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.

OF CHRISTMAS

By

H*L**RE B*LL*C