his brooding
over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant,
in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his
earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of
one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in
later life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined,' because a newspaper
had attacked him overnight.

With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges
king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a
letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean
behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He
gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even
when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the
calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller
threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of
it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy
and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all
ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how
like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible
trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even
national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as
bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself
(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than
others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.

During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass
with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill.
Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell
furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well
again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?

Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick
scorpion in the glass.

In one of his early letters to Bjoernson, he had written: 'When I read
the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable
narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane
man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen
gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and
less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the
black spot at the core of