Ibsen 367 



confine our attention to them is to have gained but a 

 limited notion of this writer's achievement. 



We have said that Ibsen sliows, in his work, as 

 marked traces of the influence of Goethe as does 

 Bjornson of the influence of Schiller. This is especially 

 patent in two long dramatic poems of a didactic- 

 satirical kind, Brand and Peer Gynt. These are, in my 

 judgment, the finest of Ibsen's works. No fair estimate 

 can be formed of the powers of the writer of The 

 Doll's House and the rest of the social dramas, unless 

 the critic is likewise acquainted with these two poems. 

 They are written chiefly in octosyllabic verse, with 

 irregular rhymes, in character varying from passages 

 of great lyrical beauty to others of a doggerel versi- 

 fication : this is as much as to say, that their 

 versification is modelled upon that of the greater 

 part of Faust. In Brand, Ibsen satirises the formal- 

 ity and sloth of the average Norse parish 'prcest, and 

 draws a picture of one of an ideally high type. Peer 

 Ghjnt is a more grotesque satire upon the average Norse 

 peasant, and may be reckoned a counterblast to the 

 fulsome praise which the majority of writers, from the 

 days of the ' syttendemai ' poets to those of Bjornson, 

 have lavished upon him. 



Other of Ibsen's works are : — 

 Cataline \sic'\, a drama in blank verse. This was 

 Ibsen's earliest work. It was written, Ibsen 

 tells us, in the winter of the revolutionary year 

 1848-9. Its object is to whitewash the man 

 whom Sallust and Cicero describe as a con- 

 spirator, but who, according to Ibsen, was a 

 reformer, with ideas far in advance of those of 



