"Ibsen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Russian in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity," which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. Or such an idea as the "craving for community of worship ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... immovable basis. While idealism shows us how life might be or ought to be, realism shows how it actually is. Unfortunately, realistic writers have not, in many cases, been true to their fundamental principles. The great continental leaders of realism—Tolstoi, Zola, Ibsen—have been tainted with a fatal pessimism. Realists of this type seem to see only one side of life,—the darker side of sin and wretchedness and despair. They often describe what is coarse, impure, obscene. No doubt their pictures are ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... of Oedipus and Jocasta.]—The technique of this wonderful scene, an intimate self-revealing conversation between husband and wife about the past, forming the pivot of the play, will remind a modern reader of Ibsen. ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... material suggested by the fantastic imagination of the composer—as in Debussy and Ravel. Among the most attractive modern Suites may be cited: The Peer Gynt (put together from incidental music to Ibsen's play) and the Holberg by Grieg; the two L'Arlesienne Suites by Bizet (written to illustrate Daudet's romantic story)—the first, with its dainty Minuet and brilliant Carillons (Peal of bells); Dvo[vr]ak's Suite for Small Orchestra, op. 39, with its sprightly ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... you mean," said the lady, "and I don't know why you are so curious about them. They all read the same books at the same time, and they sacrifice wild asses at the altar of the Hyperborean Apollo, IBSEN, you know." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... themselves could not forbear laughing. Wagner was greatly over-estimated, in her opinion; she asked for invertebrate music, the free harmony of the passing wind. As for her moral views, they were enough to make one shudder. She had got past the argumentative amours of Ibsen's idiotic, rebellious heroines, and had now reached the theory of pure intangible beauty. She deemed Santerre's last creation, Anne-Marie, to be far too material and degraded, because in one deplorable passage the author remarked that Norbert's kisses had ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Dock Tavern and in due course turned into Store street, famous for its C division police station. Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the stonecutter's in his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the right, while the other who was acting as his fidus Achates inhaled with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery, situated ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... recently had won the esteem only of the handful of people who think for themselves. I should say that no first-class modern French author is more perfectly unknown and uncared-for in England than Henri Becque. I once met a musical young woman who had never heard of Ibsen (she afterwards married a man with twelve thousand a year—such is life!), but I have met dozens and scores of enormously up-to-date persons who had never heard of Henri Becque. The most fantastic and the most exotic foreign plays have been performed in England, but I doubt if the London curtain ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... decisive influence was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. For the tendencies of these men coincided with Germany's growing interest in science and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy. Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement. But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola with him and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of French naturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: "The modern—everything ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... to make certain distinctions between the life work of Bjoernson and that of the two men whom a common age and common aims bring into inevitable association with him. These distinctions are chiefly two,—one of them is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen grew to be largely cosmopolitan in their outlook, Bjoernson has much more closely maintained throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently became, the one indifferent to ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... a past, like the Ibsen woman; it also has a future; but at present it is in the transmigratory period between the two, and is in consequence odious. The place is chiefly interesting because it is the oldest town in the archipelago settled by Europeans, and one ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... nineteenth century, Germany produced but little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries. True, there is no German Tolstoy, no German Ibsen, no German Zola—but then, is there a Russian Nietzsche, or a Norwegian Wagner, or a French Bismarck? Men like these, men of revolutionary genius, men who start new movements and mark new epochs, are necessarily rare and stand isolated in any people and at all times. The three names ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for all time, and who had, moreover, the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great actors ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with one another: Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same was true ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... philosopher. She said very little, but what she did say was magnificent. In her youth she had moved in literary circles, and now found her daily pleasure in the works of Schopenhauer, Kant, and other Germans. Her lightest reading was Sartor Resartus, and occasionally she would drop into Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the asparagus of her philosophic banquet. Her chosen mode of thought, far from leaving her inhuman or intolerant, gave her a social distinction which I had inherited from her. I could, if I had wished it, have attended with success the tea-drinkings, the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... will play many mannish parts, And these her Seven Ages. First the infant "Grinding" and "sapping" in its mother's arms, And then the pinched High-School girl, with packed satchel, And worn anaemic face, creeping like cripple Short-sightedly to school. Then the "free-lover," Mouthing out IBSEN, or some cynic ballad Made against matrimony. Then a spouter, Full of long words and windy; a wire-puller, Jealous of office, fond of platform-posing, Seeking that bubble She-enfranchisement E'en with abusive mouth. Then County-Councillor, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... as the foremost man of letters Sweden has produced in modern times, the last representative of that distinguished group of Scandinavian writers which included Ibsen, Bjornson and Brandes, with a Continental reputation surpassing that of any one of them, Strindberg well may be entitled to dream ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... Hansen, best known to the English-speaking world for his relations with Bjornson and Ibsen, reviewed[11] the eleventh installment of Lembcke's translation of Shakespeare. The article does not venture into criticism, but is almost entirely a resume of Shakespeare translation in Norway and Denmark. It is less well informed than we should expect, and contains, among several other ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... it began, several reporters of both sexes came to interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... there's nothing to retribute," ran a passage in one of the letters, "but the poor fellow is saying one thing with his lips and another in his soul. What's the play in which the ghosts come back? Is it "Hamlet," or "Macbeth," or one of Ibsen's? Well, it's like that. He's seeing ghosts. He wants us to be on hand because we persuade him that they're not there—that they can't be there, so long as we're all on friendly terms, and that we're not laying ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... pugreed-solar-hatted-Europeans go through Egypt. We are pestered and plagued with guides and dragomans of every rank and shade;—social and political guides, moral and religious dragomans: a Tolstoy here, an Ibsen there, a Spencer above, a Nietzche below. And there thou art left in perpetual confusion and despair. Where wilt thou go? Whom ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... talk Shakespeare, Goethe, and Ibsen,' said Harding, 'but I never heard him say anything new, anything personal. It seems to me that you mistake quotation for perception. He assimilates, but he originates nothing. He has read a great deal; he is covered with literature like ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... with the after-effects of her dip into Ibsen that, on her sitting down to write the work that was to form her passport to the Society, her mind should incline to the most romantic of romantic themes. Not altogether, though: Laura's taste, such as it was, for literature had, like all young ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... manhole, if a street car runs over a man from North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel through a hole in the lisle thread, if the police drag a telephone and a racing chart forth from an Ibsen Society reading-room, if Senator Depew or Mr. Chuck Connors walks out to take the air—if any of these incidents or accidents takes place, you will see the mad, irresistible rush of the "rubber" tribe to ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... woman of Norway Got IBSEN to write, in cock-sure way, Concerning her woes, And tip-tilted her nose, Crying, "Now womankind will have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... a little over thirty, in the year 1874, the Norwegian Government honored him with an annuity of sixteen hundred crowns a year, for life. Another good fortune was a request from the distinguished poet, Henrik Ibsen, to produce music for his ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... performance devoted to his works, I made up my mind, after bracing up my nerves, to attend it. The 23rd of February (the date of the proposed function) as the second Monday in Lent, seemed to me, too, distinctly appropriate. By attending the performance—IBSEN recommends self-execution—I sentenced myself to three hours and a half of boredom, tempered with disgust. I cannot help feeling that whatever my past may have been, the penance paid to wipe it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... up to haunt her. Ah, if she had only studied something, if she were only wiser, a linguist, a student of poetry or of history. Nearing twenty-five, she was as ignorant as she had been at fifteen! A remembered line from a carelessly read poem, a reference to some play by Ibsen or Maeterlinck or d'Annunzio, or the memory of some newspaper clipping that concerned the marriage of a famous singer or the power of a new anaesthetic,—this was ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... to be feared, by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and Ibsen were ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... be made clear at once, however, and that is that Galds, with regard to social questions, was neither a radical nor an original thinker. When one considers the sort of ideas which had been bandied about Europe under the impulse of Ibsen, Tolstoy and others,—the Nietzschean doctrine of self-expression at any cost, the right of woman to live her own life regardless of convention, the new theories of governmental organization or lack of organization—one cannot ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... and Schiller. Their Lives and Works; with a commentary on "Faust." Essays on German Literature. Essays on Scandinavian Literature. A Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen. Literary and Social Silhouettes. The Story of Norway. Gunnar. Tales from Two Hemispheres. A Norseman's Pilgrimage. Falconberg. A Novel. Queen Titania. Ilka on the Hill-top, and Other Tales. A Daughter of the Philistines. The Light of Her Countenance. Vagabond Tales. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I once drew Ibsen, looking bored Across a deep Norwegian Fjord, And very nearly every one Mistook him for ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangled and brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in the borders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest your cheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the other plays we favor; Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Shaw's Back to Methuselah and Hilliard's adaptation of Heinlein's Children of Methuselah, the Capek brothers' Insect People, O'Neill's The Fountain, Flecker's Hassan, Camino Real, Children of the Moon, The Beggar's Opera, Mary of Scotland, ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... House Henrik Ibsen has given us Nora Hebler, a Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn in every stage ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Pallanton had married on a new, radical basis. They had first met in the house of an intellectual woman, the wife of a university professor, where clever young persons were drawn in and taught to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Ibsen and George Moore, and to engage gracefully in perilous topics. They had been rather conscious that they were radicals,—"did their own thinking," as they phrased it, these young persons. They were not willing to accept the current ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... us that the playbill of IBSEN'S Ghosts at the Pavilion Theatre bears the following words: "Mr. Neville Chamberlain says, 'It is essential there should be provided amusements and recreations which can take people for an hour or so out of themselves and return them to their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... absinthe or ver- mouth of the last musical comedy. The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. Analysts with their problems, and teachers with their systems, are soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopœia of Galen, — look at Ibsen and the Germans — but the best plays of Ben Jonson and Molière can no more go out of fashion than the black- berries on the hedges. Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... she had mentioned the night of their talk. Rather strangely, too, he had not received from either of the girls even a note of holiday greeting; to Imogene he had had sent from Denver an edition of Ibsen's plays, and to Ruth a splendid set of furs, both in care of Mrs. McDonnell, who had promised they should be delivered when Santa Claus came down the chimney. Odd, the ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... intended to describe a luminary. But he failed to carry out his purpose consistently. In spite of himself this apostle is unable to effect any good, too often does just the contrary. The action of this character reminds us of Gregor Werle in Ibsen's "Wild Duck." ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to certain great events and developing powers in the world. She read the sardonic commentators upon modern life—Ibsen, Strindberg, and many others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own inquiries. It moved her to discover that men, more often than ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm. He's on his knees to me to do Ibsen. I tell him I will if he'll combine with Jimmy Finnigan and bring the Surprise Party on between the acts. The only way it ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... he settled in Copenhagen, and produced a series of novels and collections of short stories, which placed him in the front rank of Scandinavian novelists. Among his more famous stories are Faedra (1883) and Tine (1889). The latter won for its author the friendship of Ibsen and the enthusiastic admiration of Jonas Lie. Among his other works are:—Det hvide Hus (The White House, 1898), Excentriske Noveller (1885), Stille Eksistenzer (1886), Liv og Dod (Life and Death, 1899), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Emperor Joseph II stayed here. So much for fact. I like far more to remember the Christmas dinner eaten here—only, alas, in fancy, yet with all the illusion of fact—by Browning and a Scandinavian dramatist named Ibsen, brought together for the purpose by the assiduous Mr. Gosse, as related with such skill and mischief by ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... American stage, we can better understand the pleasure which filled Mr. James's heart. What, for example, would Madame Nathalie have thought of the modish gowns which Mrs. Fiske introduces into the middle-class Norwegian life of Ibsen's dramas? No plays can less well bear such inaccuracies, because they depend on their stage-setting to bring before our eyes their alien aspect, to make us feel an atmosphere with which we are wholly unfamiliar. The accessories ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... view—an English translation of a French play about the patient Griselda, and a comedy by Miss Clo Graves among them. Finally, I settled upon Ibsen's "Vikings." ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... height and its depth, its freedom, and its wide horizon. This drama has for the most part little to do with the operation of the Fate which works itself out when a man's soul is in the stern clutch of Necessity. We are far here from Euripides and from Ibsen. Life is always a pageant here, a tragi-comedy, which may lean sometimes more to comedy, and sometimes more to tragedy, but has in it always, even in Lear, an atmosphere of enlarging and ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... to return to the old," she said. "There are plenty of women to do Beatrice and Viola and Lady Macbeth. I am modern. I believe in the modern and I believe in America. I don't care to start a fad for Ibsen or Shaw. I would like to ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile; that as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine dealer's shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... for a man's passing fancy. If that's your new morality, I prefer the old. Don't turn this comedy into a tragedy. That's all very well on the stage, but we're not acting an Ibsen play; it ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... against an unpatriotic habit into which many of my critics have fallen. Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... unduly deplored. The Gloucester of John Blair was extremely amusing. Such a Richard, the most imaginative imaginer could never have dreamed of! He played the part as though the Duke of Gloucester were an Ibsen gentleman, battling with a dark green matinee. Mr. Loraine came from "Nancy Stair" to "The Lady Shore," and was Edward IV. It would be interesting to know which "heroine" he really preferred. The little princes ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... a conviction that because they were born in Tooting or Camberwell, they were the natural superiors of Beethoven, of Rodin, of Ibsen, of Tolstoy and all other benighted foreigners. Those of them who did not think it wrong to go to the theatre liked above everything a play in which the hero was called Dick; was continually fingering a briar pipe; and, after being overwhelmed with admiration ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... "Had Ibsen been a novelist, and had he chosen Mr. Herrick's theme in 'The Healer,' he might have written much the same sort of a ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... end, half in dreams, Aasmund Olavsen Vinje's Long figure and spare, a contemplative genius; Thin and intense, with the color of gypsum, And a coal-black, preposterous beard, Henrik Ibsen. I, the youngest of the lot, had to wait for company Till a new litter came in, after ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... careful of their reputations as of their complexions. A third, too tenderhearted to break our spirits with the realities of a bitter experience, coaxed a wistful pathos and a dainty fun out of the fairy cloudland that lay between him and the empty heavens. The giants of the theatre of our time, Ibsen and Strindberg, had no greater comfort for the world than we: indeed much less; for they refused us even the Shakespearian-Dickensian consolation of laughter at mischief, accurately called comic relief. Our emancipated young successors scorn us, very properly. But they will be able to do no ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... as it is, and this she found very trying. She suffered from her marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and from her abortive grapplings both with the abstract problems of her soul and the concrete mischiefs of her female friends. The influence of IBSEN and a militant Suffragette didn't help her meditations, and when her husband died she had the mortification to find that the first man of her own age who professed love to her was no man but a series of artistic poses. Of her difficulties, real enough ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea."—IBSEN. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... problem was solved of how to fashion a metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as great mobility as the verse of the Niebelungenlied, along with a dramatic value not inferior to that of the pentameter. Henrik Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the mutual relations of the principal characters, Svend Dyring's House owes more to Kleist's Kathchen von Heubronn than The Feast at Solhoug owes to Svend Dyring's House. But the fact remains that the versified parts of the ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... I'm not at all an Ibsen heroine," she declared. "I can't see my way like those wonderful ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... upward development. Beauty has been the genius of Evolution." Thus science has lent its authority to philosophy. The idea is charming. In its power it is irresistible. It certainly dominates modern literary art, being the principal dynamic of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... though Vaudeville delight, Musical Comedy can bore me quite; One act of Ibsen from the Gallery caught, Better than ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... Oratory has also interested itself in the drama and is responsible for several well-considered presentations of such plays as Galsworthy's Silver Box; Kennedy's The Servant in the House, (1916); Ibsen's Pillars of Society, (1917); and Masefield's Tragedy ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... furniture he had been brought up among, which had been the stage scenery of his chimney-corner days, when the back bed-room chairs became a ship, and the sofa-back was his hunter's camp. At Vailima he, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, received "a race gift from his childhood's home." He had in olden times played at being a minister like his grandfather, to wile away a toyless Sunday. When he grew into his unorthodox dark shirt and velvet-jacket stage, he had been a rebellious, rather atheistical youth; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... Not because it looks to Switzerland, or to Norway, but to Germany! Honor to Sweden for that! But what about us? We don't want to be a piddling little nation stuck up in our mountains, a nation that brings forth peace conferences, ski-runners, and an Ibsen once every thousand years; we have potentialities for a ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... the magic lyre in her hand, risking her life, by climbing to the spire of the steeple and uttering her inspiring speech from there. Is not this something like Solness, the builder, from the top of his tower? Like Tolstoi, Ibsen had evidently read George Sand and ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... to make it short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea"—wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... wanted the dolls to give Ibsen's 'Doll's House.' She didn't know what it was about of course, or who wrote it. She just went by the name. The other classes have got hold of the joke and guy ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... hours to spare of a night, and having also the sincere desire but not the will-power to improve his taste and knowledge, would deliberately sit down and work sums by way of preliminary mental calisthenics. As Ibsen's puppet said: "People don't do these things." Why do they not? The answer is: Simply because they won't; simply because human nature will not run to it. "Esperance's" suggestion of learning poetry ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... subjected the English dramatists. Indeed, when their mutinous mutterings finally jogged Parliament into inspecting his activities, the Lord Chamberlain was somewhat taken aback by the tactics of Shaw, who, instead of hissing him for forbidding public performances of certain Shaw and Ibsen plays, derided and denounced him instead for the plays he had not suppressed. And indeed, for every play which the Lord Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could point to five which, had he been more intelligent, he might ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... to persuade themselves or anyone else of the truth of their conclusions. But the giants of our time are undoubtedly alike in that they approach by very different roads this conception of the return to simplicity. Ibsen returns to nature by the angular exterior of fact, Maeterlinck by the eternal tendencies of fable. Whitman returns to nature by seeing how much he can accept, Tolstoy by seeing how ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... flinched. I do not know how I knew it, but I was sure she was his wife. She was beside herself with passion. She must have found out something—something about some other woman. I felt as I have felt at an Ibsen play—as though I were looking through the keyhole into a room where dirty linen was about to be washed. She shook and trembled all over like an express train approaching a country station. Reason told me that Peppino and I were ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Karl-Johans-gade. In this street, passing the Vor Frelsers Kirke (Church of our Saviour), the Storthings-Bygning (parliament-house, 1866) is seen, facing a handsome square planted with trees. Beyond this is the National theatre (1899), with colossal statues of the dramatists Ibsen and Bjoernsen. It faces the Fridericiana University, housed in three buildings dating from 1853, but founded by Frederick VI. of Denmark in 1811, embracing the five faculties of theology, law, medicine, history ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... phase of Wagner's harmonic style. It first came into Wagner's head as an opera to be entitled Siegfried's Death, founded on the old Niblung Sagas, which offered to Wagner the same material for an effective theatrical tragedy as they did to Ibsen. Ibsen's Vikings in Helgeland is, in kind, what Siegfried's Death was originally intended to be: that is, a heroic piece for the theatre, without the metaphysical or allegorical complications of The Ring. Indeed, the ultimate catastrophe of the Saga cannot by any perversion of ingenuity ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Notre Dame stands. It is a little old-fashioned place with a narrow entrance hall and a low-ceilinged parlour. Frederic is its proprietor, and since Joseph of the Marivaux died Frederic remains the one great "character" in the dining world of Paris. In appearance he is the double of Ibsen, the same sweeping whiskers, the same wave of hair brushed straight off from the forehead. He is an inventor of dishes, and it is well to ask for a list of his "creations," which are of fish, eggs, meat, and fruit, and are generally named after some patron of the establishment,—Canape ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... the People" Ibsen thunders his powerful protest against the democracy of stupidity, the tyrannous vulgarity of majority rule. Doctor Stockmann—that is Ibsen himself. How willing and eager the pigmies and yahoos would have ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... experience by the establishment of her famous high schools, which we can hardly imagine her doing had she been a province of Prussia; Norway has given us the greatest of modern dramatists, Henrik Ibsen; and Belgium has not only produced Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, but is industrially the most highly developed country on the continent. The world cannot afford to do without her small peoples, who ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... the importunities of numerous correspondents, the Baron has read IBSEN'S Master Builder, translated by two of the Ibsenitish cult. "Only fancy!" Of all the weak-knee'd, wandering, effeminate, unwholesome, immoral, dashed "rot," to quote Lord Arthur in the Pantomime Rehearsal, this is the weak-knee'dest, effeminatest, and all the epithets as above ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these—is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to Shakespeare. Only absurd groups of Culture-Philistines can read these "powerful modern productions" more than once! One knows not whether their impertinent preaching, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... similar plight. The sayings may not be profound, but at least they are applicable to conduct. In the last few years scores of plays have been put upon the stage whose titles might be easily translated into proper headings for sociological lectures or sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Hauptmann, which deal so directly with moral issues that the moralists themselves wince under their teachings and declare them brutal. But it is this very brutality which the over-refined and complicated city dwellers often crave. Moral teaching has become so ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... desire to take her by the shoulders and shake her out of her calm superiority. It was very trying to him. No girl had a right to act as if she thought herself the superior of any man. Just to show her how inferior she was he dropped the subject of the tariff entirely and began a conversation on Ibsen. He did not know much about Ibsen but he knew a little and he could lead her beyond her depths and make her feel her inferiority that way. Kitty listened to him with an amused smile, and then told him a few things about Ibsen, quoted a few ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... Ibsen's play, the "Doll's House"? I don't think it has been acted in America, and probably won't be, unless, perhaps, in Boston. But get it and read it. It is to show that a woman is a personality, aside from her family relations, and must live her life, finally, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that they are also as grave and sincere as suicide. And I think there is an obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between the aversion to Ibsen's "Ghosts" and the popularity of some such joke as "Dear Old Charlie." Surely there is nothing mysterious or unphilosophic in the popular preference. The joke of "Dear Old Charlie" is passed—because it is a joke. "Ghosts" are exorcised—because ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... dignified and lives in a very proper place where they have everything correct and conventional—musical advantages and oratorios and lectures on Emerson, and village improvement and associated charities and all that, but no vaudeville nor movies. I suppose if there were a theatre they'd only play Ibsen ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues in the man of the garrison. He cannot be expected to exhibit the virtues of a people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs, to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... pointed out were architects playing with Noah's arks, ministers reading Darwin's "Theory of Evolution," lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... eagles have not ceased to peck at the liver of men's benefactors. All great and high art is purchased by suffering—it is not the mechanical product of dexterous craftsmanship. This is one part of the meaning of that mysterious Master Builder of Ibsen's. "Then I saw plainly why God had taken my little children from me. It was that I should have nothing else to attach myself to. No such thing as love and happiness, you understand. I was to be only a master builder—nothing else." And ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to dub this new drama the "serious" drama; the label was unfortunate, and not particularly true. If Rabelais or Robert Burns appeared again in mortal form and took to writing plays, they would be "new" dramatists with a vengeance—as new as ever Ibsen was, and assuredly they would be sincere. But could they well be called "serious"? Can we call Synge, or St. John Hankin, or Shaw, or Barrie serious? Hardly! Yet they are all of this new movement in their very different ways, because ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... to put the masked man down to Quamina's vivid imagination," declares Eleanor, "if you had not personally encountered him, Carol. He is like a sort of 'troll,' one of Ibsen's 'helpers and servers.'" ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... been told that here also the public interest in poetry is visibly on the wane." Now whoever told him that was mistaken. The public interest in poetry and in poets has visibly wox, to use Mr. Watson's word. It is always true that an original genius, like Browning, like Ibsen, like Wagner, must wait some time for public recognition, although these three all lived long enough to receive not only appreciation, but idolatry; but the "reading public" has no difficulty in recognizing immediately first-rate work, when it is produced in ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... up, "a combination of Ibsen and hysterics, and of—er, rather declamatory observations concerning there being one law for the man and another for the woman, and Patricia's realization of the mistake we both made—and all that sort of nonsense, you know, exactly as if, I give you my word, she were one ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... NATURALLY because it is difficult to know what is "natural" and what is cultural. In the widest sense everything is natural; in the narrowest very few things are natural. Cooked food, clothing, houses, marriages, education, etc., are not found in a state of nature, any more than clocks and plays by Ibsen are. Our judgment as to what is good and bad is mainly instinctive leaning ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and women who never read and who are more interested in police news than they are in poetry. George Broadhurst or Henry Bernstein or Arthur Wing Pinero, or others like them, have always been the popular playwrights; a few names like Sophocles, Terence, Moliere, Shakespeare, and Ibsen come rolling down to us, but they are ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... has trouble with its primary men, or with the men who have any primary gifts, like Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Tolstoi, Ibsen. The idols of an age are nearly always secondary men: they break no new ground; they make no extraordinary demands; our tastes and wants are already adjusted to their type; we understand and approve of them at once. The primary ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that might ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... I am soon coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for "The Pillars of Society"; I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... whole proceeding, Would have laughed but for good breeding. "Best join me," he cried, "Old Chappie! IBSEN read, be free, and happy! Who'll buy your love-knots? Who'll buy your love-knots? Have a spree—all shackles scorning, Come! We ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... poetry will be; there is the question whether it will be, and I believe that society, being tired with Zola's realism and its caricature, not with the picturesqueness of Loti, but with catalogues of painter's colors; not with the depth of Ibsen, but the oddness of his imitators—it seems to me that society will hate the poetry which discusses and philosophizes, wishes to paint but does not feel, makes archeology but does not give impressions, and ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... phase in particular, and to our occupation with other studies in general, may be attributed the opportunity which still exists for the discussion of one of the most interesting of all problems concerning Shakspere. Mr. Browning, Mr. Meredith, Ibsen, Tolstoi—a host of peculiarly modern problem-makers have been exorcising our not inexhaustible taste for the problematic, so that there was no very violent excitement over even the series of new "Keys" to the sonnets which came forth in the lull of the analysis of the ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... their ideas, being before Darwin with the evolution theory, only theirs was a kind of evolution aided by Byamee. I dare say, though, the missing link is somewhere in the legends. I rather think the Central Australians have the key to it. One old man here was quite an Ibsen with his ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many sane men to the realistic literature of the nineteenth century. If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying. The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization in every class or trade is such as Zola would never dream of printing. Nor is the habit ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... that he almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names of the Norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: Ole Bull, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same question; over and over again he received the same answer: Ole Bull, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Nansen. A great musician, a great novelist, a ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... connection, that up to the time in question no dramatic work of similar importance had ever been produced in Sweden. Its completion was more epoch-making for Sweden than that of Brand was for Norway in 1865—since the coming of Ibsen's first really great play was heralded by earlier works leading up to it, while Master Olof appeared where nobody had any reason to expect it. This very fact militated against its success, of course; it was ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... connection with them. She also in March sent us a copy of another lecture about the modern drama which she had herself written and delivered before her current literature club. With that she sent us some works of Ibsen and the Belgian writer, Maeterlinck, with the recommendation that we devote ourselves to the study of them at once, they being eminently calculated for the widening ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... firmness. "Why, you are just a child," said Mrs. Barry-Smith. "We are utter strangers to each other. Please remember that, for all you know, I may have an unbridled temper, or an imported complexion, or a liking for old man Ibsen. What you ask—only you don't, you simply assume it,—is preposterous. And besides, opals ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and you will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the living language of his country, had been one of the most skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in arguments which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed burglar. It needs more than ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... who regard literary men merely as purveyors of amusement for people who have not wit enough to entertain themselves, Ibsen and Shaw, Maeterlinck and Gorky must remain enigmas. It is so much pleasanter to ignore than to face unpleasant realities—to take Riverside Drive and not Mulberry Street as the exponent of our life and the expression of our civilization. These men are the ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... and fashions of literary life. When The Diary of a Lover of Literature was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about Godwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... the Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the world—a covetous scandal—so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to one of the daily papers, it appears that "a hundred ladies and gentlemen who find the works of HENDRIK IBSEN (perhaps not all for exactly the same reasons, but who agree in finding them) among the most interesting productions of the modern theatre, have guaranteed the estimated expenses of a series of twelve performances, at which three of IBSEN'S plays will be presented." This arrangement is carried ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various
... the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes. Plainly, it was a passing mood; ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... surrounded by a whole flotilla of stable-names. Henry, for example, is softened variously into Harry, Hen, Hank, Hal, Henny, Enery, On'ry and Heinie. Which did Ann Boleyn use when she cooed into the suspicious ear of Henry VIII.? To which did Henrik Ibsen answer at the domestic hearth? It is difficult to imagine his wife calling him Henrik: the name is harsh, clumsy, razor-edged. But did she make it Hen or Rik, or neither? What was Bismarck to the Fuerstin, and to the mother he so vastly feared? Ottchen? Somehow it seems ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the egotistic upsetting of the "personal equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all—tinting it with strange and even outre colours. Much the same has to be said of most of what are problem-plays—several of Ibsen's among the rest. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... inspiration, makes for laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration; in either case there is a good understanding between the author and the reader, or between the draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, for example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating pattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life without ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into the field with his own contemporaries. Reviewers who had been extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner attacking landmarks in the world of letters, venturing to detest Ibsen and to ask William Archer whether he hung up his stocking on Ibsen's birthday, accusing Kipling of lack of patriotism. It is, said one angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his contemporaries." "His sense ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... people have been successfully moulded to suit the will of these dictators, and to serve as a good business basis for shrewd literary speculators? The number of Rip Van Winkles in life, science, morality, art, and literature is very large. Innumerable ghosts, such as Ibsen saw when he analyzed the moral and social conditions of our life, still keep the majority of the human race ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... interested in a man. I can never understand the attraction of this kind of symbolism. Unless it is allied to sublime powers of creation in metaphysics or morals—such as that possessed by a Goethe or an Ibsen—I do not see what such symbolism can add to life, though I see very well what it takes away from it. But it is, after all, a matter of taste; and, anyway, there is nothing in this story to astonish ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... calm! Don't you see that you're on the verge of a new 'Midsummer Night's Dream'; that the world's tired of work and gone back to play! Don't talk like a tired business man whose wife has dragged him to see one of Ibsen's frolics—'Rosmersholm,' for example—where they talk for three hours and then jump in the well! The fact that there's one girl left in the world to dance under stars ought to hearten you for anything. We don't ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... given in honor of Heinrik Ibsen by a Norwegian society known as the Woman's League, in response to a speech thanking him in the name of the society for all he had done for the cause of women, the poet, while disclaiming the honor of having consciously worked for the woman's ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... being wearied to death by lion-hunters. Eminene men from the Old Country either get feted or cut in the Colonies. He was feted because he happened to arrive at a time when "culture" was fashionable, and Shakespeare Societies, Ibsen Evenings, History Saturday Afternoons and Science Sundays were the rage. Foreign legations and Government officials gave him dinners as deadly as any in England. He saw that he was to appear in character at these dinners. He was expected to wear a phylactery on his ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... sales, I have no doubt that the number of copies of the works of any continental European author, of anything like a first-class reputation, sold in America is vastly greater than the number sold in England. Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche—I give the names at random as they come—of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a "cult" in the United States than in England—a far larger proportion of the population makes some effort to master ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... Voltaire's—Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, the Middle Age, Mediaeval Germany; Carlyle's work made him, at least in spirit, a native of France for three or four years, and for twelve a German; even Dr. Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a Catiline, and in later life seeks the subject of what is perhaps his masterpiece, the Emperor and Galilean, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in Russia Tolstoi begins, and ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... importance in the social, political, spiritual, literary, and artistic life are familiar sources of inspiration for him. With all, he shows the lofty spirit of a worshipper of greatness and depth wherever he finds them. Tolstoi or Aeschylus, Goethe or Dante, Ibsen or Poe, Swinburne or Walt Whitman, Leopardi or Rabelais, Hugo or Carlyle, Serbian Folk Lore or the Bible, Hindu legends or Italian songs, Antiquity or Middle Ages, Renaissance or Modernity, any nation or any lore are objects worthy of study and stores ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... genteel, a good many were young men of gentle birth from the public schools and universities. Paul's infallible instinct drew him into timid companionship with the last. He knew little of the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to learn. He reaped the advantage of having played "the sedulous ape" to his patrons of the studios. His tricks were somewhat exaggerated; his sweep of the hat when ladies passed him at the stage door entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Athenians. The Greek word for logic is dialectic, which really means "discussion". argumentation in the interest of fuller analysis, with the hope of more critical conclusions. The dialogues are the drama of his day, employed in Plato's magical hand as a vehicle of discursive reason. Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux, and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and systematic presentation, but ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... answered. "'A dumb priest loses his benefice.' But I was speaking of my club. We studied Andersen all winter, and got enough more out of him than a lot of us who pored over Ibsen, guided by a literary expert. Andersen has a more beautiful, a more inspiring philosophy. Every nation has its story of Psyche, the lost soul of things, but none is more beautiful than the tale of Gerda ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... two great writers who have, more than any others, made it possible for Norway to share in the comity of intellectual intercourse so characteristic of the modern literary movement, it must be granted that Bjoernson is, more distinctly than Ibsen, the representative of their common nationality. Both are figures sufficiently commanding to belong, in a sense, to the literature of the whole world, and both have had a marked influence upon the ideals of other peoples than that from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... theories in dramatic form. He had gained all at once, as he wrote to Georg Brandes, the eminent Danish critic, "eyes that saw and ears that heard." Up to this time the poet in him had been predominant; now it was to be the social philosopher that held the reins. Just as Ibsen did, so Bjornson abandoned historical drama and artificial comedy for an attempt at prose drama which should have at all events a serious thesis. In this he anticipated Ibsen; for (unless we include the satirical political ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ingenue suddenly to become the heroine—but I like it. As to the cause——" and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night, twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. Finally, frowning ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... I've never quite known where our set begins and ends, and have had to content myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh it's bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent!" Mrs. Brash never sat to me; she absolutely declined; and when she declared that it was quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation invited her, I quite took this as she meant it; before we had gone very far our understanding, ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... was deep in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement, "The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledged my first ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... along, absorbed in his thoughts, unconscious even of the direction in which his footsteps were taking him. When at last he paused, he was outside a theatre. The name of Ibsen occupied a prominent place upon the boards. From somewhere among the hidden cells of his memory came a glimmering recollection—a word or two read at random, an impression, only half understood, yet the germ of which had survived. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cried vehemently; 'why, that is just where Ibsen was so wrong! Why, the whole aim of a house is to be a doll's house. Don't you remember, when you were a child, how those little windows WERE windows, while the big windows weren't. A child has a doll's house, and shrieks when a front door opens ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... are opened, and I see my position with the eyes of IBSEN. I must go away at once, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... his criticisms of the greatest modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in saying "real women," means what is more precisely ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... spirit was stirring in the intellectual and literary world of Denmark. George Brandes was delivering his lectures on the Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature; from Norway came the deeply probing questionings of the granitic Ibsen; from across the North Sea from England echoes of the evolutionary theory and Darwinism. It was a time of controversy and bitterness, of a conflict joined between the old and the new, both going to extremes, ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... in the little theatre was from a small town away on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still, with that profound, naive attention which children give. And after a few minutes I realized that I Spettri was Ibsen's Ghosts. The peasants and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... which retained a proper touch of the Paris before the war—perfect cooking, courtly waiting, and prices not too high. I have pleasant recollections also of Fouquet's in the Champs Elysees, and of an almost divine meal at the Tour d'Argent, on the other side of the river, where Frederic of the Ibsen whiskers used once to reign: the delicacy of the soufflee of turbot! the succulent tenderness of the caneton a la presse! the seductive flavour of the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... Ibsen is still the most formidable of obstinate individualists. Absolute self-reliance is the note he constantly strikes. He is obsessed by the psychology of moral problems; but for him there are no universal ethical laws—"the golden rule is that there is no golden ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys |
