Petersen’s review is noteworthy, not for its own sake, but for the effect it produced on Ibsen. His letters to Björnson on the subject are the most vivid and spontaneous he ever wrote. Björnson happened to be in Copenhagen when Petersen’s article appeared in Fœdrelandet, and Ibsen seems somehow to have blamed him for not preventing its appearance. “All I reproach you with,” he says, “is inaction.” But Petersen he accuses of lack of “loyalty,” of “an intentional crime against truth and justice.” “There is a lie involved in Clemens Petersen’s article, not in what he says, but in what he refrains from saying. And he intentionally refrains from saying a great deal.... Tell me, now, is Peer Gynt himself not a personality, complete and individual? I know that he is. And the mother; is she not?” But the most memorable passage in this memorable letter is the following piece of splendid arrogance: “My book is poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the book.” It certainly seems that any definition of poetry which should be so framed as to exclude Peer Gynt must have something of what Petersen himself called “Tankesvindel” about it.
Ibsen’s burst of indignation relieved his mind, and three weeks later we find him writing, half apologetically, of the “cargo of nonsense” he had “shipped off” to Björnson, immediately on reading Petersen’s review. He even sends a friendly “greeting” to the offending critic. But this is his last (published) letter to Björnson for something like fifteen years. How far the reception of Peer Gynt may have contributed to the breach between them, I do not know. Björnson’s own criticism of the poem, as we shall presently see, was very favourable.
Peer Gynt was not, on its appearance, quite so popular as Brand. A second edition was called for in a fortnight; but the third edition did not appear until 1874, by which time the seventh edition of Brand was already on the market. Before the end of the century ten editions of Peer Gynt had appeared in Copenhagen as against fourteen of Brand. The first German translation appeared in 1881, and the present English translation in 1892. A French translation, by Count Prozor, appeared in the Nouvelle Revue in 1896, but does not seem to have been published in book form.
After a great deal of discussion as to the stage-arrangement, Peer Gynt, largely abbreviated, was produced, with Edvard Grieg’s now famous incidental music, at the Christiania Theatre in February 1876, Henrik Klausen playing the title-part. It was acted thirty-seven times; but a fire which destroyed some of the scenery put a stop to the performances. In 1892, at the same theatre, the first three acts were revived, with Björn Björnson as Peer, and repeated fifty times. In the repertory of the National Theatre, too (opened in 1899), Peer Gynt has taken a prominent place. It was first given in 1902, and has up to the present (1906) been performed eighty-four times. In the version which has established itself on the Norwegian stage, all five acts are given, but the fourth and fifth acts are greatly abbreviated. In the season of 1886 the play was produced at the Dagmar Theatre, Copenhagen. August Lindberg’s Swedish Company acted it in Gothenburg in 1892, in Stockholm in 1895, and afterwards toured with it in Norway and Sweden. Count Prozor’s translation was acted by “L’Œuvre” at the Nouveau Théâtre, Paris, in November, 1896, of which remarkable production a lively account by Mr. Bernard Shaw may be found in the Saturday Review of that period. At the Deutsches Volkstheater in Vienna, in May 1902, two performances of Peer Gynt were given by the “Akademisch-Litterarische Verein.” I can find no record of any other German production of the play. The first production in the English language took place at the Grand Opera House, Chicago, on October 29, 1906, when Mr. Richard Mansfield appeared as Peer Gynt. Mr. Mansfield would seem to have acted the greater part of the play, but to have omitted the Sæter-Girl scene and the madhouse scene.
We have seen that the name, Peer Gynt, was suggested to Ibsen by a folk-tale in Asbjörnsen and Moe’s invaluable collection. It is one of a group of tales entitled Reindeer-Hunting in the Rondë Hills;[[5]] and in the same group occurs the adventure of Gudbrand Glesnë on the Gendin-Edge, which Peer Gynt works up so unblushingly in Act I. Sc. 1. The text of both these tales will be found in the Appendix, and the reader will recognise how very slight are the hints which set the poet’s imagination to work. The encounter with the Sæter-Girls (Act II. Sc. 3) and the struggle with the Boyg (Act II. Sc. 7) are foreshadowed in Asbjörnsen, and the concluding remark of Anders Ulsvolden evidently suggested to Ibsen the idea of incarnating Fantasy in Peer Gynt, as in Brand he had given us incarnate Will. But the Peer Gynt of the drama has really nothing in common with the Peer Gynt of the story, and the rest of the characters are not even remotely suggested. Many scattered traits and allusions, however, are borrowed from other legends in the same storehouse of grotesque and marvellous imaginings. Thus the story of the devil in a nutshell (Act I. Sc. 3) figures in Asbjörnsen under the title of The Boy and the Devil.[[6]] The appearance of the Green-Clad One with her Ugly Brat, who offers Peer Gynt a goblet of beer (Act III. Sc. 3), is obviously suggested by an incident in Berthe Tuppenhaug’s Stories.[[7]] Old Berthe, too, supplies the idea of correcting Peer Gynt’s eyesight according to the standard of the hill-trolls (Act II. Sc. 6), as well as the germ of the fantastic thread-ball episode in the last Act (Sc. 6). The castle, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (Act III. Sc. 4), gives its title to one of Asbjörnsen’s stories,[[8]] which may be read in English in Mr. Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book; and “Soria Moria Castle” is the title of another legend.[[9]] Herr Passarge (in his Henrik Ibsen, Leipzig, 1883) goes so far as to trace the idea of Peer Gynt’s shrinking from the casting-ladle, even though hell be the alternative (Act V. Sc. 7, &c.), to Asbjörnsen’s story of The Smith whom they Dared not let into Hell;[[10]] but the circumstances are so different, and Ibsen’s idea is such an inseparable part of the ethical scheme of the drama, that we can scarcely take it to have been suggested by this (or any other) individual story.[[11]] At the same time there is no doubt that The Folk-Lore of Peer Gynt might form the subject of a much more extended study than our space or our knowledge admits of.[[12]] The whole atmosphere of the first three acts and of the fifth is that of the Norwegian Folk and Fairy Tales. It must be remembered, too, that in the early ’sixties Ibsen was commissioned by the Norwegian Government to visit Romsdal and Söndmöre for the purpose of collecting folk-songs and legends. To these journeys, no doubt, we are mainly indebted for the local colour of Brand and Peer Gynt.
What are we to say now of the drift, the interpretation of Peer Gynt? The first and most essential thing may be said in Ibsen’s own words. On February 24, 1868, he wrote from Rome to Frederik Hegel: “I learn that the book has created much excitement in Norway. This does not trouble me in the least; but both there and in Denmark they have discovered much more satire in it than was intended by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I wrote it. The satirical passages are tolerably isolated. But if the Norwegians of the present time recognise themselves, as it would appear they do, in the character of Peer Gynt, that is the good people’s own affair.” In the last sentence the innocence of intention is, no doubt, a little overdone; but there is still less doubt that Ibsen was absolutely sincere in declaring that he wrote it primarily as a poem, a work of pure imagination, and that as a work of pure imagination it ought primarily to be read. There is undeniably an undercurrent of ethical and satirical meaning in the play; but no one can properly enjoy or value it who is not swept along irresistibly by the surface stream of purely poetic invention and delineation. Peer himself is a character-creation on the heroic scale, as vital a personality as Falstaff or Don Quixote. It is here that the poem (as Clemens Petersen vaguely discerned) has a marked advantage over its predecessor. In spite of the tremendous energy with which he is depicted, Brand remains an abstraction or an attitude, rather than a human being. But Peer Gynt is human in every fibre—too human to be alien to any one of us. We know him, we understand him, we love him—for who does not love a genial, imaginative, philosophic rascal? As for his adventures and vicissitudes, if they do not give us pleasure in and for themselves, quite apart from any symbolic sub-intention—just as the adventures of Sindbad, or Gil Blas, or Tom Jones, or Huckleberry Finn give us pleasure—then assuredly the poem does not affect us as Ibsen intended that it should. Readers who approach it for the first time may therefore be counselled to pay no heed to its ethical or political meanings, and to take it as it comes, simply as a dramatic romance or phantasmagoria of purely human humour and pathos. Reading it in this way, they will naturally find a good deal that seems obscure and arbitrary; but much of this will be cleared up on a second reading, by the aid of such sidelights as this Introduction can afford. No assiduity of study, however, can find in Peer Gynt a clear, consistent, cut-and-dried allegory, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It is not an allegory, but (as aforesaid) a phantasmagory. This is what the early critics did not realise. They quarrelled with it for the very luxuriance of its invention, the buoyant irrepressible whimsicality of its humour, the shimmering iridescence of its style. They stood before an “undulant and diverse” carnival-pageant, and grumbled because it would not fit into any recognised form, sanctioned by their preconceived æsthetic principles.
I am far from maintaining that the reckless, elusive capriciousness of the poem is an unmixed merit. It would probably have done no harm if, after the first rapture of composition had died away, Ibsen had gone over it and pruned it a little here and there. I can by no means endorse the critics’ sweeping condemnation of the fourth act, which contains some of the most delightful passages in the whole poem; but the first scene of this act is unquestionably shallow in conception and diffuse in style—a piece of satiric journalism rather than of literature. The concluding scenes of the last act, too, would certainly have been none the worse of a little compression. The auction scene (Act V. Sc. 4), though it has a sort of fantastic impressiveness, seems to me hopelessly baffling in its relation both to the outward story and to the inner significance of the poem. Here, and perhaps at some half-dozen other points, one may admit that Ibsen appears to have let his fancy run away with him; but the inert, excessive, or utterly enigmatic passages in Peer Gynt are surely few and brief in comparison with the passages in Faust to which the same epithets may be applied. On the other hand, the scenes of poignant and thrilling and haunting poetry are too many to be severally indicated. The first act, with its inimitable life and movement, Åse’s death-scene, and the Pastor’s speech in the last act, are usually cited as the culminating points of the poem; and there can be no doubt that Åse’s death-scene, at any rate, is one of the supreme achievements of modern drama.[[13]] But there are several other scenes that I would place scarcely, if at all, lower than these. In point of weird intensity, there is nothing in the poem more marvellous than the Sæter-Girl scene (Act II. Sc. 3); in point of lyric movement, Peer Gynt’s repudiation of Ingrid (Act II. Sc. 1) is incomparable; and in point of sheer beauty and pathos, Solveig’s arrival at the hut (Act III. Sc. 3), with the whole of the scene that follows, stands supreme.[[14]] For my own part, I reckon the shipwreck scenes at the beginning of the fifth act among the most impressive, as they are certainly not the least characteristic, in the poem. And, in enumerating its traits of undeniable greatness, one must by no means forget the character of Åse, on which Ibsen himself dwelt with justified complacency. There is not a more life-like creation in the whole range of drama.
Having now warned the reader against allowing the search for symbolic or satiric meanings to impair his enjoyment of the pure poetry of Peer Gynt, I may proceed to point out some of the implications which do indubitably underlie the surface aspects of the poem. These meanings fall under three heads. First, we have universal-human satire and symbolism, bearing upon human nature in general, irrespective of race or nationality. Next we have satire upon Norwegian human nature in particular, upon the religious and political life of Norway as a nation. Lastly, we find a certain number of local and ephemeral references—what, in the slang of our stage, are called “topical allusions.”
In order to provide the reader with a clue to the complex meanings of Peer Gynt, on its higher lines or planes of significance, I cannot do better than quote some paragraphs from the admirable summary of the drama given by Mr. P. H. Wicksteed in his Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen.[[15]] Mr. Wicksteed is in such perfect sympathy with Ibsen in the stage of his development marked by Brand and Peer Gynt, that he has understood these poems, in my judgment, at least as well as any other commentator, whether German or Scandinavian. He writes as follows:
“In Brand the hero is an embodied protest against the poverty of spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen rebelled against in his countrymen. In Peer Gynt the hero is himself the embodiment of that spirit. In Brand the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as its central theme, the drama is constructed, is the contrast between the spirit of compromise on the one hand, and the motto ‘everything or nothing’ on the other. And Peer Gynt is the very incarnation of a compromising dread of decisive committal to any one course. In Brand the problem of self-realisation and the relation of the individual to his surroundings is obscurely struggling for recognition, and in Peer Gynt it becomes the formal theme upon which all the fantastic variations of the drama are built up. In both plays alike the problems of heredity and the influence of early surroundings are more than touched upon; and both alike culminate in the doctrine that the only redeeming power on earth or in heaven is the power of love.