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Updated: July 21, 2025
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 . 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.
Yet it is surprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovely poem shaking the bauble of its fool's cap at them, there can still be commentators who see nothing in Peer Gynt but the "awful interest of the universal problems with which it deals."
He stands between Hamlet and Peer Gynt, this strangely motionless one who has thrown the west side into an uproar. There is no drama around him. He is a dead young man in uniform walking slowly, limply through three acts. This is all one remembers that his eyes were open and unseeing, that his arms hung like a scarecrow's and that the fingers of his hands were curled in and motionless.
Peer Gynt is no longer Ibsen's if the actors are dumb. The novel, in certain respects, fares still worse, but in other respects some degrees better. It is true that in the superficial literature written for the hour the demarcation line between dramatic and narrative works is often ignored.
What Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats "Back to the shop, Mr. John, stick to plasters, pills and ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the author of Endymion, was strictly true of the author of Peer Gynt. Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius.
At first he took in the Symphony Orchestra because he was dragged thither. After about two years the Virus had permeated his System, and he was a regular Brahmsite. If he didn't get a full dose of Peer Gynt every few days, he was as nervous as a Cat.
And Gila, little Gila, how sweet and innocent she had looked when they met her that morning with her prayer-book. How wrong he must have been to take the idle talk that people chattered about her and let it influence his thoughts of her. She could not be all that they said, and yet look so sweet and innocent. What had she reminded him of in literature? Ah! he had it. Solveig in Peer Gynt!
No one wants, I suppose, to say with Peer Gynt: Thou beautiful earth, be not angry with me, That I trampled thy grasses to no avail; Thou beautiful sun, thou hast squandered away Thy glory of light in an empty hut. Beautiful sun and beautiful earth, You were foolish to bear and give light to my mother. But there is also another side to the question.
In Peer Gynt, a satiric phantasmagory, Ibsen introduces some fifty individual characters, with numberless supernumeraries; in An Enemy of the People, a social comedy, he has eleven characters and a crowd; for Ghosts and Rosmersholm, psychological tragedies, six persons apiece are sufficient. It can scarcely be necessary, at this time of day, to say much on the subject of nomenclature.
But not now." He rose abruptly. "It is warmer inside, and we can have some music. I am sure you must be tired of hearing me talk about myself." He played for us, in masterly fashion, the Peer Gynt suite, and after that a composition of his own. At last he sang, with all the swing of the sea in voice and accompaniment, and the song drew our hearts out of us.
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