A Drama in Three
Acts
185O
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The drama Catiline, with which I entered upon
my literary career, was written during the winter
of 1848-49, that is in my twenty-first year.
I was at the time in Grimstad, under the necessity
of earning with my hands the wherewithal of life and
the means for instruction preparatory to my taking
the entrance examinations to the university.
The age was one of great stress. The February
revolution, the uprisings in Hungary and elsewhere,
the Slesvig war,—all this had a great effect
upon and hastened my development, however immature
it may have remained for some time after. I
wrote ringing poems of encouragement to the Magyars,
urging them for the sake of liberty and humanity to
hold out in the righteous struggle against the “tyrants”;
I wrote a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, containing
particularly, as far as I can remember, an appeal
to set aside all petty considerations and to march
forthwith at the head of his army to the aid of our
brothers on the outermost borders of Slesvig.
Inasmuch as I now, in contrast to those times, doubt
that my winged appeals would in any material degree
have helped the cause of the Magyars or the Scandinavians,
I consider it fortunate that they remained within
the more private sphere of the manuscript. I
could not, however, on more formal occasions keep from
expressing myself in the impassioned spirit of my poetic
effusions, which meanwhile brought me nothing—from
friends or non-friends—but a questionable
reward; the former greeted me as peculiarly fitted
for the unintentionally droll, and the latter thought
it in the highest degree strange that a young person
in my subordinate position could undertake to inquire
into affairs concerning which not even they themselves
dared to entertain an opinion. I owe it to truth
to add that my conduct at various times did not justify
any great hope that society might count on an increase
in me of civic virtue, inasmuch as I also, with epigrams
and caricatures, fell out with many who had deserved
better of me and whose friendship I in reality prized.
Altogether,—while a great struggle raged
on the outside, I found myself on a war-footing with
the little society where I lived cramped by conditions
and circumstances of life.
Such was the situation when amid the preparations
for my examinations I read through Sallust’s
Catiline together with Cicero’s Catilinarian
orations. I swallowed these documents, and a
few months later my drama was complete. As will
be seen from my book, I did not share at that time
the conception of the two ancient Roman writers respecting
the character and conduct of Catiline, and I am even
now prone to believe that there must after all have
been something great and consequential in a man whom
Cicero, the assiduous counsel of the majority, did
not find it expedient to engage until affairs had taken
such a turn that there was no longer any danger involved
in the attack. It should also be remembered that
there are few individuals in history whose renown
has been more completely in the hands of enemies than
that of Catiline.
