IBSEN, HENRIK. — Poet, born at Skien, in southern Norway, on 20 March 1828, died at Cristiania (Oslo) on 23 May 1906. His life unfolded from the closed circle of a small town, pervaded by and not liberated from anxious Lutheran pietism, through sad family circumstances and the narrowness of a wretched condition, toward experiences of increasingly broader environments. The years at Grimstad were gloomy and desolate, where he lived by earning his bread as a pharmacy assistant; yet he prepared to enter the university and composed the tragedy of audaciously combative freedom, Catilina. The years of his literary and theatrical apprenticeship at Cristiania, as a student, and at Bergen, from 1851 to 1857, as director of the National Theatre, and once again at Cristiania, from 1857 to 1864, first as director of the Norwegian Theatre, then as journalist and writer, were harsh but generous; there he gained experience of the «theatrical» French theatre, after having, in the first season of his apprenticeship, steeped himself in the Romantic theatre of the Germans and Scandinavians. The third period was that of the years of wandering, the most fruitful in works: he stayed especially in Italy, distancing himself from his Nordic homeland almost in order better to understand it in the elementary reasons of its nature, and to send it, from afar, a message of life. Finally, in 1891, he returned to his homeland, where he meditated upon the works richest in immediate autobiography, conceived within a circle of more severe reflections, yet confident in the testamentary message he left to his own people.
His dramaturgy is composed of two ascending and descending branches of a parabola: it pursues, with a consistency of inner inquiry rare in modern times, that moral solution which might reconcile individual problems with social problems, mythically illuminating reality; for art is for him «final judgment», as he said in a famous epigram; and life is a struggle with the trolls of mind and heart. Catilina, The Warriors of Helgeland, Love’s Comedy, The Pretenders, Brand and Peer Gynt are the most significant works of the ascent: concluded precisely by the vertical audacity of Brand, the Protestant priest who in life disavows charity, and by the horizontal adventure of Peer Gynt, who leaves his native corner of earth to attempt mastery and pleasure, and who returns, weary, to his homeland, where love has awaited him, invincibly faithful. The transition to a new orientation is marked by the dramatic poem Emperor and Galilean, on the apostasy of the Emperor Julian, and by the Poems: apologues and confessions, more than lyrics, dense with emblems and testimonies to his travail. And finally, almost descending once more in order to carry his message of compassionate and judging spirituality among men, in a more immediate language, illuminating the ordinary terms of human experience among everyday people: The League of Youth, The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken. Even in descending thus he ascends; and if from The Master Builder onward the poet’s apologia prevails—the reflection upon himself and upon his own message—the epilogue, as he called his last drama, of a total inquiry consummated in the stage word, with the masterpieces A Doll’s House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, he sang, as no one around him did, the tragedy of individualistic abysses, the sin and expiation of human pride: gathering religious and penitential meditation into an entirely irradiated sphere, dominated by the poetic emblem that he drew from the tragic human person, chosen to tell the story of sin and condemnation.
In nineteenth-century dramaturgy it fell to I., after having driven the language of the dramatic poem to its extreme possibilities, to descend once more in order to illuminate daily life in its immediate appearance, and to transfigure into a judgment of the soul the most commonplace events of human solitude, the survival of the dead among the living, and the apparent life of men who await, in order to awaken, the day of Judgment. Often understood only in the accessory resonance of the polemical document or social theory, so that Ghosts seems a clinical document and Hedda Gabler a proclamation of Dionysian individualism, he was understood only late as an appeal to the dignity of the person, with its destiny of evil and good, and with the individual solution to every social problem. No dramatist sang of more abysses than he did: no one, word by word, takes his leave more consolingly. The truths of images and reasons were fleeting; truth stands firm. He knew none of the graces, a rugged and surly tragedy; but he awoke near the risen God.