aside, and at last we
find him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse will
be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate
future.... It is therefore doomed.' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be a
great prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet.

Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making.
His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression of
himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic
convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or
clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something
personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a
vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_,
'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception
of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the
book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it
was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would
not carve every material.

Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes
tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national
ballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Oestraat_, we see the
dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of
romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned
with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the
psychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a piece
of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and
some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it,
and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal,
nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not
his work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is already
himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science
has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to
write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;
he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into
verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and,
brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.

Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet
when he says, speaking of this play a