"Ibsen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in its 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
... 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, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... 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 out was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... single-mindedness which is beyond all praise overwhelms her into marriage by the heroic process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Koekensee we have a problem! Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... virtue is self-denial, which is not a virtue at all; but then the following of the inner light at all costs is largely self-indulgence, which is just as suicidal, just as weak, just as cowardly as self-denial. Ibsen, who takes us into the matter far more resolutely than Jesus, is unable to find any golden rule: both Brand and Peer Gynt come to a bad end; and though Brand does not do as much mischief as Peer, the mischief he does do is of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... together, no doubt, 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, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... time, the 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 dialogue ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... great conceptions, noble types of 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 of Adam ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... thickset man appeared—he is not positively ugly, but he has a way of staring at one that is rather ill-bred.... There is a gold band around his left wrist and a scar upon his right cheek.... I am sure he is the SAME man I met at one of Sadakichi-Hartmann's readings from Ibsen's Ghosts.... He may recall the time.... It was in an abandoned palace on Russian Hill, somewhere in America; the lady at his left was discussing the difficulties of getting her motor car into Ragiz; the younger one on his right was known as Alma and ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... and attended the Orthodox church. He knew Russian, Swedish, and German. He had read a good deal in those languages, and nothing one could do gave him greater pleasure than lending him some new book or talking to him, for instance, about Ibsen. ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... character types. Deep and sure they may be, but never too complex for the reader to comprehend. The more varied characters—as the critic Johan Mortensen has pointed out—like Hellgum, the mystic in "Jerusalem," are merely indicated and shadowy. How unlike Ibsen! Selma Lagerloef takes her delight, not in developing the psychology of the unusual, but in analyzing the motives and emotions of the normal mind. This accounts for the comforting feeling of satisfaction and familiarity which comes over one reading the chronicles of events so exceptionable ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... House"?' he 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 ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... to follow is expressed in the motto carved on the wall of the great reading-room of the Harper Memorial Library at The University of Chicago: "Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider." Ibsen bluntly states the ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... actors, the advantage of the cheap multiplication was so great that the ambition of the producers was natural, to go forward from the little playlets to great dramas which held the attention for hours. The kinematographic theater soon had its Shakespeare repertoire; Ibsen has been played and the dramatized novels on the screen became legion. Victor Hugo and Dickens scored new triumphs. In a few years the way from the silly trite practical joke to Hamlet and Peer Gynt was covered with such thoroughness that the possibility of giving a photographic rendering of any ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... Did the arrangement of Shakespeare's stage make this convenient. (See description of the threefold stage of the Globe Theatre in "Anthonie and Cleopatra," pp. 172-173). Is the monologue rightly disused in modern plays? Why? Compare Ibsen's ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... verbal gifts who can write novels and epics, but cannot for the life of them write plays. Well, the film lends itself admirably to the succession of events proper to narrative and epic, but physically impracticable on the stage. Paradise Lost would make a far better film than Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, though Borkman is a dramatic masterpiece, and Milton could ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... Ibsen heroine," said Reid. "Take that woman out of this country and dress her right, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... filled with a packed throng over a mile long, being from six to eight in the morning. Here you may hear more languages spoken than the Tower of Babel could have echoed. Polish Jews and Russian princes, Chinese mandarins and Turkish pashas, Norwegians looking as if they had stepped out of Ibsen's plays, women from the Boulevards, Spanish grandees and English countesses, mountaineers from Montenegro and millionaires from Chicago, you will find every dozen yards. Every luxury in the world Carlsbad provides for its visitors, with the one exception of pepper. That you cannot get within ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... I think, abhors blatant uxoriousness. So do I. And I fear the Most Wonderful Man on Earth is blatantly uxorious. I honour him for a certain sadness in his voice when he speaks of unrequited love. But his constant reference to Ibsen's motif in the "Wild Duck," though it fails in its primary object of convincing me that he is familiar with Ibsen's plays, does in truth tell me that some fair one ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... of the official organ of the Menorah Societies something in the spirit of Ibsen's Master-Builder, who hears the coming generation knocking at the door. I have long been of the opinion that the future of American Israel lies with the academic Jews of the American universities. The organ that represents them should be, from this point ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... they 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 left their ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... moreover, that would appeal to the little group of thinking people about us—he would have "a little theatre of ideas," as he phrased it—and he had chosen for his first offering a play entitled "Ghosts" by the foreign dramatist Ibsen. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... critic, though not given to over optimism, has recognized Sigurjonsson's distinction, and the Icelander is acclaimed by the public who best know Ibsen and Strindberg, in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Christiania. Eyvind has been successful also on the German stage. "Poetic talent of high order," says Brandes, "manifests itself in this new drama, with its seriousness, rugged ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... Master Builder Solness, as the title runs in the original—we enter upon the final stage in Ibsen's career. "You are essentially right," the poet wrote to Count Prozor in March 1900, "when you say that the series which closes with the Epilogue (When We Dead Awaken) began with Master ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... by the more democratic term, they are always individuals standing apart from society, often in violent opposition to it, though they have always conquered in the end. When any great person has stood alone against the world it has always been the world that lost. The strongest man, as Ibsen argued in his Enemy of the People, is the man who stands most alone. "He will be the greatest," says Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, "who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent." Every great and vitally ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter, 'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and to stand aside, reserving ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... circuit even wider than 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 in Russia he ends. As volume after volume ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... complains bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not reassured, when ethics are 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" ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... whenever it leads to forced and stagy contrasts. But surely no general indictment can lie against Schiller for taking advantage of a principle which is perfectly legitimate in itself and has been employed more or less freely by the dramatists of all ages, including realists like Ibsen and Hauptmann. After all life does really offer contrasts of character as glaring as any that poet ever imagined, only they are not apt to be found in juxtaposition. The artist, however, has a perfect right to juxtapose them if it suits his purpose; that is, if it will really enhance the effect ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... largely abroad. He studied law at Harvard and Columbia, and was admitted to the bar in 1882. He was married, in 1892, to Marion Lea, of London, whose name was connected with the early introduction of Ibsen to the English public; she was in the initial cast of "The New York Idea," and to her ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... 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
... 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 raspberries and ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... read 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, herself. At least, so I understand ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... you might almost say dazed. He asked me apologetically if we ever did anything to relieve the strain,—had any amusements, you know,—and I said, oh, yes; we had a Browning and an Ibsen club, and we sometimes gave Greek tragedies in the original. He was positively afraid to come near me again, for fear I'd forget and talk to him in ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... 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 Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... know how he can help it now. But I have to be very firm with him. 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 would go, in ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... regard to 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... 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, in which nearly every one had a share. How ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... principal street, 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, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... 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 which they sprung; but the wider intellectual scope of Ibsen ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... under the leadership of Willisen, a former Prussian general and distinguished theoretical strategist, engaged a superior Danish army at Idstedt. They were beaten. Their defeat had so discouraging an effect that Prussia abandoned the struggle in their behalf. In Norway, about this time, Henrik Ibsen came into prominence with a publication of his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... this world is the most ancient of monuments. We go through life as those 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? ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Jones, "I don't believe in the play. I would never think of producing it—it's not the sort of thing anybody is interested in. But Miss Lewis likes it; she's been reading Ibsen, and she wants to do a 'drama of ideas', and all that sort of thing, you know. And that's all right—she's the sort to make a success of whatever she does. But you must do your share, and give her a part she can make something out of—some chance to show her charm. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... would both now be ridiculed. Favorite heroes in novels have often set a pose. Carlyle inspired a literary pose ("hatred of shams," etc.). He and Ruskin set a certain cant afloat, for every fad and pose which pretends to be sober and earnest must have a cant. Zola, D'Annunzio, Wagner, Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoi, Sudermann, are men who have operated suggestion on the public mind of our time. They get a response from a certain number who thus cluster into a self-selected union of sympathy and propagate the cult of a view of life. Gloom and savagery, passion and crime, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... servant. He drew his chair over by Hilda's, and began discussing Mrs. Ogilvy's eyes and the first officer's flirtations. Hilda hated gossip, and took refuge in generalities. In three minutes the talk had wandered off to Ibsen's influence on the English drama, and we had forgotten the very existence of the Isle ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 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, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... assassins, executioners, and devils painted by Mantegna, Titian, and Ribera the Spagnoletto embody with marvellous exactitude the characteristics of the born criminal; and the descriptions of great writers, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Ibsen, are equally faithful representations, physically and psychically, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... 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
... 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. The ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... by girls in their teens. It is not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was typical. At forty Ibsen was a sedate family man, and it is doubtful that he ever so much as glanced at a woman; all his thoughts were upon the composition of "The League of Youth," his first social drama. At fifty he was almost as preoccupied; "A Doll's House" was then hatching. But at ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... beyond the reach of any but the most venturesome travellers. Still less was it supposed that Norway possessed a modern school of poets and novelists. Wergeland, Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Bjoernson, Ibsen, Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen were concerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has been changed; sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficult every year to hire rivers. Tourists swarm ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... winter the playhouses are crowded with people who cannot pay week-day prices, and yet are intelligent enough to enjoy a fairly good performance of Hamlet or Egmont; who are musical and choose a Mozart opera; or who are interested in the problems of life presented by Ibsen, Gorky, Tolstoy, or their own great fellow-countryman Gerhardt Hauptmann. When summer comes, as long as the theatres are open the whole audience streams out between the acts to have coffee or beer in the garden, or when there is no garden, in the nearest restaurant; and then comes your chance ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... literature to take? The 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
... 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 a rock with moss ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Edmond de Goncourt should have ended by disliking the form of the novel, which he came to regard as an exhausted convention. His pessimism was universal. Art was dying, literature was perishing daily. The almost universal acceptance of Ibsen and of Tolstoi was in itself a convincing symptom of degeneration, if the vogue of the latter writer were not indeed the result of a cosmopolitan plot against the native realistic school. It was some consolation to reflect that, after all, there was more "philosophy" in Beaumarchais than ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... triumph for Becque, who until 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 ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... insist that 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 up anything against him. The very fact that he pays our bills makes ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... This crude medieval psychology of heart and brain—Shakespear would have called it liver and wits—is really schoolboyish. Surely weve had enough of second-hand Schopenhauer. Even such a played-out old back number as Ibsen would have been ashamed of it. Heart ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... and particular. He liked O. Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four—flusher. Edgar Saltus' Anatomy of Negation was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck was a mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen's Ghosts was the stuff, though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real goods. He preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... from the north and south, gathered as unto strife, breathed upon his mouth and filled his body—with ideas: Mr. Hind supplying the life. But this is not so: the ideas are all Mr. Hind's and the godfathers only supplied the name. What a name it is to be sure! It recalls one of Ibsen's plays: 'Claude Williamson Shaw was a miner's son—a Cornish miner's son, as you know; or perhaps you didn't know. He was always wanting plein-air.' Some one ought to say that in the book, but I must say it instead. At ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarme and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... some were pretentiously 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 ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... know Browning or Ibsen or Keats, But he knows mighty well when the other man cheats And he licks him and makes him the laugh of the ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association—just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is—aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... novel. A writer who dares to show up the hollowness of social conventions must have the courage of her convictions and be willing to accept the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine Ibsen or Tolstoy writing under a false name?" Mrs. Fetherel lifted a tragic eye to her cousin. "You don't know, Bella, how often I've envied you since I began to write. I used to wonder sometimes—you won't mind my saying so?—why, with all your cleverness, you hadn't taken up some more exciting subject ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... that all the nations are tired; and it may be that only the boldest and breeziest are not too tired to say that they are tired. It may be that a man like Ibsen in Norway or a man like Gorky in Russia are the only people left who have so much faith that they can really believe in scepticism. It may be that they are the only people left who have so much animal spirits that they can really feast high and ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... Bakouninist anarchist and the Marxian socialist. In the case of the former, it has been necessary to present the views of a particular school of anarchism, more or less regardless of certain other schools. Proudhon, Stirner, Warren, and Tucker do not advocate violent measures, and Tolstoi, Ibsen, Spencer, Thoreau, and Emerson—although having the anarchist point of view—can hardly be conceived of as advocating violent measures. It will be obvious to the reader that I have not dealt with the philosophical anarchism, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... of 1888 a Danish magazine published a few chapters of an autobiographical novel which instantly created the greatest stir in literary circles throughout Europe. At that time Ibsen, Bjornson, Brandes, Strindberg, and other Scandinavian writers were at the height of their cosmopolitan fame, and it was only natural that the reading world should keep in close touch with the literary production of the North. But even the professional ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of despondency. Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought, politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Naturalism in fiction, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... and lifeless old beliefs, 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
... I know: though Vaudeville delight, Musical Comedy can bore me quite; One act of Ibsen from the Gallery caught, Better than Daly for ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... be shown men and women as they are; and at first it is more than we can endure.... All Ibsen's characters speak and act as if they were hypnotised, and under their creator's imperious demand to reveal themselves. There never was such a mirror held up to nature before: it is too terrible.... Yet we must return to Ibsen, with his remorseless surgery, his remorseless ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Europeans of eminence have let their minds play with the ideas of metempsychosis, pre-existence and karma, as for instance Giordano Bruno, Swedenborg, Goethe, Lessing, Lavater, Herder, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, von Helmont, Lichtenberg and in England such different spirits as Hume and Wordsworth. It would appear that towards the end of the eighteenth century these ideas were popular in some literary circles on the continent. See Bertholet, The ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the 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 won't ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... not at all an Ibsen heroine," she declared. "I can't see my way like those wonderful ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wild-goose chase offer such easy sport. The birds were just asking to be put into the bag. I should myself have preferred, out of compliment to the chorus, to call the play "Wild Ducks," only, of course, IBSEN had been there before. Not that this would have greatly troubled an author who showed so little regard for the proprietary rights of ARISTOPHANES and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... worse for the community," was the comment of the Philosopher. "Man, as Ibsen has said, will always be at his greatest when he stands alone. To return to our friend Abraham, surely he, wandering in the wilderness, talking with his God, was nearer the ideal than the modern citizen, thinking with his morning ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... Grieg was 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 drama ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... 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 Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... the Germans are, brave, conceited, sentimental, prosaic, patriotic, and yet no people so soon lose their national characteristics, and become citizens of another country as Germans. Many of their intellectual poses are absolutely morbid. They adore Ibsen as a playwright and despise Goldsmith and Sheridan; they worship Gauguin, and the school of Impressionists, and have little appreciation nowadays for pre-Raphaelitism. They are intensely and truly musical, and it is amazing, taking into consideration their extraordinary ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... 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 of writing thus of these ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... hoarse, coarse, raucous voice. The custode glanced at her as she drew near and I thought he 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 ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... that; she makes it very interesting. 'What English Literature Owes to Meredith,' 'Rossetti, the Man,'—you see I'm just skimming, to give you some idea. Then the Dramatic Section, every other Thursday; they give a play once a year; that's great fun! 'Ibsen—Did he Understand Women?' 'Please Explain—Mr. Shaw?'—Mrs. Moore makes that very amusing. Then alternate Thursdays the ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... performances of Pinero's The Amazons, (1918), and Barrie's Quality Street, (1919). The Department of 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
... PUNCH,—According to a well-known Critic, writing of a morning performance of The Doll's House on Tuesday, the 27th ult., at Terry's Theatre, "There is no need to discuss IBSEN's piece any more." I will go a little further, and say, not only should the play be spared discussion, but also performance. All that could be done for this miserable drama (if a work utterly devoid of dramatic interest can be so entitled) was effected ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... 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 comedy, The League of Youth, which was published in 1869, among Ibsen's ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... "pessimist" is frequently applied to the few dramatists who have been content to work in this way. It has been applied, among others, to Euripides, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen; it will be applied to many in the future. Nothing, however, is more dubious than the way in which these two words "pessimist" and "optimist" are used; for the optimist appears to be he who cannot bear the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her father's insistence, Laura Van Dorn changed from the night watch to the day nurse, and from that day on for ten days, she ministered to Grant Adams' wants. Mechanically she read to him from such books as the house afforded—Tolstoi—Ibsen, Hardy, Howells,—but she was shut away from the meaning of what she read and even from the comments of the man under her care, by the consideration of her own problems. For to Laura Van Dorn it was a time of anxious doubt, of sad retrogression, of inner anguish. In some of the books ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... be used in 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 of ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... obligation for the sake of his own selfish and individual development. The man, for instance, who deserts his family that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he considers more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse our contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain a larger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola" did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must always remain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... clever the setting—the reason lying in 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... on the technical side, it is 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
... If there is any man living and writing for the stage with youth on his side and the future before him, it is John Synge, whose four plays.... represent accomplishment of the highest order. It is true that these dramas do deal only with peasants, but they are handled in the universal way that Ibsen used when he made the bourgeois of slow Norwegian towns representative of the human race everywhere.... it is not only in the avoidance of joyless and pallid words that Mr. Synge has chosen the better part. He has experienced the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality; ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... 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
... decades of the 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 mentioned ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... know, to free oneself wholly from traditional interpretation, for it often succeeds in reasserting its sway upon us at the very moment we strain every nerve to escape from our bondage. So has it happened with Ibsen, who, in his search for a new and almost scientific form of fatality, erected the veiled, majestic, tyrannical figure of heredity in the centre of the very best of his dramas. But it is not the scientific mystery of heredity which awakens within us those human fears ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... "Ibsen makes a strange impression on me; he foreshadows someone mightier than himself who is yet to come; he is like the light of dawn before the rising sun. And as regards the newest, over-praised and over-advertised ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the aesthetic theories of men of letters, such as that of E. Zola, developing his thesis of natural science and history mixed, which is known as that of the human document or as the experimental theory, or of Ibsen and the moralization of the art problem, as presented by him and by the Scandinavian school. Perhaps no French writer has written more profoundly upon art than Gustave Flaubert. His views are contained in his Correspondence, which has been published. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... death in Sydney and he rather discredited the sincerity of it for he was 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 ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... in the mysteries of Ibsen's latest achievement, "The Rise and Fall of the Hobble Skirt," but she politely acknowledged my first sneeze with the ...
— You Should Worry Says John Henry • George V. Hobart
... 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 ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... newspaper writer. Of Norwegian parentage; her family closely related to Henrik Ibsen. Graduate of Univ. of Ore. Took part in Lafayette Sq. meeting of Aug., 1918; sentenced to 15 days. Jan., 1919, arrested for participation in watchfire demonstration and sentenced to 5 days. For several months acted as editor ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... 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 morality, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... I went to a tea, and then I stopped in to hear Madame Ruvier read a paper on the Ethics of Ibsen, ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... to meddle at all with a question in which so many conflicting interests were involved, and which had probably no electoral value whatever. Many simple simple souls believed that it was because certain severely virtuous plays by Ibsen, by M. Brieux, by Mr Granville Barker, and by me, were suppressed by the censorship, whilst plays of a scandalous character were licensed without demur. No doubt this influenced public opinion; but ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... but, to Chesterton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are "orthodox." Of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of Theosophists who "recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions"—the liars! Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling, Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... moral life. The philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain extremes of his teaching, represents the other. Nietzsche, I suppose, should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with their splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... land of almost perpetual fogs and mists, there died not long ago an extraordinary man. Ibsen, by some called revolutionary, by others evolutionary, dreamed in all his works of a new day of peace and concord for all mankind. This dream did not exist in the poet's brain alone, for it has imbedded itself in the mind and heart of a great ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... Is IBSEN your idol, with plays that are noise, Some say nauseous; is he a sage? Or are you contented to see a live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... play of Peer Gynt was given in two theatres during each winter of the war. All of Ibsen's dramas played to crowded houses. Reinhardt, during the last winter I was in Berlin, produced Strindberg's "Ghost Sonata," in quite a wonderful way. The play was horrible and grewsome enough, but as produced by him, it gave a strong ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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 too unexpected, and also too ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the foremost creative writer of the Scandinavian countries. Those approaching most nearly to his position are probably Selma Lagerloef in Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to have less than he of that width ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... golf or sailing or fishing. He believed that he ought to read up in the summer, too, and he had the very best of the recent books, in fiction and criticism, and the new drama. He had all of the translations of Ibsen, and several of Maeterlinck's plays in French; he read a good deal in his books, and he lent them about in the hotel even more. Among the ladies there he had the repute of a very modern intellect, and of a person you would never take for an actor, from his tastes. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... 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 regard Galds as other than a social conservative, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... 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 precious ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten |
