Ibsen, Henrik

IBSEN, HENRIK. - Poet, b. at Skien, in southern Norway, on 20 March 1828, d. at Christiania (Oslo) on 23 May 1906. His life unfolded from the closed circle of a small town, pervaded and never freed from an anxious Lutheran pietism, through sad family vicissitudes, in the narrowness of a wretched condition, to experiences of ever vaster environments. Gloomy and squalid were the years at Grimstad, where he lived earning his bread as a pharmacy apprentice; but he prepares for entrance to the university and composes the tragedy of audaciously combative freedom, Catiline. Hard, but generous were the years of his literary and theatrical novitiate at Christiania, as a student, and at Bergen, from 1851 to 1857, as director of the National Theatre, and at Christiania again, from 1857 to 1864, first as director of the Norwegian Theatre, then as publicist and writer; and there he gained experience of the French "theatrical" theatre, after having, in the first season of his novitiate, steeped himself in the romantic theatre of the Germans and the Scandinavians. The third period is that of the years of wandering, the most fruitful in works: he resides especially in Italy, withdrawing from his Nordic land almost the better to understand it in the elementary reasons of its nature, to give it, from afar, a message of life. And finally, in 1891, he returns to his homeland, and there meditates the works richest in immediate autobiography, conceived in a sphere of more severe reflections, but trustful in the testamentary message that he leaves to his own.

And in two branches, ascending and descending, of a parabola his dramaturgy is composed: pursued with a coherence, rare in modern times, of inner search, attempting that moral solution which might reconcile the individual problematic and the social problematic, mythically illuminating reality: for art is for him "last judgment," as he said in a famous epigram; and life is a struggle with the trolls of the mind and of the heart. Catiline, The Warriors of Helgeland, Love's Comedy, The Pretenders to the Throne, 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 horizontal adventure of Peer Gynt, who from his native corner of earth departs to attempt dominion and pleasure, and who to his land returns weary, where love, invincibly faithful, has awaited him. The passage to a new orientation is marked by the dramatic poem of Caesar and Galileo, on the apostasy of the emperor Julian, and by the Poems: apologues and confessions, rather than lyrics, dense with emblems and testimonies of his travail. And finally, almost descending again to carry among men, in a more immediate language, illuminating the current terms of the human vicissitude, among everyday people, his message of pitying 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 Solness, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken. Even thus descending he ascends; and if from The Master Builder Solness onward the apology of the poet prevails, the reflecting on himself and on his own message, the epilogue, as he called the last drama, of a total search consummated in the scenic word, with the masterpieces A Doll's House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler, he sang, as no one around him, the tragedy of individualistic precipices, the sin and the expiation of human pride: gathering religious and penitential meditation into a sphere wholly irradiated, dominated by the poetic emblem that he drew from the tragic human person, chosen to tell the story of sin and of condemnation.

In the dramaturgy of the nineteenth century it fell to I., after having pushed the language of the dramatic poem to its extreme possibilities, to descend again to illuminate everyday life in its immediate semblance, and to transfigure into a judgment of the soul the most trite vicissitudes of the solitude of human days, the survival of the dead among the living, 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 of social theory, so that Ghosts seems a clinical document, and Hedda Gabler a proclamation of Dionysian individualism, only late is he understood as an appeal to the dignity of the person, with its destiny of evil and of good, and with the individual solution of every social problem. No dramatist sang more precipices than he: none, from word to word, takes leave more consolingly. The truths of images and of reasons were caducous, the truth is firm. He did not know the graces, a tragedy bristling and surly; but he awoke near the risen God.

Mario Apollonio