Throughout these early years, the relationship between Ibsen and Björnson was very friendly. Björnson became godfather when the Ibsens’ son, Sigurd, was born in 1859; when the dramatist was in serious financial straits, Björnson made every effort to raise money for him. The two men also shared the same circle of friends at this time, although Ibsen was disappointed to find that his poetic ideals were misunderstood by his gregarious contemporaries. In a poem, “On the Heights,” he expressed the view that a man who wishes to devote himself to the arts must sacrifice the usual pleasures of life; a poet must view life apart in order to find in it models for his work.
Ibsen suffered great depression during this part of his life. The varied responsibilities of his job allowed him no chance for his own creative work. In addition, the theater was doing so badly that his salary was severely reduced. Besides neglecting his work, he published no play from 1857 until Love’s Comedy in 1862. This new anti-romantic satire received hostile reviews although it shows a maturing talent and the bold viewpoint which characterizes his later works. When the theater finally declared bankruptcy, Ibsen’s despair was complete. Like Captain Alving, he became a victim of that “second-rate town which had no joys to offer—only dissipations,” and spent much time in barrooms. Björnson, meanwhile, was a successful and already famous poet to whom the government awarded an annual grant of four hundred dollars to devote himself exclusively to poetic works. However, Ibsen’s fortunes changed in the following year when The Pretenders, a play glorifying the Norse heroes of the past, won an enthusiastic reception from both audience and reviewers. As a result of this success, the government awarded Ibsen a travelling scholarship to bring him in contact with the cultural trends in the rest of Europe.
Visiting Rome, Ibsen viewed for the first time the great art masterpieces of the classical and renaissance periods. In the warm, sunny climate of Italy, Ibsen felt intoxicated with his freedom from the stultifying atmosphere of Norwegian provincialism. Retiring with his family to a little town in the hills, Ibsen wrote with an inspired pen. Affected by the events of the Prusso-Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein, his interests turning from the esthetic to the ethical, Ibsen produced the colossal Brand.
Considered “the most stirring event in Norway’s literary history of the nineteenth century,” this drama won nationwide fame for its composer. The protagonist of the play, a mystical clergyman, is a courageous idealist of noble stature whose lack of love or humanity destroys his own wife and child in an uncompromising commitment to his ethical principles.
Published in the following year, Peer Gynt established Ibsen’s international fame. This exuberant, fantasy-filled drama is the antithesis of Brand. The spoiled darling of a weak mother and rich father, Peer lives according to the principle of “to thyself—enough.” Rather than overcoming obstacles, he goes “roundabout” and avoids facing problems. Unlike Brand, Peer never commits himself to principles unless they are to his personal benefit. The play is full of symbolic allusions and rich lyrical poetry. In 1867, the king decorated Ibsen for his achievement.
After four years in Italy, Ibsen settled down to his lifework, first in Dresden and then in Munich. His biography from this point on is more or less uneventful. Producing a new play every two years, Ibsen’s dramatic powers increased and his social criticism ripened. Along with Björnson, he was considered Norway’s greatest poet, but he maintained primacy as a dramatist. Honors heaped upon him and with a prosperous income, Ibsen appeared as a frock-coated and respectable middle class individual.
Almost entirely self-inspired, Ibsen was a rare genius who required no outside influence for his work. Unlike Björnson, who lectured, made frequent public appearances, and wrote novels and plays as well as poems, Ibsen kept to himself as much as possible. Constantly working and reworking his dramas throughout each two year period, rarely divulging, even to his family, the nature of his current writing, he single-mindedly pursued his art. Just as he gave up painting in his youth for writing poetry and drama, he now stopped composing poems, eventually relinquishing even the verse form of his earlier plays for the prose of the later works.
Harsh self-analysis was one of his life principles. In each play he expresses this constant introspection, always underscoring a thesis based on self-seeking. In Emperor and Galilean, for example, Julian fails to establish the “first empire” of pagan sensuality, then casts aside the “second empire” of Christian self-abnegation. As the hero expires, he envisions a “third empire,” where, in the words of the biographer Zucker, “men were to find God not on Mount Olympus nor on Calvary but in their own souls, wills, and senses.” Ibsen himself once wrote in a poem that “to live is to fight with trolls in heart and brain. To be a poet is to pronounce a final judgment upon oneself.”
The Norwegian commentator Francis Bull (1887–1974) sums up Ibsen’s personal search:
More deeply than ordinary men, Ibsen was split in two—a great genius and a shy and timid little philistine. In daily life he quite often did not come up to his own heroic ideals and revolutionary theories, but listened to the troll voices of narrow-minded egotism and compromise—and then, afterwards, the genius in him arose, a judge without mercy. This ever-recurring fight meant to him lifelong suffering; but it was this drama constantly going on in his own soul that made him a great dramatist and compelled him again and again to undertake a penetrating self-analysis.
Ibsen died in 1906. His tombstone, inscribed only with a hammer, the miner’s symbol, alludes to a poem Ibsen wrote as a youth. Ending with “Break me the way, you heavy hammer, / To the deepest bottom of my heart,” the verse is a succinct statement of the intensity of Ibsen’s personal vision and of his dramatic art.
