rate, to hold himself back; and the
effort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed
merely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and his
romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be
in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant,
extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an
extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the
long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding
eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of
stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock.

1906.

HENRIK IBSEN

'Everything which I have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter,
'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never
wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief
aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and
to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique of
the construction,' he says, speaking of what is probably his
masterpiece, _Ghosts_, 'in itself entirely precludes the author's
appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in
the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.' That, at
his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he
achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;
and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet
inevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then
going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity
of his nature.

In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this
character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none
the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard,
crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow,
precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed
himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense
of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated
and resembled.

His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of
self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but
what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen
was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the f