Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/73

 Andrews 57 FURTHER INFLUENCES UPON IBSEN'S PEER GYNT III. HEIBERG'S En Sjal efter Dtfden Of an influence of J. L. Heiberg upon Ibsen there has hitherto been little recognition. In connection with Peer Gynt it has been noted that the influence of Goethe's Faust was not only a direct one, but had also passed through such an intermediate Faustiad as Heiberg's En Sjal efter Dfiden. 1 The particular element which Ibsen's work has been seen to share with Heiberg's as distinguished from Goethe's is that the hero, who is treated satirically in both, is barred from hell as well as from heaven by the triviality of his sin, an idea which in itself Ibsen could have got from other sources or evolved independently, but which in Heiberg's work was already combined with Faustian material. I have further called attention to the troll-newspapers, which appear to have been suggested by the newspapers of hell in Heiberg's poem, and have inferred that the whole satire of Norway as the troll-kingdom was influenced by that of Denmark as hell. 2 Logeman includes this in his commen- tary together with a number of additional observations mostly unrecorded in his index: 3 Mefistofeles explains that the entrance to hell is easy and unimpeded, but that there is no getting out again; Dovregubben says the same of his castle (pp. 120 f., 187). Saint Peter as the gate-keeper of heaven appears in both works, in Peer Gynt it is true only as conjured up by the imagination of the hero (p. 165). The soul expresses to St. Peter its preference for a trip to America, as Peer in the fourth act already has his American experience behind him; both authors represent America as a sort of materialists' paradise (p. 170). The separating of sheep from goats is referred to in both (pp. 181 f.). Peer's idea of having a bridge open behind him as a stimulus to bravery reminds one of Heiberg's souls in hell, whose only consolation consists in the hope of a pos- sible escape (p. 187). Both Peer and the soul refer to "skimming the cream" of history (p. 235). As Begriffenfeldt insists that everyone is himself in the madhouse, so Mefistofeles in hell (p. 259), 1 The two works were brought into connection by Georg Brandes as early as 1882 (see his Samlede Skrifter, III, 281). 2 JOURN. ENGL. AND GERM. PHILOL., XIII, 241. 1914. 8 A Commentary on Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. 1917.