The correspondence of Henrik Ibsen Author:Henrik Ibsen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: value as sources from which to derive knowledge of Ibsen. We have in these Letters that unreserved expression of his personal feelings which has hitherto been, t... more »o a great extent, withheld from the public; we see him in his human weakness and greatness; we learn that his proverbial reserve is not in reality an essential element of his character; and a wonderful light is thrown upon the development of his theories of life and art, and upon the germination and growth and aim of his works. Into some of his most private feelings and most intimate relations with others it is not permissible to allow the public any insight; common consideration for the author who could never bear to strip himself completely in public (see Letter 17) forbids it. For the present, at least, our knowledge must remain incomplete. And there is another respect in which this collection of Letters is unavoidably imperfect. It has been impossible to include a single letter to Ibsen—as none are to be found. In a case of the same kind, namely, at the time of the publication of the letters of Julius Lange, Ibsen himself wrote (Letter 233) that " it is not conducive to the understanding of a dialogue that we should hear only the one interlocutor's speeches, and be obliged to guess at those of the other." The fact that Ibsen must appear in the character of a monologist makes our understanding of his frames of mind incomplete. The Introduction and the Notes appended to the Letters are intended to remedy this defect, as far as it is remediable. No attempt is made to point out all the new data provided by the Letters and to deduce conclusions from them; this must be done in some more elaborate biographical or critical work. All that we aim at is to assist our readers to a better understanding of the Letters, by providi...« less