But he was no longer
suffering from what he himself had called "the feeling of an insane man
staring at one single, hopelessly black spot." He went to Amalfi for the
summer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with
his present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what is
probably the most widely famous of all his works, _A Doll's House_. The
day before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublished letter
of July 4, 1879): "I have been living here with my family since
September last, and most of that time I have been occupied with the idea
of a new dramatic work, which I shall now soon finish, and which will be
published in October. It is a serious drama, really a family drama,
dealing with modern conditions and in particular with the problems which
complicate marriage." This play he finished, lingering at Amalfi, in
September, 1879. It was an engineer's experiment at turning up and
draining a corner of the moral swamp which Norwegian society seemed to
be to his violent and ironic spirit.
_A Doll's House_ was Ibsen's first unqualified success. Not merely was
it the earliest of his plays which excited universal discussion, but in
its construction and execution it carried out much further than its
immediate precursors Ibsen's new ideal as an unwavering realist.
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