whispering in the ear of
the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a
wonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and given
uncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, he
has set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house,' and added a
window there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened on
ornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design.

In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and the
Germans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era of
marvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondingly
realistic poetry.... We received from it the first idea of a possible
new poetic world.... We were adherents of this new school of realistic
art: we had found our aesthetic creed.' But the maker of this creed, the
creator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content with
what he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do.
It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of what
he can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of,
namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in the
choice of means.' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice of
means for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his best
energies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discover
exactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimenting
impulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin its
disintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, was
to pay homage to poetry.

Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be a
poet; or who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by the
scientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man of
science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a
long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His
first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with
prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or
less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, _Love's Comedy_, in which
there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play,
the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose,
_The Pretenders_; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems,
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. After this, verse is laid