The reply he made to their enthusiasm was dignified and reserved, but it
revealed a sense of high gratification. Skule's long doubt was over; he
believed at last in his own kingdom, and that the world would be
ultimately the better for the stamp of his masterful soul upon its
surface.
It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat dreaming through the early
part of the uneventful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melancholy
when, in the following year, he settled down to the composition of a new
play which was to treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He told
Snoilsky that for several reasons this work made very slow progress,
"and it robbed him of his summer holidays." From May to November, 1890,
he was uninterruptedly in Munich writing what is known to us now as
_Hedda Gabler_. He finished it at last, saying as he did so, "It has not
been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I
principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and
human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions
and principles of the present day.
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