Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 4).djvu/31

 may not have been Ibsen's personal creed during the years of its incubation, could scarcely be better expounded.

When we come to subsidiary meanings, we must proceed more carefully, for we have the poet's own word for it that many have been read into the poem whereof he never dreamt. For example, in his first letter to Björnson after reading Clemens Petersen's criticism, he protested against that critic's assumption that the Strange Passenger (Act V. Scs. 1 and 2) was symbolic of "dread." "If my head had been on the block," he said, "and such an explanation would have saved my life, it would never have occurred to me. I never thought of such a thing. I stuck in the scene as a mere caprice." For this element of caprice we must always allow. The whole fourth act, the poet told the present writer, was an afterthought, and did not belong to the original scheme of the play.

Here we come upon the question whether Ibsen consciously designed Peer Gynt as a counterblast to Björnson's idyllic peasant-novel, Synnöve Solbakken. This theory, put forward by a judicious French critic, M. Auguste Ehrhard, among others, has always seemed to me very far-fetched; but as Dr. Brandes, in the introduction to Peer Gynt in the German collected edition, appears to give it his sanction, I quote what he says on the point: "German critics have laid special emphasis on the fact that Ibsen here placed himself in conscious opposition to Björnson's glorification, in his early novels, of the younger generation of Norwegian peasants. Quarrelsomeness and love of fighting were represented in Thorbjörn, the hero of Synnöve Solbakken, as traits of the traditional old-Norse viking spirit; in Arne the poetic proclivities