Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 4).djvu/17

 exaggerations—served as the model for Ase. (Likewise for Inga in The Pretenders)." Twelve years later (1882) Ibsen wrote to George Brandes: "My father was a merchant with a large business and wide connections, and he enjoyed dispensing reckless hospitality. In 1836 he failed, and nothing was left to us except a farm near the town In writing ''Peer Gynt'', I had the circumstances and memories of my own childhood before me when I described the life in the house of 'the rich Jon Gynt.'"

Returning to the above-quoted letter to Peter Hansen, we find this further allusion to Peer Gynt and its immediate predecessor and successor in the list of Ibsen's works: "Environment has great influence upon the forms in which imagination creates. May I not, like Christoff in Jakob von Tyboe, point to Brand and Peer Gynt, and say: 'See, the wine-cup has done this?' And is there not something in The League of Youth [written in Dresden] that suggests 'Knackwurst und Bier'? Not that I would thereby imply any inferiority in the latter play." The transition to prose was no doubt an inevitable step in the evolution of Ibsen's genius; but one wishes he had kept to the "wine-cup" a little longer.

A masterpiece is not a flawless work, but one which has sufficient vitality to live down its faults, until at last we no longer heed, and almost forget, them. ''Peer Gynt'' had real faults, not a few; and its great merit, as some of us think—its magnificent, reckless profusion of fantasy—could not but be bewildering to its first critics, who had to pronounce upon it before they had (as Ballested would put it) acclimatised themselves to its atmosphere. It's reception, then, was much more