IBSEN, Henrik. - Poet, born in Skien, in southern Norway, on March 20, 1828, died in Kristiania (Oslo) on May 23, 1906. His life unfolded from the closed circle of a small town, permeated but not freed from the anxious Lutheran pietism, through troubled family circumstances, in the narrowness of a wretched condition, to experiences in ever-wider environments. Grimstad’s years were dark and bleak, where he lived earning his bread as a pharmacy assistant; yet they prepared his entry into the university and the composition of the boldly combative tragedy *Catilina*. Harsh but generous were the years of his literary and theatrical apprenticeship in Kristiania as a student, and in Bergen from 1851 to 1857 as director of the National Theatre, and again in Kristiania from 1857 to 1864 as director of the Norwegian Theatre, later as a publicist and writer; here he gained experience in theatre and theatrical matters, after having, in the first season of his apprenticeship, absorbed the romantic theatre of the Germans and Scandinavians. The third period was that of his wandering years, the most fruitful in works: he resided especially in Italy, distancing himself from his Nordic land almost to understand it better in the elemental reasons of its nature, to send it, from afar, a message of life. Finally, in 1891, he returned to his homeland and there meditated his works richest in immediate autobiographism, conceived within a circle of more severe reflections but confident in the testamentary message he left to posterity.
And in two branches, ascending and descending, of a parabola, his dramaturgy is composed: pursued with a coherence, rare in modern times, of inner research, attempting that moral solution which would reconcile individual and social problems, illuminating reality mythically; for art was for him a ‘final judgment,’ as he said in a famous epigram; and life is a struggle with the trolls of the mind and heart. *Catilina*, *The Warriors at 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 disowns charity, and by the adventurous horizon of *Peer Gynt*, who departs from his native corner of earth to attempt mastery and pleasure, and who, weary, returns to his land, where love awaited him, invincibly faithful. The transition to a new orientation is marked by the dramatic poem *Caesar and Galilean*, on the apostasy of Emperor Julian, and by the *Poems*: apologues and confessions, more than lyrics, dense with emblems and testimonies of his inner turmoil. And finally, almost descending to bring among men, in a more immediate language, illuminating the current terms of the human drama among everyday people, his message of compassionate and judging spirituality: *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 this descent he ascends; and if from *The Master Builder* onward the apology of the poet prevails, the reflection on himself and his own message, the epilogue—as he called his last drama—of a total search consummated in the stage word, with the masterpieces *A Doll’s House*, *Ghosts*, *The Wild Duck*, *Rosmersholm*, *Hedda Gabler*, he sang, as none around him did, the tragedy of individualistic abysses, sin and expiation of human pride: gathering religious and penitential meditation into a sphere entirely irradiated, dominated by the poetic emblem he delineates, by the tragic human person, chosen to recount the story of sin and condemnation.
In nineteenth-century dramaturgy it fell to Ibsen, after having pushed to the extreme possibilities the language of the dramatic poem, to descend again to illuminate everyday life in its immediate semblance, and to transfigure into a judgment of the soul the most trite events of the solitude of human days, the survival of the dead among the living, the apparent life of men who await, to awaken, the Day of Judgment. Often understood only in the incidental resonance of the polemical document or social theory, so that *Ghosts* seems a clinical document and *Hedda Gabler* a proclamation of Dionysian individuation, only later was it grasped as an appeal to the dignity of the person, with its destiny of good and evil, and with the individual solution to every social problem. No dramatist sang more abysses than he: none, word by word, achieved more consolingly. The truths of images and reasons had fallen; truth stands firm. He knew no graces, a bristling and sullen tragedy; yet he awoke near the risen God.