Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popular of
its author's works.

Ibsen left his little tavern at Saeby towards the end of September,
1887, in consequence of an invitation to proceed directly to Stockholm,
where his Swedish admirers, now very numerous and enthusiastic, would
no longer be deprived of the pleasure of entertaining him publicly.
He appeared before them, the breast of his coat sparkling with foreign
stars and crosses, the Urim and Thummim of general European recognition.
He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out lived all the obscurity
of his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries--even in recalcitrant
Norway--he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age.
In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of the
sang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of high
and settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was now
discussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of what
is even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers at
Stockholm told him that he had taken a foremost place in re-creating
their sense of life, that he was a fashioner and a builder of new social
forms, that he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-Builder.
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." It was a proof of the immense growth
of Ibsen's celebrity that editions of _Hedda Gable