent ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... of 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 ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm. 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, in ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... could not forbear laughing. Wagner was 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 trace on the Countess's ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... monuments. We go through life as 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? Whom ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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 towards him; the writer ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... 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 then comes ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... 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 been said a thousand ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this young woman of Norway Got IBSEN to write, in cock-sure way, Concerning her woes, And tip-tilted her nose, Crying, "Now womankind will have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... 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 ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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, made a proposal, the consequences ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... 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 ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... 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 ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... feast with his presence, and especially honored the Chianti and Genzano wines, which were served copiously, in fiascos. When you see Ibsen, with his lion face and tangle of hair, for the first time, you are fascinated by him, knowing what a genius he is, but when you talk with him, and feel his piercing, critical eyes looking at you from under his bushy brows, and see his cruel, satirical smile, you are a little prejudiced against ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... foremost men of Norway, were very closely associated throughout life. They were schoolmates, and both were interested in writing and producing plays. Ibsen's son, Dr. Sigurd Ibsen, married Bjoernson's daughter, Bergilot. These two great writers were direct contrasts in nearly everything: Bjoernson lived among his people, Ibsen was reserved; Bjoernson ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... 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
... you might almost say dazed. He asked me apologetically if we ever did anything to relieve the strain,—had any amusements, you know,—and I said, oh, yes; we had a Browning and an Ibsen club, and we sometimes gave Greek tragedies in the original. He was positively afraid to come near me again, for fear I'd forget and talk to him in ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... 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 great ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... of 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 ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... "Had Ibsen been a novelist, and had he chosen Mr. Herrick's theme in 'The Healer,' he might have written much the same ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. Such reading is 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 truly refined people ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that might ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... to be, realism shows how it actually is. Unfortunately, realistic writers have not, in many cases, been true to their fundamental principles. The great continental leaders of realism—Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen—have been tainted with a fatal pessimism. Realists of this type seem to see only one side of life,—the darker side of sin and wretchedness and despair. They often describe what is coarse, impure, obscene. No doubt their pictures are true as far as they go; but the fatal ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... to one of the daily papers, it appears that "a hundred ladies and gentlemen who find the works of HENDRIK IBSEN (perhaps not all for exactly the same reasons, but who agree in finding them) among the most interesting productions of the modern theatre, have guaranteed the estimated expenses of a series of twelve performances, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... 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 ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... 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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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
... the Paris before the war—perfect cooking, courtly waiting, and prices not too high. I have pleasant recollections also of Fouquet's in the Champs Elysees, and of an almost divine meal at the Tour d'Argent, on the other side of the river, where Frederic of the Ibsen whiskers used once to reign: the delicacy of the soufflee of turbot! the succulent tenderness of the caneton a la presse! the seductive flavour of the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... Ibsen heroine," said Reid. "Take that woman out of this country and dress her right, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... Hansen, 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 ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... took a nap after luncheon. I stayed in the den and read Ibsen, and felt very mournful. And after Hedda had shot herself, I lay down on the divan and cried a little—over Hedda; she was young and it was such a tragic ending—and then I ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... started out on our married life five months before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with itself;—or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the weakness of most women in feeling it a disgrace, or a misfortune, to be caught in the wrong clothes in the right place. But that ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of giving a photographic ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... error in the moral life. The 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 ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... to forced and stagy 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 ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Ah, if she had only 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 was ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words which make ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... forth. They have no 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
... has followed in its upward 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 ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... Pinero's early farces abounded with asides and even lengthy soliloquies; but his later plays are made entirely without them. The present prevalence of objection to both is due largely to the strong influence of Ibsen's rigid dramaturgic structure. Dramatists have become convinced that the soliloquy and the aside are lazy expedients, and that with a little extra labor the most complicated plot may be developed without resort to either. The passing of the aside has had an important effect on naturalness ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... 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, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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
... 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 ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... sexual life entered into the drama, they would be accepted as a social background, just as the landscape is the natural background. A community which is aesthetically mature enough to appreciate Ibsen does not leave "The Ghosts" with eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... 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
... 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 Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... last to be shown men and women as they are; and at first it is more than we can endure.... All Ibsen's characters speak and act as if they were hypnotised, and under their creator's imperious demand to reveal themselves. There never was such a mirror held up to nature before: it is too terrible.... Yet we must return to Ibsen, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... for instance, who deserts his family that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he considers more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse our contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain a larger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola" did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must always remain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... That's 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, I was sent ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... 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 ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... describe 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
... 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 ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... modern literature of towns, however, 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 ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... man Withstood the years Until one day I met a Dane Who'd talked with Henrik Ibsen: This man, with head bowed to the wind, Was walking up a Stockholm way When 'round the corner came the seer, And he plumped into him. And that great mind Whose thinking moved the world Surveyed my friend Through his big eyes And slowly spoke: "Since when ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... the death of Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the foremost creative writer of the Scandinavian countries. Those approaching most nearly to his position are probably Selma Lagerloef in Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to have less than he of that width ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... "Oh, don't make an 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 like to handle. But, somehow, I can't strike just the answer. Bill Watson may, and ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... a town 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 ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... other's way, wrecking each other's plans, frustrating each other's schemes. The woman almost never is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both. She is between two fires. Euripides understood this when he put into Medea's mouth a cry as modern as any that Ibsen has conceived:— ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could not write ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter, 'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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
... one, 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 ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... of the quivering sky, which is never still even when it seems most immobile; I tried to paint the rhythms of the atmosphere, shivering as it is with chords of sunlight and chromatic scales as yet unpainted. Like Oswald Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, my last cry will be for 'the sun.' How did my friends act? What did the critics say? A black sun was too much for the world, though astronomers have proven my theory correct. The doctors ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... 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 ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis |
