remarking upon the over-exuberance of detail, and criticising the versification, Björnson says little or nothing in dispraise of the poem. On the other hand he says curiously little of its individual beauties. He never mentions Åse, says nothing of her death-scene, or of the Pastor’s speech, and picks out as the best thing in the play the thread-ball scene (Act V. Sc. 6). The most obviously satirical passage of the first three acts is the scene in the Dovrë-King’s palace (Act II. Sc. 6), with its jibe at Norwegian national vanity: The cow gives cakes and the bullock mead, Ask not if its taste be sour or sweet; The main matter is, and you mustn’t forget it, It’s all of it home-brewed. Much more difficult is the interpretation of the Boyg,[17] that vague, shapeless, ubiquitous, inevitable, invulnerable Thing which Peer encounters in the following scene (Act II. Sc. 7). Ibsen found it in the folk-tale, and was attracted, no doubt, by the sheer uncanniness and eerieness of the idea. Neither can one doubt, however, that in his own mind he attributed to the monster some symbolic signification. Dr. Brandes would have us see in it the Spirit of Compromise—the same evil spirit which is assailed in _Brand_. The Swedish critic, Vasenius, interprets it as Peer Gynt’s own consciousness of his inability to take a decisive step—to go through an obstacle in place of skirting round it. Herr Passarge reads in it a symbol of the mass of mankind, _perpetuum immobile_, opposing its sheer force of inertia to every forward movement.[18] This would make it nearly equivalent to “the compact majority” of _An Enemy of the People_; or, looking at it from a slightly different angle, we might see in the scene an illustration in action of that despairing cry of Schiller’s Talbot: “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” The truth probably is that the poet vaguely intended this vague monster to be as elusive in its symbolism as in its physical constitution. But when, in Act IV. Sc. 12, he formally identifies the Boyg with the Sphinx, we may surely conclude that one of the interpretations present to his mind was metaphysical. In this aspect, the Boyg would typify the riddle of existence, with which we grapple in vain, and which we have to “get round” as best we can.