On the other hand, he deeply resented a criticism by Clemens Petersen, who seems to have been at this time regarded as the æsthetic lawgiver of Copenhagen. Why he should have done so is not very clear; for Petersen professed to prefer _Peer Gynt_ to _Brand_, and his criticism on _Brand_ Ibsen had apparently accepted without demur. Most of Petersen’s article is couched in a very heavy philosophic idiom; but the following extract, though it refers chiefly to _Brand_, may convey some idea of his general objection to both poems:—“When a poet, as Ibsen does in _Brand_, depicts an error, a one-sidedness, which is from first to last presented in an imposing light, it is not sufficient that he should eventually, through a piece of sensational symbolism, let that one-sidedness go to ruin, and it is not sufficient that in the last word of the drama[4] he should utter the name of that with which the one-sidedness should have blended in order to become truth. If he throughout his work shows us this error—in virtue of its strength, if for no other reason—justifying itself as against everything that comes in contact with it, then it is not only in the character depicted that something is lacking, but in the work of art itself. That something is the Ideal, without which the work of art cannot take rank as poetry—the Ideal which here, as so often in art, lies only in the lighting of the picture, but which is nevertheless the saving, the uplifting element. It is to poetry what devotion is to religion.... In _Peer Gynt_, as in _Brand_, the ideal is lacking. But this must be said rather less strongly of _Peer Gynt_. There is more fantasy, more real freedom of spirit, less strain and less violence in this poem than in _Brand_.” The critic then speaks of _Peer Gynt_ as being “full of riddles which are insoluble, because there is nothing in them at all.” Peer’s identification of the Sphinx with the Boyg (Act IV. Sc. 12) he characterises as “Tankesvindel”—thought-swindling, or, as we might say, juggling with thought. The general upshot of his considerations is that _Peer Gynt_ belongs, with Goldschmidt’s _Corsaren_, to the domain of polemical journalism. It “is not poetry, because in the transmutation of reality into art it falls half-way short of the demands both of art and of reality.”