A Christmas Garland

By

EDMND GSSE

“And let us strew
Twain wreaths of holly and of yew.”

WALLER.

One out of many Christmas Days abides with peculiar vividness in my memory.  In setting down, however clumsily, some slight record of it, I feel that I shall be discharging a duty not only to the two disparately illustrious men who made it so very memorable, but also to all young students of English and Scandinavian literature.  My use of the first person singular, delightful though that pronoun is in the works of the truly gifted, jars unspeakably on me; but reasons of space baulk my sober desire to call myself merely the present writer, or the infatuated go-between, or the cowed and imponderable young person who was in attendance.

In the third week of December, 1878, taking the opportunity of a brief and undeserved vacation, I went to Venice.  On the morning after my arrival, in answer to a most kind and cordial summons, I presented myself at the Palazzo Rezzonico.  Intense as was the impression he always made even in London, I think that those of us who met Robert Browning only in the stress and roar of that metropolis can hardly have gauged the fullness of his potentialities for impressing.  Venice, “so weak, so quiet,” as Mr. Ruskin had called her, was indeed the ideal setting for one to whom neither of those epithets could by any possibility have been deemed applicable.  The steamboats that now wake the echoes of the canals had not yet been imported; but the vitality of the imported poet was in some measure a preparation for them.  It did not, however, find me quite prepared for itself, and I am afraid that some minutes must have elapsed before I could, as it were, find my feet in the torrent of his geniality and high spirits, and give him news of his friends in London.

He was at that time engaged in revising the proof-sheets of “Dramatic Idylls,” and after luncheon, to which he very kindly bade me remain, he read aloud certain selected passages.  The yellow haze of a wintry Venetian sunshine poured in through the vast windows of his salone, making an aureole around his silvered head.  I would give much to live that hour over again.  But it was vouchsafed in days before the Browning Society came and made everything so simple for us all.  I am afraid that after a few minutes I sat enraptured by the sound rather than by the sense of the lines.  I find, in the notes I made of the occasion, that I figured myself as plunging through some enchanted thicket on the back of an inspired bull.

That evening, as I was strolling in Piazza San Marco, my thoughts of Browning were all of a sudden scattered by the vision of a small, thick-set man seated at one of the tables in the Café Florian.  This was—­and my heart leapt like a young trout when I saw that it could be none other than—­Henrik Ibsen.  Whether joy or fear was the predominant emotion in me, I should be hard put to it to say.  It had been my privilege to correspond extensively with the great Scandinavian, and to be frequently received by him, some years earlier than the date of which I write, in Rome.  In that city haunted by the shades of so many Emperors and Popes I had felt comparatively at ease even in Ibsen’s presence.  But seated here in the homelier decay of Venice, closely buttoned in his black surcoat and crowned with his uncompromising top-hat, with the lights of the Piazza flashing back wanly from his gold-rimmed spectacles, and his lips tight-shut like some steel trap into which our poor humanity had just fallen, he seemed to constitute a menace under which the boldest might well quail.  Nevertheless, I took my courage in both hands, and laid it as a kind of votive offering on the little table before him.

My reward was in the surprising amiability that he then and afterwards displayed.  My travelling had indeed been doubly blessed, for, whilst my subsequent afternoons were spent in Browning’s presence, my evenings fell with regularity into the charge of Ibsen.  One of these evenings is for me “prouder, more laurel’d than the rest” as having been the occasion when he read to me the MS. of a play which he had just completed.  He was staying at the Hôtel Danieli, an edifice famous for having been, rather more than forty years previously, the socket in which the flame of an historic grande passion had finally sunk and guttered out with no inconsiderable accompaniment of smoke and odour.  It was there, in an upper room, that I now made acquaintance with a couple very different from George Sand and Alfred de Musset, though destined to become hardly less famous than they.  I refer to Torvald and Nora Helmer.  My host read to me with the utmost vivacity, standing in the middle of the apartment; and I remember that in the scene where Nora Helmer dances the tarantella her creator instinctively executed a few illustrative steps.

During those days I felt very much as might a minnow swimming to and fro between Leviathan on the one hand and Behemoth on the other—­a minnow tremulously pleased, but ever wistful for some means of bringing his two enormous acquaintances together.  On the afternoon of December 24th I confided to Browning my aspiration.  He had never heard of this brother poet and dramatist, whose fame indeed was at that time still mainly Boreal; but he cried out with the greatest heartiness, “Capital!  Bring him round with you at one o’clock to-morrow for turkey and plum-pudding!”

I betook myself straight to the Hôtel Danieli, hoping against hope that Ibsen’s sole answer would not be a comminatory grunt and an instant rupture of all future relations with myself.  At first he was indeed resolute not to go.  He had never heard of this Herr Browning.  (It was one of the strengths of his strange, crustacean genius that he never had heard of anybody.) I took it on myself to say that Herr Browning would send his private gondola, propelled by his two gondoliers, to conduct Herr Ibsen to the scene of the festivity.  I think it was this prospect that made him gradually unbend, for he had already acquired that taste for pomp and circumstance which was so notable a characteristic of his later years.  I hastened back to the Palazzo Rezzonico before he could change his mind.  I need hardly say that Browning instantly consented to send the gondola.  So large and lovable was his nature that, had he owned a thousand of those conveyances, he would not have hesitated to send out the whole fleet in honour of any friend of any friend of his.

Next day, as I followed Ibsen down the Danielian water-steps into the expectant gondola, my emotion was such that I was tempted to snatch from him his neatly-furled umbrella and spread it out over his head, like the umbrella beneath which the Doges of days gone by had made their appearances in public.  It was perhaps a pity that I repressed this impulse.  Ibsen seemed to be already regretting that he had unbent.  I could not help thinking, as we floated along the Riva Schiavoni, that he looked like some particularly ruthless member of the Council of Ten.  I did, however, try faintly to attune him in some sort to the spirit of our host and of the day of the year.  I adumbrated Browning’s outlook on life, translating into Norwegian, I well remember, the words “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.”  In fact I cannot charge myself with not having done what I could.  I can only lament that it was not enough.

When we marched into the salone, Browning was seated at the piano, playing (I think) a Toccata of Galuppi’s.  On seeing us, he brought his hands down with a great crash on the keyboard, seemed to reach us in one astonishing bound across the marble floor, and clapped Ibsen loudly on either shoulder, wishing him “the Merriest of Merry Christmases.”

Ibsen, under this sudden impact, stood firm as a rock, and it flitted through my brain that here at last was solved the old problem of what would happen if an irresistible force met an immoveable mass.  But it was obvious that the rock was not rejoicing in the moment of victory.  I was tartly asked whether I had not explained to Herr Browning that his guest did not understand English.  I hastily rectified my omission, and thenceforth our host spoke in Italian.  Ibsen, though he understood that language fairly well, was averse to speaking it.  Such remarks as he made in the course of the meal to which we presently sat down were made in Norwegian and translated by myself.

Browning, while he was carving the turkey, asked Ibsen whether he had visited any of the Venetian theatres.  Ibsen’s reply was that he never visited theatres.  Browning laughed his great laugh, and cried “That’s right!  We poets who write plays must give the theatres as wide a berth as possible.  We aren’t wanted there!” “How so?” asked Ibsen.  Browning looked a little puzzled, and I had to explain that in northern Europe Herr Ibsen’s plays were frequently performed.  At this I seemed to see on Browning’s face a slight shadow—­so swift and transient a shadow as might be cast by a swallow flying across a sunlit garden.  An instant, and it was gone.  I was glad, however, to be able to soften my statement by adding that Herr Ibsen had in his recent plays abandoned the use of verse.

The trouble was that in Browning’s company he seemed practically to have abandoned the use of prose too.  When, moreover, he did speak, it was always in a sense contrary to that of our host.  The Risorgimento was a theme always very near to the great heart of Browning, and on this occasion he hymned it with more than his usual animation and resource (if indeed that were possible).  He descanted especially on the vast increase that had accrued to the sum of human happiness in Italy since the success of that remarkable movement.  When Ibsen rapped out the conviction that what Italy needed was to be invaded and conquered once and for all by Austria, I feared that an explosion was inevitable.  But hardly had my translation of the inauspicious sentiment been uttered when the plum-pudding was borne into the room, flaming on its dish.  I clapped my hands wildly at sight of it, in the English fashion, and was intensely relieved when the yet more resonant applause of Robert Browning followed mine.  Disaster had been averted by a crowning mercy.  But I am afraid that Ibsen thought us both quite mad.

The next topic that was started, harmless though it seemed at first, was fraught with yet graver peril.  The world of scholarship was at that time agitated by the recent discovery of what might or might not prove to be a fragment of Sappho.  Browning proclaimed his unshakeable belief in the authenticity of these verses.  To my surprise, Ibsen, whom I had been unprepared to regard as a classical scholar, said positively that they had not been written by Sappho.  Browning challenged him to give a reason.  A literal translation of the reply would have been “Because no woman ever was capable of writing a fragment of good poetry.”  Imagination reels at the effect this would have had on the recipient of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”  The agonised interpreter, throwing honour to the winds, babbled some wholly fallacious version of the words.  Again the situation had been saved; but it was of the kind that does not even in furthest retrospect lose its power to freeze the heart and constrict the diaphragm.

I was fain to thank heaven when, immediately after the termination of the meal, Ibsen rose, bowed to his host, and bade me express his thanks for the entertainment.  Out on the Grand Canal, in the gondola which had again been placed at our disposal, his passion for “documents” that might bear on his work was quickly manifested.  He asked me whether Herr Browning had ever married.  Receiving an emphatically affirmative reply, he inquired whether Fru Browning had been happy.  Loth though I was to cast a blight on his interest in the matter, I conveyed to him with all possible directness the impression that Elizabeth Barrett had assuredly been one of those wives who do not dance tarantellas nor slam front-doors.  He did not, to the best of my recollection, make further mention of Browning, either then or afterwards.  Browning himself, however, thanked me warmly, next day, for having introduced my friend to him.  “A capital fellow!” he exclaimed, and then, for a moment, seemed as though he were about to qualify this estimate, but ended by merely repeating “A capital fellow!”

Ibsen remained in Venice some weeks after my return to London.  He was, it may be conjectured, bent on a specially close study of the Bride of the Adriatic because her marriage had been not altogether a happy one.  But there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that he went again, either of his own accord or by invitation, to the Palazzo Rezzonico.