Returning to the above-quoted letter to Peter Hansen, we find this further allusion to _Peer Gynt_ and its immediate predecessor and successor in the list of Ibsen’s works: “Environment has great influence upon the forms in which imagination creates. May I not, like Christoff in _Jakob von Tyboe_,[1] point to _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_, and say: ‘See, the wine-cup has done this?’ And is there not something in _The League of Youth_ [written in Dresden] that suggests ‘Knackwurst und Bier’? Not that I would thereby imply any inferiority in the latter play.” The transition to prose was no doubt an inevitable step in the evolution of Ibsen’s genius; but one wishes he had kept to the “wine-cup” a little longer. A masterpiece is not a flawless work, but one which has sufficient vitality to live down its faults, until at last we no longer heed, and almost forget, them. _Peer Gynt_ had real faults, not a few; and its great merit, as some of us think—its magnificent, reckless profusion of fantasy—could not but be bewildering to its first critics, who had to pronounce upon it before they had (as Ballested[2] would put it) acclimatised themselves to its atmosphere. It’s reception, then, was much more dubious than that of _Brand_ had been. We find even George Brandes writing of it: “What great and noble powers are wasted on this thankless material! Except in the fourth act, which has no connection with what goes before and after, and is witless in its satire, crude in its irony, and in its latter part scarcely comprehensible, there is almost throughout a wealth of poetry and a depth of thought such as we do not find, perhaps, in any of Ibsen’s earlier works.... It would be unjust to deny that the book contains great beauties, or that it tells us all, and Norwegians in particular, some important truths; but beauties and truths are of far less value than beauty and truth in the singular, and Ibsen’s poem is neither beautiful nor true. Contempt for humanity and self-hatred make a bad foundation on which to build a poetic work. What an unlovely and distorting view of life this is! What acrid pleasure can a poet find in thus sullying human nature?”[3] The friendship between Brandes and Ibsen was at this time just beginning, and—much to Ibsen’s credit—it appears to have suffered no check by reason of this outspoken pronouncement.