PEER GYNT.
INTRODUCTION.
The publication of Brand, in March 1866, brought Ibsen fame (in Scandinavia) and relieved him from the immediate pressure of poverty. Two months later the Storthing voted him a yearly “poet-pension” of £90; and with this sum, as he wrote to the Minister who had been mainly instrumental in furthering his claim, he felt “his future assured,” so that he could henceforth “devote himself without hindrance to his calling.” This first glimpse of worldly prosperity, no doubt, brought with it the lighter mood which distinguishes Peer Gynt from its predecessor. To call it the gayest of Ibsen’s works is not, perhaps, to say very much. Its satire, indeed, is bitter enough; but it is not the work of an unhappy man. The character of Peer Gynt, and many of his adventures, are conceived with unmistakable gusto. Some passages even bear witness to an exuberance of animal spirits which reminds one of Ben Jonson’s saying with regard to Shakespeare—“aliquando sufflaminandus erat.”
The summer of 1866 Ibsen spent at Frascati, in the Palazzo Gratiosi, where he lived “most comfortably and cheaply.” He found Frascati and Tusculum “indescribably delightful.” From the windows of his study he could see Soracte, “rising isolated and beautiful from the level of the immense plain ... the battlefield where the chief engagement in the world’s history took place.” So he writes in a letter to Paul Botten-Hansen, and immediately afterwards proceeds: “I shall soon be setting to work in good earnest. I am still wrestling with my subject, but I know that I shall get the upper hand of the brute before long, and then everything will go smoothly.” But was the play here referred to Peer Gynt? Perhaps not. From a letter to his publisher, Hegel, written three months later, we learn that at that time he was still turning over several themes in his mind, and that one of them dealt with the period of Christian IV. of Denmark. It is in a letter to Hegel, dated from Rome, January 5, 1867, that we find the first unmistakable reference to Peer Gynt: “Now I must tell you that my new work is well under way, and will, if nothing untoward happens, be finished early in the summer. It is to be a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the Norwegian peasantry’s half-mythical, fantastic heroes of recent times. It will bear no resemblance to Brand, contain no direct polemics and so forth. I have long had the subject in my thoughts; now the entire plan is worked out and written down, and the first act begun. The thing grows as I work at it, and I am certain that you will be satisfied with it.”
Two months later (March 8) the poem has “advanced to the middle of the second act.” On August 8, he sends to Hegel, from Villa Pisani, Casamicciola, Ischia, the complete manuscript of the first three acts, and writes: “I am curious to hear how you like the poem. I am very hopeful myself. It may interest you to know that Peer Gynt is a real person, who lived in Gudbrandsdal, probably at the end of last, or beginning of this, century; but of his exploits not much more is known than is to be found in Asbjörnsen’s Norwegian Fairy Tales, in the section Pictures from the Mountains. Thus I have not had very much to build upon; but so much the more liberty has been left me. It would interest me to know what Clemens Petersen thinks of the work.” What Clemens Petersen did think we shall presently learn.
On October 18 Ibsen despatched from Sorrento the remainder of his manuscript, and the book was published on November 14. It has often been pointed out (by myself among others) as a very remarkable fact that two such gigantic creations as Brand and Peer Gynt should have been given to the world in two successive years; but on examination the marvel somewhat dwindles. Peer Gynt did not follow so hot-foot upon Brand as the bare dates of publication would lead us to suppose. Brand was written in the summer of 1865, Peer Gynt (as we have seen) in 1867; so that the poet’s mind had lain fallow for a whole year (1866) between the two great efforts. It was a long delay in the publication of Brand that made its successor seem to tread so close upon its heels.
One or two other references to the origin of Peer Gynt may be found in Ibsen’s letters. The most important occurs in an autobiographical communication to Peter Hansen, dated Dresden, October 28, 1870: “After Brand came Peer Gynt, as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at Sorrento. So far away from one’s readers one becomes reckless. This poem contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth. My own mother—with the necessary exaggerations—served as the model for Ase. (Likewise for Inga in The Pretenders).” Twelve years later (1882) Ibsen wrote to George Brandes: “My father was a merchant with a large business and wide connections, and he enjoyed dispensing reckless hospitality. In 1836 he failed, and nothing was left to us except a farm near the town.... In writing Peer Gynt, I had the circumstances and memories of my own childhood before me when I described the life in the house of ‘the rich Jon Gynt.’”
Returning to the above-quoted letter to Peter Hansen, we find this further allusion to Peer Gynt and its immediate predecessor and successor in the list of Ibsen’s works: “Environment has great influence upon the forms in which imagination creates. May I not, like Christoff in Jakob von Tyboe,[[1]] point to Brand and Peer Gynt, and say: ‘See, the wine-cup has done this?’ And is there not something in The League of Youth [written in Dresden] that suggests ‘Knackwurst und Bier’? Not that I would thereby imply any inferiority in the latter play.” The transition to prose was no doubt an inevitable step in the evolution of Ibsen’s genius; but one wishes he had kept to the “wine-cup” a little longer.
A masterpiece is not a flawless work, but one which has sufficient vitality to live down its faults, until at last we no longer heed, and almost forget, them. Peer Gynt had real faults, not a few; and its great merit, as some of us think—its magnificent, reckless profusion of fantasy—could not but be bewildering to its first critics, who had to pronounce upon it before they had (as Ballested[[2]] would put it) acclimatised themselves to its atmosphere. It’s reception, then, was much more dubious than that of Brand had been. We find even George Brandes writing of it: “What great and noble powers are wasted on this thankless material! Except in the fourth act, which has no connection with what goes before and after, and is witless in its satire, crude in its irony, and in its latter part scarcely comprehensible, there is almost throughout a wealth of poetry and a depth of thought such as we do not find, perhaps, in any of Ibsen’s earlier works.... It would be unjust to deny that the book contains great beauties, or that it tells us all, and Norwegians in particular, some important truths; but beauties and truths are of far less value than beauty and truth in the singular, and Ibsen’s poem is neither beautiful nor true. Contempt for humanity and self-hatred make a bad foundation on which to build a poetic work. What an unlovely and distorting view of life this is! What acrid pleasure can a poet find in thus sullying human nature?”[[3]] The friendship between Brandes and Ibsen was at this time just beginning, and—much to Ibsen’s credit—it appears to have suffered no check by reason of this outspoken pronouncement.
On the other hand, he deeply resented a criticism by Clemens Petersen, who seems to have been at this time regarded as the æsthetic lawgiver of Copenhagen. Why he should have done so is not very clear; for Petersen professed to prefer Peer Gynt to Brand, and his criticism on Brand Ibsen had apparently accepted without demur. Most of Petersen’s article is couched in a very heavy philosophic idiom; but the following extract, though it refers chiefly to Brand, may convey some idea of his general objection to both poems:—“When a poet, as Ibsen does in Brand, depicts an error, a one-sidedness, which is from first to last presented in an imposing light, it is not sufficient that he should eventually, through a piece of sensational symbolism, let that one-sidedness go to ruin, and it is not sufficient that in the last word of the drama[[4]] he should utter the name of that with which the one-sidedness should have blended in order to become truth. If he throughout his work shows us this error—in virtue of its strength, if for no other reason—justifying itself as against everything that comes in contact with it, then it is not only in the character depicted that something is lacking, but in the work of art itself. That something is the Ideal, without which the work of art cannot take rank as poetry—the Ideal which here, as so often in art, lies only in the lighting of the picture, but which is nevertheless the saving, the uplifting element. It is to poetry what devotion is to religion.... In Peer Gynt, as in Brand, the ideal is lacking. But this must be said rather less strongly of Peer Gynt. There is more fantasy, more real freedom of spirit, less strain and less violence in this poem than in Brand.” The critic then speaks of Peer Gynt as being “full of riddles which are insoluble, because there is nothing in them at all.” Peer’s identification of the Sphinx with the Boyg (Act IV. Sc. 12) he characterises as “Tankesvindel”—thought-swindling, or, as we might say, juggling with thought. The general upshot of his considerations is that Peer Gynt belongs, with Goldschmidt’s Corsaren, to the domain of polemical journalism. It “is not poetry, because in the transmutation of reality into art it falls half-way short of the demands both of art and of reality.”