“Peer Gynt, as already stated, stands for the Norwegian people, much as they are sketched in Brand, though with more brightness of colouring. Hence his perpetual ‘hedging’ and determination never so to commit himself that he cannot draw back. Hence his fragmentary life of smatterings. Hence his perpetual brooding over the former grandeur of his family, his idle dreams of the future, and his neglect of every present duty. Hence his deep-rooted selfishness and cynical indifference to all higher motives; and hence, above all, his sordid and superstitious religion; for to him religion is the apotheosis of the art of ‘hedging.’
“But Ibsen’s allegories are never stiffly or pedantically worked out. His characters, though typical, are personal. We could read Brand, and could feel the tragedy and learn the lessons of the drama without any knowledge whatever of the circumstances or feelings under which it was written, or the references to the Norwegian character and conduct with which it teems.
“So, too, with Peer Gynt. We may forget the national significance of the sketch, except where special allusions recall it to our minds, and may think only of the universal problems with which the poem deals, and which will retain their awful interest when Ibsen’s polemic against his countrymen has sunk into oblivion. The study of Peer Gynt as an occasional poem should be strictly subsidiary and introductory to its study as the tragedy of a lost soul.
“What is it to be one’s self? God meant something when he made each one of us. For a man to embody that meaning of God in his words and deeds, and so become in his degree a ‘word of God made flesh,’ is to be himself. But thus to be himself he must slay himself. That is to say, he must slay the craving to make himself the centre round which others revolve, and must strive to find his true orbit and swing, self-poised, round the great central light. But what if a poor devil can never puzzle out what on earth God did mean when he made him? Why, then, he must feel it. But how often your ‘feeling’ misses fire! Ay! there you have it. The devil has no stauncher ally than want of perception! [Act V. Sc. 9.]
“But, after all, you may generally find out what God meant you for, if you will face facts. It is easy to find a refuge from facts in lies, in self-deception, and in self-sufficiency. It is easy to take credit to yourself for what circumstances have done for you, and lay upon circumstances what you owe to yourself. It is easy to think you are realising yourself by refusing to become a ‘pack-horse for the weal and woe of others’ [Act IV. Sc. 1], keeping alternatives open and never closing a door behind you or burning your ships, and so always remaining the master of the situation and self-possessed. If you choose to do these easy things you may always ‘get round’ your difficulties [Act II. Sc. 7], but you will never get through them. You will remain master of the situation indeed, but the situation will become poorer and narrower every day. If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.”
So far Mr. Wicksteed. The general significance of the poem, in the terms of that theism which may or may not have been Ibsen’s personal creed during the years of its incubation, could scarcely be better expounded.
When we come to subsidiary meanings, we must proceed more carefully, for we have the poet’s own word for it that many have been read into the poem whereof he never dreamt. For example, in his first letter to Björnson after reading Clemens Petersen’s criticism, he protested against that critic’s assumption that the Strange Passenger (Act V. Scs. 1 and 2) was symbolic of “dread.” “If my head had been on the block,” he said, “and such an explanation would have saved my life, it would never have occurred to me. I never thought of such a thing. I stuck in the scene as a mere caprice.” For this element of caprice we must always allow. The whole fourth act, the poet told the present writer, was an afterthought, and did not belong to the original scheme of the play.
Here we come upon the question whether Ibsen consciously designed Peer Gynt as a counterblast to Björnson’s idyllic peasant-novel, Synnöve Solbakken. This theory, put forward by a judicious French critic, M. Auguste Ehrhard,[[16]] among others, has always seemed to me very far-fetched; but as Dr. Brandes, in the introduction to Peer Gynt in the German collected edition, appears to give it his sanction, I quote what he says on the point: “German critics have laid special emphasis on the fact that Ibsen here placed himself in conscious opposition to Björnson’s glorification, in his early novels, of the younger generation of Norwegian peasants. Quarrelsomeness and love of fighting were represented in Thorbjörn, the hero of Synnöve Solbakken, as traits of the traditional old-Norse viking spirit; in Arne the poetic proclivities of the people were placed in an engaging light. The vaunted fisticuff-heroism was, in Ibsen’s view, nothing but rawness, and the poetic proclivities of Norwegian youth appeared to him, in the last analysis, simply a very prevalent love of lying and gasconading. The Norwegians appear in the caricaturing mirror of this brilliant poem as a people who, in smug contentment, are ‘to themselves enough,’ and therefore laud everything that is their own, however insignificant it may be, shrink from all decisive action, and have for their national vice a tendency to fantastication and braggadocio.” That Peer Gynt is a counterblast to national romanticism and chauvinism in general there can of course be no doubt; but I see no reason to suppose that Ibsen had Björnson’s novels specially in view, or intended anything like a “caricature” of them. It is pretty clear, too, that Björnson himself had no such idea in his mind when he reviewed the poem in the Norsk Folkeblad for November 23, 1867. His long article is almost entirely laudatory, and certainly shows no smallest sign of hostile party-spirit. “Peer Gynt,” says Björnson, “is a satire upon Norwegian egoism, narrowness, and self-sufficiency, so executed as to have made me not only again and again laugh till I was sore, but again and again give thanks to the author in my heart—as I here do publicly.” Beyond remarking upon the over-exuberance of detail, and criticising the versification, Björnson says little or nothing in dispraise of the poem. On the other hand he says curiously little of its individual beauties. He never mentions Åse, says nothing of her death-scene, or of the Pastor’s speech, and picks out as the best thing in the play the thread-ball scene (Act V. Sc. 6).
The most obviously satirical passage of the first three acts is the scene in the Dovrë-King’s palace (Act II. Sc. 6), with its jibe at Norwegian national vanity:
The cow gives cakes and the bullock mead,