work upon the greatest of his Norse Histories--_The
Pretenders_. But history was for him little more than material
for the illustration of modern problems; and he turned with zest
from the task of breathing his own spirit into the stubborn mould
of the thirteenth century, to hold up the satiric mirror to the
suburban drawing-rooms of Christiania, and to the varied phenomena
current there,--and in suburban drawing-rooms elsewhere,--under
the name of Love.

Yet _Love's Comedy_ is much more than a satire, and its exuberant
humour has a bitter core; the laughter that rings through it is
the harsh, implacable laughter of Carlyle. His criticism of
commonplace love-making is at first sight harmless and ordinary
enough. The ceremonial formalities of the continental _Verlobung_,
the shrill raptures of aunts and cousins over the engaged pair,
the satisfied smile of enterprising mater-familias as she reckons
up the tale of daughters or of nieces safely married off under her
auspices; or, again, the embarrassments incident to a prolonged
_Brautstand_ following a hasty wooing, the deadly effect of
familiarity upon a shallow affection, and the anxious efforts to
save the appearance of romance when its zest has departed--all
these things had yielded such "comedy" as they possess to many
others before Ibsen, and an Ibsen was not needed to evoke it.
But if we ask what, then, is the right way from which these "cosmic"
personages in their several fashions diverge; what is the condition
which will secure courtship from ridicule, and marriage from
disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts company with all his predecessors.
"'Of course,' reply the rest in chorus, 'a deep and sincere love';--
'together,' add some, 'with prudent good sense.'" The prudent
good sense Ibsen allows; but he couples with it the startling
paradox that the first condition of a happy marriage is the absence
of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence
of marriage.

The student of the latter-day Ibsen is naturally somewhat taken
aback to find the grim poet of Doubt, whose task it seems to be
to apply a corrosive criticism to modern institutions in general
and to marriage in particular, gravely defending the "marriage of
convenience." And his amazement is not diminished by the sense
that the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which
poets have at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond
question happily, married. The truth is