ef in
Ivanhoe-within-the-reach-of-all would not long survive that
experiment.

IBSEN'S "PEER GYNT"

Oct. 7, 1892. A Masterpiece.

"_Peer Gynt_ takes its place, as we hold, on the summits of
literature precisely because it means so much more than the poet
consciously intended. Is not this one of the characteristics of
the masterpiece, that everyone can read in it his own secret? In
the material world (though Nature is very innocent of symbolic
intention) each of us finds for himself the symbols that have
relevance and value for him; and so it is with the poems that are
instinct with true vitality."

I was glad to come across the above passage in Messrs. William and
Charles Archer's introduction to their new translation of Ibsen's
_Peer Gynt_ (London: Walter Scott), because I can now, with a clear
conscience, thank the writers for their book, even though I fail to
find some of the things they find in it. The play's the thing after
all. _Peer Gynt_ is a great poem: let us shake hands over that. It
will remain a great poem when we have ceased pulling it about to find
what is inside or search out texts for homilies in defence of our own
particular views of life. The world's literature stands unaffected,
though Archdeacon Farrar use it for chapter-headings and Sir John
Lubbock wield it as a mallet to drive home self-evident truths.

Not a Pamphlet.

_Peer Gynt_ is an extremely modern story founded on old Norwegian
folk-lore--the folk-lore which Asbjoernsen and Moe collected, and
Dasent translated for our delight in childhood. Old and new are
curiously mixed; but the result is piquant and not in the least
absurd, because the story rests on problems which are neither old nor
new, but eternal, and on emotions which are neither older nor newer
than the breast of man. To be sure, the true devotee of Ibsen will not
be content with this. You will be told by Herr Jaeger, Ibsen's
biographer, that _Peer Gynt_ is an attack on Norwegian romanticism.
The poem, by the way, is romantic to the core--so romantic, indeed,
that the culminating situation, and the page for which everything has
been a preparation, have to be deplored by Messrs. Archer as "a mere
commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen had not outgrown when he wrote
_Peer Gynt_." But your true votary is for ever taking his god off the
pedestal of the true artist to set him on the tub of the
hot-gospeller; even so genuine a