She was a woman who had felt
strongly and thought much; she had lived a rich, and eventful life; but
all that had befallen her she romanticised. Her poetic tendency was
towards the sublime. She was absolutely veracious, and did not really
mean to adorn her tales, but partly from pride, partly from
whimsicality, she saw everything, from greatest to least, through
beautifully coloured magnifying-glasses, so that a translation of her
communications into every-day language became a very difficult matter,
and when an every-day occurrence was suspected through the narrative,
the same could not be reproduced in an every-day light, and according to
an every-day standard, without wounding the narrator to the quick. For
these reasons I never ventured to include among my Collected Essays a
little biographical sketch of her (written just as she herself had
idealised its events to me), one of the first articles I had printed.
She saw strong natures, rich and deep natures, in lives that were meagre
or unsuccessful. Again, from lack of perspicacity, she sometimes saw
nothing but inefficiency in people with wide intellectual gifts; thus,
she considered that her son-in-law, Henrik Ibsen, who at that time had
not become either known or celebrated, had very imperfect poetic gifts.
"What he writes is as flat as a drawing," she would say.
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