The conception that
this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish
national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_,
which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to
a justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen's graver
prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act,
where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs
and tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their
reproaches.

_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment,
and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as
_Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it
did not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules must
be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book," he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and if
it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry
is shall be made to fit my book." There was a struggle at first against
this assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is now
generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to
include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made
wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic
intellectual caprices.

[Note.--By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has
hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these
pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his
posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young
man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where
Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently
deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising
and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_
all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in
Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in
Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after
the death of the mortal men who planted them.]

CHAPTER V

1868-75

Ibsen's four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm.
The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other
illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from
Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought
with them a personal