“Thou hast made all my life as a beautiful song. 
      Blessed be thou that at last thou hast come! 
      Blessed, thrice-blessed our Whitsun-morn meeting!”

“But,” says Peer, “I am lost, unless thou canst answer riddles.”  “Tell me them,” tranquilly answers Solveig.  And Peer asks, while the Button-Moulder listens behind the hut—­

“Canst thou tell me where Peer Gynt has been since we parted?”

Solveig.—­Been?

Peer.—­ With his destiny’s seal on his brow;
Been, as in God’s thought he first sprang forth? 
Canst thou tell me?  If not, I must get me home,—­
Go down to the mist-shrouded regions.

Solveig (smiling).—­Oh, that riddle is easy.

Peer.—­ Then tell what thou knowest! 
Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the true man? 
Where was I, with God’s sigil upon my brow?

Solveig.—­In my faith, in my hope, in my love.

A Shirking of the Ethical Problem?

“This,” says the Messrs. Archer, in effect, “may be—­indeed is—­magnificent:  but it is not Ibsen.”  To quote their very words—­

“The redemption of the hero through a woman’s love ... we take to be a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt.  Peer’s return to Solveig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem.  It would be impossible to the Ibsen of to-day, who knows (none better) that No man can save his brother’s soul, or pay his brother’s debt.”

In a footnote to the italicized words Messrs. Archer add the quotation—­

     “No, nor woman, neither.”

* * * * *

Oct. 22, 1892.  The main Problem.

“Peer’s return to Solveig is surely a shirking, not a solution of the ethical problem.”  Of what ethical problem?  The main ethical problem of the poem is, What is self?  And how shall a man be himself?  As Mr. Wicksteed puts it in his “Four Lectures on Henrik Ibsen,” “What is it to be one’s self?  God meant something when He made each one of us.  For a man to embody that meaning of God in his words and deeds, and so become, in a degree, ‘a word of God made flesh’ is to be himself.  But thus to be himself he must slay himself.  That is to say, he must slay the craving to make himself the centre round which others revolve, and must strive to find his true orbit, and swing, self poised, round the great central light.  But what if a poor devil can never puzzle out what God did mean when He made him?  Why, then he must feel it.  But how often your ‘feeling’ misses fire!  Ay, there you have it.  The devil has no stancher ally than want of perception.”

And its Solution.