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In 1862, he began a series of satirical and philosophical dramas with Kjaerlighedens Komedie, "Love's Comedy," which was succeeded by two masterpieces of a similar kind, Brand, in 1866, and Peer Gynt, in 1867.
"Eleanor," said Grace solemnly, "you ought to be a very happy girl. You have everything a heart can wish. Think of poor little Mabel Allison." "Oh, don't let's think about disagreeable things," said Eleanor lightly. "Sit down and be comfy and I'll play for you. What shall I play?" "Do you know the 'Peer Gynt' suite?" asked Grace. "I love 'Anitra's Dance."
But Ibsen, too, was a character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is no psychology in Brand he is a mere incarnation of intransigent idealism while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar Ekdal a piece of searching psychology.
Surely, surely, this was loveliness undefiled. The words of Peer Gynt came floating back disconnectedly, more as a puzzled question in his mind than as they stand in the story: "Is your psalm-book in your 'kerchief? Do you glance adown your apron? Do you hold your mother's skirt-fold? Speak!"
Henrik Ibsen if it is ever possible to tie a true dramatist down to a doctrine preaches in Peer Gynt that "to be thyself is to slay thyself." Mr. Wells has a cloud of witnesses to back him up; and yet it is very doubtful whether the turn of phrase is a really helpful one whether it does not rather get in the way of the natural man in his quest for a sound rule of life.
These had now been excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of Peer Gynt, and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again in verse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenile and fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-like bard of sixty.
As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the ferment of self."
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