It was not until her fresh field-
blossoms had struck him on the cheek that he was emboldened to follow
her and to send her the lyrical roses and auriculas which live forever
in his poems. If we wish to note the difference of temperament, we have
but to contrast Ibsen's affair with Rikke Holst with Goethe's attitude
to Christiana Vulpius; in doing so, we bring the passive and the active
lover face to face.
Ibsen would gladly have married his flower of the field, a vision of
whose bright, untrammelled adolescence reappears again and again in his
works, and plainly in _The Master-Builder_. But he escaped a great
danger in failing to secure her as his wife, for Rikke Holst, when she
had lost her girlish freshness, would probably have had little character
and no culture to fall back upon. He waited, fortunately for his
happiness, until he secured Susannah Thoresen. Mrs. Ibsen, his faithful
guide, guardian and companion for half a century, will live among the
entirely successful wives of difficult men of genius. In the midst of
the spiteful gossip of Christiania she had to traverse her _via
dolorosa_, for it was part of the fun of the journalists to represent
this husband and wife as permanently alienated.
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