with the lovely poem shaking the bauble of its fool’s-cap at them, there can still be commentators who see nothing in Peer Gynt but the “awful interest of the universal problems with which it deals.” This obsession of the critic to discover “problems” in the works of Ibsen has been one of the main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long black coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of the Nonconformist conscience.
Casting aside, therefore, the spurious “lessons” and supposititious “problems” of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above everything else which we see in Peer Gynt we see its fun and its picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted admirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst of lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carried along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant success than
