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What Makes a Masterpiece? Ibsen and the Western World ROLF FJELDE Just over forty years ago, in 1944, T.S. Eliot gave a presidential address to the Virgil Society in London entitled "What Is A Classic?" Not surprisingly, Eliot found Virgil the very measure of the term as he chose to define it. The distinguishing quality of the classic work, in his view, could be found in its maturity. The talent oftheindividual poet matures into an unexampled ripeness only in a society or civilization that has itself matured adequately; thus, the maturity of mind that marks the classic is conjoined necessarily with the maturity of manners and maturity of language that are culturally given, as occurred when Virgil's poetry flowered in the compatible Augustan age. This fortunate fusion results in the achieved perfection of a common style, as if the inherent genius of the mother tongue had found its voice in and through the classic writer. The needful confluence of all these elements prompted Eliot, however, to make some odd exclusions. The Aeneid is assured in its classic status. The Divine Comedy is the equivalent classic in a modem European language. But Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, though great works, fall short of these two, for maturity ofmind requires a consciousness ofhistory and one's place in history. In that regard, Homer had only the provincial and inadequate annals ofhis own people to draw upon, whereas the Virgilian resonance reflected the productive tension between two successive high cultures, Greek and Latin. Chaucer, in tum, wrote in an immature language, cruder than Dante's, and moreover lacked amplitude compared to his medieval colleague. Nor can Shakespeare or Milton be considered any the more classic. Both, owing to the brilliant eccentricity of their respective dictions, failed to exhaust the resources ofthe language of their times, precluding them from the perfection of a common style. In France, Racine and Moliere betrayed a disqualifying thinness relative to the raw plenitude of Rabelais and Villon, leading Eliot to a second criterion of the classic: comprehensiveness. Yet even that paragon of all-inclusive scope, ROLF FJELDE Goethe, remains outside the select circle, failing a third, last test for classic rank: universality. Goethe is a classic author. in that we should all be familiar with his works, but, limited by his time, his culture, the partial transience ofhis concerns, he cannot be claimed as a universal classic. The theatre-poet Henrik Ibsen, doubtless amore serious case ofGoethe's disabilities in Eliot's estimate, is beyond mention, although that year a play many of the less discriminating might deem classic, Peer Gynt. was running in a notable production at London's Old Vic theatre. It is easy either to smile or to bridle at Eliot's stellar roster of rejections. He has, in fact, succeeded in chartering a club so exclusive that even Groucho Marx might have sought to belong, confined as it is to only two duly certified members. Nevertheless, in our present superheated atmosphere of mediainflated reputations and profitably blurred standards, such principled severity ofjudgment comes with something ofthe healthy shock of a cold shower after a sauna. Certainly it braces and refreshes one's focus on the matter at hand: the question of what makes a masterpiece, with particular reference to Ibsen. Is a classic, for example, the same thing as a masterpiece? What qualities distinguish the latter? Are any, or all, of Ibsen's principal dramas to be accounted masterpieces? If so, to what level or company in that rank should they be admitted? In their etymologies, "classic" and "masterpiece" diverge in meaning and implication. The Roman scriptar classicus, from whom the former term stems, wrote for an upper-class audience, whereas the scriptor proletarius scribbled his ephemera for the lower classes. "Masterpiece," on the other hand, derives from the prime specimen of work submitted by a journeyman to a guild for admission to the rank of master of the craft. Thus, "classic" connotes the patrician outlook, "masterpiece" the artisan. One rightly asks, what is a classic, but what makes a masterpiece, for the latter brings with it some part ofthe sweat and struggle and ultimate triumph of its making, as against the...

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