a cowardly suitor, while in Ibsen’s tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband.  In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of the Bataille de Dames may have contributed to the shaping of The Feast at Solhoug in Ibsen’s mind.  But more significant than any resemblance of theme is the similarity of Ibsen’s whole method to that of the French school—­the way, for instance, in which misunderstandings are kept up through a careful avoidance of the use of proper names, and the way in which a cup of poison, prepared for one person, comes into the hands of another person, is, as a matter of fact, drunk by no one but occasions the acutest agony to the would-be poisoner.  All this ingenious dovetailing of incidents and working-up of misunderstandings, Ibsen unquestionably learned from the French.  The French language, indeed, is the only one which has a word—­quiproquo—­to indicate the class of misunderstanding which, from Lady Inger down to the League of Youth, Ibsen employed without scruple.

Ibsen’s first visit to the home of his future wife took place after the production of The Feast at Solhoug.  It seems doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her; but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the previous summer, when he was writing his play.  It is a curious coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had occupied him in his first dramatic effort, Catilina, and which had formed the main subject of the play he had just produced.  It is less wonderful that the same contrast should so often recur in his later works, even down to John Gabriel Borkman.  Ibsen was greatly attached to his gentle and retiring sister-in-law, who died unmarried in 1874.

The Feast at Solhoug has been translated by Miss Morison and myself, only because no one else could be found to undertake the task.  We have done our best; but neither of us lays claim to any great metrical skill, and the light movement of Ibsen’s verse is often, if not always, rendered in a sadly halting fashion.  It is, however, impossible to exaggerate the irregularity of the verse in the original, or its defiance of strict metrical law.  The normal line is one of four accents:  but when this is said, it is almost impossible to arrive at any further generalisation.  There is a certain lilting melody in many passages, and the whole play has not unfairly been said to possess the charm of a northern summer night, in which the glimmer of twilight gives place only to the gleam of morning.  But in the main (though much better than its successor, Olaf Liliekrans) it is the weakest thing that Ibsen admitted into the canon of his works.  He wrote it in 1870 as “a study which I now disown”; and had he continued in that frame of mind, the world would scarcely have quarrelled with his judgment.  At worst, then, my collaborator and I cannot be accused of marring a masterpiece; but for which assurance we should probably have shrunk from the attempt.