(m CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Joseph Whitmore Barry dramatic library THE GIFT OF TWO FRIENDS OF Cornell University 1934 DATE DUE M^ - m* P MB^ ,- in-fC A 1 J GAVLORD PRINTCD1NU.S.A. Cornell University Library PT 8858.A34 1898 Brand 3 1924 026 309 157 The Plays of Henrik Ibsen Small ^io, Clothf $s. ; Cheap Edition Paper^ ij. 6(f. each JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN LITTLE EYALF *THE MASTER BUILDER •HEDDA GABLER * Also a Utnited Edition, large paper price 2IJ- net each LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN -O J\^ «Ar U : U 1)%yiiPTipir.p oi Jifs- which -helflaggto the earlier ? TBey"^ve the precision, but also mudTof the hardness and abstractness, of scientific diagrams. They in- form, impress, convince, or paralyse conviction ; they drive home a thought with more formid- able power, and slay an illusion with a more deadly and certain stroke ; but they do not INTRODUCTION xvii in the jame degree irradiate and fertilise those parts of human nature which lie ou tside defini te intellectual co nyiction7 and yetgive con giclien much of its practical vitality and momentum. The problems tney deal with, too, arenot only Jfi/ not the whole of life, but they are of a kind not always best approached in practice by curiously scrutinising their conditions. The happiest men are not those who most pertina- ciously seek happiness; and the man who is perpetually occupied with his dependence on the past is likely to make a worse bargain with the heredity that none can escape than the man who acts as if he were free. No one is entitled to entertain illusions ; it is the per- manent glory of poetry — ' the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ' — not that it overlays unpleasant facts with a veil of radiant dreams, but that it feeds that apprehension of the greatness and beauty of the world, which is no illusion, and which can give nerve and vigour to life when all illusions have faded away. Second, if not first, among Ibsen's poems in this quality is Brand. xviii INTRODUCTION I Brand was written in the summer of 1865, at Ariccia, near Rome. Fifteen months before, Ibsen had left Christiania, a voluntary exile, eager to escape from the narrow Scandinavian world, and burning with the sense of national disgrace. Denmark was in the throes of the heroic but hopeless struggle to which her northern kinsmen had sent only a handful of volunteers. He had travelled southward, almost within hearing of the Prussian guns; and among the passengers on the steamer was that venerable silver-haired mother who, as his sarcastic verses tell, believed so firmly in the safety of her soldier-son, and with such good ground, 'for he was a Norwegian soldier.'" ^ On arriving at Rome he turned resolutely away from these rankling memories, broke all the bonds that tied him to his country, plunged into the study of the ancient world, and made preparations for that colossal drama on the Emperor Julian which eight years later saw the light. ' The poem Troens grund. It is translated hy Mr. Wicksteed, Lect. p. 24. This admirable little volume is indispensable to the English student of Ibsen's poetry INTRODUCTION xix But the genius of the North held him in too strong a grip. 'Never have I seen the Home and its life so fully, so clearly, so near by,' he told the Christiania students in 1873, 'as precisely from a distance and in absence.' ^ Under the Italian sky, among the myrtles- and aloes of the ' Paradise of exiles,' there rose before him more vividly than ever the vision of the stern and rugged Norwegian landscape, the solemn twilight of the fjord, the storm- swept glacier, the peasant-folk absorbed in the desperate struggle for bread, officialdom absorbed in material progress, 'intelligence' growing reiined, 'humane,' and somewhat effeminate; and, emerging here and there, glimpses somewhat futile and forlorn of heroic manhood. A summer tour which he had made among the western fjords in July 1862, on a commission from Government to collect popular legends, supplied a crowd of vivid local and personal reminiscences] a ruined parsonage under a precipice, a little mouldering church, a wild march across Jotunheim in storm and snow, and then the dizzy plunge down into ^ Speech to the students, printed in full in Halrorsen, Norsk Forfatter-lexikon, art, ' Ibsbn.' XX INTRODUCTION one of those deep lowland valleys that strike up like huge rocky rifts from the fjord-head into the heart of the mountains. ^ A few- months of intense labour sufficed to organise these scattered images into a moving world of drama, penetrated through and through with Ibsen's individuality, and clothed in rich and many-coloured poetry. He had as yet written nothing at once so original, so kindling, and so p rofusely st rewn with the most provocative brilliances of style; nothing which, with all its fierce iji¥eciive against Norway, was so profoundly and intimately Norwegian in colour- ing and in spirit. Upon its publication, on March 15, 1866, at Copenhagen, the whole Scandinavian world was taken by storm. A Copenhagen letter, of April 17, to the Chris- tiania ilforgr«ra6M (No. 113, 1866), tells how 'it is read with the greatest interest, its praise is in all mouths, and its weighty watchwords in all minds.' ' Wherever you go,' reports another correspondent, 'the talk is only of Brand, and that to such a degree that a Norwegian visiting Copenhagen found himself fatigued, in spite of his great admiration for 1 For details, see the Notes to pp. 30, 64, 83, 105. INTRODUCTION xxi the poem, by the eternal one-and-the-same, at all times, and in all places.' Literary Denmark, which barely knew Ibsen by name, began to read his previous works, with not unnatural amazement that plays so brilliant as the Pre- tenders and the Comedy of Love should have remained so obscure. The religious public crowded the bookshops, eager to be thrilled by the evangelical fiilmina.i jons which they under- / stood the newpoem to contain.! TheChristiania folks began to suspect that they had been starv- ing a prophet in the poet they had insufficiently fed. In both capitals, indeed, some voices of criticism, even of protest, were presently raised. Doctrinaire theologians declared it unchristian and dangerous j^ matter-of-fact observers found that many of the incidents were impossible in Norway; ^ literary men, ravished by the poetry, / pronounced the ideas nonsense j while en- thusiastic young men and women sometimes defended it with more zeal than discretion.* 1 The above detaUs from Halvorsen, u.s; and Brandes, Modeme Oeister. 2 ' L. T.' (Krohg), in the MorgenUad, 1866, No. 229. 3 Professor Monrad, in a series of able articles in the MorgenUad, 1866, Nos. 242, 249, 256, 263. * One ardent disciple and correspondent of the poet's, Laura Kieler, even paid him the doubtfnl compliment of a xxii INTRODUCTION But no cavilling could keep down the in- stinctive feeling that the poem, let its faults be what they might, was in some indefinable way great; and its unmistakable power blunted the inquiry into its goodness or badness. A gifted poet, A. O. Vinje, who reviewed his old friend Ibsen, as he reviewed every one else, with sarcastic geniality, expressed this frankly enough. ' It was said of Welhaven and Werge- land that, if compounded, they would have made one first-rate man. Before I read Brand I thought that only a third- or second-rate man would result from the compounding of Ibsen and Bjornson. . . . But now, after reading it, I cannot help suspecting that Ibsen might have made the one Ug end of a big man.' i Another reviewer, who thinks that few will read the whole twice, admits that there are continuation, Brands DBttre, Et LivsWllede (Christiania, 1869), which tells how Agnes has three daughters, and how ' a light enters into Brand's heart,' and instead of being buried in misery and disquiet under an avalanche, he expires in peace and faith in his daughters' arms. Of this climax the authoress gives due warning at the close of a long and interesting Introduction, and I confess that having read so far I read no further In the book, either on that day or any other. 1 In his journal BBlen ('The Dalesman'), 29th April 1866 ; Vinje's Skrifter i Utval, iv. 86 f. INTRODUCTION xxiii a hundred places to which the reader will turn again and again.i The sale was from the outset immense, and has continued, though at a diminished pace, till the present day. Four editions appeared before the close of 1866; the eleventh in 1889. Ibsen was little accustomed to such success. It is said that immediately after the publication his sister-in-law drank to the 'tenth edition'; the poet confidently shook his head and declared that the profits of the tenth edition should be hers. She took him at his word, and has not repented her pro- phetic gift.2 Outside Scandinavia, too, the name of the author of Brand rapidly became famous. It was the beginning of his European fame. In Germany, its intellectual suggestive- ness and philosophical mysticism were keenly appreciated ; it was compared with Hamlet and with Faust, and the puzzling phenomenon of so much abs truse, thinking in a Scandinavian found a satisfactory explanation in the Teutonic maidens whom the poet's seafaring or mercan- tile ancestors had in three successive genera- 1 Johann Vibe, Litierairt Tidskrift, i. (1866), p. 183 f. 2 Halvorsen, Forf.-lex, u.s. xxiv INTRODUCTION tions taken to wife. No less than four verse translations have appeared there since 1872.^ Even on the stage, for which it was never meant, Brand has not been quite unknown. In Christiania, the Fourth Act has repeatedly been played; but it was reserved for the Director of the New Theatre at Stockholm, L. Josephson, to undertake the bold experi- ment of performing the whole. On March 24th, 1885, a crowded house sat through a performance which lasted from 6.30 to 1.15. It was repeated fifteen times.^ Of recent at- tempts of this kind in England it is needless to speak. Together with its still more splendid and various, yet completely dissimilar, successor, Peer Gynt, Brand marks an epoch in Scandi- 1 By Siebold (Kassel, 1872), Julie Ruhkopf (Bremen, 1874), Alfred Freih v. Wolzogen (Wismar, 1876), and L. Passarge (Leipzig, 1882). I have seen only the second and fourth. Frl. Ruhkopf's appears to be fairly literal, but a little stiff and tame ; Passarge, on the contrary, has sup- plemented the defects of the original with a lavishness of native fancy which makes the title of translator quite inadequate to his merits. 2 The Stockholm Ny ill. Tidning, 1885, Nos. 14, 15, gives an interesting account of the performance, with several illustrations. Brand was .played by E. Hillberg. Ibsen congratulated the Director in a letter printed by Halvorsen, u.s. J INTRODUCTION xxv navian literature. A large majority of those who know the original believe that it marks an epoch in the literature of Europe. Nothing in English literature in the least resembles a work, which is nevertheless peculiarly fitted to impress and to fascinate the English nature.'^ But those who can imagine the prophetic fire of Carlyle fused with the genial verm and the intellectual athleticism of Browning, and ex- pressed by aid of a dramatic faculty to parallel which we must go two centuries backward, may in some degree understand that fascination. n The reader of Ibsen's powerful historical drama, Kongsemnerne, will remember how, in King Skule's hour of ruin, the shade of the dead Bishop Nicholas suddenly forgets his rdle, and delivers a prophetic sermon across the footlights to the Norwegian audience of 1862 :— ' While to their life-work Norsemen set out, Will-lessly wavering, daunted with doubt, 1 Mr. Gosse has, however, pointed out that it has points of likeness, striking rather than important, to Dobell's dramatic poem Balder (1854). xxvi INTRODUCTION While hearts are shrunken, minds helplessly shivering, Weak as a willow-wand, wind-swept and quivering. While about one thing alone they 're united, Namely, that greatness be stoned and despited, — While they seek honour in fleeing and falling, Under the banner of baseness unfurl'd, — Then Bishop Nicholas toils in his calling, The Bagler-bishop 's at work in the world. ' ^ This significant pourahasis gives the best clue to the nature of the ethical passion, which drives like a rushing wind through the pages of Brand. This First Act of the poem is little but a translation of this summary analysis of the national character into vivid dramatic dialogue. The Peasant, Einar, and Gerd, — the Faint, the Frivolous, and the Wild, — are all foreshadowed in these lines. They stand for so many in different forms of failure to satisfy that demand for Will, for 'Force of Character, for wholeness of life, which with Ibsen, as with Carlyle, sometimes seems to occupy the whole field of ethics. The Peasant 'flee- ing and falling' in that grim walk over the 1 The Pretenders, translated by W. Aruher, p. 360. A slight verbal change has been made in the rendering. INTRODUCTION xxvii glacier through storm and darkness, stands for Will that shrinks ; Einar, with his chameleon instincts, his easy impulsive gaiety, for the Will that ' wavers and quivers ' j G-erd, the dis- tracted gipsy -girl, whose missiles fall 'like witch-corn ' about Brand in his heroic voyage across the fjord, and whose haunt is the savage 'Ice-church,' where the wind sings mass, and the sudden avalanche sweeps all living things to ruin, — Gerd stands for the untaught, elemental savagery that 'stones the noble and devoted,' and iinds foul things fair. All three failed in the heroic wholeness of the ideal Man, as Ibsen conceived him, the Hian whose entire being is concentrated upon one aim which he inflexibly pursues. The life of modern Norwegians is, he declares in a famous and brilliamt passage, a 'collection of fragments,' — a mass of half-desires tliwart- ing and dwarfing one another, and breaking up the heroic unity of manhood into dust and atoms. This was the 'fatal cancer' which was sapping the national life. In ordinary times its deadliness might escape notice ; but became at once apparent when a great crisis put the mettle of the nation to a test which xxviii INTRODUCTION it could not avoid. To a man who in 1862 had denounced the ' will-less wavering ' and ' willow-wand weakness ' of Norway, the events of the two following years were naturally as oil poured on fire. When the Danish King, in November 1863, supported by the King of Sweden, declared Slesvig an integj;al^ part of Denmark, there was much loud jubilation in Norway at the extension of ' Scandinavian ' rule, even among people not at all prepared to allow that the cause of Denmark and of Norway were one ; while the more ardent spirits pledged themselves over flowing cups to support their 'brothers' in the field. The actual invasion of Denmark by Prussia and Austria which followed (February 1864) was, in Ibsen's eyes, for his own country too, a moral crisis which could be manfully met only in one way; and when the Storthing, by virtually refusing war,i forced the King, to his bitter shame, to leave Denmark to her fate, Ibsen's heroic scorn broke into flame, and found its fiercest and keenest expression in 1 They accepted the King's demand that the army should be placed absolutely in his hands, but coupled the condi- tion that he was to make war only in alliance with England or France. INTRODUCTION xxix the pages of Brand. It is the worst trait in the man of ' fragments ' to be ' A little free in promise-making, And then, when vows in liquor will'd Must be in mortal stress fuliiU'd, A little fine in promise-breaking ' ; ^ and among the ' dark visions ' which sweep before the gaze of Brand in his final ruin, the thought reappears in more fantastic imagery, — the 'gentle brothers hiding in the hat of darkness while their kinsmen ride to battle,' and the ' dragon ' of the fjords, who, in spite of his newly-won teeth and tongue (the indented war-flag), dares not bite, but answers "the cal! for aid by hissing : " What is that to him ? " "^ We presently discover, however, that the three national ' vices ' which Brand goes forth to overthrow do not stand — for him or for Ibsen — upon the same moral plane. 'Faint- ness' and 'Frivolity' belong to the lowest circle of the Ibsenian Inferno, — as the absolute negation of all heroic wholeness of life. They find with him such mercy as Treason found with the imperial-minded Dante. But in ' Wild- ness,' misguided and defiant thing though it 1 Tr. p. 23. 2 Tr. pp. 258-9. XXX INTRODUCTION was, he could not help recognising something not only compatible with the force of character upon which that wholeness of life is based, but in a subtle way akin to it. He condemned it as men condemn the faults to which their master-bias leans. Hence Brand's 'warfare' with it is like the Aristotelian brave man's struggle with ' rashness,' or the generous man's with extravagance ; or like Dante's tender chastisement of that vice in which he saw a distorted image of the divine lord Love. The figure of Gerd, who symbolises 'Wildness,' thus falls under a cross light of conflicting moral ideas, which make this strange creation as intellectually suggestive as she is at first enigmatical. All the features of her existence share, and enforce, this doubleness of aspect. She dwells alone, tameless and loveless, scorn- ing human ties and humane impulses; — a natural egoist of the school of the Troll-king in Peer Gynt, whose motto, 'Be sufficient for yourself,' is the ruin of Peer. But this savage and loveless isolation has of itself a strange fascination for Ibsen ; and Gerd is no less clearly a spiritual sister of that spectral second self of the poet who in Pa Vidderne appears INTRODUCTION x™ before him 'with dumb thoughts like an Aurora- flame about his brow,' the embodiment of all his own half-suppressed scorn for the bonds of home and humanity;— ^nay, she already fore- shadows that ' Enemy of the People,' who was one day to declare that the strongest man on earth is he who stands alone. She dwells among the crags, looking down scornfully on the valley all3TEe d-wellings of men, and again we are reminded of the fascination of mountain freedom which vibrates through this same F°a Fidderne: 'Over the moors flies the rein- deer, — after it in wind and wet : better that than to break stones in the needy earth below ! But I hear the church-bell ringing upward from the Ness. Let it ring, let it ring, — the foss has a better song. . . . My lowland life I have lived out ; up here on the fell are freedom and God, down yonder fumble the others ! ' Ibsen merely completes this motive when he creates for his distracted mountain-dweller a ' Church ' among the crags and ice, and when he makes her the deadly enemy of the Hawk, the symbol of the human sociality in which she has no part. Gerd is a mountain-solitary, but one neither xxxii INTRODUCTION after the manner of Wordsworth nor after that of Eousseau. Ibsen cares for mountains as the abode rather of freedom than of sublime beauty, and for solitude as the antithesis rather of society than of civilisation; which, as such, he has at no time shown any disposi- tion to renounce, either in art or in life. The Ice-church which Gerd haunts is made, characteristically, to play an essential part in the intellectual mechanism of the poem. Throughout, it is contrasted with the Church in the Valley, as the religion of savage solitude to the religion of 'men who dwell in houses.' ' Which is the better ? ' Brand asks already in the First Act ; i and the Valley-church in the stifling air which crushes the spiritual life of society wins no preference over the Church of the desolate fell which is the negation of society itself. The entire poem may be said to revolve between these two extremes : it repre- sents a heroic attempt to spiritualise society by a teaching which saps its human basis. At the great crises of the action, the two Churches become almost human things, sharing in the keen encounter of the ideals they symbolise. 1 Tr. p. 36. INTRODUCTION xxxiii When Brand is on the point of deserting his people in order to save his child, we hear, in Gerd's vision, the Ice-church bells calling from the crags, while ' the parson ' hastes away ' on the back of the Hawk ' of compromise, and the people, released from his yoke, crowd upward to the realms of freedom to embrace again all the natural impulses upon which he had laid his spell. And when the Valley-church has been shattered, the old drowsy religion crushed, and an all-subduing spiritualism, as Brand dreams, set in its place, it is in the desolate Ice-church that he finds himself ati last, his dream of social regeneration over, ana the wild Gerd at his side, while the Hawk rolls dead at his feet. Ill No class of Norwegian society is exempted froni this comprehensive indictment of the Norwegian character. But the brunt of it is borne by that class which during the previous generation had become most inured to the smell of literary incense, and for the last dozen years had set its stamp most decisively upon literature. In Norway, as elsewhere, Koman- t xxxiv INTRODUCTION ticism and Democracy had combined to throw about tie Peasant a glamour of charm ; and the poets of the earlier half of the century — the sons, almost exclusively, of officials — had sung with sentimental enthusiasm of the lowly lives which they knew only from the outside. The ' national ' revolt in the forties and fifties against the culture and literature of Denmark gave this enthusiasm substance and reality. For almost all that was ' national ' in Norway was to be found in the keeping of the Peasant, stored up in the treasure-house of his usages, his folk-lore, his tales, his speech, his song. Gifted men, who had drunk in these things from childhood, crowded into literature and found an eager hearing : Asbjornsen and Moe collected fairy tales ; Landstad and Bugge, ballads ; Ivar Aasen composed his wonderful dictionary of the Norse dialects. Tidemand became the first great painter of peasant life ; Bjornson its first gifted poet ; and Gude first painted with power the natural grandeur which surrounds the Norwegian peasant's home. A new literature began to grow out of these rich traditions ; nay, a new language, — a sort of quintessence of the popular speech, — was con- INTRODUCTION xxxv jured up, with more effort and more noise, by a group of enthusiasts, led by two gifted poets and ripe scholars, Aasen and Vinje. It is true that their profounder study of peasant-life did some damage to the romantic legend of the Peasant. Nevertheless, since it was essentially concerned with the poetic and picturesque elements in the peasant's life, its result was to obscure the many elements which were neither poetic nor picturesque, and to establish a con- ception of the Peasant which, though no longer 'legendary,' was true only when the lucky mood was on, and when the happy moment came by. This fabric of idealism Ibsen rends with a rude hand. He has never shown any sympathy for ' Norse-Norse ' tendencies. In Peer Gynt he pours scorn upon the speech- framers ; and his own language is neither more nor less ' Norwegian ' than that of any other cultivated Norseman. Of the glorious scenery amid which the peasant dwells he lets us see little but the barrenness which makes life hard and the gloom which makes it monotonous; and the peasant himself he paints as a dull drudge 'stooping in the yoke,' with earth- xxxvi INTRODUCTION bound eyes, his inborn spiritual capacities stunted by the ceaseless toil for a livelihood, eaBi^y^nflamed with religious enthusiasm, but promptly suppressing it in the face of a conflicting offer of bread and gold. Suffering calls out the brute in him, not the hero. This sternness provoked the protest of Vinje, the peasant-poet par excellence : • Our peasant may be poor,' he writes, ' but he is refined ; he is delicate in his ways of thinking, when really under stress. He is a man, not a monster.' i IV Who was responsible for these defects in the national character ? Ibsen's reply is definite and peremptory enough : The State. ' Why has this sleep fallen on the people 1 ' asks Brand indignantly of the Mayor. ' Because you officials have lulled and stupefied it — caged and tamed its remnant of Mountain- Nature.' ' Out of your niggard Hunger-cure They pass dejected, dull, demxire ; Their best, their bravest blood you tap. Scoop out their marrow and their sap ; Pound into splinters every soul That should have stood a welded whole.' 1 Vinje, DSlen. u.s. INTRODUCTION xxxvii 'The State crushes Individuality; away with the State ! ' This was the beginning and the end of Ibsen's politics. ' When that revolution is accomplished,' he wrote some years later to Georg Brandes, ' I will be there. Undermine the notion of the State, let freewill and spiritual affinity be the only recognised basis of union, and you will have a liberty worthy of the name.'^ Hence, if he calls upon the ' fragments ' of men for the strong Will that makes whole, he reserves his fiercest anathemas for an administration which either galls the fragile spiritual life by over- rigid forms, or starves it by draining off its energy, or demoralises it by too persistent doses of material comfort. The theory of the State thus announced was no doubt sufficiently crude ; but it was a not unnatural product of the political rigime, under which Ibsen had grown up, which had however already passed its most acute crisis some years before Brand wss written. During the nineteen years 1840-59, the official party in the Storthing, supported by the ' classes ' — the party of ' intelligence,' as they 1 Quoted by Jaeger, ff. Ibsen, p. 205 (Eng. Tr.). xxxviii INTRODUCTION called themselves, — held their own trium- phantly against the peasants and their genial leader, the poet Wergeland.^ In 1859, how- ever, they had to submit to the law which pro- vided that, in future, the Country members should be to the Town members as two to one. This at once secured the peasants a majority.^ However, the officials, as a body, used their power with ability and goodwill, and under the energetic guidance of Oskar I. and his ministry materially changed the face of the country. New chaussdes were built and old ones reconstructed; railways (1854) and telegraphs were introduced ; canals and lighthouses multiplied ; agriculture was pro- moted by the foundation of agronomic schools (1844), business of all kinds by the cheapening and equalisation of the post.^ Wealth grew rapidly, while growing inter- 1 In politics, as in poetry, the spiiitnal father of Bjomson. " Prof. J.E. Sars, Etog andet om vor politiske Situation, in Nyt Tidshrift, 1882, p. 379. Prof. Sars the historian, one of the most genial and brilliant of Ibsen's early asso- ciates, is now editor of this review, which may be warmly recommended to all who are interested in the intellectual life of modern Norway. 3 These details are based on Overland's Lcerehog i Norges nyeste historie (1887). INTRODUCTION xxxix course began to wear down the dissonances of provincial life. The age grew 'civil,' or, as the Mayor has it, 'humane,' like its exemplar the king, — a striking type of that combination of civilising energy and politic compliance with public opinion which this word in Ibsen's mouth denotes.^ Changes such as these come home to men's business and bosoms too palpably to arouse widespread opposition ; but a lonely voice or two from the fastnesses of old Norway had already anti- cipated the fiery diatrife gs of Brand. Vinje had strewn amid the enthralling poetry of his Ferdaminni many a sarcastic allusion to the new roads." And Ibsen himself, during his journey in the west in 1862, had sugges- tively contrasted, in a letter from Vestnaes, the material weUbeing of the district with the d ilapidatio n of the Church. 'The farms are well cultivated,' he wrote, ' and the houses comely to look at. In short, all kinds of worldly weUbeing seem to be highly 1 On his most famous act of compliance, see note to p. 258. 2 These ' Travel-memories,' recording a journey of 1860, throw a picturesque light on the Norway that Ibsen has in view. xl INTRODUCTION treasured here. But the Church, and every- thing ecclesiastical, with the exception of the parsonage, stands on a weak, not to say tumble- down, foundation. How far,' he adds sarcas- tically, ' there may be in these phenomena a symbolism by which the Chwrch News (a promi- nent ecclesiastical organ) may profit, I as a layman do not pretend to decide.' ^ It is tempts ing to see in this passage the germ of that other mouldering, ' tumble-down ' (Jcddefcerdig) Church, which Brand ruins and rebuilds The genius of the ' humane age ' is embodied in Ibsen's Mayor (' Foged,' more literally Sheriflf), — a character drawn with singular verve and humour. A genial and capable promoter of new roads and bridges, prisons and workhouses, fresh ways of earning and fresh facilities for spending, — looked up to by the people and ardently admired as a first-rate man of business by his subordinates, — he is 1 must. NyhedsUadet, 26tli Oct. 1862. This letter led to a fierce attack by Krohg ('L. T.') in the Morgenblad, No. 313. This busy but unscrupulous theologian afterwards reviewed Brand in the very spirit of the ' Dean ' ; cf. ' Bemerkninger om Ibsen's Brand fra det christelige Stand- punkt,' MorgerMadet, 1866, No. 299. Was he in Ibsen's mind ? — Some of the emana^ons of the ' Christian stand- point ' are, it must be saicCquite unfit for quotation. INTRODUCTION xli the niost successful of governors until the arrival of Brand. He has no principle but success, and success means ' adapting oneself to the wants of the country.' If you can't carry things by force, carry them by compromise. In thinking, as he playfully hints, he seeks the ' winged ' thought, ' that is to say, the thought that shifts its ground.' So liberal-minded a man naturally favours popular culture — within limits ; even presides on occasion at village festivities, and perorates eloquently on the great days of old. The taste for poetry is elevating, and ought to be encouraged ; but poetry must never be mixed up with life. Culture is a graceful adjunct to bread- winning. ^ Of moral culture he has no conception. His remedy for crime is a new prison ; for poverty a new workhouse, or wholesale almsgiving ; for moral and intellectual wants of all kinds, 1 Ibsen's animus here is well illustrated by his funeral oration at Rome over the grave of the historian P. A. Munch, June 12, 1865, where he contrasts the political distinction which only great States can acquire with the high culture which is open to every nation. ' States like ours cannot hold their own by material forces ; but nations like ours can win the right to exist by labouring for culture. . . . The State, as such, among us, sees in culture only the decorations of the edifice, not its stays and timbers.' — III. NyhedsUadet, 1865, No. 29. xlii INTRODUCTION in the last resort, a ' commission.' ^ ^ His heart and soul are in material progress, and it is with cutting irony that Ibsen makes him defend the Eomantic culture of the Past, by the plea — hollow on his lips — that 'great memories bear in them the seed of growth.' All Ibsen's intense scorn for dilettante idealism rings out in Brand's retort : ' Yes, memoriea that to Life are bound. But you, of Memory's empty mound Have made a stalking-horse for Sloth. ' As the Mayor represents the ' humanity ' of the State, so the Dean (Provsten, more literally ' the Archdeacon ') embodies the gross and mechanical conception of spiritual things which a time of eager economic advance commonly induces. The Church in Norway is a depart- ment of the State, like the Post-office or the Army ; and the Dean identifies their ends with a frankness almost inconceivable to an 1 The word has a peculiarly scornful ring in Ibsen's mouth. ' He is always highly amused,' relates Brandes, ' when he reads in the papers : ' ' And then a commission was appointed," or "And then a union was formed." He sees a symptom of modern corruption in the fact that as soon as any one wishes to carry out a plan, his first thought is to found a union or a commission,' Another Carlylean trait. Bi'andes, Moderne Qeister, p. 434. INTRODUCTION xliii Anglican. The State requires religion only as a means to order and morality; 'good Christians ' means for it ' good citizens,' and it pays the priest with a sole eye to their manufacture. Individual tastes and needs are as irrelevant to it as to the road-maker or the prison-maker ; weigh them in the mass, he says to Brand, 'use one comb to all the flock.' ' The State is (as you hardly dream) Exactly liaXf Republican : Liberty held in strictest ban, Equality in high esteem. ' This secular machinery imposes no friction on his own purely secular nature ; the bonds which fray and lacerate Brand sit on him like comfortable clothing : ' It 's all so easy ! Faith, you see, Broad based upon authority ; Which being upon learning stay'd May be implicitly obey'd ; While Rule and Ritual leave no doubt How faith ought to be acted out. ' And as the Church is subservient to the State, so religion has its narrowly limited province in life. To consecrate the whole of xliv INTRODUCTION life would be a waste of religious resources calculated for just one-seventh of it. For ' Life and Faith hold such dissent, They only thrive when kept apart ; Six days for toiling hands are meant, The seventh, for stirring of the heart ; If all the week we preach'd and pray'd The Sabbath had in vain been made. ' But in spite of his meclianical system, the Dean shares the ' Humanity ' of the age. His bigotry is absolute, but it does not go deep. He never dreams of doubting the faith he has prospered by ; but he advances its claims with urbanityAnd" decorum as a man of the world, and is visibly disturbed by the scornful epi- grams with which alone Brand condescends to answer him. And his moral rigour dissolves at once under the influence of fear. ' I am no formalist, my friend,' he assures the Mayor, after hearing of the politic lie by which the latter has just quelled the popular revolt ; and assents readily to his thoroughly 'humane' defence : ' To-morrow, When agitation 's dead or dying, What will it matter if the end Was gain'd by telling truth, or lying?' INTRODUCTION xlv Ihsei), in truth, hated the system represented by the Dean too vigorously to allow it fair play, and the stoutest Nonconformist can afford to admit that this sleek and soulless ecclesiastic, with his vacant rhetoric, his pu sillanimity, j iis credulity, and his Epicureanism, is a weed which grows lustily in the soil of established Churches rather than their normal product. The character is highly amusing; but it is such a picture as Milton might have given of one of his ' hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw,' had he been able to forego his magnificence of touch, and to bring humour into the service of his scorn. Into this society of half-heartedness and compromise suddenly emerges Brand, a ' holy athlete,' like Dante's Dominic — the prophet of a new gospel and of a new God.^ His gospel is the iron Will which a humane age had emas- culated in the name of Christian love ; and his God is the implacable Jehovah of the Hebrews, 1 The name Brand niean.s ' Are.' It is used coUoqiiially, like our 'firebrand,' of a man who excites passion and uproar. It hardly exists as an actual surname. xlvi INTRODUCTION the Lord, 'young like Hercules,' who 'stayed the sun,' and stood by Moses on Horeb, who ' Wonders without end has done. And -sironders without end would do, Were not the age grown sick — like you. ' With the boldness of Elijah before the priests of Baal he contrasts with this .virilejGod the ' doti^-greybeard ' of the popular belief, who 'looks through his fingers' at sin, and can always be ' haggled with ' for a pardon. 'Faint- heart' and 'Light-heart' and 'Wild-heart' alike, genial impulse and dull routine, the thraldom of custom and the thraldom of pleasure, he confronts with the summons : 'Be through and through, what God meant you to become ! ' The character was no doubt originally in- tended to be simply an embodiment of Ibsen's own heroic ideal of character. Brand is a priest of modern Norway. But Ibsen has himself declared that this was not at all essen- tial for his purpose. 'I could have applied the whole syllogism just as well,' he writes to Georg Brandes, ' to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest. I could quite as well have worked out the impulse which drove me to INTRODUCTION xlvii write, by taking Gralileo, for instance, as my hero — assuming, of course, that Galileo should stand firm and never concede the fixity of the earth ; — or you yourself in your struggle with the Danish reactionaries.' ^ The gist o f the whole is therefore ethical, in spite of its theo- logical clothing, and in spite of the theological phraseology in which Ibsen's own ethical con- ceptions were as yet habitually entangled. The faith which inspires it is the faith in the spirit of man — 'the one eternal thing,' as Brand declares in a splendid outburst, that of which churches and creeds are only passing moods, and which, now dispersed and disintegrated among the torsos of humanity, shall one day gather once more into a whole, and Man become again the glorious heir and child of God.^ That faith in ' spirit ' I take to be the keynote of Ibsen's whole teaching; the ground of his scorn both for the 'mate- rialist' and for the politician. The problems of life reduce themselves, for him, to the one problem : how to give spirit scope. Applied to individual men, this becomes the command ^ First published by Brandes in Ms Gjemiembrudtsmoend ; partiAly quoted by Jaeger, H. Ibsen (Bng. Tr. p, 155). S Tr. p. 26. xlviii INTRODUCTION — the divine ' call ' of each : — Give your own spirit scope ; let your life be the working-out of your character, not the product of your circum stances ; he what you are ; fulfil yourself. This ideal, variously expressed and variously quali- fied, pervades Ibsen's whole work.'^ In the Comedy of Love (1862), the 'self is conceived as a kind of ideal stamp impressed upon each soul by God at birth, which it is its ' call ' to realise in life. ' Just this is freedom,' says Talk to Svanhild, ' to perfectly fulfil one's call.' And this, alas, is what marriage makes impossible. Lind has a ' call ' to go as a missionary to America, and Anna, his be- trothed, a 'call' to remain at home. Love leads each forthwith to accept the call of the other; and the experienced Frdken Skjsere sums up incisively : ' Follow his call ? Good heavens ! That is what men do as bachelors ; but an engaged man only follows his Iride.' In the Pretenders (1863) the basis of the whole action is Hakon's divine ' call ' to be king ; while to ' doubt your call ' or to mistake it, is 1 Several suggestions in what follows are due to a valu- able essay by Aine Loohen, Om den udmkling Ibsens vwralske ansktielse har gjermemgaet (Nyt Tidstoift, 188?, p, 412f.). INTRODUCTION xlix the tragic lot of Skule, as later of Julian. Peer Gynt, again (1867), is entirely built upon the problem of 'being yourself Here it becomes clear that 'being oneself,' with Ibsen, is the very antithesis of ' selfishness.' For Peer, after practising every kind of self-indulgence with success through life, finds that he is merely a bundle of impulses with no personality at the core. ' To be oneself,' the redoubtable Button- moulder tells him, ' is to lose oneself ' ; and he adds, for Peer's better understanding, the further definition : ' To be oneself is to stand forth everywhere with Master's intention hung out like a sign-board.' ^ Brand thus stands on purely Ibsenian ground when he preaches, as he does on almost every page, 'Be yourself,' and when he means by that essentially a triumph, as we might prefer to say, of character over impulse and over circumstance. 2 Will thus becomes the very ' Peer Gynt, tr. by W. and C. Archer, p. 261. 2 Wergeland had expressed the ideal, ' Be yourself ' in a little poem which reads like a prelude to Brand ('Efter tidens Leilighed '). This is the close : ' Vaer i et og alt dig selv ! Det er sejrens kunst, min sjsel ! Som Stefanen mellem stene Ma du sta, om selv alene. ' d 1 INTRODUCTION essence of moral advance, and he urges its claim with Carlylean vehemence. Will, with him, stands above all calculation of pos- sibilities. 'That you had not power may be pardoned, but never that you had not will.' Brand crosses the misty glacier and the raging fjord by Will, as Bjornson's saintly mesmerist by Faith.^ But WUl is commonly conceived as self-sacrifice rather than as self- assertion ; its business is to crush down all the rebellious desires that impede the 'inner self.' It is true that when we ask what the inner self is, and how a man is to distinguish that element in his nature which he has to ' fulfil ' from that which he has to crush, Ibsen's replies are vague and conflicting. At times he seems to identify the self with the morally best impulse; as in the words of Lona Hessel to Bernick after his confession: 'There at last you have found yourself,' and his reply: ' Thanks, Lona, you have saved what was best in me.' But at other times it is simply the deepest rooted impulse, the bias of character, or what Pope called the ' ruling passion.' ' Be what you are,' cries Brand to Einar, ' whatever 1 Cf. Bjornson'a striking creation Sang in Over Mone.. INTRODUCTION H it is, but be it out and out. If you tipple, be a Bacchante at once ; if you serve pleasure, serve it heart and soul.' In any case Ibsen puts the strong will first, and mere good im- pulse second, 1 — and his teaching is summed up in the demand : Make your life heroic by pervading it with a single aim. These ideas have often been compared to the teaching of Fichte. But there is nothing to show that Ibsen ever grasped the idealist conception of the relation between the 'Ego' and the 'world,' upon which the whole of Fichte's metaphysic was founded. All other resemblances are necessarily superficial. If he preached Will with the energy of Fichte, it is because in this quality of character he bears a singular resemblance to a thinker, of whose writings (as he expressly avowed to me) he had ' so far as he knew, never read a line.' ' I have never,' Ibsen added, ' specially con- ' ' The weak man, taking his ohject at any time from the desire which happens to affect him most strongly, cannot possibly be a good man. Concentration of will does not necessarily mean goodness, but is a necessary condition of goodness.' T. H. Green, Proleg. of Ethics, n. 1, §105. The whole chapter expresses, in precise and subtle language, the conceptions of will and self which I take Ibsen to have in view. lii INTRODUCTION cerued myself with philosophy as such. I have studied men and human fate, and drawn the philosophy out of them for myself.' VI. 'I pride myself on the objectivity of my Brand,' Ibsen has somewhere said, justly enough. But it is the objectivity of a mask which conveys, in heightened profile, one out of several expressions of the face it conceals. Brand is Ibsen reduced, if one may say so, to simpler terms, and at the same time raised to a higher power. His impulses are less com- plex ; but they are translated into action with a single-minded vehemence which makes the total effect completely different. The core of Brand's thought is thoroughly Ibsenian, but the dialect he clothes it in, the impetuous energy and eloquence with which he enforces it, and, to a great extent, the practical applica- tions he makes of it, are alien to Ibsen. Something, but not very much, of the non- Ibsenian Brand was due to vivid reminiscence. The rigid orthodoxy of the Scandinavian Churches in the middle of the century had given rise to several independent movements outwardly resembling Brand's. In Denmark INTRODUCTION liii a genial and powerful thinker, Soren Kierkeg- jaard, found the current orthodoxy too narrow for him, and thundered at the Church in in- exhaustible diatribes of mingled wit, poetry, and philosopEy!' JCObsen's own early home, ^ Particular thoughts of Kierkegjaard strikingly recall Brand ; as the very title of his EmUn — Eller ( ' Either — Or ' ) suggests Brand's way of planting men face to face with an unavoidable dilemma : ' At the crossway stand' st thou : choose ! ' The following (partially quoted by Brandes) also recalls the Button-moulder in Peer Oynt : ' Let others,' he there says (i. 13), ' complain that the Age is evil : I complain that it is feeble ; for it is without passion. . . . The thoughts of men's hearts are too petty to be sinful. . . . They fancy God does not keep accounts so strictly but they can befool him a little and get off scot-free. Baseness ! Therefore I always turn to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one feels, after all, that it is men that speak ; there they hate, there they love, murder their enemies, curse their oifspring through all generations, there they sin.' This and similar obvious parallels to Brand's thinking led the Danish critics to assume as a matter of course that Brand was intended as a portrait of him : and the idea was widely accepted in Germany. Much industrious speculation in a little contemporary volume : ' Bjornson og Ibsen i deres to seneste Vaerker ' [Bfand and Oe Nygifte], by B. Helveg (Kbnhvn, 1866) is vitiated by it. But Kierkegjaard had an element of the 'purely intellectual athlete which is quite foreign to Brand. He delighted in problems with Socratic eagerness, for the sake of thinking, heedless whether the conclusion tasted sweet or not. As he playfully says : ' I am like the Lilneburger iag_^ I can grub up truffles for others, but have no pleasure in them myself. I take the problems on my nose; but then I have done with them, and toss them over my head.' — [lb. I. 23.) Cf. also Jaeger, H. Ibsen, p. 155 f. liv INTRODUCTION Skien, his friend Gustav A. Lammers had separated from the Church on a purely doctrinal question, and founded one of those ' free Apostolic communities ' which in Norway- corn monly exist on almost as frail a tenure as Brand's own forlornly magniiicent^hurch of Life' itself. Lammers is one of the most striking figures in the modern Norwegian Church, and his career and personality were undoubtedly present to Ibsen when he wrote Brand,. Many single traits reappear. He had planned and built his own Church ; spoke with impetuous and fiery eloquence, ' using the strongest expressions known to Christian speech,' and denouncing sin with an energy which terrified yet fascinated his people.^ One of the incidents of his ministry was the building of a supplementary chapel (Bedehus), the original church being 'too small.' But his secession turned upon specifically Christian questions, such as 'infant-baptism,' which for 1 Lammers had previously been chaplain in a reformatory at Trondhjem. It is said that many of his parishioners (naively enough) begged him to remember that he was no longer preaching to criminals. I take this and other details from a series of articles on Lammers by his friend Provst Ording (in the Skien paper Fnmskridt, Aug. 19, etc., 1893). His life is sketched by Jseger, Tr. p. 156. INTRODUCTION Iv Brand, as for Ibsen, hardly existed at all ; and the whole movement, which ended a year later in Lammers' return, revolved within the narrow pale of the evangelical world, of which Brand from the first stands clear. Brand's theology is indeed that of no exist- ing Church. To attack the established religions in the name of religion implied the possession of a form of faith unoontaminarted — by that conversion into an organised fact which, for Ibsen, is so deadly to all ideals. ^ With felicitous instinct Ibsen divined the religion of all others most capable of fusion with his own thought; and the doctrine of self-fulfilment emerged from Brand's lips clothed in the fire and gloom of Hebrew prophecy. His eloquence, his scorn, his grim humour even, are those of Elijah. A lonely and loveless childhood has dried up all the natural tenderness of his nature. Love means 1 Cf. his eccentric expression to Brandes in regard to freedom : ' I must say, the only thing I love about freedom is the struggle for it; for the possession I don't care.' More seriously: 'Whoever possesses freedom otherwise than as something he strives for, possesses it as a dead and soulless thing? ... If any one stops during the struggle, and cries, Now I have it ! he shows by the very fact that he has lost it.' — Brandes Moderns Oeister, pp. 433-4, Ivi INTRODUCTION for him the disposition of God towards those whom He chastens. To Christianity, the 'humane' religion, with its compassion for sinners and its various expedients, so easily abused, for removing the burden of sin, he feels himself instinctively alien. 'I hardly know whether I am a Christian.' Christ is for him the heroic martyr rather than the Redeemer; man has to redeem himself by crucifying his own flesh. To pray for pardon is to offer payment on easy terms for sin. To watch for Divine grace is to ignore the demand for human will. But to follow out any one course rigorously involves more Will, calls more 'Spirit' into play, than to follow several partially. Hence we- reach Brand's paradox, that to ' sacrifice ' less than All is worse than to sacrifice Nothing, and the terrible formula, Allw Nothing, with which he ' pierces the bosom ' of a ' humane ' and com- promising age. The formula is thus, in spite of its intensely theological colouring, a product of ethical and not of theological ideas. To fall short of absolute service is no doubt infidelity to Grod ; but the root of Brand's fierce denunci- atipn of it is that it is infidelity tp charS/Cter. INTRODUCTION Ivii VII A doctrine such as 'AH or Nothing' obvi- ously lent itself to the most extreme fanaticism. But the quality of the fanaticism depended altogether on the spirit in which this rigid and absolute formula was applied to the actual world of growing, relative, and imperfect life. The demand for 'No compromise' may be deadly enough if it is made to mean : ' Throw away the seed because it is not the flower.' And this is at the outset and at the close the peremptory method of Brand. ' Turn your faces utterly from the light,' he cries to the peasants who are dimly feeling after the heroic ideal of which he has given them a glimpse;, ' be wholly men of clay ! ' His religion is not for gropers and crawlers ; its imperious de- mands can only be satisfied by men in the vigour and freshness of youth. 'No man hobbles through heaven's gate. . . . What should God do with effete cripples grovelling about His throne ? ' Let them get down into the grave-vault with their pestiferous sighs for the mercy they have forfeited ; but come ye, ,jnen and women with the bloom still upon Iviii INTRODUCTION your cheek, to the great Church of Life. Thus interpreted, Brand's 'All or Nothing' ^^.excludes not only the Christian reverence for r that which is beneath us, but the very concep- "^ / tion of spiritual growth altogether. It is a religion of heroism for those who are heroes already ; the natural birthright of great souls, inaccessible to the dim humanity which stands in most need of inspiration. And yet Brand himself holds that the Divine image is set in the heart of every man, and that it is the end of all to live, it dear. But this interpretation of the formula under- goes a change, and that under the influence of one who heroically accepts it, and who becomes at last its willing martyr. Agnes has all Brand's valour without his absoluteness ; she dares and wills with him, but she has also the woman's insight and tenderness, the patience with small beginnings, the instinctive forefeeling of the flower in the seed. It is her gift to ' divine great things in the small ' ; as he finely and significantly says of her, she can 'clasp earth and heaven in one embrace, like the tree's spreading roof of leaves.' Her companionship wakes the human love that slept in him, and INTRODUCTION lix through loving her he comes to love the struggling peasant-folks about him. He aban- dons his dream of a world-warfare in order to labour obscurely in a remote mountain nook. All comers share in the rich banquet of his heart. Those who only half see are no longer bidden turn utterly away from the light. Nay, it is his most grievous charge against his rival, the Mayor, that he crushes the unfulfilled germs of character, the ' seed that might have ripened into deed.'^ He still hurls his ana- / thema at the compromiser, but with an inner longing to clasp the bosom he rends. His conception of the relation of religion to life insensibly changes. The vulgar division be- tween the sacred and profane is now to be met by hallowing, not by extruding, the common things. Oificialdom stands aghast at a creed which, as the Mayor bluntly puts it, tries to make religion and potato-growing fuse inex- tricably together, and keeps the festal flag fly- ing on week days as persistently ' As if the Almighty were on board Of every skiff that skims the fjord.' Thus Brand's vision of the ideal Church 1 Tr. p. 113. Ix INTRODUCTION expands into that magnificent picture of the ' Church of Life,' which is to include ' all that by God's leave lives indeed,' in nature and humanity, — labour and joy, faith and action, 'daily drudgery made one with the dance before the Ark.' ^ He anticipates that far-off ' Third Kingdom ' foreshadowed in Caesar and Galilean, where the Pagan religion of nature and the Christian religion of spirit are har- monised and consummated in one all-embrac- ing faith. Gradually, Brand's thought penetrates and possesses the community ; first ' the best ' are with him (Act III.), and then (Act IV.) also ' the most.' With them it takes a form for which Brand is unprepared. The little tumble- down church might serve for a decayed re- ligion, content to occupy its consecrated corner of life, and to abandon the rest. But a religion which 'is that magnificent thing that fills the whole of life ' ^ could not be housed in such limits. On all sides, blind, inarticulate in- stinct impels the cry, 'The church is small.' Agnes herself, though she also cannot explain 1 Tr. pp. 231-4. 2 Canon Knox Little at the last Church Congress. INTRODUCTION Ixi her impulse, shares in the cry And Brand, for whom the visible symbol of his Church has little importance, nevertheless yields to his faith in her inspiration, and prepares (like Lammers) to ' build the greater church ' which is to symbolise more adequately the limitless Church of Life. This church-building motive may at first strike the reader as disturbingly prosaic amid the passion and poetry of Brand. As with all Ibsen's other examples of architectural sym- bolism, however (and surely no dramatist was ever so great a builder of churches, lunatic asylums, and ' dwellings for men '), a little study shows that the prosaic nucleus is im- bedded in a network of subtle and suggestive meanings.^ It is thus Agnes who keeps the humaner point of view vigorous in Brand, and appar- ently turns his formula of elimination, as Mr. Wicksteed aptly terms it, into a formula of harmony. Yet the formula in its old 1 Brand's church-building has another aspect, not touched here ; it is his way of cancelling the ' debt ' of his mother, whose fortune ' to the last penny,' he spends in the work. Similarly, Fru Alying (in Ghosts) builds her asylum with the exact sum for'whioh she had been 'bought.' Ixii INTRODUCTION exclusive sense is never really put by. With- in a few pages of his admission that he owes all the new tenderness of his nature to the presence of wife and child, occur his bit- terest denunciations of ' what man calls love,' ' word of all words most smirched with Jies.' ^ And Agnes herself is powerless against the terrible formula when it is confronted with a case where love seems to set up claims against God. He is inflexible to his dying mother when she gives up only nine-tenths of her treasured wealth. He is inflexible, though after a far fiercer struggle, to his child, when the ' call ' of fatherhood comes in conflict with the call of the priest. He is inflexible to his oroken-hearted wife herself, when he leads her to that dizzy height of heroism in which she 'willingly' crushes the heart of motherhood in her without which even her heroic nature can- not live. And he is inflexible to himself, when he yields up ' life and light to the grave.' ' Only the Lost is for ever ours ' is his cry after their last good-night. Yet he is soon to find that the Lost is, still, very really — lost. Deprived of Agnes' presence, he loses his sympathy with 1 Tr.p.91. INTRODUCTION Ixiii groping and struggling humanity, returns to his rigorous exclusiveness, and becomes again 'a lonely -warrior,' fighting now without heart or hope a forlorn battle with the world. The opening of the new church assembles about him whatever was most prov ocative ta a man of his temper in the little world of Norway. The crowd with their idle wonder at 'the show,' the Mayor with his fulsome congratula- tions and distinctions, the Dean with his in- tolerable claim in the name of Caesar to the things of God, the universal assumption that the new building is the real Church and not its symbol, — the 'cacklings and croakings ' that answer all his questionings, while even the two lonely resources of music and prayer fail, — the organ's song becomes a shriek, and his cry to God ' falls back broken like the moan of ii river bell ' ; — all these things stir him to the depths. To serve a Church and State so conditioned is incompletely to serve God, and is thus compromise, and the devil. The All or Nothing asserts itself in all its rigour as a formula of elimination, not of harmony. To Brand's fanatical imagination the whole ap- paratus of ordered society now presents itself. Ixiv INTRODUCTION not as material which can be made to ixoakgce^ with religion, but as an irreducible alien element by which religion can only be warped and corrupted. To recur to the Mayor's drastic image, ' potato-growing ' will no longer be assimilated to the ' All,' and must therefore be rejected as a 'Nothing.' He revokes his gift of the church, throws the keys into the river, and carries the multitude away in an access of inarticulate enthusiasm to seek that 'great Church of life,' which, having no limits, can involve no ' com- promise.' They are to wander through the land, to 'loose every fettered soul,' to 'crush every vestige of sloth,' to make the whole realm ' a vaulted temple.' But the enterprise meets the fate of all attempts to purify religion by cutting it adrift from everything which is not religious ; and Brand, stoned and deserted, finds a last refuge, not in the ' Church of life,' but in that Ice-church which is the negation of all human relations, — of the very stuff out of which life has to be carved. He grasps his weapon — the formula — as boldly as ever, but he has only the empty air to strike with it. His heroic repudiation of love has brought him INTRODUCTION Ixv logically to the home of the desolate and desolating forces of nature — the haunt of the savage and loveless Gerd. Scorn for ' humanity ' has finally thrust him out of the work of uplifting Man. Plainly, for one who had planned as his life's work the ' refashioning of Man ' in G-od's image, this cannot be self-fulfil- ment. 'To fulfil oneself,' and 'to be a tablet for God's law,' have become irreconcilable aims. One of them must be abandoned. With the gladness of renewed youth Brand revokes the All or Nothing. ' Henceforth his life shall be not a rigid tablet for God's law, but a ' poem, rich, flexible, free.' ' Compromise ' is thus on the point of being accepted. The hawk, which at two former moments of waning resolutions had appeared to him, flutters into the vault of the deadly Ice-church, where it had never ventured before. But it is now too late to turn. The hawk is shot by Gerd, and rolls down at her feet, ' white like a dove.' The demon compromise was, after all, akin to love. Cut off alike from advance and retreat. Brand can only perish, and the snows of lifeless and loveless nature, loosened by the shot, descend upon the man Ixvi INTRODUCTION who had hated in the name of love, and slain out of very passion for life. VIII Thus Brand falls, and the cloud of symbolism which surrounds his fall does not prevent our perceiving that its principal ground is the formula All or Nothing. Whether it is in so far, in Ibsen's eyes, a glorious martyrdom or a tragic penalty for error, is a different question, which for the moment we put aside. But it is equally clear that the formula is not its only ground ; and there are persistent hints of an influence which leads us into a totally different sphere of Ibsen's thought. ' Blood of children must be spilt To atone their fathers' guilt ' groans Brand, as the avalanche roars above him. And the avalanche is the work of Gerd. Gerd, who, as we have seen, stands for the loveless isolation towards which Brand's de- velopment thrusts him on, thus becomes also the involuntary Nemesis which closes it, — ^in atonement not of any fault of Brand's, but of 'the fathers' I guilt.' The meaning of this is INTRODUCTION Ixvii explained by the Mayor's story, i and the very harshness and violence of the inven- tion shows how eager Ibsen was to work in his thought at all costs, to entangle his idealist in the consequences not only of his own im- perfect grasp of truth, and not only of the provocative conditions under which he is called to live, but of the sins of his own kindred in the past. Gerd is the child of a 'scholar-gipsy,' who, as a poor parson, had been rejected on merce nary gr ounds by Brand's mother, though she loved him. This sacrifice of 'soul' to gain. Brand's jealous Lord avenges on her posterity ; and Gerd, the indirect fruit of it, becomes a factor in that vengeance. At the crisis of the Third Act, it is her mockery which recalls Brand to his half- abandoned formula, and dooms his 'spotless lamb ' to the sacrifice it had all but escaped. The death of the child leads to that of the wife, and their loss leaves him a prey to the 'All or Nothing ' in all its naked rigour. In the crisis of the Fifth Act, Gerd only carries this intervention a step further. Thus the 'vengeance' takes the form of an influence J Tr. p. 160. / Ixviii INTRODUCTION which, like that of the witches upon Macbeth, simply reinforces .those elements in his own nature which made for ruin. Gerd turns the balance, when it trembles, between Will and Love. The story of Gerd is only one of the indica- tions in Brand that Ibsen was approaching those problems of inheritance which dominate the ' Social dramas.' ' Can I help being what I am r asks the gipsy in the Fourth Act.^ The spectacle of the young children of the murderer drinking in the poison of the deed they have witnessed,^ plunges Brand into an abyss of questioning, from which he emerges only with a horrible sense that to live at all is to be involved in an infinite tangle of guilt. In none of these cases does Ibsen actually face the problem of heredity. But it is plain that it lies near at hand. They are symptoms of the coming conflict between the view of the early dramas that Character is shaped and stamped by God, and that of the later, that it is a function of ancestry. The power of self- determination is still everywhere assumed, and Will still ranges along in magnificent freedom 1 Tr. p. 176. 2 Tr. p. 53 f. INTRODUCTION Ixix ('as if shot from a pistol,' as Hegel said), innocent of the suspicion which Maximus is presently to express, that ' to will is to have to will ' ; 1 but already there are frequent glimpses of a totally different point of view, from which Life loses this semblance of heroic simplicity, and appears a tangle of interrelated influences, in whose intricate action and reaction all distinct character tends to disappear.^ IX It is impossible to read the closing Acts of Brand without feeling that the poet is strug- gling between two ethical ideals, both of which have a powerful hold upon his nature, and that neither influence absolutely masters the other. The man who wrote : ' The State crushes individuality ; away with the State ! . . . Let free will and spiritual affinity be the only recognised basis of union,' unmistakably felt the profound sympathy for Brand in his final revolt, which seems to burn through the page, and is apt to touch even the coolest reader with revolutionary passion. But it is 1 Emperor and Galilean, tr. Archer, p. 352. 2 Of. esp. tr. p. 122. Ixx INTRODUCTION equally clear that he feels that Brand has in some sense missed his way. Not because he is finally ruined, for ' overthrow,' as he re- peatedly tells us, is the condition of 'triumph,' and in the last pages the ' overthrow ' of Christ is explicitly recalled. But because_Jifi_ has foregone the sympathetic love without which no man can divine what ' self -fulfilment,' jn- ^bsen 's sense, for himself or tor others Remands. Lovi ng love and hating hate, he has nevertEeless ' willed to hate ,' ^ and, un- quickened by sympathetic insight, his ideal of sacrifice degenerates, as every ideal must" int o a mechanical rule. ^ Become a table t for God to write on ' comes at last to mean, not ' seek what God intended you to be, and bey but 'clear away everything purely human in you, that God's writing m ay be seen,'— and then Brand himself takes as it were the pencil oiit of the hand of God, and writes in his name — simply the same negative and inhuman formula over again. We never get further than this mech a nical Conception of God's will. and the ' All or Nothing ' comes to stan d (as in the case of his Mother) rather for an opera- 1 Tr. p. 92. INTRODUCTION Ixxi tion in arithi oetic— a anm in snhtract.inn mnrp. or less well carried through — than for a spiritual_prQ£ess. Brand has, in a word, put himself on the side of men of system he abhors, and with subtle irony Ibsen shows us this by bringing them before us, one after another, each with his characteristic profession of faith, a parody of what was weakest in Brand's own. Brand's scorn for Love reappears ' writ small ' in the Schoolmaster's horror at being thought to ' feel ' ; his rigid suppression of human nature in the name of God's law is travestied in the Dean's suppression of personality in the name of the State ; and the final and most deadly parody is provided, as Mr. Wicksteed has admirably shown, by Einar, for whom his narrow creed is ' All ' and the rest Nothing. ' The principle that slays the saintly Agnes and drives her heroic husband mad, fits the miserable Einar like a glove ; he is happy and at home in it.' ^ Ibsen has been called the 'poet of doubt.' But his • doubt ' is as like the complacent indecision of the ordinary agnostic as the brief ' Lectures, p. 50. Ixxii INTRODUCTION repose of a ship just balanced on the shoulders of two great waves is like that of one riding in a smooth and glassy stream. It is an uneasy equilibrium between vehemently contending impulses, — the one more deeply-rooted in passion and temperament, the other in intellect, the one expressed with more genius, the other with more conviction. It is impossible to ignore, under the philosophic and cosmopoli- tan surface of Ibsen's nature, a core of pure revolutionary fire, — an element of defiant, tameless, solitary, unsocial power, sometimes cynical, as in the grim close of Pa Fidderne, sometimes ardent and heroic. As one reads the passionate invectives of Brand, even at the points where he is most palpably in the grip of his formula, one seems to hear the poet's undertone, ' Yes, he is going to his ruin, and to the ruin of his work, — no doubt about that ; but then, to have this Titanic world-defying Will, that dares all things and endures all things, is so glorious that all the ruin matters less than the loss of it. To act with a nice regard to the services you are likely to render is good, but it is a good which appeals chiefly to our prosaic sense of utility. There is another kind INTRODUCTION Ixxiii which seizes us through the imagination and the instinct for poetry, — the glory of heroic character, — do what it will, end where and how it wiU. If it is forced at last to isolation, then, you know, 'the strongest man upon earth is he that stands most alone.' If it perishes, then 'Death is not Overthrow,' and ' True triumph is to lose,' and ' only what is lost is our own for ever.' If it goes down at last into the darkness, then that is the very way to eternal peace : ' Nej, i dybet ma jeg ned, Der er fred fra evighed. ' ' But this volcanic and irresponsible element in Ibsen has always been met, and to a large degree controlled, on the one hand by a very keen, cool, and critical intellect, incessantly probing and questioning its own impulses; and, on the other, by a vein of sympathetic, tender, almost feminine emotion. He has never, indeed, been conspicuously a poet of love. The ' little wing ' of his ideal castle of poetry which was to be consecrated to love- lyrics was shattered long ago.^ But the genius 1 2 Cf. the subtle little poem Byggeplaner, and Mr Wioksteed's comments (Leduree, p. 2). Ixxiv INTRODUCTION of the love-lyric must have sighed as it fell^ for no living poet has sung of love, when he chose, with more thrilling power. He grew up in the traditions of Romanticism. He has satir- ised the Romantics without mercy. But he has never ceased on certain points to be one of them. The cynicism of Pa Vidderne was the violent protest of a poet still under the spell of Romanticism against the ideals he could not forego. At present he is Romantic by his symbolism, by that delight in dreamy and fantastic motives which so sorely perplexes the reader who thinks he has to do with a plain, honest ' Realist,' who ' draws things as they are.' And the Romantic idealisation of love, as the noblest and most potent force in life, had a hold upon him at the time when he was still enthralled by the purel}"^ Romantic ideal of a drama full of ringing rhymes which he fulfilled in Brand and Peer Gynt. j3u t_over again st Love stood "Will, and so long as Society remains per- vaded by low ideals, the question of their rela- tionship is for Ibsen a standing dilemma, from which he never unecjuivocally escapes. If a man's social environment is incomp atible with wholeness of life, if State and Church force him INTRODUCTION Ixxv into soul-slaying ' compromise,' resolute revolt seems to be the only course open to him, even though he perish in solitude, and find the all encompassing Church of Life only in the deso- late and deadly Church of Ice. But against this solution the opposing instincts are for ever raising their quiet protest : Love is need- fu l to self-fulfilment, and can rear the Church of Life even out of the .stra^ and chaff nf a. seemingly unideal society. The one answer is given in a passionate cry, the other in a whisper of conviction. The readers of Brand for the most part heard the cry and ignored the whisper ; and the poet of Brand intended that they should. Almost all Ibsen's work has something of the same complexity.- His most vehement teaching is apt to be coupled with the materials for criticising it. His most definite and dominant thoughts come to the surface laden with that tangle of counter-thought which gathers about every peremptoryjionclusion in the depths of a critical mindT There is sugges- tive truth under the guise of tmisnij in Jiis Ixxvi INTRODUCTION declaration in the interesting preface to Gildd p°a Solhcmg (2nd ed., 1883), that each of his writings has been ' the necessary outcome of his development at a given moment.' Each is in some sense an epitome of his intellectual consciousness. Hence, too, the difficulty of defining their artistic character. The early critics of Brand spent much ink and not a little temper in the attempt to find a proper pigeon-hole for it in the scheme of literary categories. One of the ablest of them wrote a series of papers to prove that it was a 'Satire.'^ He was met by a formal demon- stration that it was a ' Tragedy.' ^ Vinje com- pared it to the Dunciad, and declared that he had only begun to enjoy it when he discovered it to be a 'parody of what the English call Sensationalism. '8 Its author described it with judicious vagueness as a 'dramatic poem.'* The controversy was, however, no mere dis- 1 Prof. M. J. Monrad, in MorgenUadet, 1866, Nos. 248 f. = Morgeniladet, 1866, Nos. 332, 335. 3 Skrifter % Utval, iv. 86 f. * It was, as Jseger says, not origmally designed tq be dramatic. In answer to an inquiry about this early ver- sion, Ibsen replied : ' I wrote at the outset 3 — 4 sheets in narrative verse, but soon threw them aside. They are destroyed, and have not been used iu the complete poem.' INTRODUCTION Ixxvii pute about terms : it sprang from the very ambiguity which we have just described. If ' Satire ' can include a drastic exposure of national failings, set off by an ideal antitype, and ' Tragedy,' a picture of the ruin of a great but defective character in an antagonistic world, Brand has obvious afiBnities to both. It is difficult not to suspect that the ' satiric ' motive was dominant at the outset, and was gradually overpowered by the ' tragic,' which, as has been seen, presides at the close. Biaiidwas to be the ideal antit y pe of the Norwegian people. But Ibsen's own com- plexity of nature, as we have seen, and per- haps also his keen dramatic instinct, interfered with this simple scheme. The ideal, type gj e w hnma Ti and individual : the T itan going forth with drawn sword against the world became a strugg ling «^^ agonised soul, .s wayed by doubts an d entangled by illusion ; the vice s he denounc es are represented by men, drawn mostly with a genial and humorous, and in' the r-ggRj vf t.bp. ' hiimanp, ' o ld Doctor with a kindly and sympa^th etic hand. .T he beautiful creation of Agn^ serves the purpose of Satire admirably in the Second Act, where her Ixxviii INTRODUCTION heroism is set off against the 'fainthearted- ness ' of the Peasants and Einar ; but in the Third and Fourth A ct s she has passed into th e domain of Tragedy ; her heroism is no longer an example hurled at the cringing patriots of '64, but a pathetic sacrifice to the idol which holds her husband in its spell. Thus the tragedy of Brand, the man, struggling in the grip of his formula, disengages itself from the ' satire ' of Brand, the Titan, subduing the world to his creed. It will hardly be denied that such tragedy is ' tragic ' in the great Shakespearean sense. The Norwegian priest is tortured by problems as unlike those which baffle Hamlet or Brutus as the simple peasant-world by the solemn fjord-side is unlike the Machiavellian court of Elsinore or the imperial pomp of Rome. But the entire contrast of colour and setting throws the inner affinity into relief. The fatal flaw in each is rooted in that which makesnim'greatr Hamlet's power of resolve is d eplete d by the restless discursiveriess..of his intellect : Brand's failure in sympathetic insight hangs tog ether w ith his peremptory self-assertion. And Harriet, above all the other great tragic INTRODUCTION Ixxix characters of literature, is drawn with that profound and intimate personal sympathy, blended with clear perception of defect, which we have recognised in Brand. In him also, as a century of critical warfare abundantly witnesses, there is the apparent ambiguity which that blending of apparently opposite standpoints is likely to produce. Unless appearances wholly deceive, Shakespeare drew in Hamlet the triumph of impulses which agitated without dominating his own nature ; and it may be that he could have adopted the significant words in which Ibsen, some years after the completion of Brand, wrote of it to a friend : ' Brand came about as the result of something I had lived through, ... I felt it necessary to free myself through poetic forms from something which I had inwardly done with.'i It is just this struggle with a deep- rooted and passionate impulse of which he saw the limitations that explains the ambiguity of Brand. Whatever its tragic quality, however, Brand has no pretensions to compact dramatic struc- 1 Laura Kieler, Silhouetter (1887), p, 10; quoted by HalTorsen. Norsk. Forf.-lex. u.s. Ixxx INTRODUCTION ture. Its ' plot ' is a series of stories connected by a single thread, the pervading personality of Brand himself. Long intervals of time separate the various incidents ; Agnes meets Brand a stranger in the First Act : in the last, the grave of his wife and child is already green. The First Act is a brilliant overture rather than a commencement of the actual business of the poem. The Third and Fourth Acts can be detached, without grave violence, from the larger story of which they contain the tragic crisis. And the Fifth Act, a third of the whole in bulk, is again a small drama in itself, the development of a social uprising through all its phases from triumph to collapse. Several of the scenes consist of prolonged discussions which leave little trace upon the subsequent action, and deal with topics not invariably exciting in themselves. Yet, in spite of all this, the poem has an intense and continuous interest. No competent reader of the original is likely to lay it down at any point with ease ; and its arresting power is happily of a kind which the dullest of translators cannot wholly stifle, nor the most daring dissipate. One suspects at times that Ibsen has deliberately INTRODUCTION Ixxxi strewn his course with obstacles in order to triumph over them. His wonderful command of dramatic motive makes his most purely theoretic collo quies in teresting. A by no means very patient audience has been held by the long discussion de rebus divinis in the First Act. And when was a dispute, twenty pages long, over the question of building a church, or a workhouse, made more instinct with dramatic movement, more alive with wit and humour, than is the central scene of Act IV. 1 Such scenes, with all their prodigal and various power, may be reckoned mere tows de force. But how many others there are which derive their power from the simplest and strongest human emotions, — the passion of the mother for the child, of the husband for the wife ; or which appeal to instincts as simple, and only a little less strong, — the delight in daring, the inborn sympathy with greatness which no cynicism wholly quells, the cry of joy which is evoked from the ' sleeping poet in man ' by the bold effort to make life 'a poem,' not mechanically evolved by the stress of petty needs, but heroically hewn and shaped by passion and will. The stirring scene which / ixxxii Introduction opens the Second Act must appeal in a measure to readers who find neither truth nor savaui- in Brand's ideas. The scenes which close the Third and the Fourth Act are surely among the most poignant Jn the whole range of drama. XI And the student of the original is at once arrested by the singular richness and power of the language and of the rhythmic form. The literary influences which surrounded Ibsen's early manhood had told mainly in the direc- tion of bold, brilliant expression, of choice and polished verse. When he began his career at Christiania, as a shy, struggling provincial, in 1851, the great masters in vogue had all grown up in or been profoundly influenced by the Romantic school; and the traces of the Romantic ideals, ' fancy and irony,' were every- where visible, in the cultivation of a rich and scintillating style, in wilful alternations of pathos and wit. At home there were "Werge- land and Welhaven; the one an impetuous revolutionary, discharging torrents of dis- orderly but often splendid eloquence 'shot INTRODUCTION Ixxxiii through with lightning-gleams of thought,' ^ the other a clear-rainded artist, chiselling his marble verse slowly towards perfect form. To Wergeland, as has been well said, a poem was a product of inspiration : to Welhaven the ex- pression of ' a great clearness in the soul.' Neither had a trace of dramatic genius (though only Welhaven was quite aware of the fact), but both in their several ways were masters of a poetey of seductive brilliance. In Denmark, there was a group of accomplished poets, disciples of the German Eomantics, inferior to them in intellectual range, but, as Brandes has justly insisted, superior in form, — Oehlen- schlager, Baggesen, Paludan-Miiller, Heiberg. Finally, there was Young Germany, with its fer- menting, revolutionary, unclear spirit embalmed in the poetry and prose of Heine. The influence of Heine was dominant with Ibsen's first literary associates, — the young poets Paul Botten Hansen and A. 0. Vinje, who in 1851 joined him in editing the journal Manden. Vinje's Ferdaminni, as already hinted, is a kind of Norwegian Beisebilder, not less rich in poetry than Heine's, if poorer in wit. Among ^ Lassen, IT. Wergeland, p. 84. Ixxxiv INTRODUCTION Hansen's principal contributions were an essay on ' Young Grermany,' and a novel, Norske Mysterier, the style of which, ' thridded svith biting and disintegrating reflection, and scat- tered with allusions and quotations,' ^ is palpably Heinesque. To both these friends Ibsen owed much. In the next decade both the Comedy of Love and Peer Gynt were to bear striking traces of Hansen's most notable work, also contributed to Manden, — 'The Witch-bridal' (Suldrebryllupet).^ It has even been described as 'standing in a prototypic relation ' to Peer Chjnt.^ A precursor of Styver, the copying-clerk in the Comedy of Love, lias been found in Hansen's Jurist Karlsen. The sarcastic rhymes and voluble rhythms of Peer Gynt have also a palpable analogue in Hansen's play ; and Ibsen even quotes one of his friend's couplets in his own text.* 1 Daae, P. Botten Hansen, p. 14. 2 This little drama has a signal interest as a link between Peer Oynt and Faust, not hitherto noticed, so far as I know, by any English critic. A palpably Mephistophelean figure, Mester Hurtig, is the mouthpiece of cynicisms which re- appear in Peer. 8 Nordish Conv. Lex. i. 384, * Hansen's epigram : 'thi Kjserligheden gjdr Petrarker, som I'ffl og Ladhed Patriarker. ' Cf. Kjcerlighedens Kom. p. 23. INTRODUCTION Ixxxv Ibsen had thus grown up in a school which on all hands fostered daring fancy, piquant mixture of grave and gay, striking and telling form. The whole scheme of Brand as a satiric tragedy exempliiies the second, its verse from beginning to end the third, and its poetic speech the first. ' I wanted a verse in which I could career where I would {frd mntwmneln), as on horse- back,' Ibsen said to the present writer in the course of a discussion. And in his hands the common four-beat verse does indeed develop a versatilifc ji-for which neither Scott nor Byron nor Butler nor Coleridge in the least prepares us. The nearest analogue is Browning's Christmas Eve and Easter Day, with its similar intefcfianges from homely realism to the dizziest heights of imaginative ecstasy. The immense wealth of Norwegian in double rhymes greatly adds to the flexibility of the measure. English has not very many rhymes which can be used in serious verse without risk of ruin in either th o. Scylla^ jiLthe grot- esque or the Charybdis of the namby-pamby. But the Norwegian double-rhyme caii^Be witty and epigrammatic, or sonorous and rhetorical, Ixxxvi INTRODUCTION or Jilting ajOLA-pathetic, No doubt the use of rhyme of any kind in the dialogue of high- wrought passion is a violation of English dramatic tradition, — a shock to the faith in which most of us were brought up, that Dryden's vindication of rhymed tragedy was an essential blunder in principle, a gratuitous desertion of the one true way which Shakespeare once for all had shown. But Shakespeare's royal road was not necessarily the best for all r^f eet. No student of Calde ron wo uld willingly detach the passion of his Herod and Mariene or of the Alcalde de Zalamea from the wonder- ful flights of on-rushing rhymes by which it is sped along. Had Victor Hugo been other- wise capable of writing Lear, we might have found that world-tragedy not unworthily clad in the magniiicent Alexandrine of the Ligende des Slides. And, in a lowlier sphere, the stern, simple, penetrating pathos and passion of many an old Danish and Swedish ballad forcibly suggests the question : Why should not tragic drama avail itself of the forms traditionally consecrated to the record of all that stirred the popular heart, 'familiar matters of to-day,' as well as 'battles long ago'? INTRODUCTION Ixxxvii This question the Spaniards had answered by building up their whole drama out of the rhythms of their 'Romances.' The German Romantics had enthusiastically imitated them, and the Dane Heiberg, a gifted and versatile^ lyric poet, as well as a popular dramatist, wrote an entire drama — Dristigt vovet halv er mn- det — in Calderonesque measures and style. Ibsen read no Spanish, and was probably not much affected by Heiberg's example, though he certainly knew his works. But he had been early struck by the capabilities of the ballad-form, as well as of the ballad-subject, and in his interesting and important essay ' on the heroic ballad and its value for poetic lit- erature ' ^ he explicitly proposes its use in drama. ' The heroic ballad is the one form of literature which has remained alive in the popular consciousness. ... If a new subject is to appeal to the people, it must in some degree be old, must not be invented but re- sumed. ... It is only through a national form that a national subject can come to its full 1 Ojb. Kjcempemsen og dens Betydning for Kunstpoesien. lUustr. Nyhedsblad, 1857, Nos. 19, 20. Some portions of it are quoted by Jaeger (Eng. tr. p. 91). Ixxxviii INTRODUCTION rights.' A ballad was the most favourable kind of material for the dramatist, and the liberties allowed by its facile rhythm were of immense value in (&amatiws a game- And hark, ai song out of their laughter ! [EiNAR and Agnes, in light summer dress, both of them warm a/ad glowing, come playing across the level. The m/ist is gone ; a bright swmmer morning lies on the mountains.] BRAND BlNAE. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, Playfully shalt thou be caught ! I am weaving a net, and its meshes fine Are all of my music wrought ! Agnes \ianamg baekwa/rds and always eluding him']. And am I a butterfly, dainty and slight, Let me sip of the heather-bell blue, And art thou a boy, let me be thy sport, But oh ! not thy captive too ! ElKAE. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, I have woven my meshes so thin. And never availeth thy fluttering flight. Soon art thou my captive within. Agnbs. And am I a butterfly young and bright. Full joyously I can play. But if in thy net I a captive lie Oh, touch not my wings, I pray ! ElNAR. Nay, I will lift thee with tender hand. And lock thee up in my breast. And there thou shalt play thy whole life long At the game thy heart loves best. , [They have unwittingly approached a sheer precipice, and are now close to the edge!] BRAND 13 Brand \(MO,i dovm to themj. Hold ! hold ! You stand by an abyss ! ElNAR. Who calls us ? Agnes [pointing itp]. See! Brand. Heed where you go I Your feet are on the hollow snow That overhangs a precipice. EiNAR [clasping her, and laughing up to Brand.] Needless for her and me your fears ! Agnes. We have a whole life long to play ! ElNAR. In sunshine lies our destined way, And ends but with a hundred years. Brand. And then you perish ? So ! Agnes [waving her veil"]. No ; then We fly to heaven and play again ! 14 BRAND EiNAK. A hundred years to revel given, Each night the bridal lamps aflame, — A century of glorious game Brajstd. And then — ? EiNAR. Then home again to heaven,— Brand. Aha ! so THAT is whence you came ? EiNAR. Of course ; how should we not come thence ? Aqnbs. That is, our very latest flight Is from the valley, eastward hence. Brand. I think I saw you on the height. EiNAR. Ay, it was there on those loved faces Even but now we look'd our last. And with clasp'd hands, kisses, embraces Seal'd aU our tender memories fast ! Come down to us, and I will tell How God's been good beyond compare — And you shall all our gladness share 1 Pooh, stand not like an icicle ! Come, thaw now ! There, I like you so. First, I 'ro a painter, you must know, BRAND 15 And even this to me was sweet, — To lend my fancy wings and feet, In colours to bid life arise. As He of grubs breeds butterflies. But God surpass'd Himself when He My Agnes gave me for my bride ! I came from travels over sea, My painter's satchel at my side Agnes \eage.rly\. Glad as a king, and fresh, and free, — And knew a thousand songs beside ! ElNAB. Just as the village I pass'd through, She chanced to dwell an inmate there. She long'd to taste the upland air, 'The scented w oods, the sun, the dew ; Mb tjpd unto the mountains drew, — My heart cried out : Seek Beauty's might In forests dim and rivers bright And flying clouds beneath the blue. — Then I achieved my height of art : A rosy flush upon her cheek. Two joyous eyes that seem'd to speak, A smUe whose music filled the heart — Agnes. For you, though, aU that art was vain, You drank life's beaker, blind and rapt, And then, one sunny morn, again Stood, staff in hand and baggage strapp'd — l6 BRAND EiNAR. Then suddenly the thought oocurr'd : ' Why, friend, the wooing is forgot ! ' Hurrah ! I ask'd, she gave her word, And all was settled on the spot. Our good old doctor, like a boy, Was all beside himself with joy ; So three whole days, and whole nights three, Held revelry for her and me ; Mayor and constable, clerk and priest, — AH the grown youth was at the feast. Last night we left, but not for that The revel or the banquet ceased ; With banner'd pole and wreathed hat, Up over bank, on over brae. Our comrades brought us on our way. Agnes. The mountain-side we danced along. In couples now, and now in groups, — BiNAR. Drank luscious wine from silver stoups, — Agnes. Awoke the summer night with song, — EiNAK. And the thick mist before our_feet Beat an obsequiousjaiaieftite"^ Brand. And now your way lies — ? Before us. BRAND 17 EiNAR. To the town Agnes. To my parents' home. , EiNAR. First over yonder peak, then down To the fjord haven in the west ; On Egir's courser through the foam Kide homeward to the bridal feast, — So to the sumiy south together Like paired swans in their first flight 1 Brand. And there- ElNAR. A life of summer weather, A dream, a legend of delight. For on this Sabbath morn have we. High on the hills, without a priest, From fear and sorrow been released And consecrate to gaiety. Brand. By whom ? BiNAR. By all the merry crowd. With ringing glasses every cloud Was banish'd that might dash the leaves Too rudely at our cottage eaves. B iS BRAND Out of our speech they put to flight Each warning word, of stormy showers, And haU'd us, garlanded with flowers, The true-born children of Delight. Brand [g-omg']. Farewell, ye two. EiNAR [starting and looking more closely at Aim]. I pray you, hold ! Something familial in your face Brand [coldly]. I am a stranger. EiNAB. Yet a trace Surely there lingers of an old Friend of my school-days— Brand. School-friends, true ; But now I am no more a boy. Einar. Can it be ? [Cries out suMenly'\ Brand ! It is ! joy I Brand. From the first moment I knew tou. BRAND 19 EiNAK. Well met ! a thousand times well met ! Look at me ! — Ay, the old Brand yet, Still centred on the things within, Whom never any one could win To join our gambols. Brand. You forget That I was homeless and alone. Yet you at least I loved, I own. You chUdren of the southern land Were fashion'd of another clay Than I, born by a rocky strand In shadow of a barren brae. EiNAR Your- home is here, I think ? Brand. My way Lies past it. EiNAE. Past? What, further? Brand. Far Beyond, beyond my home. ElNAR. You are A priest ? Brand \mM'mg\. A mission-preacher, say. I wander like the woodland haTfi,_ And where I am, my home is there. BRAND EiNAR. And whither is your last resort ? Brand \sUr'nly and quickly]. Inquire not ! ElNAR. Wherefore 1 Braud [changing his tone]. Ah, — then know, The ship that stays for you below Shall bear me also from the port. EiNAR. Hurrah ! My bridal-courser true 1 Think, Agnes, he is coming too 1 Brand. But / am to a burial bound. AaNEs. A BURIAL ? EiNAE. You ? Why, who is dead ? Brand. The God who was tour God, you said. Agnes [shrinking 6acfc]. Come, Einar ! EiNAR. Brand ! BRAND 21 Brand. WitltJseieiafia^jTOund The God of each mechanic slave, Of each dull drudger, shall be laid By broad day in his open grave. End of the matter must be made ; And high time is it you should know He aU'd a thousand years ago. EiNAE. Brand, you are Ul ! Brand. No, sound and fresh As juniper and mountain-pine ! It is our age whose pining flesh Cravesjairial at these hands of mine, 'ffewill but laugh and love and play, A little doctrine take on trust, And all the bitter burden thrust On One who came, ye have been told, And from youi shoulders took away Your great transgressions manifold. He bore for you the cross, the lance-r-. Ye therefore have full leave to dance ; Dance then, — but where your dancing ends Is quite another thing, my friends 1 EiNAE. Ah, I perceive, the latest cry. That folks are so much taken by. You come of the new brood, who hold Tbat^life''israLly gUded mould, AnHTwith God's penal fires aid flashes Hound all the world to sack and ashes. BJRAND Brand. No, I am no 'Evangelist,' I speak not as the Church's priest ; That I 'm a Christian, even, I doubt ; That I 'm a man, though, I know well, And that I see the cancer fell That eats our country's marrow out. EiNAR \smnlmg\, I never heard, I must confess, Our country tax'd with being given'' To worldly pleasure in excess ! Brand. No, by delight no breast is riven ; — Were it but so, the iU wereless ! Be passion's slave, be pleasure's thrall, — But be it utterly, all in all ! ""~-~— ^°" Be not to-day, to-morrow, one, Another when a year is gone ; Be what you are with all your heart. And not by pieces and in part. The Bacchant 's clear, defined, complete, The sot, h is sordid counterfeit ; Silenus charms ; but all his graces The drunkard's parody debases. Traverse the land from beach to beach, Try evS^ man in heart and soul. You '11 find he has no virtue whole. But just a little grain of each. BRAND 23 A little pious in the pew, A little grave, — his fathers' way, — Over the cup a little gay, — It was his fathers' fashion too ! A little warm when glasses clash. And stormy cheer and song go round For the small Folk, rock-will'd, rock-hound, That never stood the scourge and lash. A Uttle free in promise-making ; And then, when vows in liquor wiU'd Must be in mortal stress fulfiU'd, A little fine in promise-breaking. Yet, as I say, all fragments still, His faults, his merits, fragments all. Partial iu good, partial in ilL Partial in great things and in small ; — But here 's the grief — that, worst or best, Bach fragment of him wrecks the rest ! EiNAR. Scoffing 's a n easy task : it were A nobler policy to spare—: — Brand. Perhaps, if it were wholesome too. BiNAR. Well, well, the indictment I endorse With all my heart ; but can't divine What in the world it has to do With Him, the God you count a corse, Whom yet I still acknowledge mine. 24 BRAND Brand. My genial friend, your gift is Art ; — Show me the God you have a yerr'd. Him you have painted, I have heard, And touch'd the honest people's heart. Old is he haply ; am I right ? EiNAB. Well, yes Brand. Of course ; and, doubtless, white ? Hairs straggling on a reverend head, A beard of ice or silver-thread ; Kindly, yet stern enough to fright A pack of children in the night. I will not ask you, if your God With fireside slippers you have shod ; But 'twere a pity, without doubt. To leave skuU-oap and glasses out. EiNAR \cm,grily\. What do you mean ? y^ Brand. I do not flout ; Just so he looks in form and face, The household idol of our race. As Catholics make of the Redeemer A baby at the breast, so ye Make God a dotaxd and a dreamer. Verging on second infancy. And as the Pope on Peter's throne Calls little but his keys his own. BRAND So to the Church ye would confine The world-wide realm of the Divine ; 'Twixt Life and Doctrine set a sea, Nowise concern yourselves to be ; Bliss for your souls ye would receive, Not utterly and wholly live. Ye need, such feebleness to brook, A God who '11 through his fingers look. Who, like yourselves, is hoary grown, And keeps a cap for his bald crown. Mine is another kind of God ! Mine is a storm, where thine 's a lull. Implacable where thine 's a nlnd^ ■ All-loving there, where thine is dull ; And He is young like Hercules, No hoary sipper of life's kgs! His voice rang through the oazzIeJnight When He, within the burning wood, By Moses upon Horeb's height As by a pigmy's^pigmy stood. In Gibeon's vale He stay'd the sun, And wonders without end has done. And wonders without end would do. Were not the age grown sick, — like you ! EiNAR \smiU,ihg fa,intl'ij\. And now the age shall be made whole 1 Brand. It shall, I say, and that as sure As that I came to earth to cure The sapping fester of its soul. 26 BRAND EiNAB \shakvn,g his head]. Ere yet the radiant torchlight blazes, Throw not the taper to the ground ! Nor blot the antiquated phrases Before the great new words be found ! Brand. Nothing that 's new do I demand ; For Everlasting Right I stand. It is not for a Church I cry, It is not dogmas I defend ; Day dawn'd on both, and, possibly, Day may on both of them descend. What 's made has ' finis ' for its brand ; Of moth and worm it feels the flaw, And then, by nature and by law, Is for an embryo thrust aside. But there is One that shall abide ; — The Spirit, that was never bom, That in the world's fresh gladsome Mom Was rescued when it seem'd forlorn. That built with valiant faith a road Whereby from Flesh it climb'd to God. Now but in shreds and scraps is dealt The Spirit we have faintly felt ; But from these scraps and from these shreds, These headless hands and handless heads. These torso-stumps of soul and thought, A Man complete and whole shall grow, And God His glorious child shall know, His heir, the Adam that He wrought ! BRAND 27 EiNAR \bre,akmg off\. Farewell. I judge that it were Ijest We parted. Brand. You are going west, I northward. To the fjord from here Two pathways lead, — hoth alike near. Farewell 1 EiNAR. Farewell. Brand \tuniing round again]. Light learn to part From vapour. — Know that Life 's an art ! EiNAR [waving him off]. Go, turn the universe upside down ; StiU in my ancient God I trust ! Brand. Good ; paint his crutches and his crown, — I go to lay him iu the dust ! [Disappea/rs over the pass.] [EiNAR goes silently to the edge a/nd loohs after him.] Aqnes [stcmds a moment lo'st in thought ; then starts, looks about hir uneasily, and asks] Is the sun set already '! 28 BRAND EiNAB. Nay, A shadowing cloud ; and now 'tis past. Agnes. The wind is cold ! EiNAR. Only a blast That hurried by. Here lies our way. Agnes. Yon mountain southward, sure, till now. Wore not that black and beetling brow. EiNAR. Thou saw'st it not for game and glee Ere with his cry he startled thee. Let him pursue his toilsome track. And we will to our gambols back ! Agnes. No, now I 'm weary. EiNAR. And indeed I 'm weary too, to tell the truth, — And here our footing asks more heed Than on yon upland broad and smooth. But once we 're on the level plain We 'U dance defiantly once more, Ay, in a tenfold wilder vein And tenfold swifter than before BRAND 29 See, Agnes, yon Uue line that sparkles, Fresh from the young sun's morning kiss. And now it dimples and now darkles. Silver one moment, amber t hia-; It is the ocean glad and free That in the distance thou dost see. And seest thou the smoky track In endless line to leeward spread ? And seest thou the point of black Just rounding now the furthest head ? It is the steamer — thine and mine — And now it speeds into the fjord. Then out into the foaming bjjjie — ^ ' To-night with thee and me on board ! — The mists have veil'd the mountain brow — Saw'st thou how vividly, but now. Heaven's image in the water woke 1 Agnes Rooking absently about her]. Oh, yes. But teU me — sawest thou ? EiNAB. What? AONBS \in a hushed voice, without loohmg at him]. How he tower'd as he spoke 1 [She goes dovm over the pass, 'Eis An follows.] 30 BRAND \A path along the ciags, with a wild valley beyond, to the right. ^tSroepemii beyond the mountain, are glimpses of greater heights, with peales and snow."] Brand [comes up along the path, descends, stops half-way upon a jutting crag, and gazes into the valley], les, 1 know myself once more ! Every boat-house by the shore, Every home ; the landslip-fall, And the inlet's fringe of birch, And the ancient, moulder'd church, And the river ald£rs,_aE From my boyhood I recall But methinks it all has grown Grayer, smaller than I knew ; Yon snow-co rnice h angs more prone Than of oldTt usedTo do. From that scanty heaven encloses Yet another strip of blue, Beetles, looms, immures, imposes — Steals of light a lalgerdue. [Sits down and gazes into the distance.] And the fjord too. Crou^dit then In so drear and deep a den 1 "lis a squall.... A square-rigg'd skiff Scuds "before it to the land. Southward, shadoVd by the cliff, I descry a wharf, a shed, TEenJ^ai-farm-house, painted red. — 'Tis the farm beside the strand ! BRAND 31 'Tis the widow's farm. The home Of my childhood. Thronging come Memories born of memories dead. I, where yonder breakers roll, Grew, a lonely infant-soul. Like a nightmare on my heart Weighs the burden of my birth. Knit to one, who walks apart With her spirit set to earth. All the high einprise_that stirr'd In me, now is veil'd and b luyr'd. _ Force and valour from me fail, Heart and soul grow faint and frail ; As I near my home, I change, To my very self grow strange — Wake, as baffled Samson woke. Shorn and fetter'd, tamed and broke. \Looks again down into the valley.'] What is stirring down below ? Out of every garth they flow. Troops of children, wives and men. And in long lines meet and mingle. Now among the rocks and shmgle."— ...^^ Vanish, now emerge again ; — To the ancient Church they go. [Bises.] Oh, I know you, through and through I Sluggard spirits, souls of lead ! All the Lord's Prayer, said by you, Is not with such anguish sped. By such passion borne on high, 32 BRAND That one tittle thrills the sky As a ringing human cry, Save the prayer for daUy bread ! That 's this people's battle-call, That 's the blazon of them all ! From its context pluok'd apart, Branded deep in every heart — There it lies, the tempest-tost Wreckage of the Faith you 've lost. Forth ! out of this stifling pit ! Vault-like is the air of it ! Not a Flag may float unfurl'd In this dead and vindless world ! [Be is going ; a atone is thrown ^rom above cmd rolls down the slope close by him.] Brand [calling upward]. Ha ! who throws siones there ? Gerd [a girl of fifteen, running along the crest with stones in her apron']. Ho ! Good aim ! He screams ! [She throws again.] Brand. HuUo, child, stop that game ! Gerd. Without a hurt he 's sitting now. And swinging on a wind-swept bough ! BRAND 33 [She throws agam, and screams.] Now fierce as ever he 's makiiig for me. Help ! Hoo ! With claws he '11 rend and gore me ! Bkaitd. In the Lord's name ! Gerd. Whist ! who are you 1 Hold still, hold still ; he 's flying Brand. Who? Gerd. Didn't you see the falcon fly ? Brand. Here? no. Gerd. The laidly fowl with crest Thwart on its sloping brow depress'd, And red-and-yeHow-circled eye ! Brand. Which is your way ? Gerd. To church I go. Brand. Then we can go along togethen Gerd [pointing upward]. We 1 But the way I 'm bound is thither. <5 34 BRAND Beand [ pomtvng downwa/rd\. But yonder is the church, you know ! Gbed [pointing doumward with a scornful smile]. That yonder ? Brand. Tfuly ; come with me. Gerd. No ; yon is ugly. Brand. Ugly? Why? Gerd. Because it 's small. Brand. Where did you see A greater ? Gerd. I could tell you, I. Faiewell. [She turns away upwa/rds.] Brand. Lies THERE that church of yours ? Why, that way leads but to the moors. Gerd. Come with me, you ; I Ve got to show A church that 's built of ice and snow I Brand. Of ice and snow ! I see the truth ! BRAND 35 There, amid peat and precipice As I remember from my youth, There yawns a cayerafl u&Abyss ; ' Ice-church' they call'd the place of old ; And of it many a tale was told ; A fcozenJajaLhas paved the floor ; Aloft, in massy-pUed blocks, The gather'd snow-drifts slope and soar Arch-like over the yawning rocks. GrEED. It seems a mountain cleft, — ah, yes. It is a church, though, none the less. Beaud. Never go there ; a sudden gust Has often crack'd that hoUow crust ; A rifle-shot, a scream, a whoop Geed [without listenmg to Aim]. Just come and see a reindeer troop Gulf' d in the fall, and never found Till spring and the great thaw came round. Beand. Yonder is danger ; go not near it ! Geed [pointing down]. Yonder is foulness ; thou must feax it ! BUAIfD. God's peace with you ! 36 BRAND Gerd. Nay, this way pass ! Yonder the cataract's singing Mass ; There on the crags the whistling weather Preaches you Eof and "cold together. Thither the hawk will ne'er steal in ; Down, down he sweeps from Svartetind, — Yonder he sits, the ugly block, Like my church-steeple's weathercock. Brand. WUd is thy way, and wild thy soul, — A cittern wi th a shatter'd bowL Of dWness dulness is the brood, — But evil 's lightly won to good. Gbrd. With whirring wings I hear him come ! I '11 e'en make shift to get me home ! In yonder church I'm safe, — farewell ; — He 's on me, — hoo, how fierce and fell ! [SAe s