File:Richard Mansfield as Peer Gynt.jpg

Identifier: lifeartofrichard02wint (find matches)
Title: Life and art of Richard Mansfield : with selections from his letters
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Winter, William, 1836-1917
Subjects: Mansfield, Richard, 1857-1907
Publisher: New York : Moffat, Yard and company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Public Library

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as theBinomial Theorem would be, or the DifferentialCalculus, or Baxters Call to the Unconverted,or Ferae on Contingent Remainders. PeerGynt may please the seekers after freaks, whim-whams, and novations: Were I in England, now,says Trinculo, and had but this fish painted, nota holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver:there would this monster make a man; any strangebeast there makes a man: when they will not givea doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out tento see a dead Indian: judgment and taste indramatic art and literature, on the other hand, areonly wearied by it. Enthusiasts of the writings of Ibsen have intimatedthat Peer Gynt is not a play but a dramaticpoem; that it is not intended as a picture of actuallife, but as an allegory; that it is, first, a satire onthe provincial character of the people of Norway,and, secondly, a homily on the paltry, contemptiblelittleness of human nature and on the egregious follyof individual egotism; that Gynt is an emblem of
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Photograph by Street MANSFIELD AS PEER GYNT(Act I.) PEER GYNT 201 concrete Man, considered as a thing that never wasworthy of having been made or saved; and, accord-ingly, that everything is nothing and all is gas andgaiters. That cynical opinion was long ago satiric-ally expressed by Lockhart, in two lines, declaring That nothings new, and nothings true,And nothing signifies. That view of the subject, however, being accepted,the fabric is found to appertain to the Symbolicalorder of fiction,—such as The Pilgrims Progress,or The Tale of a Tub, to both of which it isvastly inferior,—a form that is useful in literature,but one that is foreign to all the sensible purposesof the stage. Upon the arid, misanthropical impart-ment itself,—the freight that is conveyed in theallegory,—it would be idle to waste a passingthought, for it does not even possess the slendervalue of being fresh. Goethe created his Mepliis-topheles in order to voice it, and to show its falsehood,long before Hen

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