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.
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