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From Lear to Joyce. For Ibsen, as later for an Ibsen idolater named James Joyce, exile was creation's catalyst. Living in Italy, and later in Germany, lent perspective to his judgments and released his power. In less than two years he produced his first masterpiece. Brand is the epic tragedy of a zealot, a Norse Savonarola hurled to ruin by his own hubris. Published back home, it hit Norway like an Arctic blizzard, and Ibsen was hailed as the greatest Norwegian poet since the age of the Eddas. Two years later he published an even more stupendous poetic drama called Peer Gynt. Its hero is Brand's shadow, the orgiastically natural as opposed to the fanatically spiritual man. The tragic last act of the play, in which Gynt's whole life unravels in his mind at the moment of his death, is one of the great farragoes in world literature: a bridge that miraculously leaps the centuries between King Lear and Finnegans Wake.
Shattering Episode. At the height of his success as a dramatic poet, Ibsen suddenly risked his career by switching from poetry to prose and from romanticism to realism. In The Pillars of Society, he blistered the middle class for its greed and indifference; in A Doll's House, he pictured holy matrimony as a slave pen; in Ghosts, he symbolized hypocrisy as a social disease that destroyed the rising generation. An Enemy of the People stated flatly that the majority is always wrong. Amazingly, a Norway that had only had gas lamps for a generation leaped on these advanced ideas and demanded more. So did Germany, France and England. By the late 1880s, Ibsen had become Europe's most famous playwright, a stern alternative to Eugene Scribe and the French farce industry.
But once again Ibsen abandoned his course, this time for a painfully romantic interlude. At 61, a white-maned old man with one big eye and one little eye, Ibsen met a 19-year-old girl named Emilie Bardach and fell boyishly in love. "He means to possess me," Emilie informed her diary. "That is his absolute will." But Meyer says that caution intervened, possibly in the form of impotence. Emilie later told a friend that Ibsen had never even kissed her.
The episode was shattering to Ibsen. Meyer believes that in a few wild weeks he discovered the power and the wonder of love-and realized that the discovery had come too late. In any case, over the next ten years Ibsen's plays moved away from the passionate centers of life into the cold silence of ultimate considerations. Many of his contemporaries found Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm befuddling and repellent. But at this distance they seem startlingly modern. Their symbols invite psychoanalysis, their bareness prefigures Beckett, their dialogue is often as runic as Pinter's. In late Ibsen what is said often hides what is felt, and to reveal what is felt an actor must learn not only to speak the text but to act the context.