that effect. In like
predicament, he would give a detailed account of the properties of _Rosa
setigera_, not forgetting to mention the urn-shaped calyx-tube, the five
imbricated lobes, or the open corolla of five obovate petals. To an
Ibsen or a Cezanne one account would appear as irrelevant as the other,
since both omitted the thing that mattered, what philosophers used to
call "the thing in itself," what now they would call "the essential
reality":

SOLNESS. ... Do you read much?

HILDA. No, never! I have given it up. For it all seems so
irrelevant.

SOLNESS. That is just my feeling.

It was just what the books left out that Ibsen wanted to express.

He soon worked through the romantic tradition. It hampered him long
enough to prevent _Peer Gynt_ from becoming a great poem; after that he
found himself on the threshold of a world where everything mattered too
much in itself for its associations to be of consequence. Attempting to
analyse Ibsen's characters used to be a pastime for fools; to-day, we
all know that they come from that world where everything has been
reduced to an essence that defies analysis. There Ibsen was never so
completely at home as Cezanne; he lacked the imagination by which alone
one arrives and remains in the world of reality. His vision was more
uncertain and so his faith was weaker. He was a less ferociously sincere
artist. When vision began to fail he took refuge in a catalogue of facts
or in unconvincing symbolism: Cezanne tossed his picture into a bush.
Perhaps that is why a new generation, hungry for great contemporary art,
turns more hopefully to painting than to literature.

Thirty years ago it would have been misleading to say, what is
undoubtedly true, that it is as an artist that Ibsen is great. To call a
man a good artist came to much the same thing as calling him a good
ping-pong player: it implied that he was proficient in his own business;
it did not imply that he was a great man who affected life greatly.
Therefore many people who understood Ibsen and were moved by his plays
preferred to call him a political thinker or a social reformer; while
their enemies, the aesthetes, were very willing to call him a great
artist, since by doing so they excused themselves from paying the least
attention to anything that he said. Ibsen was a reformer in the sense
that all great artists are reformers; it is impossible to speak of
reality without criticizing civili