Henrik Ibsen by Edmund Gosse

While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival. These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Bjoernson suddenly swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid modern life. This was his first attempt at that "photography by comedy" which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded what was Ibsen's comment on these two plays, and particularly on _A Bankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bjoernson had carried a very spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities.

Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen upon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a year he gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, he was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of inanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_, which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique in the fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all.