Vol. 106

No. 6

A

T Dublin, New Hampshire, in the year 1908, I read the works of Ibsen in the edition at that time recently translated by William Archer for the English-speaking public. In connection with this I read the brief biography of the dramatist by Edmund Gosse. In Gosse's "Life" my curiosity was particularly stirred by the romantic episode in which Fräulein Emilie Bardach has one of the two parts.

With some animation we discussed it in the family. Some of us saw more in it than Gosse had ventured to hint at; some of us saw less; to the best of my recollection none of us took the incident as exactly what it

of Ibsen's thought and the nature of his output. "He was overwhelmed with a passion," writes Gosse, “and yet made it serve as material for his plays. From this time onwards every dramatic work of his bears the stamp of the hours spent among the roses at Gossensass."

Except for the brief account in Gosse's "Life," this episode has never yet been given to the public. Even Gosse could narrate it but partly, for the reason that he had not the full information. Emilie Bardach has now, however, placed in my hands not only the twelve letters written to her by Ibsen, but the diary she kept during the months in which the intimacy between herself and him began, developed, and, without dying, passed away into the spirit. Many small details, too, she has given me both by letter and by word of mouth, putting me in a position in which, I think, I can tell the tale with as much understanding as any third person could

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bring to it. But before doing that I must explain a little more at length how it was that I, so remote from all the circumstances, came to be given this authority.

§ 2

Leaving Dublin, New Hampshire, in September, 1908, I proceeded with my family to Munich. Here we spent the winter at the Hotel Continental, which many Americans will remember as a quiet old establishment with what I suppose would be called an aristocratic clientele. Year after year the same people spent the winter there. They came from the near-by castles in Bavaria, from Vienna, from St. Petersburg, from Budapest, from London, from New York. People of means and position, they loved Munich because of its music or its galleries or its quietness. A few like ourselves were there for the education of their children. Within the hotel we formed a society not unlike that in an American summer hotel, or during a long voyage on board ship. One could not lunch and dine, and sit about in the public rooms, day in and day out for six or eight months, with the same set of people, without breaking the ice between oneself and one's fellowcreatures any more than one could do it on a liner's deck.

So it fell out that I found myself addressed one evening by a lady speaking English with the soft, crisp foreign accent which gives to our tongue an exceptional charm. What was odd about the incident was that I held in my hand the very volume of Gosse's "Life of Ibsen" from which I had been reading in the previous summer in New Hampshire. Ibsen, in 1908, was not only a topic of discussion

everywhere, and especially in America, where he was a relatively new discovery, but a cycle of his plays was at that minute being given in Munich. To two strangers, meeting in such fashion, with nothing in common to talk about, he was one of the readiest subjects.

My own interest in him was keen. With the exception of "Ghosts," which I had seen on the stage in Boston, his work was new to me that year; his career and personality were quite unknown to me. The lady talked of him with so much knowledge that a door in the blank wall of my ignorance was thrown wide open. After she had risen and, with her peculiar gentle dignity, said good night, my curiosity was such that I went to the concierge to ask who she was. He wheeled round his book, which stood on a revolving-desk, pointing to her name: "Fräulein Emilie Bardach, Wien." I had met the lady about whom the book in my hand had already told me, and whose heart history had been so much in my mind for the last three months.

Little by little we became friendly, and finally almost intimate. I have said that she told us the story of her friendship with Ibsen, by which I mean she told us what had already been given to the public, but not much more. That anything at all should be given to the public of a secret supposed to be sealed within two hearts, one of which had ceased to beat in 1906, cannot but seem altogether strange.

But secrets sealed between two hearts have a way of seeping out of them. It will be seen later that Ibsen himself was not wholly discreet. To a man, a friend of Edmund Gosse, and

to a woman, a professor's wife at Gossensass, he, partly at least, betrayed himself. Another woman had surprised something, we do not know what, but enough to call forth her comments. In a small summer resort, where people have little to do, gossip, especially about persons of importance, runs like wild-fire. We may take it for granted that the secret supposed to be sealed within two hearts was shared by a good many.

It is certain that at the time of Ibsen's death in May, 1906, the existence of a correspondence was suspected. When, in September of that year, the letters were actually published, there was consternation among Ibsen's friends. That such an episode could have marked the experience of an elderly man whose previous life had been so austere seemed to them incredible. Gosse says of it in a footnote, "It was quite unknown until the correspondence-which has not been translated into English-was published by Georg Brandes at the desire of the lady herself."

As to the last statement there is some disagreement and confusion, but with that the American reader has little concern. The letters did appear. Half of the tale was told. It has been told now for nearly twenty years. The main incident is a generation behind us, in a world condition that seems to have existed before a great flood. More and more Ibsen takes his place as one of the classic figures of the world. He belongs to time. The public has a right to any detail which reveals him. The episode in question has the greater significance in that it is the single glimpse we ever get into a burning, raging inner life

which on the outside was as cold and stern as the glaciers of his native mountains. The whole tale can surely now be told without indiscretion. It is too far past for the rifling of any of those holy places all men keep locked and barred.

§3

At the time I met Emilie Bardach she was in the habit of spending her winters in the little Munich coterie I have already spoken of, going later to Paris for the spring, to London for the season, and often to Scotland for country-house gatherings. In other words, she was a woman of the world. She was also a musician and a linguist. Gentle in manner, soft of voice, dressed with the distinction of which Viennese women have long possessed the art, she had about her that something intriguing to curiosity of which Ibsen had felt the spell.

He called it enigmatic, the puzzling quality which defied that fury of his to probe to the depths of motives and happenings and discover what they were. Here, apparently, he found himself baffled, the baffling adding to the charm. Had he been able to read at a glance, or even after many glances, the girl whom he met at Gossensass, the passion which shook him as a whirlwind shakes a tree would probably never have arisen. But the secret behind the calm gaze of her eyes, behind a self-possession too withdrawn and unconscious to seem wholly of this world, appears to have eluded him to the very end.

The only daughter of a Viennese gentleman of means, Emilie Bardach moved in the best social life of Vienna till both her parents had died. Being then left free and independent, with

an only brother resident in England, much of her time was spent out of Austria. In this way the years followed each other till the breaking out of war brought, as it did to the majority of Austrians, an overthrow of fortune unexpected and appalling.

War caught her at Bern, in Switzerland, as safe a place as possible for a woman unused to hardship and no pressing ties. The situation of her brother was what disturbed her most. An Englishman in all but legal nationality, "it broke his heart," she wrote me from Bern, "to find himself a foe in the country he adored. When he joined me here at the Bernerhof he found, living in the hotel, the English attaché, as well as Colonel Picot, the French attaché, with his wife and daughter, all old friends of his. He told me then that he must leave Bern at once, so as not to embarrass them. As diplomats they were not allowed to stay under the same roof with an enemy, and he was anxious not to put them in a false position. Withdrawing to Zurich, he died there within a few weeks. This is my tragedy. Nothing can ever hurt me any more."

But she was not let off so easily. Little by little money began to come from Vienna less frequently, and with the exchange increasingly against it when it came. In time it was virtually worthless. Then it ceased. Work became a necessity. The situation of an upper-class woman, suddenly obliged to earn her bread after a lifetime in the enjoyment of a comfortable income, alone in a foreign country crowded with refugees in the same unhappy plight, would move us more had it not become a commonplace.

In the summer of 1889 Emilie Bardach accompanied her mother to Gossensass, a small resort between Innsbruck and Botzen, in the Austrian Tyrol. For five years previously Ibsen had made this picturesque mountain village, close to the Brenner Pass, and so on the direct line of his journeys between Italy and Germany, his summer headquarters. A world figure by this time, he was naturally the great man of the town. Each season an Ibsen fête was organized by residents and tourists, while the principal open place had received the name of the Ibsen-Platz.

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The poet was now sixty-one years of age. He had weathered most of the storms of his tempestuous career. What was before him was to be, outwardly at least, a continuous advance from a high peak of fame to a higher one. Not only in the Scandinavian countries, but in Germany, Russia, Austria, and Italy, he was recognized as the most daring and original dramatist of the nineteenth century. In France and England he had his following among the intellectual, though in America he was scarcely known, as among the rank and file of Americans he is little known to-day.

At the time he met Emilie Bardach he had written all but two or three of his great successes, and on one of them, "Hedda Gabler," he was mentally at work. "Brand," "Peer Gynt," "Ghosts," "The Doll's House," "An Enemy of the People," "The Wild Duck," "Rosmersholm," with other works less well known to the American reader, were all behind him. Stone by stone he had built up his fame through the struggle and the suffering