nding and
losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _Peer
Gynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high
spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin
of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in
it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded,
because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two
elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first
comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this
brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce,
local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may
itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian
summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music,
childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated
it. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this
that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia
and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a
single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is
one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it
born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What
touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has
poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which
comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and
under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen,
rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this
queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main
value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the
poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away
into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose
equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives
us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of
rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.

In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half
taken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes,
'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deep
feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is
written in