[Note.--By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has
hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these
pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his
posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young
man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where
Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently
deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising
and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_
all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in Ibsen,
unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in
Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after
the death of the mortal men who planted them.]
CHAPTER V
1868-75
Ibsen's four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm.
The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other
illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from
Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with
them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian servitude had
roused some of them to anger or irony; they had spent nights of insomnia
dreaming of Italian liberty.
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