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Frederick Bulpert, new silk hat at back of head, and arms folded, listens to the "William Tell" overture, Handel's "Largo," and the suite from "Peer Gynt" with the frown of a man not to be taken in and unwilling to be influenced by the approbation exhibited by people round him. A song follows, and he remarks to Gertie that a recitation would be more in keeping with the style of the entertainment.
In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that Peer Gynt was diametrically opposed in spirit to Brand, and that it made no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators.
To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer Gynt music. She found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight.
In several respects, though perhaps not in concentration of effect, The Lady from the Sea shows a distinct advance on Rosmersholm. It is never dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and there is thrown over the whole texture of it a glamour of romance, of mystery, of beauty, which had not appeared in Ibsen's work since the completion of Peer Gynt.
But to me it always seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless Boyg invisible yet everywhere we were struggling with the unwatered hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady.
This tendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in Brand and Peer Gynt, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted for his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had quitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic expression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear it altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in itself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements.
This poem contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth. My own mother with the necessary exaggeration served as the model for Ase." Peer Gynt was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen.
This is implied in the very word "drama," which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing. It would be possible, no doubt, to place Don Quixote, or Falstaff, or Peer Gynt, on the stage, and let him develop his character in mere conversation, or even monologue, without ever moving from his chair.
He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted himself heart and soul to the composition of Peer Gynt, which he described as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of modern Norway." He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was a whole year on the stocks.
Altho 'Emperor and Galilean, like 'Brand' and like 'Peer Gynt' was intended for the closet only, and not for the stage itself, it proves its author to be a true dramatist, centering the interest of his story on an essential struggle and keeping in view always the pictorial aspects of his action.
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