inty, this calmness,
this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of
himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of
religious sequel to _Brand_. He tells her:

_Brand_ is an aesthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have
demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
It came into being as the result of something which I had not
observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself
from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic
form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book
had no longer any interest for me.

It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that _Peer
Gynt_ is a poem, not a satire; _The League of Youth_ a 'simple comedy
and nothing more'; _Emperor and Galilean_ an 'entirely realistic work';
that in _Ghosts_ 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance
which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to
produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing
something real.... It preaches nothing at all.' Of _Hedda Gabler_ he
says: 'It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings,
human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of the social
conditions and principles of the present day.' 'My chief life-task,' he
defines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies.'

Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his
tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies,
a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as
only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and,
from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of
life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the
sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to
fly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when he
has been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to build
solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great
work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on
doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent
poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for
more than a moment, to create poetry, has come