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.
