James Joyce's debt to the past has been repeatedly and sometimes indiscriminately acknowledged. I wish to show that there is an undefined debt to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen which it is fruitful to recognize and to elucidate. It is a debt far more inclusive than that of a merely literary influence. It is rather that of a fiery and consuming ideal, adopted freely and with love in adolescence, and warmly invading James Joyce's conduct both as man and as artist. Indeed, the first three decades (roughly) of Joyce's life were subtly and pervasively, consciously and unconsciously, modeled along the central lines of Ibsen's own biography.