The personal record of Ibsen in these years is almost silent. He was growing old and set in his habits. He was growing rich, too, and he surrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His wealth, it may here be said, was founded entirely upon the success of his works, but was fostered by his extreme adroitness as a man of business. Those who are so fond of saying that any man of genius might have excelled in some other capacity are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen as the model financier. He certainly possessed a remarkable aptitude for affairs, and we learn that his speculations were at once daring and crafty. People who are weary of commiserating the poverty of poets may be pleased to learn that when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiest private citizens of Christiania, and this was wholly in consequence of the care he had taken in protecting his copyrights and administering his receipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct which tells us that
Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature, Mais sa bonte s'arrkete a la litterature,
we must believe, with Ibsen's enemies, that his fortunes were not under the divine protection.
The actual numbers of each of his works printed since he first published with Hegel in Copenhagen--a connection which he preserved without a breach until the end--have been stated since his death. They contain some points of interest. After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editions of each new play, but they went off at first slowly. _The Lady from the Sea_ was the earliest to appear, at once, in an issue of 10,000 copies, which was soon exhausted. So great, however, had the public interest in Ibsen become in 1894 that the edition of 10,000 copies of _Little Eyolf_ was found quite inadequate to meet the first order, and it was enlarged to 15,000, all of which were gone in a fortnight. This circulation in so small a reading public as that of Denmark and Norway was unprecedented, and it must be remembered that the simultaneous translations into most of the languages of Europe are not included.
_Little Eyolf_, which was written in Christiania during the spring and summer of 1894, was issued, according to Ibsen's cometary custom, as the second week of December rolled round. The reception of it was stormy, even in Scandinavia, and led to violent outbursts of controversy. No work from the master's pen had roused more difference of opinion among the critics since the bluster over _Ghosts_ fourteen years before. Those who prefer to absolute success in the creation of a work of art the personal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed to place _Little Eyolf_ very high among his writings. Nowhere is he more independent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may even be said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this play may fairly be considered in the light of a _tour de force_. Ibsen--one would conjecture--is trying to see to what extremities of agile independence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped me; but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty not quite easily or completely overcome which _Little Eyolf_ produces. To mention but one technical matter; there are but four characters, properly speaking, in the play--since Eyolf himself and the Rat-Wife are but illustrations or symbolic properties--and of these four, one (Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to have challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three characters in it. By a process of elimination this has been done by Aeschylus (in the _Agamemnon_), by Racine (in _Phe*dre_ and _Andromaque_), and in our own day by Maeterlinck (in _Pelle*as et Me*lisande_). But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his experiment seems not wholly successful. _Little Eyolf_, at least, is, from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazard the conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satisfaction to write, but for enjoyment the reader may prefer less prodigious agility on the trapeze.