The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

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."