But the poet pretends for fun; he asserts his freedom by lying—that is to say, by creating worlds which he knows are imaginary. When die troll king offers to turn Peer into a real troll by a little eye operation, Peer indignandy refuses. He is perfecdy willing, he says, to swear that a cow is a beautiful maiden, but to be reduced to a condition in which he could not tell one from the other—that he will never submit to.
The difference between trolls and men, says the king, is that the Troll Motto is To Thyself Be Enough, while the Human Motto is To Thyself Be True. The Button-Moulder and the Lean One both have something to say about the latter.
To be oneself is: to slay oneself.
But on you that answer is doubdess lost;
And therefore we'll say: to stand forth everywhere
With Master's intention displayed like a sign-board.
Remember, in two ways a man can be
Himself—there's a right and wrong side to the jacket.
You know they have lately discovered in Paris
A way to take portraits by help of the sun.
One can either produce a straightforward picture,
Or else what is known as a negative one.
In the latter the lights and the shades are reversed.
But suppose there is such a thing as a poetic vocation or, in terms of Ibsen's play, a theatrical vocation; how do their words apply? If a man can be called to be an actor, then the only way he can be "true" to himself is by "acting," that is to say, pretending to be what he is not. The dreamer and the madman are "enough" to themselves because they are unaware that anything exists except their own desires and hallucinations; the poet is "enough" to himself in the sense that, while knowing that others exist, as a poet he does without them. Outside Norway, Peer has no serious relations with others, male or female. On the subject of friendship, Ibsen once wrote to Georg Brandes:
Friends are a cosdy luxury, and when one invests one's capital in a mission in life, one cannot afford to have friends. The expensiveness of friendship does not lie in what one does for one's friends, but in what, out of regard for them, one leaves undone. This means the crushing of many an intellectual germ.
But every poet is also a human being, distinguishable from what he makes, and through Peer's relations to Ase and Sol- veig, Ibsen is trying to show us, I believe, what kind of person is likely to become a poet—assuming, of course, that he has the necessary talent. According to Ibsen, the predisposing factors in childhood are, first, an isolation from the social group—owing to his father's drunkenness and spendthrift habits, he is looked down on by the neighbors—and second, a playmate who stimulates and shares his imaginative life—a role played by his mother.
Ay, you must know that my husband, he drank, Wasted and trampled our gear under foot. And meanwhile at home there sat Peerkin and I— The best we could do was to try to forget. . . . Some take to brandy, and others to lies; And we—why, we took to fairy-tales.
It is not too fanciful, I believe, to think of laboring as a neuter activity, doing as masculine, and making as feminine. All fabrication is an imitation of motherhood and, whenever we have information about the childhood of an artist, it reveals a closer bond with his mother than with his father: in a poet's development, the phrase The milk of the Word is not a mere figure of speech.
In their games together, it is the son who takes the initiative and the mother who seems the younger, adoring child. Ase dies and bequeaths to Solveig, the young virgin, the role of being Peer's Muse. If the play were a straight realistic drama, Peer's treatment of Solveig would bear the obvious psychoanalytic explanation—namely, that he suffers from a mother-fixation which forbids any serious sexual relation: he cannot love any women with whom he sleeps. But the play is a parable and, parabolically, the mother-child relationship has, I believe, another significance: it stands for the kind of love that is unaffected by time and remains unchanged by any act of the partners. Many poets, it would seem, do their best work when they are "in love," but the psychological condition of being "in love" is incompatible with a sustained historical relationship like marriage. The poet's Muse must either be dead like Dante's Beatrice, or far away like Peer's Solveig, or keep on being reincarnated in one lady after another. Ase's devotion gives Peer his initial courage to be a poet and live without an identity of his own, Solveig gives him the courage to continue to the end. When at the end of the play he asks her, "Where is the real Peer?"—the human being as distinct from his poetic function—she answers, "In my faith, in my hope, in my love." This is an echo of his own belief. Ibsen leaves in doubt the question whether this faith is justified or not. It may be that, after all, the poet must pay for his vocation by ending in the casting-ladle. But Peer has so far been lucky: "He had women behind him."
The insoluble difficulty about the artist as a dramatic character is that, since his relations with others are either momentary or timeless, he makes any coherent plot impossible. Peer Gynt is a fascinating play, but one cannot say its structure is satisfying. Practically the whole of the drama (and nearly all of the best scenes) is a Prologue and an Epilogue: the Prologue shows us how a boy comes to be destined for the vocation of poet rather than a career as a statesman or an engineer, the Epilogue shows us the moral and psychological crisis for a poet in old age when death faces him and he must account for his life. Only in the Fourth Act are we shown, so to speak, the adult poet at work, and in this act the number of scenes and the number of characters introduced are purely arbitrary. Ibsen uses the act as an opportunity to make satirical comments on various aspects of Norwegian life, but Peer himself is only accidentally related to the satire.
il
Two years before Peer Gynt, Ibsen wrote Brand. Both were composed in Italy, and Ibsen said of them:
May I not like Christoff in Jacob von Tyboe, point to Brand and Peer Gynt and say—See, the wine cup has done this.
The heroes of these two plays are related to each other by being each other's opposite. To Peer the Devil is a dangerous viper who tempts man to do the irretrievable; to Brand the Devil is Compromise.
Brand is a priest. Ibsen once said that he might equally well have made him a sculptor or a politician, but this is not true. In Rome Ibsen had met and been deeply impressed by a young Norwegian theological student and Kierkegaard enthusiast, Christopher Brunn. At the time Ibsen was very angry with his fellow countrymen for having refused to come to the aid of Denmark when Germany attacked her and annexed Schleswig-Holstein. Brunn had actually fought as a volunteer in the Danish army and he asked Ibsen why, if he had felt as strongly as he professed, he had not done likewise. Ibsen made the answer one would expect—a poet has other tasks to perform—but it is clear that the question made him very uncomfortable and Brand was a product of his discomfort.
Whether he had read it for himself or heard of it from Brunn, it seems evident that Ibsen must have been aware of Kierkegaard's essay on the difference between a genius and an apostle. In Peer Gynt he deals with the first; in Brand, which he wrote first, with the second.
An apostle is a human individual who is called by God to deliver a message to mankind. Oracles and shamans are divine mouthpieces, but they are not apostles. An oracle or a shaman is an accredited public official whose spiritual authority is recognized by all; he does not have to seek out others but sits .and waits for them to consult him—Delphi is the navel of the world. He receives a professional training and, in order to qualify, he must exhibit certain talents, such as an ability to enter into a trance state.