The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of nature. Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in _Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_, which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is both beauty and wisdom. It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been seriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with _Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with Sidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, of which there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is more abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it; their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse of Browning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carried further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter, and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian. The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St. Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.