in frequent
straits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollar
breeding. He cast the suspicion of poetry from him, and with his gold
spectacles, his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom and his quick
staccato step, he adopted the pose of a gentleman of affairs, very
positive and with no nonsense about him.

He had long determined on the wilful abandonment of poetic form, and the
famous statement made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must be
quoted, although it is well known, since it contains the clearest of all
the explanations by which Ibsen justified his new departure:--

You are of opinion that the drama [_Emperor and Galilean_] ought to have
been written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here I
must differ from you. The play is, as you will have observed, conceived
in the most realistic style: the illusion I wished to produce is that of
reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he
was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed
verse, I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented
the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary
insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into
the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one
another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same
rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare.
Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural
colors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desire
to see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a
negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally,
the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the
representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation;
what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not
let them talk "the language of the Gods."

This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877
Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est
en vers, et l'ennui s'y promene librement entre les rimes."

No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held so rigidly to his
intention of reproducing the exact language of real life, as did Ibsen
in the series of plays which opens with _The Pillars of Society_. This
drama was published in Copenhagen in October, 1877, and was acted a