nd of _Brand_:

Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance
in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words,
these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre
and rhyme thoughts already expressed.

_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific,
prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it
sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries
to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles
and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate.
There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;
realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which
has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;
but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air
of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;
they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse
comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and
poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but
only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet,
like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom
cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of
his attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature,
and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.

The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and
Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile
than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks
he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a
denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal
suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air
unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old
idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of
self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of
nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of
nature.

Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in
_Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_,
which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a