Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 4).djvu/19

 may convey some idea of his general objection to both poems:—"When a poet, as Ibsen does in Brand, depicts an error, a one-sidedness, which is from first to last presented in an imposing light, it is not sufficient that he should eventually, through a piece of sensational symbolism, let that one-sidedness go to ruin, and it is not sufficient that in the last word of the drama he should utter the name of that with which the one-sidedness should have blended in order to become truth. If he throughout his work shows us this error—in virtue of its strength, if for no other reason—justifying itself as against everything that comes in contact with it, then it is not only in the character depicted that something is lacking, but in the work of art itself. That something is the Ideal, without which the work of art cannot take rank as poetry—the Ideal which here, as so often in art, lies only in the lighting of the picture, but which is nevertheless the saving, the uplifting element. It is to poetry what devotion is to religion In Peer Gynt, as in Brand, the ideal is lacking. But this must be said rather less strongly of Peer Gynt. There is more fantasy, more real freedom of spirit, less strain and less violence in this poem than in Brand." The critic then speaks of Peer Gynt as being "full of riddles which are insoluble, because there is nothing in them at all." Peer's identification of the Sphinx with the Boyg (Act IV. Sc. 12) he characterises as "Tankesvindel"—thought-swindling, or, as we might say, juggling with thought. The general upshot of his considerations is that Peer Gynt belongs, with Goldschmidt's Corsaren, to the domain of polemical journalism. It "is not poetry, because in the transmutation of reality into art it falls halfway short of the demands both of art and of reality."