The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In order to become an artist, a man must be endowed with an exceptional talent for fabrication or expression, but what makes it possible for him to exercise this talent and for his public to appreciate it is the capacity of all human beings to imagine anything which is the case as being otherwise; every man, for example, can imagine committing a murder or laying down his life for a friend's without actually doing so. Is there, one can picture Ibsen asking himself, perhaps subconsciously, any figure traditionally associated with the stage who could be made to stand for this imaginative faculty? Yes, there is: the actor. Keats' famous description of the poet applies even more accurately to the actor.

As to the poetic character itself, it is not itself: it has no self—it is everything and nothing. The Sun, the Moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of im­pulse, are poetical and have about them an unchange­able attribute—the poet has none: no identity.

Throughout Peer Gynt, one question keeps being asked and answered in various ways, namely, Who am I? What is my real self? For the animals, the question does not arise.

What innocence is in the life of beasts.

They perform the behest of their great creator.

They are themselves.

The nearest human approximation to this animal selfhood is the "second nature" a man acquires through heredity and social custom.

My father thieves, His son must steal. My father received, And so must 1. We must bear our lot, And be ourselves.

So, too, with the drowning cook who gets as far in the Lord's Prayer as Give us this day our daily hread and then sinks.

Amen, lad. You were yourself to the end.

Next comes the social "idiot" in the Greek sense, the indi­vidual whose life is as conditioned by one personal overriding interest as the conventional individual's is by social habit. In the first act Peer sees a young peasant cutting off a finger in order to escape conscription; Peer is fascinated and shocked:

The thought perhaps—the wish to will, That I can understand, but really To do the deed. Ah me, that beats me.

In the last act he hears a funeral sermon about the same peasant in which the parson says:

He was a bad citizen, no doubt, For Church and State alike, a sterile tree— But up there on the rocky mountain side Where his work lay, there I say he was great Because he was himself.

Neither of these human ways of being oneself, however, sat­isfy Peer. He tells his mother he means to be a King and Emperor, but there is only one kind of empire which nobody else can threaten or conquer, the empire of one's own con­sciousness, or, as Peer defines it:

The Gyntian Self—An army that, Of wishes, appetites, desires! The Gyntian Self—It is a sea Of fancies, claims, and aspirations.

But the Peer we see on stage has no appetites or desires in the ordinary sense; he plays at having them. Ibsen solves the problem of presenting a poet dramatically by showing us a man who treats nearly everything he does as a role, whether it be dealing in slaves and idols or being an Eastern Prophet. A poet in real life would have written a drama about slave trading, then another drama about a prophet but, on the stage, play acting stands for making.

The kinship of the poet to the dreamer on the one hand and the madman on the other and his difference from them both is shown by Peer's experiences, first in the kingdom of the trolls and then in the asylum. The kingdom of dreams is ruled by wish or desire; the dreaming ego sees as being the case whatever the self desires to be the case. The ego, that is to say, is the helpless victim of the self; it cannot say, "I'm dreaming." In madness it is the self which is the help­less victim of the ego: a madman says, "I am Napoleon," and his self cannot tell him, "You're a liar." (One of the great difficulties in translating Peer Gynt is, I understand, that Norwegian has two words, one for the I which is conscious and another for the self of which it is conscious, where Eng­lish has only one. Myself can mean either.)

Both the dreamer and the madman are in earnest; neither is capable of play acting. The dreamer is like the moviegoer who writes abusive letters to the actor he has seen playing a villain; the madman is like the actor who believes the same thing about himself, namely, that he is identical with his role.

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.