to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this
intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical
cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could
never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that
'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an
admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and
feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in
Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had
been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one
is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'

He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon the
forms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone of
half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares
that wine had something to do with the exaltation of _Brand_ and _Peer
Gynt_, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of _The League
of Youth_. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place the
last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view
has changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even to
weariness.' He says elsewhere that he could only have written _Peer
Gynt_ where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'written
without regard to consequences--as I only dare to write far away from
home.' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange
docility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life,' but
his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in
substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to
the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is
'up-to-date civilisation to study,' he would certainly never have
written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end
of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am
taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his
word.

What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his
dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human
tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is
his main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosed
this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than
any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just t