As a boy, Ibsen appears to have been lacking in animal spirits and the ordinary childish taste for games. Our chief glimpses of his home life are due to his sister Hedvig, the only one of his family with whom, in after years, he maintained any intercourse, and whose name he gave to one of his most beautiful creations.[1] She relates that the only out-door amusement he cared for was "building"—in what material does not appear. Among indoor diversions, that to which he was most addicted was conjuring, a younger brother serving as his confederate. We also hear of his cutting out fantastically-dressed figures in pasteboard, attaching them to wooden blocks, and ranging them in groups or tableaux. He may be said, in short, to have had a toy theatre without the stage. In all these amusements it is possible, with a little goodwill, to divine the coming dramatist—the constructive faculty, the taste for technical legerdemain (which made him in his youth so apt a disciple of Scribe), and the fundamental passion for manipulating fictitious characters. The education he received was of the most ordinary, but included a little Latin. The subjects which chiefly interested him were history and religion. He showed no special literary proclivities, though a dream which he narrated in a school composition so impressed his master that he accused him (much to the boy's indignation) of having copied it out of some book.
His chief taste was for drawing, and he was anxious to become an artist; but his father could not afford to pay for his training.[2] At the age of fifteen, therefore, he had to set about earning his living, and was
- ↑ See Introduction to The Wild Duck, p. xxiii.
- ↑ He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or thereabouts.
