The lad threw himself head-foremost
out of window, in a crisis of fever. Ibsen writes down all the minutest
details with feeling and refinement, but with as little sympathetic
emotion as if he was drawing up a report for the police. With this trait
may be compared his extreme interest in the detailed accounts of public
trials; he liked to read exactly what the prisoner said, and all the
evidence of the witnesses. In this Ibsen resembled Robert Browning,
whose curiosity about the small incidents surrounding a large event was
boundless. When Ibsen, in the course of such an investigation, found the
real purpose of some strange act dawn upon him, he exhibited an almost
childish pleasure; and this was doubled when the interpretation was one
which had not presented itself to the conventional legal authorities.
In everything connected with the execution of his own work there was no
limit to the pains which he was willing to take. His handwriting had
always been neat, but it was commonplace in his early years. The
exquisite calligraphy which he ultimately used on every occasion, and
the beauty of which was famous far and wide, he adopted deliberately
when he was in Rome in 1862.
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