The hero is the apotheosis of selfish vanity, and he is presented to us, somewhat indecisively, as the type of one who sets at defiance his own life's design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or even a successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote the first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study, full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical class of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention; he found it in those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjörnson and Moe, in which he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Böig, a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_, which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to a justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen's graver prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act, where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs and tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their reproaches.
_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment, and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as _Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it did not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules must be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book," he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry is shall be made to fit my book." There was a struggle at first against this assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is now generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic intellectual caprices.
[Note.--By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_ all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after the death of the mortal men who planted them.]
