March 20, 1828

Edmund Gosse (1849 to 1928) was an early admirer of Henrik Ibsen (March 20, 1828 to May 23, 1906). He published articles on the playright, helped translate his plays into English, and published a major study: Henrik Ibsen (1907) which went through multiple editions. Here is where we learn that Ibsen had said of his native Norway, "that...[it] was a barbarous country inhabited by two millions of cats and dogs. "

By this Ibsen may have meant that his home lacked the charms of cafes. This is a scene Gosse sketched of the dramatist in Rome:

And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafés had begun. In Rome Ibsen had his favourite table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirror in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his gold spectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, and especially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, every couple that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to those untiring eyes. The newspaper and the café mirror—these were the books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and out of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could build up a drama. Incessant observation of real life, incessant capture of unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual living experience leaping in his hands like a captive wild animal, this was now the substance from which all Ibsen’s dreams and dramas were woven. Concentration of attention on the vital play of character, this was his one interest.

Edmund Gosse knew something of that: he was himself the author of the first psychological biography: Father and Son (1907).