ch lasted to the end of their lives, and some of Ibsen's
best letters are those written to his wife's step-mother. She worked
hard for him at the Bergen theatre, translating plays from the French,
and it was during Ibsen's management of the theatre that several of her
own pieces were produced. Her prose stories, in connection with which
her name lives in Norwegian literature, were not yet written; so long as
Ibsen was at her side, her ideas seem to have been concentrated on the
stage. Constant communication with this charming woman only nine years
his senior, and much his superior in conventional culture, must have
been a school of refinement to the crude and powerful young poet. And
now the wise Magdalene appeared to him in a new light, dedicating to
him the best treasure of the family circle, the gay and yet mysterious
Susannah.

While he was writing _The Vikings at Helgeland_, and courting Susannah
Thoresen, Ibsen received what seemed a timely invitation to settle
in Christiania as director of the Norwegian Theatre; he returned,
thereupon, to the capital in the summer of 1857, after an absence of
six years. Now began another period of six years more, these the most
painful in Ibsen's life, when, as Halvorsen has said, he had to fight
not merely for the existence of himself and his family, but for the very
existence of Norwegian poetry and the Norwegian stage. This struggle was
an excessively distressing one. He had left Bergen crippled with
debts, and his marriage (June 26, 1856) weighed him down with further
responsibilities. The Norwegian Theatre at Christiania was, a secondary
house, ill-supported by its patrons, often tottering at the brink of
bankruptcy, and so primitive was the situation of literature in the
country that to attempt to live by poetry and drama was to court
starvation. His slender salary was seldom paid, and never in full. The
only published volume of Ibsen's which had (up to 1863) sold at all was
_The Warriors_, by which he had made in all 227 specie dollars (or about
L25).

The Christiania he had come to, however, was not that which he had left.
In many directions it had developed rapidly. From an intellectual point
of view, the labors of the nationalists had made themselves felt;
the folk-lore of Landstad, Moe and Asbjoernsen had impressed young
imaginations. In some of its forms the development was unpleasing and
discouraging to Ibsen; the success of the blank-verse tragedies of
Andreas Mun