THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 DISCARDED 
 
 GIFT OF 
 Robert M. Adame
 
 ROBERT MARTIN ADAMS 
 
 CORNELL UNiVRSlTY
 
 'Cbc Dilettante Xtbran?, 
 
 i. DANTE AND HIS IDEAL. By HERBERT BAVNES, 
 M.R.A.S. With a Portrait 
 
 a. BROWNING'S MESSAGE TO HIS TIKES. By 
 Dr. EDWARD BERDOE. With a Portrait and Fac- 
 simile Letters. 
 
 3, 4. TEE DOCTOR, AND OTHER POEMS. By T. 
 E. BROWNE, M.A., of Clifton College, Author of 
 " Fo'c's'le Yarns." a vols. 
 
 5. GOETHE. By OSCAK BROWNING, M.A. With a 
 
 Frontispiece. 
 
 6. DANTE. By OSCAR BROWNING, M.A. With a 
 
 Frontispiece. 
 
 Not. 5 and 6 are enlarged from the articles in the 
 " Entycloftedia Britanttica." 
 
 7. BROWNING'S CRITICISM OF LIFE. By W. F. 
 
 REVELL, Member of the London Browning Society. 
 
 8. HENRIE IBSEN. By the REV. PHILIP H. WICK- 
 
 STEED, M.A.
 
 HENRIK IBSEN.
 
 ;ffs
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 DEALING CHIEFLY WITH HIS METRICAL 
 WORKS. 
 
 'BY 
 
 PHILIP H. IwiCKSTEED, M.A. 
 I _ 
 
 AUTHOR OF " DANTE : SIX SERMONS," " THE ALPHABET OF ECONOMIC 
 SCIENCE," ETC., ETC. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO 
 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAN & CO 
 
 1892
 
 PT 
 
 V 
 
 TEo 
 
 THESE STUDIES ARE DEDICATED 
 
 IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF HER UNWEARIED ZEAL 
 
 IN HELPING E1IGLISH VISITORS TO ENJOY AND TO APPRECIATE 
 
 NORWAY AND HER POETS.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 
 
 IT is the special purpose of these Lectures (originally 
 delivered in the Chelsea Town Hall) to call attention 
 to a part- of Ibsen's work which is still very little known 
 in England ; and so to help towards the formation of 
 a larger and calmer judgment of him than is at present 
 common. 
 
 The atmosphere of controversy is hostile to a wise 
 and fruitful appreciation ; and a " cult " is always 
 annoying to those who do not join in it, and generally 
 hurtful to those who do. It must surely be the desire 
 of all, who are free from passion, to escape from the 
 forced and unnatural polemics which seem to be an 
 unhappy necessity laid upon us when we meet with 
 anything to which we are not accustomed. And surely 
 the time is not now distant when we may be allowed
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 to admire Ibsen without striking an attitude, and may 
 pass him by (if we do not care for him) without 
 making a grimace. 
 
 In the hope of helping forward this consummation, 
 I address myself particularly, though not, of course, 
 exclusively, to that large class of readers who have 
 themselves seen nothing specially admirable in Ibsen, 
 but yet are not content to dismiss his admirers as the 
 victims of a wanton caprice or a morbid love of 
 things hateful. 
 
 I do not wish to make anyone read Ibsen who does 
 not like him ; but I shall be glad if I can help candid 
 readers, who have not been drawn to him, to under- 
 stand, at least in part, what there is in him that attracts 
 others. 
 
 The whole of the first, and a great part of the third, 
 of these Lectures have already appeared in the 
 "Contemporary Review," and are reprinted by the 
 kind permission of the Editor.
 
 PREFACE. XI 
 
 The details as to Ibsen's biography are drawn 
 entirely from H. Jaeger's book. 1 
 
 The translations from Ibsen, in this volume, (such 
 as they are), are my own. I append, for comparison, 
 metrical translations of three passages given in the 
 text. The first and third are from a MS. of Prof. 
 Herford's, and the second is from Mr. Archer's pub- 
 lished translation of " Kongsemnerne." They will 
 partly indicate how much has been sacrificed in 
 adopting prose as the vehicle for rendering Ibsen's 
 lyrics. 
 
 Finally, though I make no pretensions to a close 
 and scholarly knowledge of the Dansk-Norsk language, 
 I have reason to hope that few, if any, serious blunders 
 will be found in my translations; for they have been 
 very carefully and conscientiously revised by Froken 
 Kirstine Thaning of Copenhagen, to whom I am glad 
 
 1 "Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1888." An English version of 
 the German translation of this work has been executed 
 by Miss Bell.
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 to have this opportunity of tendering my sincerest 
 
 thanks. 
 
 P. H. W. 
 
 BRAND ON DARKNESS. 
 (See pp. 10, 11.) 
 
 Two thoughts in boyhood broke upon me, 
 And spasms of laughter in me woke ; 
 
 And from our ancient school-dame won me 
 Many a just and bitter stroke. 
 
 An Owl, I fancied, scared by Night ; 
 
 A Fish that had the water-fright ; 
 
 I sought to banish them ; in vain, 
 
 They clung like leeches to my brain. 
 
 Whence rose that laughter in my mind ? 
 
 Ah, from the gulf, dimly divined, 
 
 Between the living world we see 
 
 And the world as it ought to be, 
 
 Between enduring what we must 
 
 And murmuring, It is unjust ! 
 
 Ah, whole or sickly, great and small 
 Such owls, such fishes, are we all. 
 Born to be tenants of the deep, 
 Born to be exiles from the sun, 
 This, even this, does us appal ;
 
 PREFACE. Xlii 
 
 We dash against the beetling steep, 
 Our starry-vaulted home we shun, 
 And crying to heaven, bootless pray 
 For air, and the glad flames of day ! 
 
 MARGRETE'S CRADLE SONG. 
 (See p. 16.) 
 
 Now roof and rafters blend with 
 the starry vault on high ; 
 now flieth little Hakon 
 on dream-wings through the sky. 
 
 There mounts a mighty stairway 
 from earth to God's own land ; 
 there Hakon with the angels 
 goes climbing, hand in hand, 
 
 God's angel-babes are watching 
 thy cot, the still night through ; 
 God bless thee, little Hakon, 
 thy mother watcheth too. 
 
 EINAR AND AGNES. 
 (See pp, 32, 33.) 
 
 Einar. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, 
 
 Playfully shalt thou be caught ; 
 I am weaving a net, and the meshes fine 
 Are all of my music wrought.
 
 XIV PREFACE. 
 
 Agnes. And am I a butterfly, dainty and small, 
 
 Let me sip of the heatherbell blue ; 
 And art thou a boy, let me be thy sport, 
 But, oh ! not thy captive too ! 
 
 Einar. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, 
 
 I have woven my meshes so thin, 
 And never availeth thy fluttering flight, 
 Soon art thou my captive within. 
 
 Agnes. 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 ! 
 
 Einar. 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 !
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 r- LECTURE I. -THE POEMS. 
 
 IBSEN is a poet. His admirers claim for him that he 
 is a great deal more ; but they base the claim upon 
 works which seem to those who are not his admirers 
 to establish a great deal less. I shall be content if in 
 this lecture I can give my hearers some of the materials 
 for a judgment on Ibsen's claim to the name of poet, 
 and, at the same time, point out sundry clues to the 
 meaning of his later writings which may be found in 
 his early poems. 
 
 But I must ask you to remember one thing which 
 indeed there is little danger of your forgetting namely, 
 that if Ibsen is a poet, I am none. The poems I shall 
 try to put before you will be robbed of the splendour 
 and depth of their colouring, and shorn of their rhyme, 
 they will have the pulsations of their metre tamed, 
 and, as far as form is concerned, will be but a mockery 
 of themselves. Yet, even so, I think they may be 
 
 A
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 trusted, and without further preface I will introduce 
 Ibsen's early 
 
 ARCHITECTURAL SCHEMES. 
 
 I remember as distinctly as if it had been this very 
 day, the night I saw my first printed poem in the paper. 
 There I sat in my den, 'midst the clouds I was puffing, 
 and smoked and dreamt in blessed self-complacency. " I 
 will build me a cloud castle. It shall gleam athwart the 
 North. Two gables shall there be there ; a great one and 
 a small. In the great one a deathless bard shall dwell ; 
 and the small one shall be a lady's bower." I thought 
 there was a glorious harmony in the conception ; but 
 afterwards some confusion crept in. As the master came 
 to his senses, the castle went clean crazy : the big gable 
 was too little, and the little one collapsed. 
 
 Many of Ibsen's poems are autobiographical, and it 
 is hardly hazardous to read into these lines (the suc- 
 cessive versions of which themselves contain a history) 
 the epitome of the author's poetic career. In those 
 days when the young apothecary was striving to make 
 good the defects of his early education, and was con- 
 scious of poetic powers struggling for utterance and 
 recognition, he probably conceived the task of the 
 poet much as other men did. Melodramatic and 
 romantic conceptions were in the air, and a " lady's 
 bower" was a quite necessary property for a rising 
 poet. But already strong elements of originality 
 manifested themselves in his ideas, and as he came to 
 his full powers he saw that the traditional motives and 
 materials of poetry were too narrow to give him scope, 
 and that " love poetry," as ordinarily understood, was
 
 THE POEMS. 
 
 to occupy no place in his mature and serious work. 
 " The big gable was too little and the little one 
 collapsed." 
 
 Brandes, the Danish critic, only repeats the testi- 
 mony of these verses when he declares that sometime, 
 in the course of the battle of his life, Ibsen had a 
 Lyric Pegasus killed under him. 
 
 Let us look amongst the ruins of the little gable for 
 a moment. Let us see if the hoof of Pegasus struck 
 the soil anywhere, and left a Hippocrene to mark the 
 spot. 
 
 GONE ! 
 
 We followed the last guests to the wicket. The night 
 wind swept away our last farewells. In ten-fold desola- 
 tion lay the garden and house in which, but now, sweet 
 tones had entranced me. It was only a festive meeting 
 before the black night-fall ; she was only one of the 
 guests and now gone ! she is gone ! 
 
 Or let us turn to the verses sent 
 
 WITH A WATERLILY. 
 
 See, my darling, what I've brought you. The flower 
 with the white wings ! Borne on the quiet stream it floated 
 dream-laden in the spring. Wouldst thou place it in its 
 home, so lay it on thy breast, my darling ; for there a 
 deep and silent wave will swell beneath its petals. Ah, 
 child, beware of the mountain tarn stream ! There is 
 danger, danger in dreaming there. The water-sprite 
 pretends to sleep and lilies play above. Child, thy 
 bosom is the mountain tarn stream. There is danger, 
 danger in dreaming there. Lilies play above and the 
 sprite pretends to sleep. 
 
 Or in a somewhat lighter vein we have
 
 IIENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 A BIRD BALLAD. 
 
 We walked one lovely day in spring to and fro in the 
 avenue ; fascinating as a riddle was the forbidden spot. 
 And the west wind was sighing, and the heaven was so 
 blue ! On the lime-tree sat a mother bird, singing to her 
 brood. And I painted poet pictures with sportive colour- 
 play ; while two brown eyes were shining, laughing, 
 and listening. And over above we could hear how they 
 laughed and whispered at us. But we we parted with 
 a sweet farewell, never to meet again. And now when I 
 wander all alone to "and fro in the avenue, I can have 
 neither rest nor peace for the little feathered folk. 
 Dame sparrow sat there and listened as we walked in 
 our innocence, and she made a poem about us and set it 
 all to music. It's in the mouth of all the birds, for, 
 under the foliage roof, every beaked songster twitters 
 of that shining day in spring. 
 
 About contemporaneous with this poem was the 
 composition of the " Gildet paa Solhaug," the brightest 
 in tone and the happiest in its catastrophe of all 
 Ibsen's plays. I will transcribe a song from it, less 
 for its own sake than in order that the one bright 
 picture in Ibsen's gallery may not be wholly unnoticed 
 here. 
 
 I wandered on the hill-side, all heavy and alone, and 
 from every bush and branch around twittered the little 
 birds. So cunningly the little songsters sang : "Now listen 
 while I tell how love doth spring ! Though oak-like 
 through long years it grows, nurtured by ponderings, 
 sorrows, and songs, yet so quick does it shoot that a 
 moment's space may fix its roots in the soil of the heart. 3 '
 
 THE POEMS. 5 
 
 These specimens must suffice as samples of Ibsen's 
 love poetry, but there is one splendid example of 
 melodrama that has borne him over all the Scandina- 
 vian countries as a popular poet, something as 
 Browning's "Pied Piper," and " How they brought the 
 good news from Ghent to Aix/' took hold of the 
 popular fancy when his more characteristic work was 
 practically unread. We do not readily think of Ibsen 
 in connection with " Penny Readings," but yet "Terje 
 Vigen," the hero of the longest of his minor poems, is 
 ideally framed to figure at those humble entertain- 
 ments. 
 
 Terje Vigen is a Norwegian sailor, who after a more 
 or less wild and wandering life marries, and finds the 
 constraints of a settled life converted into the supremest 
 happiness when a little daughter laughs up at him 
 from her cradle. But the wars of the early part of 
 this century reduce his Norwegian village to direst 
 distress. The British fleet cuts off all supplies from 
 without, and the harvest fails at home. Terje takes 
 the desperate resolve to row over to Denmark in an 
 open boat to get food for his wife and child. As he 
 returns, and is close at home, he is sighted by an 
 English man-of-war and pursued by a boat with fifteen 
 men. He rows till the blood bursts from his 
 finger nails to clear a rock two feet below the water on 
 which the heavier boat of his pursuers may strike; but 
 just as he is clearing it the English come up, and the 
 young officer raises an oar and strikes a hole in 
 Terje's boat. His three precious casks of barley are 
 lost and he is taken prisoner, to the immense delight
 
 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 of the young Englishman, who laughs at his outlandish 
 attempts to plead for his liberty and the life of his 
 dear ones, and carries him off in triumph to the man- 
 of-war. 
 
 It is years before the peace puts an end to Terje's 
 captivity, and when he returns home it is to hear that 
 " when her husband deserted her," the woman died, 
 and so did her child ; and they had a pauper burial. 
 
 Thenceforth Terje, grey-headed with the anguish he 
 has suffered, and with his neck bent as in shame, is 
 the most daring and skilful of pilots ; and on a cer- 
 tain stormy night he is summoned to the aid of a 
 distressed English yacht. He is just bringing her off 
 when he sees " my lord " with " my lady " and their 
 beautiful child. Then he lets the yacht go, declares 
 that she will not obey the helm, thrusts the three 
 with himself into a boat, rows them into quieter 
 waters, then stands erect, seizes an oar, strikes a hole 
 in the bottom of the boat, and they are all standing 
 in two feet of water far from the shore. 
 
 Then my lord cried out. "The rock gives way! It 
 can be no rock at all." But the pilot smiled. " Nay, be 
 sure of that ! A sunken boat and three barley casks are 
 the rock that bears, us now." Then swept the memory of 
 a half-forgotten deed like a lightning flash o'er the 
 Englishman's face, as he knew the sailor that once knelt 
 weeping on the deck of his corvette. Then Terje Vigen 
 shouted aloud : "You held my all in your hand that day, 
 and for glory you squandered it all. One moment more 
 and revenge will have come." 
 
 It was then that the haughty Englishman bent his
 
 THE POEMS. 
 
 knee to the Norsk pilot. But Terje stood straight, as in 
 days of youth, as he steadied himself with the oar ; 
 through his eyes flamed out his untamed force, and his 
 hair streamed out on the wind: 
 
 "You sailed at your ease, in your great corvette, and 
 I rowed my little boat ; I was toiling for dear ones, 
 wearied to death, and you took their bread, and you 
 thought so lightly of mocking my bitter tears. Your rich 
 lady there is as bright as spring, and her hand is as soft 
 as silk ; and my wife's hand it was coarse and hard, but, 
 she was my own, my wife. Your child has golden hair 
 and blue eyes like a little guest of the Lord ; and my 
 daughter was nothing to look upon, for she God help 
 her was^sallow and lean as most poor folk's little ones 
 are. But they were the sum of my earthly wealth, they 
 were all that I called my own. They seemed such a 
 mighty treasure to me, and with you so little they 
 weighed. And now has the hour of recompense struck, 
 for you shall go through such an hour as well may balance 
 the whole long years that bowed my neck and that 
 bleached my hair, and that ran my bliss a-ground." 
 
 Then he seized the child and he swung him free, and 
 his left arm the lady clasped. 
 
 " Stand back, my lord ! One step in advance will cost 
 you your child and wife ! " 
 
 And the Briton was ready to spring to the fight, but 
 his arm fell palsied and weak ; his breath came burning, 
 his eye drooped down, and his hair as the dawning 
 showed next day turned grey in that single night. But 
 on Terje's brow there was calmness and peace, and his 
 breast was free and still, and in reverence laid he the 
 baby down, and its hands he gently kissed. And he 
 breathed as if loosed from a prison's vault, and his voice 
 came steady and calm 
 
 " Now is Terje Vigen himself again. Till now my
 
 8 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 blood flowed like a river stone-rent ; for I must, I must be 
 avenged ! . . . But now it is over ; we two are quits. 
 Your debtor has played you fair. I gave what I could ; 
 you took all I had, and now if you think you've been 
 wronged by me, then make your complaint to the Lord 
 above, for He made me the way I am." 
 
 In the end, of course, Terje brings them all safe to 
 shore, and when thanked as their preserver, points to 
 the child. It was she that saved them. 
 
 But it is time we left the common ground on which 
 Ibsen comes into comparison with so many of his 
 brethren ; for we shall find in his poems many a weird 
 foreshadowing of the motives of his later work. 
 
 Quite an early poem gives a powerful presentment 
 "of that almost passionate belief that light may be 
 found in and through darkness, alternating with ap- 
 parent acquiescence in the darkness itself, which 
 fascinates and repels the readers of the social dramas. 
 
 THE MINER. 
 
 Mine- wall ! break with crash and clang before my 
 heavy hammer-strokes. Downward must I break my 
 way till I hear the ore-stones ring. Deep in the moun- 
 tain's waste of night rich treasure beckons me, diamond 
 and precious stone, amidst the gold's red veins. And in 
 the deep is peace, peace and desolation from eternity ; 
 break me the way, my heavy hammer, to the hidden 
 mystery's heart. 1 Erst I sat, a merry boy, under the 
 heaven's host of stars, or trod the flowery way of spring, 
 
 1 Lit. "the heart-chamber of the Hidden." Compare 
 Job xxviii. with the whole poem.
 
 THE POEMS. 
 
 with child-peace for my own. But I forgot the glory of 
 day, as I turned to the midnight darkness, forgot the 
 soughing and song of the hillside in the temple arcade 
 of my mine. When first I came down hither, in inno- 
 cence of heart I deemed that the spirit of the depth would 
 read me the endless riddle of life. As yet no spirit has 
 unravelled for me what seemed to me so strange ; as yet 
 no ray has risen, gleaming upward from the ground. 
 Have I failed then ? Will my chosen way never lead me 
 through to the clear ? Yet the light blinds my eyes when 
 I seek it above. Nay, I must down into the depth ; 
 there is peace from eternity. Break me the way, my 
 heavy hammer, to the hidden mystery's heart. Hammer 
 stroke on hammer stroke, on till life's last day. No beam 
 of morning shines. No sun of hope arises. 
 
 What are we to say to this strange affinity with 
 darkness ? The shy and sensitive poet, neglected or 
 made light of by the literary coteries and the critics 
 of his day, barely able to secure his daily bread, 
 feeling as though tne light were not for him. learns to 
 love the darkness and strives to find its peace, its 
 light, its hope if it may be its peace in any case. 
 CcOi he here find the scope that seems to be denied 
 him in the world of light ? 
 
 AFRAID OF THE LIGHT. 
 
 In my schoolboy days I had pluck enough, at least 
 till the sun went down behind the mountain ridge. But 
 when the shadows of night stretched over hill and marsh, 
 then ugly hobgoblins scared me from sagas and fairy
 
 IO IIENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 tales. And no sooner did I close my eyes than I dreamt, 
 and dreamt, and dreamt, and all my pluck had left me 
 and had gone to God knows where. But now everything 
 has changed with me. Now my courage sets off on its 
 wanderings when the morning sunshine comes. Now 
 'tis the troubles of the day and the bustle of life that drip 
 all the cold horrors into my breast. I hide myself under 
 a flap of the scarecrow veil of the dark, and there all my 
 courage arms itself as eagle-bold as ever. Then I defy 
 flame and fire, I sail like a falcon in the cloud, I forget 
 all my care and woe till the next morning dawn. But 
 when the protection of night fails me I am helpless and 
 lost again. Yea, if I shall e'er do a heroic deed it must 
 needs be a deed of the dark. 
 
 Readers of " Brand " will remember how this strange 
 motive reappears there. Through all -the passion for 
 light and air that beats through the poem there runs a 
 suspicion sometimes faint and forgotten, sometimes 
 resented and fought against, sometimes felt as a crush- 
 ing and deadening weight, sometimes accepted as a 
 faith in which alone is strength and rest that man 
 was made for the peace and depth of darkness, not 
 for the glare of light, and that the longing for happi- 
 ness is but the monstrous disease of a creature sick to 
 leave its own natural element. 
 
 Two ideas [says Brand], used to drop into my mind 
 as a boy, and shake my frame with fits of laughter, and 
 get me a tanned hide when the old school-dame was out 
 of temper. I used to fancy myself an owl afraid of the 
 dark, and a fish with a horror of water. I laughed aloud 
 at the idea ; and strove to smuggle it out of my mind, but
 
 THE POEMS. II 
 
 it stuck there with tooth and claw. What was it caused 
 these bursts of laughter ? It was a confused sense of the 
 incongruity between the thing as it is and the thing as it 
 ought to be, between the fact of our having to bear and 
 our finding the burden unbearable. Almost every man 
 that walks, sick or sound, is such an owl, is such a fish. 
 Created for abysmal deeds, he should have lived with life's 
 dark depths and that is just what scares him. He spralls 
 in eager longing on the edge of the tide. He shuns his 
 own star chamber. And shrieks out for " air and the blaz- 
 ing day ! " 
 
 In the period of seething and ferment to which 
 most of the " poems " belong, we find other indications 
 that the disappointed, disillusionised, almost starving 
 poet strove in many moods to find the highest life in 
 an existence cut off from the sympathy, the apprecia- 
 tion, the expansion, the full personal utterance, that 
 seemed to be denied him. 
 
 In a poem that in the original almost freezes the 
 blood, we have a kind of prelude to Peer Gynt. 
 Ibsen makes the characteristic attempt to extract the 
 highest life out of a cynicism, driven to an extreme at 
 which the most hardened must shudder, and out of 
 the absolute death of all that most call life. Here, as 
 often elsewhere, we are left in doubt whether the con- 
 cluding lines are intended as a real solution, or only 
 as the last and bitterest satire. The hero of " On the 
 Viddes," 1 like Peer Gynt after him, strives at first to 
 
 1 A " Vidde " is a high stretch of mountain land, the 
 home of the rein-deer and bear.
 
 12 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 make good his trespasses by cheap regrets and re- 
 solutions that cost nothing. He lies high up on the 
 hill-side the night after he has parted with his be- 
 trothed ; 
 
 And thoughts they came and thoughts they went like 
 folk on church-way path ; gathered in knots and gazed 
 around, set up the judgment-seat and uttered doom, and 
 stalked in silence by. Oh were I near thee in this 
 hour, thou flower I broke yestreen, I would lay me down 
 like a faithful hound before thy garment's hem. Right 
 into thine eyes I would I float, and there would I cleanse 
 my soul ; and the trold that bewitched my soul last night 
 as I stood by thy father's gate I would smite to death in 
 scorn ! 
 
 Then glowing with the sense of victory he leaps up 
 and first offers a winged prayer to God that on all his 
 dear bride's days sunshine may ever lie ; but then as 
 the sense of strength mounts in him he prays rather 
 that her path may be hard, the river dammed when 
 she would cross, the rock slippery, the pathway steep, 
 that he may bear her on his arm across the torrent and 
 clasp her close to his breast, where God himself shall 
 not hurt her unchallenged or unresisted ! 
 
 Then on the Vidde he meets his own mysterious 
 second self in the form of a stranger who lays a spell 
 upon him that he would oft have broken if he could, 
 that he does not now even wish to break. This man, 
 with the unspoken thoughts, gleaming like the northern 
 dawn around his brow, with tears in his laughter, and 
 lips that move when he is silent, in utterance as 
 mysterious as the song of the wind through the trees,
 
 THE POEMS. 13 
 
 terrifies and fascinates him with his cold eye as un- 
 fathomable as the darkling tarn fed and clasped by the 
 bosom of the great snow-fields. Heavy thought- 
 birds sweep low over the face of this man's mind, or 
 it is torn by wild storms whereat you lower sail and 
 crouch in terror for your very life. Ever seeming to 
 stand for a wider, freer, and nobler life, and represent- 
 ing himself as an uplifting force, he gradually weans 
 our hero from all his home thoughts and longings, 
 till at last he learns to be ashamed of every old affec- 
 tion and to trample upon his own humanity as mere 
 sentimentalism. At last the freezing cynicism of 
 his other r *self has found such a lodgment that it can 
 assert itself even under the shadow of a sorrow or a 
 passion that rends his very soul. He is gazing down 
 at his mother's cottage, and a sneer from the stranger 
 has determined him never again to yield to such 
 weakness, when he sees a glow round roof and rail : 
 first it is like a cloudy dawn, then the red flame bursts 
 through. 
 
 It shone and it flamed and it crashed into ruins, and 
 I shrieked my agony into the night ; but the stranger had 
 comfort : " Why so disturbed ? I suppose it's only the old 
 house burning, with the Christmas ale and the cat ! " He 
 talked with such skill in all my woe that it well-nigh made 
 me shudder ; and he pointed out the striking effect of the 
 fiery glow as it streamed out into moonbeam's light, with 
 two-fold illumination. He looked at it through his 
 hollowed hand to secure the right perspective ; while a 
 song swept over the rock and snow, and I knew full well 
 that my mother's soul into angel hands was being given ; 
 " In stillness thou toiledst, in stillness didst bear, and went
 
 14 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 thy still way through the turmoil ; so we bear thee all 
 gently away from the earth, high o'er the Vidde to light 
 and to peace, to the joy of the Christmas in heaven ! " 
 The hunter was gone, the moon hidden in cloud, and 
 my blood was on fire and freezing. O'er the Vidde I 
 bore my anguish-load. But it can't be denied that it 
 was effective, that two-fold illumination ! 
 
 It only remains for him to feel the last pang as a 
 bridal procession goes out from another cottage, and 
 he recognises in the bride her who was to have been his. 
 
 Joy go with thee, my sweetest ! Now I have played 
 my last stake and gained a loftier outlook upon things. 
 Now I am steeled, and shall follow the summons that 
 bids me stride out o'er the mountains ! My life in the 
 valleys has been lived out. Up here on the Vidde are 
 freedom and God ! All the rest are but fumbling down 
 there. 
 
 A terrible story of bitterness and disappointment 
 may be read in such lines as these. But what sup- 
 pressed passion and intensity of life through it all, and 
 what Titanic strength ! If anyone finds in such 
 cynicism blood-curdling as I have called it mere 
 frivolity or " Leichtzinnigkeit," he mistakes a deadly 
 determination to endure for a want of sensibility. 
 Here, if ever, the words of a German admirer are 
 applicable, " Ibsen ist so furchtbar ernst." 
 
 In truth, Ibsen was in the valley of the shadow of 
 death at the period when his chief poems were 
 written. He was fightiug for his very life, both 
 literally and metaphorically. He himself associates 
 verse-writing and suffering together in a grimly
 
 THE POEMS. 15 
 
 humorous poem, which may serve to relieve us after 
 " Paa Vidderne." 
 
 THE POWER OF MEMORY. 
 
 Listen here ! Do you know how a trainer teaches 
 his bear a lesson he never forgets ? He ties the beast up 
 in a brewer's vat and they light a fire right under it. 
 Meanwhile the trainer plays, " Oh, happy, happy life ! " 
 on the barrel organ, for the bear to hear. The hairy 
 monster is almost beside himself with pain. He can't 
 stand still, so he has to dance. And ever after, as soon as 
 he hears _that tune, he's possessed by a dancing devil. I 
 myself once sat in a copper with a full accompaniment, 
 and a very respectable temperature. And on that occasion 
 I burnt myself more than skin-deep, and I don't suppose 
 I shall ever forget it. And whenever an echo of that 
 time comes over me I feel as if I were chained in a red- 
 hot copper. I know it like a thrust under the roots of the 
 nails and I can't choose but hop on my metrical feet. 
 
 But through all this period Ibsen still had a refuge 
 in an ideal world. He had begun his practical 
 dramatic career with a play founded on the darkest 
 period of Norwegian history. Then he had ascended 
 to the fourteenth century, the ballad period. Then 
 he had idealised the Viking period in a play of ex- 
 treme beauty, founded on the story of the Volsung 
 saga, and finally had dramatised the great historical 
 motives of the period following upon Harold Fair- 
 hair's unification of Norway. Would that English- 
 men could have learnt to know Ibsen first by " The
 
 16 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Vikings of Helgeland " and " The Pretenders " ! These 
 noble dramas are now accessible in translations, and 
 I will, therefore, refrain from any attempt to indicate 
 their general character and significance. But the man 
 who, in the midst of such feelings and experiences as 
 we have seen reflected in the " poems," could conceive 
 not only a Hjordis and a Skule, but a Dagny, a 
 Sigurd, a Margrete, and a Ingebjorg, had surely not 
 lost all sense of quiet beauty and tenderness, even as 
 judged by us " fumblers down here below " ! 
 
 Let us listen for one moment to Margrete's 
 u Cradle Song," before we plunge again into the deep 
 waters. 
 
 Now roof and rafter open out to the blue star-vault 
 above. With dream-wings on his shoulders, flies little 
 Haakon up. Upon the earth a ladder that reaches 
 heaven is set and little Haakon rises with angels to the top. 
 God's angels small are watching over the baby's peace ; 
 God bless thee, little Haakon, thy mother shares their 
 watch. 
 
 In King Skule, critics have agreed in recognising 
 many traits of Ibsen's own character and experiences. 
 Perhaps in his last speech we may find an indication 
 of the crisis through which the poet was now passing. 
 All his surroundings seemed to be hostile and cramp- 
 ing. He panted for life and scope. He sought 
 refuge in the great memories of the past, though with 
 an eye more and more fixed on the present. Did 
 that present really offer him a life and scope to which
 
 THE POEMS. 17 
 
 he was somehow blind? The dying Skule sees at 
 last that in the love of his wife and daughter he had, 
 and knew it not, the treasure for which he ranged 
 the world in sin and devastation. Has each man his 
 true mission close at hand, if he could but see with 
 his eyes ? Had Ibsen himself a poetic call for the 
 present rather than the past? Had he sources of 
 strength which could well enable him to defy the 
 neglect and opposition that were embittering his life ? 
 There was one already standing at his side, to whom 
 after many years he wrote his words of 
 
 THANKS. 
 
 The griefs that made rugged my way were her sorrow, 
 the spirit-beings that bore me forward were her joy. Her 
 home is out here on the ocean of freedom, where the 
 poet's bark may lie mirrored. The rank of shifting forms 
 that march with waving banners through my verse are 
 her kin. Her goal is to kindle my sight into glow, while 
 none can know who gave me the help. And just because 
 she looks not even for thanks must I sing her, and print 
 her this thankful song. 
 
 But if Ibsen was to be the poet of his own time, it 
 must be in his own way. And what that way should 
 be is again indicated in a remarkable passage in " The 
 Pretenders." 
 
 King Skule's heart is gnawed by doubts as to his 
 right and as to his rival's right. Were he sure of 
 either, he thinks, he could be at peace. He doubts 
 his own power and worthiness for kingship, but he 
 doubts it doubtingly. He is questioning the skald
 
 1 8 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Jatgeir, whose answers strike deeper than he himselfj 
 knows, and answer more than the questions that. 
 provoke them. 
 
 K. Skule. Tell me, Jatgeir, how came you to be a 
 bard ? Who taught you the art ? 
 
 Jatgeir. The art cannot be taught, sire. 
 
 K. Skule. It cannot be taught ? Then how came 
 it? 
 
 Jatgeir. One gave me the gift ot sorrow, and so I 
 became a bard. 
 
 K. Skule. Then is the gift of sorrow what a bard 
 needs ? 
 
 Jatgeir. It was what I needed. Another may need 
 faith, or joy, or doubt. 
 
 K. Skule. Doubt ! can it be that ? 
 
 Jatgeir. Yes ! but then the doubter must be strong 
 and crisp. 
 
 K. Skule. And what do you mean by a limp doubter ? 
 
 Jatgeir. One who doubts his own doubt. 
 
 K. Skule (slowly). That, methinks, were death. 
 
 Jatgeir. Worse ! worse ! It were life in death ! i 
 
 Place side by side with this scene the " Rhymed 
 Epistle," printed near the end of Ibsen's collected 
 poems. A friend has asked him what is the matter 
 with the present age which, with all its resources and 
 all its strength, seems to be haunted by a vague appre- 
 hension, and to have its vigour sapped by some secret 
 spirit of dulness and weariness. Ibsen answers, 
 characteristically enough, that he prefers asking ques- 
 
 i Literally " twilight."
 
 THE POEMS. 19 
 
 ^ions, and that it is not his mission to answer them. 
 For once, however, he will try to say how the thing 
 looks to him. Sailors have a superstition against 
 making a voyage with a corpse on board. If a 
 suspicion gets about that there is a dead body some- 
 where in the cargo, all becomes spiritless and slack, 
 and there is no spring or confidence in the crew. 
 Ibsen compares life to a good ship on her voyage. 
 He is one^of the passengers himself. 
 
 I was sitting here alone upon the deck one sultry 
 night, with the stars and silence for company. The 
 breeze was as soft and gentle as may be, for the wings of 
 the evening wind were clipped. All the passengers had 
 gone to their berths, and the lamp burned sleepily down 
 below. A stifling hot air flowed up from the cabin, and 
 held its weary victims in a half slumber. Their sleep was 
 restless and unpeaceful, as I could see through the half- 
 opened swing glass of the skylight. Here lay a statesman, 
 twisting his mouth as if for a smile, but it ended in a yawn. 
 There a learned professor tossed from side to side, 
 quarrelling, it seemed, with his own learning. A theolo- 
 gian dragged the bed-clothes over his head ; and another 
 man was burrowing into his pillow. High and low there 
 lay artists, authors, like folk in a dream, fearing and 
 expectant. But over all this half sleeping life below 
 brooded a lurid, steaming, stifling heat. I averted my 
 eye from all the weary turmoil. I gazed out into the 
 fresh night. I looked eastward where the faint dawn was 
 already beginning to veil the brightness of the stars. 
 Then a sound struck my ear from there below ; it struck 
 me as I sat leaning against the mast. Someone cried out, 
 half-way, it seemed, between an uneasy sleep and a night- 
 mare, " I believe we're sailing with a corpse in the cargo."
 
 2O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 There we have it ! What is the corpse ? What is 
 the dead matter we are carrying with us ? Is it the 
 inheritance from our ancestors ? Is it our commercial 
 system ? Is it our marriage laws ? Is it our con- 
 firmed habit of lying ? Is it the foolish and narrow 
 way in which we speak the truth when we give it a 
 turn ? Is it our untamed elemental passions not yet 
 humanized? Is it our traditional and conventional 
 pretences ? Is it our religion ? 
 
 If any man is afraid of these questions let him give 
 Ibsen a wide berth. If any man dares to ask them 
 without reserve, let him welcome the terrible " poet of 
 doubt," and listen to his questionings without demand- 
 in<* that he shall answer as well as ask them. 
 
 & 
 
 Ibsen is the poet of doubt. What is his mission, 
 and what must be his qualifications ? He must be a 
 whole-hearted doubter. He must not feel responsible 
 for Diving answers, or he will tone down his question- 
 ing to the compass of his answering powers. But 
 above all he must be neither a cynic nor a sentiment- 
 alist, else how can he put true questions ? Under and 
 through them all we must feel unfailing discernment 
 of beauty, and loyalty to truth, undulled responsiveness 
 of soul to generosity and nobility, a determination not 
 to accept as answers what are no answers at all, and a 
 i tender reverence for every thought or impulse that 
 I bears in itself such life, that the poet doubter needs 
 not question it. 
 
 Ibsen is the poet of doubt ; and his doubting is so 
 strong and true that, when we have dealt with the 
 questions he asks us, we shall have dealt with life.
 
 THE POEMS. 21 
 
 But at the period we have already reached the 
 period of the publication of "The Pretenders" in 1863 
 Ibsen was still able to live an ideal life in the great 
 traditions of Norway, and had not yet been forced to 
 accept his mission as the poet of doubt. It was in 
 Norwegian history and legend that he found the sub- 
 jects of almost all his dramas, and it was here that he 
 found again the Norway, brave and strong, which he 
 could hardly recognise amid the petty interests, and 
 the sordid jealousies, and disputes of his immediate 
 surroundings. In his love of the glorious memories 
 of the past he was at one with those from whom he 
 was divided in all else. 
 
 When the Dano-German War was impending, the 
 memories of Norway's heroic age revived in every 
 breast. The King of Norway and Sweden had 
 pledged himself to the King of Denmark, wild enthu- 
 siasm reigned among the youthful Norwegians, and 
 the cause of Scandinavia seemed to be one. 
 
 But when the test came prudence prevailed ovei 
 enthusiasm. The King, to his bitter grief it is said, 
 was forced to draw back from his word. Sweden 
 and Norway took no part in the struggle. No stream 
 of volunteers flowed southward. It was looked upon 
 as a mere piece of useless Quixotism to throw into 
 the scale a weight that could not turn it. The 
 Norwegians were a poor and feeble nation. What 
 could they do against the overwhelming power of 
 the foe ? 
 
 So Denmark was left to fight and fall alone. 
 
 Ibsen sounded the alarm-bell over Norway in a
 
 22 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 poem which the older generation of Danes cannot 
 read dry-eyed to this day. 
 
 Now round the fort of Tyra gathers maybe for the last 
 time a folk under strain and grief, with flag hung half- 
 mast high. Deserted, deserted in the day of peril, de- 
 serted in the hour of strife ! Was this the meaning of 
 the clasp of hands so rich in promise for the Northern 
 cause at Axelstad and Sound ? 
 
 The words that flowed as from the heart were but a 
 gush of phrases, and now the well is dry. The tree that 
 blossomed into vows in the sunshine of a festal day 
 stands stripped by the storm wind, like a cross to mark 
 the grave of Norway's youth, the first night that calls for 
 work ! 
 
 They were but dressed-up lies, a poisoned Judas kiss, 
 that Norway's sons shouted but now in exultation towards 
 the beach of Sound. What passed 'twixt King and King 
 at the last royal journey ? It was only King Gustave once 
 again playing at the game of Charles the Twelfth's 
 sword in Stockholm Castle. 
 
 "A grieving folk on the path of death, deserted by 
 every friend" So ends the book of Denmark's history. 
 Who is it wrote the close? What cowaid suffered such 
 an end, and let Tyra's fort turn German, while Denmark's 
 rent flag wrapped its red folds round the last Danish 
 corpse ? 
 
 But thou, my Norsk brother, in thy safety, standing 
 in a land of peace, thanks to thy fair words of promise 
 forgotten in the hour of danger, flee from the gathering 
 places of thy sires, haste o'er the ocean's arch, tread from 
 harbour to harbour the path of forgetfulness, take on thee 
 a stranger's name, and hide from thy very self ! 
 
 The breath of every storm that sweeps to Norway
 
 THE POEMS. 23 
 
 from the shores of Denmark's sea, strikes thee with 
 horror as it sighs, " My brother, where art thou ? I strove 
 a strife of life and death for the northern lands, and my 
 home became a grave ; I gazed over belt and fiord all in 
 vain to see thy war-ships' trace. My brother, where art 
 thou?" 
 
 It was a dream. Wake strong and brave a people 
 roused from slumbering to deeds ! A brother's need ! 
 All hands on deck ! Swift counsel need we now ! Yet 
 may it stand in history: "Danes, Danes, hold Tyra's 
 fort." Yet may the tattered flag of Denmark wave its red 
 folds rich over the future of the North ! 
 
 But as we all know it was the last stanza, not the 
 others, that was the dream ; and the Danes fought 
 and fell alone. Ibsen could no longer take refuge in 
 Norway's past, for the measure of its former glory had 
 become to him the measure of its present shame ; 
 and every thought of the heroic past was turned to 
 bitterness. 
 
 At this very time Ibsen lost the means by which he 
 earned his scanty rations, for the theatre with which 
 he was connected failed, owing to want of sufficient 
 interest in the national Norwegian drama. 
 
 There is a custom in Norway of making par- 
 liamentary grants to distinguished or promising 
 authors, to enable them to travel. Ibsen applied for 
 a grant and obtained it, bat it was given him half as 
 a charity. 
 
 Sick at heart he turned southwards and felt that he 
 could never return. Home life was poisoned for him. 
 In burning shame and indignation at what he con-
 
 24 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 sidered his country's disgrace, stung by personal in- 
 sults, and embittered by disappointment, he stood, as 
 he himself expresses it, " on the edge of his grave as 
 a poet." But it was out of the very heart of all this 
 bitterness that he produced the two great poems that 
 took Norway and all Scandinavia by storm, and es- 
 tablished his fame beyond the reach of cavil. 
 
 These poems were " Brand " and " Peer Gynt," 
 and in them, together with " The Youthful Le?gue," 
 which followed, Ibsen poured out the vials of his 
 wrath. 
 
 The frame of mind in which he left his home 
 and composed his great lyric dramas, together with 
 the gradual softening of his feelings towards his 
 fatherland, and the yearning of his heart towards the 
 North, may be traced in the group of poems with 
 which I shall conclude this lecture. 
 
 First in immediate connection with the poem just 
 transcribed comes : 
 
 WELL GROUNDED FAITH. 
 
 I swung the alarm bell over the land in my rhymes 
 but no one was the least alarmed. My part was played ; 
 I embarked on a steamer and left the " dear North " be- 
 hind me. We lay to in a fog in Kattegat and no one slept 
 the first night. A council of war was held in the cabin, 
 and the passengers talked of the fall of Dybbol. They 
 discussed everything, and told sundry tales of the wild 
 doings of the young volunteers. One had lost a nephew 
 eighteen years old, another had lost his shop assistant. 
 It really became quite touching, and I was more or less 
 affected myself. On the sofa right under the lamp-shade
 
 THE POEMS. 25 
 
 sat a lady of advanced age, dauntless and unshaken. 
 Most of the company addressed their words to her and 
 vied with each other in offering her comfort. And the 
 ladies, with sigh and moan, expressed their anxiety for 
 her only son. I can see her still, so confidently nodding 
 and smiling as she said, " I've no fear for him! " How 
 beautiful she looked with her silvered hair and the rooted 
 faith in her heart. A warm glow coursed through blood 
 and marrow, and my drooping courage was steeled. 
 " Thy people is not dead, e'en though it slumber; it lives 
 in the miracle of woman's faith ! " But afterwards I 
 found she was better skilled in the ways of the world than 
 the " way of life." And so she became a riddle to me. 
 Where did it spring from, this grace of confidence ? The 
 explanation was as plain as the nose on your face. Her 
 son was a warrior in the Norwegian army ! 
 
 In marked contrast of tone, is the more celebrated 
 poem entitled : 
 
 THE EIDER-DUCK. 
 
 In Norway the eider-duck dwells, and his home is the 
 lead-grey fiord. He plucks the soft down from his breast 
 and builds his nest warm and snug. But the fiord fisher- 
 man has a heart of steel, and he plunders the nest to the 
 very last mote. If the fisherman is cruel, the bird's love 
 is warm ; he strips his own breast once more. And if 
 plundered again, he yet once more lines his nest in a well- 
 hidden nook. But if his third treasure, his last, be robbed, 
 then he spreads his wings on a spring night ; then he 
 cleaves the clouds with his bleeding breast, southward, 
 southward, to lands of the sun ! 
 
 Ibsen felt that he had definitively broken with his 
 own land as a home, but he belonged to it still.
 
 26 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 BURNT SHIPS. 
 
 Southward he turned his vessel's prow, and sought the 
 sportive track of brighter gods. The snow land's moun- 
 tains sank in the sea, his longings were rocked into still- 
 ness by the sun-lit strands. He burned his ships ; and 
 the smoke-cloud drifted blue towards the north like a 
 bridge-way. -To the huts of the snow land, from the groves 
 of the south, all alone rides a horseman each night as 
 night comes. 
 
 Yet more explicit is the opening of the poem written 
 in 1872 on the occasion of the millenary feast of 
 Norway's unification. 
 
 My folk, that gave me in deep shoals the wholesome, 
 bitter, strengthening drink, wherefrom, standing on the 
 brink of my grave as a poet, I received strength for the 
 fight amidst the broken lights of daily life, my folk 
 that reached me the exile's staff", the burden of sorrow 
 and the swift shoes of care, the sad and solemn equipment 
 for my journey, home from the world I send thee back 
 a greeting send it with thanks for all thy gifts, with 
 thanks for the cleansing-tide of every anguish. For each 
 plant that has thriven in the garden of my calling 
 stands rooted deep in those same times. If here it shoot 
 in fulness wealth and joy, it owes it to the grey blasts 
 blowing in the North. What sunshine loosened mists 
 made firm ! Have thanks, my land thy gift to me was 
 best. Yea ! there where the mists roll over the rock-peaks, 
 where the blasts smite bleak upon the Vidde, where 
 echoing silence reigns over hut and hill, where between 
 farm and farm stretches the waste, thither I gaze like the 
 pilot from the deck-bridge. At night and in my poems I 
 belong to home.
 
 " BRAND.'' 27 
 
 LECTURE II." BRAND." 
 
 WHEN Ibsen turned his back upon " the dear North,' 
 and tried to forget the life that lay behind him, he bathed 
 his soul for a time in the warmth and beauty of Italy. 
 
 His thoughts and studies turned to the ancient 
 world, and he planned and partly executed the work 
 that afterwards grew into the two plays, of which 
 Julian the Apostate is the hero. 
 
 But the spell of the North was still upon him. It 
 forced his mind back to the bleak and chill home of 
 his childhood with all its freezing memories. The 
 unfinished work was set aside, and before it was taken 
 up again and completed, " Brand," " Peer Gynt," and 
 "The Youthful League" had flowed in rapid succession 
 from Ibsen's pen. 
 
 In " Brand " the poet turns fiercely upon his 
 native land, but amid all his passion and contempt 
 learns and tells the truth that there is no redeeming 
 power save in love. 
 
 Brand is a young Norwegian clergyman, to whom 
 the heroic age has vanished, and who regards his 
 contemporaries as a paltry, timorous, and sordid race, 
 who plead their own self-inflicted feebleness as the 
 excuse for shrinking from every sacrifice, who believe 
 they have been stamped as farthings in the mint of 
 God, and are content to have it so, and who are yet 
 not content to give up all pride in the past, and all 
 aspirations for the future, and frankly own themselves 
 the slaves of earth. He finds them striving to be a 
 little of everything, to have a little faith and earnestness
 
 28 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 for use on Sundays, a little patriotism for national 
 anniversaries, a little hilarity and good-fellowship for 
 festive occasions after work, a little recklessness and 
 abandon in making promises, a little caution and 
 sobriety in fulfilling them, a little attachment to the 
 good old times and their customs and memories, a 
 little perception of the changed spirit of their own day. 
 Their life is all broken up into fragments, and each 
 fragment hampers, contradicts, deadens all the rest so 
 that they can never live a full life. 
 
 Their religion is in perfect keeping with all this. 
 One might, perhaps, think that their very materialism 
 had, at least, given unity to their lives but no, it is 
 haunted and broken by memories of a spiritual 
 religion that make a discord with it. Men still repeat 
 the Lord's Prayer, but there is not a line of it that is 
 winged with will and has in it such deep and anxious 
 insistence of demand as will launch it heavenwards 
 with the full ring of prayer, save the fourth petition : 
 "Give us this day our daily bread." This has become 
 the people's war-cry and the password of the world. 
 Wrenched from its context and stamped upon every 
 heart this prayer remains the storm-tossed spar that 
 tells of the wreck of faith ! Yet this very survival is 
 the testimony that men are not contentedly and whole- 
 heartedly material. They snip and trim the kingdom 
 of God till it can all get inside the Church walls, but 
 they must have " a little " of it. They have none of 
 the fresh manhood of faith that can bridge over the 
 chasm between spirit and flesh, but they still haggle 
 for " a little " of the spiritual consolations now dealt
 
 " BRAND." 29 
 
 out in retail by the ecclesiastical hucksters. " A 
 little " idealism and spiritual exaltation is quite essen- 
 tial as an element in their existence. 
 
 Into such a society Brand leaps with his awful and 
 heroic motto, " all or nothing," and in the name of 
 the jealous deity who " will have no other gods by his 
 side," seeks to build up human nature into unity, to 
 remake, out of these stumps of soul and torsos of 
 spirit,, out of these scattered heads and hands, such a 
 whole that God may be able to recognise once more 
 his noblest work in man. 
 
 For the current religion Brand has neither sym- 
 pathy nor even pity nothing but scorn. The God 
 men worship is a superannuated and feeble dotard, 
 that did miracles long ago, and was once a jealous 
 God, but is now quite easy-going, and content with 
 his fragment of the human heart, willing enough to 
 accept the service of one day out of seven, and alto- 
 gether past working miracles. The very doctrine of 
 Christian redemption has made men look upon them- 
 selves as no longer called upon for any sacrifice as 
 long as they formally assert their claim to a share in 
 the great sacrifice made for them long ago. 
 
 Against this miserable, sordid, and decrepid religion 
 Brand declares war to the death. Better become 
 frankly material and godless, better give oneself up to 
 the world and become an acknowledged muck-raker 
 on the one hand, or Bacchanal on the other, than 
 cheat oneself with such a sham. It must be " every- 
 thing or nothing," and if there be a God to serve, then 
 his service must be " everything." And such a God
 
 3O IIENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 there is. If we must picture him under human form, 
 then he is no benevolent and weak old man ; he is 
 young and strong as Hercules, his love is the love 
 that could listen to the prayer of anguish in Gethse- 
 mane and yet not take away the cup. He demands 
 the whole life and will accept no less. He who offers 
 God one-seventh, or one-half, or nine-tenths of his 
 life flings it into the abyss it must be all or nothing. 
 Brand's God can still work miracles, and the life that 
 is given wholly to him may still be divinely harmoni- 
 ous as of old. 
 
 When we first see Brand he is fired with the 
 thought of preaching this living God to all the world, 
 and, as he contemptuously puts it, burying the dead 
 God that men still profess to worship. 
 
 With the so-called " practical " spirit of the age he 
 has little sympathy, still less with its tolerant and 
 humane culture. Its "practical" spirit means putting 
 material things before spiritual, with the poor hope 
 of achieving a true humanity by means of in- 
 creased material appliances. It thinks a new road 
 and a new bridge of more pressing consequence than 
 a bridge between faith and life, fails to see that until 
 we are men we heap up wealth in vain, and if we are 
 men we do not need it. And the humane and toler- 
 ant spirit of the age is only a fine name for indiffer- 
 ence to truth, for weak shrinking from giving or 
 bearing pain, for dissipation of energy, for the devil's 
 breath of compromise and cowardice. 
 
 To this man, with his motto "all or nothing," 
 there is no common measure between material and
 
 "BRAND." 31 
 
 spiritual things. You may stay your steps on God's 
 errands because you can not go farther, but never 
 because you dare not, or because you will not. If 
 his way leads him over the crevasse-crossed glacier, 
 and the mists fall upon him as the ice rings thin and 
 hollow beneath his feet, and the roar ot the hidden 
 waters threatens him with instant death, he has no 
 thought of pausing or turning back. It is enough for 
 him that he can go farther, and while his peasant 
 guide leaves him in mortal terror, though his dying 
 daughter lies on the other side of the snow-field and 
 can not be at peace without seeing him, the intrepid 
 priest, with no reason to cross to-day rather than to- 
 morrow, save that each day is a day to be devoted to 
 his mission, pursues his way. 
 
 No physical suffering moves him. He passes 
 untouched through the starving town, where the blue- 
 grey ring round every hollow eye shows that death is 
 holding his assize, and is only moved to a deeper 
 scorn when he sees that the scourge brings out the 
 brute rather than the angel in the sufferers. But a 
 tale of the mental anguish of a father who has slain 
 his child that he might not see it starve, and now 
 himself lies dying, stirs him to deepest compassion, 
 and in a storm through which even the wife of the 
 dying man dare not venture with him, he crosses the 
 fiord in an open boat to stand by the bed of the mur- 
 derer and suicide as the messenger of God. 
 
 Then the call comes to him to relinquish all his 
 thoughts of a crusading march through his land, and 
 an attack in the face of all the world upon the idols it
 
 32 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 serves, and to bury himself in a sunless town on a re- 
 mote fiord, where the memory of his lonely childhood 
 broods like night over his soul, where his miserly 
 mother, who bartered away her soul for wealth in her 
 early days, and hopes to save it in her old age by 
 dedicating her son to the Church, oppresses him with 
 her unreclaimed sordidness, and where every influence 
 seems most hostile to his life-work. 
 
 And yet in truth the sacrifice is no sacrifice at 
 all. For Agnes has already convinced him that 
 his crusade must be fought out at home and not 
 abroad. 
 
 And who is Agnes ? We see her first, with her 
 lover, Einar, the painter and poet, in the sunshine 
 and beauty of the morning on the hill-side. 
 
 Einar. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, thee will I 
 capture in sport ! I am weaving a net with meshes so 
 fine, and the meshes so fine are my songs. 
 
 Agnes [dancing back before him and darting out of 
 his reach\ If I'm a butterfly little and fine, then let me 
 still sip from the ling-bloom ; and if you are a boy that 
 delights in his game, then chase me, but catch me not 
 ever. 
 
 Einar. Agnes, my beautiful butterfly, now have I 
 woven the meshes ; sure your fluttering flight will avail 
 you naught soon you sit in the net fairly captured. 
 
 Agnes. If I'm a butterfly young and bright, rejoicing 
 I swing in the sport ; but should I be caught 'neath your 
 woven net, then brush not against my wings. 
 
 Einar. Nay ! With such care on my hand will I 
 lift thee, and lock thee right into my heart ; and there
 
 " BRAND." 33 
 
 shall thou play thy whole life long the gladest of 
 games thou e'er knewest. 
 
 But when Agnes hears Brand speak of the feebleness 
 and poverty of the age and of the stern gospel it 
 needs, she wakes from her butterfly existence as from 
 a dream. It is in vain that Rinar strives to pick up 
 the thread of sport where they dropped it. Agnes 
 answers htm without hearing, and in her turn asks, 
 without looking at him, in a hushed whisper as if in 
 church : " But tell me, did you see how he grew 
 while he was speaking ? " Then when Brand is ready 
 to cross the storm-torn fiord and none dares to go with 
 him, Agnes bids Einar join him, and when he shrinks 
 back in terror the whole world-ocean stretches between 
 him and her. She herself leaps into the boat and 
 braves the storm with Brand. 
 
 When he leaves the death-bed to which he had 
 come to stand between the dying sinner and his fight- 
 ing soul he sees Agnes sitting in the clear sunshine, 
 rapt as if in a vision. 
 
 See how there she sits and listens, as to songs that 
 fill the welkin. In the boat she sat and listened, as it 
 cleft the troubled waters ; as she grasped the thwart she 
 listened, listened as she shook the storm-spray from her 
 clear, unclouded forehead. 'Twas as though the sense 
 had changed its seat, and with her eyes she listened. 
 
 What is her vision, as she sits there listening with her 
 eyes ? She sees the crude forces of an unborn world, 
 with its torrents, its clouds, its lightning glow, its wild 
 
 c
 
 34 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 winds, its desert stretches, its unmeasured possibilities, 
 waiting to be created and created by her ! For in 
 her own breast she recognises its counterpart in the 
 swelling of untamed forces like mountain torrents, in 
 the rising light of the new day, in the widening of the 
 reach of life, in the new quickening and movement of 
 thought and deed, as though their hour of birth had 
 come, in the sadness and the joy that are as one, in 
 the divine voice that rings in her ears, " Now shalt thou 
 create, now be created ! Now art thou redeemed or 
 lost ! Do thy work thy work of dear account." 
 
 When Einar comes and claims her once again she 
 stands between him and Brand. Brand warns her 
 that he is uncompromising in his demands, requiring 
 "all or nothing," that if she fails halfway, then all her 
 life will have been flung into the sea, that she must 
 look for no concession in time of need, no yielding to 
 any weakness, that if her life-strength falls short she 
 must face death itself. Einar cries to her that she is 
 choosing between storm and calm, between peace and 
 sorrow, between night and morning, between life and 
 death. And she answers, " Into the night. Through 
 death. Behind, there gleams the morning dawn." 
 
 At the beginning of the third act we find Brand and 
 Agnes, with their baby boy, living on the margin of the 
 sunless fiord under the overhanging rock, and we learn 
 something of the progress of his work. He is still true 
 to his old motto, " everything or nothing." His un- 
 compromising devotion and his overmastering in- 
 dividuality have produced a profound impression in
 
 * BRAND." 35 
 
 his parish. The commonplace, material, matter-of- 
 fact tradition of the place, impersonated in the bailiff 
 of the town, though not overcome, is forced into a 
 kind of acquiescence in his leadership, and a new spirit 
 seems to be abroad. And Brand himself is in one 
 sense changed. Till now no strong human affection 
 has ever claimed him. In the home of his youth and 
 at school he was a stranger. A hideous act of 
 covetous heartlessness, of which he was an unsuspected 
 witness, completely alienated him from his mother 
 when he was yet a child. The grandeur and heroism 
 of his character had been untempered hitherto by the 
 personal tenderness the whole wealth of which he now 
 pours out for his wife and child. But Agnes com- 
 plains that to others his love is still hard, and that in 
 the terrible sternness of his demand, "all or nothing," 
 he repels instead of winning. His old mother yearns 
 with a superstitious longing to receive the sacrament 
 and the assurance of forgiveness from him on her 
 deathbed. He lays down the condition that before 
 she dies she shall give away the whole of that wealth 
 for which she has sinned, and toiled, and pinched, and 
 lived a loveless and sunless life, and shall go naked 
 into her grave. In vain she pleads that he is bidding 
 her scatter her very soul to the winds. He is inexor- 
 able. In the anguish of a deathbed repentance she 
 sends messengers to him. She offers half her wealth, 
 at last nine-tenths of it ; but is only met with the old 
 answer, "everything or nothing," and dies muttering, 
 " God is not so hard as my son," comforted, so says 
 the almost broken-hearted Brand, by the old lie, look-
 
 36 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 ing upon God, as all the rest do, as a good-natured 
 huckster that may be beaten down if he cannot get 
 his full price. And yet this man, now that his love is 
 awakened, is visited in spite of himself by seasons of 
 compunction if not of doubt. To stand before men 
 with his awful " everything or nothing " draws tears of 
 blood from his heart. In loneliness he bites the 
 tongue with which he has chastised, and when he lifts 
 his arm to strike, the passionate longing comes over 
 him to embrace the weak and sinful brother. 
 
 Then comes his own trial. He and Agnes both 
 notice, though neither will confess it, the pale cheek 
 and waning strength of their boy. Surely, says Brand, 
 God cannot take him from them. Yet what if he can ? 
 May not God do to-day what " the terror of Isaac " 
 did long ago? Then comes the doctor's verdict. It 
 is certain death to the child to stay another month on 
 the sunless fiord, and Brand in an agony of appre- 
 hension orders immediate preparations to be made 
 for leaving their home that very hour. 
 
 Then one after another, from the mouth of the 
 doctor himself, from the parishioner who has heard a 
 report that he means to leave them on receiving his 
 inheritance from his mother, from the poor mad girl, 
 Gerd, who is so strangely connected with his late, 
 from every side come echoes of his own teaching, " all 
 or nothing." He has given up his ambition, he has 
 given up his life to his work in his remote parish, he 
 has refused to yield or to depart, has nailed his flag to 
 the mast and declared that here he will stand or fall 
 in conflict with his foe. He has given much for his
 
 " BRAND. 37 
 
 work on the fiord. Yet it is nothing if he will not 
 give all. Now he realises what he has been demanding 
 of others, and stands horror-smitten before his own 
 motto, "all or nothing." Nominally he throws the 
 choice upon Agnes, but not till he has shown her that 
 there is no choice at all. Brand's awful God seems to 
 pass by in the thick darkness before our very eyes as 
 Agnes lifts her child on high and cries 
 
 r* 
 
 " God ! the sacrifice thou can'st demand I can lift up 
 towards thy heaven ! Guide me through life's horror !" 
 
 When next we see Brand and his wife their child 
 has been lying for months beneath the sod of the 
 churchyard. It is Christmas-eve, the children's 
 festival. Brand is not content with having made the 
 sacrifice ; he demands that there shall be no repining, 
 no tender idolatries, no cherished memories making 
 the season of rejoicing into a season of mourning. 
 Agnes must not dwell on the contrast between this 
 Christmas and the last ; she must not draw the curtain 
 back that the light may stream upon the little grave ; 
 she must not even plead for time and beg her husband 
 to have patience with her. And at last when a wild 
 gypsy woman, with her mouth full of profanity and her 
 heart full of defiance, bursts into the house and begs 
 or rather demands the little garments that Agnes keeps 
 as sacred relics, that she may wrap them round her 
 own child born among curses and, as it were, baptised 
 in gin, she must part with all her treasure, must not 
 retain even a single relic " all or nothing." Agnes
 
 38 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 has at one point rebelled like a wild thing driven to 
 bay; but now a serene and perfect joy overspreads 
 her countenance, now she is free and triumphant, but 
 as she turns to her husband and thanks him for the 
 strength with which he has uplifted her, and for the 
 awful but now glorious vision of God that he has re- 
 vealed to her, she bids him remember the old word, 
 " He who sees Jehovah dies." 
 
 Then there sweeps upon Brand the vision of his lonely 
 life and strife when Agnes shall be gone, and he folds 
 round her the arms of a giant and declares that she 
 shall not be taken from him. Nor need she be taken. 
 She tells him that if he will sink her down again into 
 the life from which he raised her, if he will hide from 
 her once more the God that he has revealed, if he will 
 bid her return to her idol-house and forget his " all or 
 nothing," she will have no power against him as he 
 unteaches any more than she had as he taught. Then 
 she can live and be his wife. But to see Jehovah is to 
 die ; and unless he takes her back she must pass on 
 and leave him to fight alone. 
 
 "Soul!" cries Brand, " be steadfast to the last. Tis 
 victory's victory to forfeit all. The sum of loss has framed 
 thy gain, only the lost is our own for ever ! " 
 
 Agnes used to say that the "church was too small," 
 but she could give no account of what she meant by 
 it. The truth was that the church with its associations 
 and forms and traditions oppressed her; and the feeling 
 of narrowness and oppression translated itself into a
 
 " BRAND. 39 
 
 sense of physical confinement. Everything else was 
 too big for her, she sometimes felt. Her husband, 
 his vocation, his purposes, his presence, his will, his 
 ways ; the mountain that overhung her, the fiord that 
 locked her in, her sorrows, her memories, her darkness, 
 her strife, all were too big for her, only the church 
 was too small. 
 
 The mad Gerd said the same. The church down 
 there in~the valley was poor and hideous because it 
 was so small. She knew of a church up on the moun- 
 tain height, a church of ice and rock, and snow, 
 where waterfall and avalanche read the mass, and 
 the wind preached amongst the snow-peaks. 
 
 And Brand himself felt that the ruinous and 
 mouldering edifice, with its cramped and narrow 
 walls, was the symbol of the pining and paltry spirit 
 of a religion in its second childhood. He would dedi- 
 cate his mother's wealth to the rearing of a church 
 worthy of the religion he preached. It should be the 
 symbol of a wider and a stronger faith in which life 
 should find its unity. Its vault should stretch not 
 only over faith and doctrine, but over all to which God 
 has given the right to be in human life the day's 
 toil, the evening's rest, the cares of night, the fresh 
 delight of childhood all that can claim a lodgment 
 in a human heart. The river that foams down its 
 course, the waterfall that roars through the cleft, the 
 voice from the storm's great lungs and the sounds 
 that ring from the sea soul-caught should melt into 
 one with the organ notes and the stave on the people's 
 tongue !
 
 40 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 So Brand builds his church-symbol. And from all 
 around the people stream to fill the air with common- 
 place laudations of his generosity, to give him know- 
 ing advice as to the best way of turning his gift to the 
 advantage of the State and his own ; to burn in 
 upon his tortured soul the fact that of all his deeds 
 this one is least understood ; to madden him by 
 showing him that his symbol has none but a material 
 meaning for the world; to drive him to fanaticism 
 when he sees that all he does or says feeds the very 
 spirit of commonplace against which he is fighting ; 
 to teach him that his church itself has become one 
 huge lie and that its dedication will be his lying 
 reward. 
 
 Overladen now with his sorrow and his defeat, and 
 losing all touch with practical reality, goaded yet further 
 on the path he has been taking, and no longer re- 
 cognising any physical limitations or conditions of his 
 mission, he turns the key contemptuously in the lock of 
 the church door and flings it into the river, and 
 summoning the people to follow him on his crusade 
 through the world, and show that " life " and " God's 
 service" are one, he leads the multitude up on to 
 wild mountain heights whither they follow him in the 
 belief that he is an inspired prophet and can work 
 miracles for their sustenance and glory. When, 
 hungry and footsore, they halt, and learn, in answer 
 to their demand, that they must look for life-long toil, 
 must strip themselves naked of every joy and comfort, 
 that a crown of thorns pressed upon every brow will 
 be their wages, and a free soul their reward, they
 
 " BRAND." 41 
 
 turn round fiercely upon the " deceiver " and chase 
 him with blows and curses out into the snow-fields. 
 
 Weary, bleeding, and alone, Brand now sees as in 
 vision the people for whom he has sacrificed himself, 
 the God whom he has striven to serve, the home and 
 happiness that he has lost. 
 
 Those miserable thralls, whom he has given his very 
 life to raise out of their sordid cares, will sink lower 
 and lowej. Their national history passes before him. 
 He sees them sheltering their cowardice under the 
 plea of feebleness, sitting still while their brethren in 
 Denmark are crushed; bribed by English gold to 
 polute their land with smoke and their hearts with 
 greed ; drawing aside from the great spiritual battles 
 of the world, suffering the old faith to die, and taking 
 no part in establishing the new ; for their stake in the 
 world's redemption is too small to fight for. Not for 
 them was the cup drained, not for them did the crown 
 of thorns strike its teeth into the Saviour's temples, 
 not for them the thrust of the Roman lance into his 
 side, not for them the burning of the nails that 
 pierced his hands and feet, not for them the bearing 
 of the cross the purple ridge that rose upon his 
 shoulder under the leather thong with which the 
 cobbler Ahasuerus smote him, is Norway's " fraction 
 of the passion." These are the men he, Brand, had 
 sought to redeem ! 
 
 And as for the God whom he had striven to bring 
 men to serve with whole heart, had he not accepted 
 his all and then rejected him? Had he not quenched 
 every light that shone upon his path, had he not
 
 42 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 suffered him to be crushed in utter defeat, had he not 
 flung back his prayers to him and deserted him in his 
 utmost need ? 
 
 Through the storm he hears the sentence of doom 
 chanted, 
 
 Never, never can'st be like him, for in flesh hast 
 thou been made. Do his bidding or desert him, either 
 way alike thou'rt lost ! Worm, thou never can'st be like 
 him, though thou drain the cup of death ! Follow 
 after or desert him, either way thy deeds are doomed. 
 Dreamer ! ne'er shall thou be like him ; lands and goods 
 though thou hast lost ; all thou giv'st can naught enrich 
 him for the earth-life wast thou formed. 
 
 And in the service of this inexorable and unap- 
 proachable God, for the sake of these sordid and 
 unredeemable earthlings, what had he lost? Agnes 
 and his baby boy might yet have been his may yet 
 be his, for Agnes appears to him, in his fever, and 
 tells him that all the loss and sorrow is but a dream. 
 She is still living, and so is their boy. They may 
 have peace and joy if he will but strike a line through 
 these three words, " everything or nothing," and fall 
 into the even easy ways against which he has fought 
 in vain. No, never ! If indeed it has been a dream, 
 then he will now make that dream a reality, will lose 
 wife and child and everything sooner than endure the 
 devil's breath of compromise ! Whereat the shadowy 
 form of the tempter vanishes with a shriek, " Then 
 die 1 The world has no use for thee." 
 
 Then comes the end. From the mad Gerd he
 
 " BRAND. 43 
 
 learns more than the wisdom of the wise had taught 
 him. He learns in penitential tears that while the name 
 of Jesus has been on his lips, he has never been bathed 
 in his spirit, that while proudly thinking himself another 
 Saviour by whose wounds the world may be healed, 
 he has not even found salvation for his own poor soul. 
 
 With still unbroken will, recognising himself as the 
 poorest thing that creeps the earth, feeling that he 
 stands owthe lowest round of the ladder, yet still with 
 fresh hope as the new truth breaks upon him, Brand 
 rises to begin his journey anew. 
 
 But his weary and shattered powers are spared the 
 fresh trial. For Gerd brings down an avalanche by a 
 rifle shot, and as the great snow-slip sweeps over him 
 and her, Brand cries to God from the jaws of death to 
 answer whether man's modicum of ze>/// weighs a single 
 grain in the scales of salvation. And as the crashing of 
 screes and ice overwhelms him and fills the valley, a 
 voice thunders the answer, " He is the God of Love." 
 
 It is impossible to read Brand, especially in the 
 light of Ibsen's previous poems and experiences, with- 
 out perceiving that his feelings towards his country- 
 men are accurately reflected in Brand's withering 
 denunciations. But it is likewise impossible not to 
 perceive that he is conscious throughout that Brand 
 is treading a path that leads to no goal. Though 
 his character is sketched with a sympathy that sweeps 
 us with it, yet we see from first to last that he is 
 essentially a fanatic, that his formula, " everything or 
 nothing," is one by which man cannot live, and that
 
 44 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 his aimless crusade in the snow-fields is the legitimate 
 outcome of his principles. If human ties are in truth 
 to go for " nothing," if starvation on the one hand 
 and material improvements and prosperity on the 
 other are to go for " nothing," then the very harmony 
 which Brand seeks becomes impossible. "Your 
 idea," says one of his opponents, "seems to be to 
 combine God's service with potato planting ; and you 
 go on as if God himself were aboard every fishing 
 smack," and Brand accepts this account of his pro- 
 posed reformation. But potatoes and fishes clearly 
 are not "everything." It should follow, then, that 
 they are " nothing," and if so why should we have 
 potato plots and fishing smacks at all ? Brand is 
 driven step by step practically to admit that we 
 must not. 
 
 And yet if we decline to follow him we seem to fall 
 back into the miserable, paltry spirit of compromise 
 against which he protests. Is the conclusion, then, 
 that the requirements of this life are hopelessly irrecon- 
 cilable with high faith and lofty principle, and that 
 men must choose between being sordidly practical 
 and nobly fanatical ? Or had Brand in some sense 
 wasted his heroism for want of the consecration of 
 sympathetic love? 
 
 If the concluding passage of the drama, in which 
 this latter answer seems to be given, stood alone, we 
 might hesitate to take it as Ibsen's deliberate teaching. 
 But it does not stand alone. A rapid review of 
 Brand's relations with five other characters in the play 
 will suffice to convince us of this. The good and
 
 " BRAND. ' 45 
 
 wise old doctor, whose pregnant words enforce the 
 lesson of Brand's experience, is sketched too slightly 
 to challenge further comment. 
 
 First, then, let us take the clerical dignitary who 
 pursues his successful way through his ecclesiastical 
 career without earnestness, without consecration, with- 
 out soul. With the shallow and unspiritual shrewdness 
 of worldly wisdom ; with the vanity that often besets 
 successfuVperformers whatever their stage ; with a 
 soul-destroying familiarity with sacred themes unaccom- 
 panied either by depth of feeling or by conscious 
 insincerity ; never entertaining a doubt as to the 
 importance of his office or the truth of his teaching, 
 but not knowing what consecration or faith means, the 
 arch-deacon steadily pursues his own advancement 
 and cannot comprehend what Brand is aiming at if 
 he is not doing the same. And when Brand, mad- 
 dened by his sordid counsels, turns upon him and 
 cries, " Aye, fear of punishment and hope of gain is 
 the Cain-mark upon thy brow ! It cries aloud that in 
 thy worldly wisdom thou hast slain thy heart's pure 
 Abel ! " he is so far from understanding him that he 
 is shocked and offended at being addressed by the 
 familiar "thou," and pays no attention at all to the 
 substance of the remark. 
 
 With such a man we can well forgive Brand for 
 breaking off all relations. He could but live his own 
 life independently of him. His very breath was 
 poison. But we also have the bailiff of the town, a 
 man whom Brand himself recognises as well-meaning, 
 honest, and, after his own fashion, industrious, warm,
 
 46 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 and just. The material welfare and the decorous 
 government of the place are the constant subjects of 
 his thoughts and schemings. It is true that he has no 
 breadth of view, no poetry, and indeed no soul, except 
 officially. But that he had a soul officially is testified 
 by the fact that he contemptuously refused to save it 
 at the expense of the archives, for which he was 
 officially responsible, and which were threatened by a 
 fire. " Oh, save your soul ! " cried his poor wife in an 
 agony of fear. "My soul ! " he answered, "the Devil 
 take my soul ! Help me to get out the archives ! '' 
 This man, with his limited ideas, who strove to do his 
 duty but always within his own district ; who had 
 his share of personal ambition, and who looked for 
 some reasonable reward for his untiring devotion to 
 duty could not, of course, understand Brand in the 
 least; but Brand might have understood him, respected 
 him, worked with him, and ultimately even taught him 
 something. Instead of this he looks upon him as the 
 most deadly foe of his work. The things the bailiff 
 busies himself with are not " everything " then they 
 must be " nothing." Because he minds material, and 
 not spiritual things, he is a scourge to his land. Earth- 
 quakes, flood, and winter-blast, famine, frost, and 
 pestilence, work less havoc than he from year to year; 
 for they can only rob the life, but he ! how many 
 thoughts he cleaves, how many wills he deadens, how 
 many a song he chokes ; how many a smile on the 
 people's lips, how many a flash in the people's bosom, 
 how many a thrill of exalting joy or wrath that might 
 have grown into a deed, has such a narrow and
 
 " BRAND. 47 
 
 material soul laid in a bloodless grave ! And so it is 
 war between Brand and the bailiff, war in which Brand 
 appears to be completely victorious and his foe appears 
 to become his disciple, and honestly means to be so ; 
 but he has understood nothing and learned nothing ; 
 he has lost his dignity and self-respect, he has swallowed 
 his principles, and at last he has stooped to unworthy 
 means of retaining or regaining his influence. All 
 that Braftd has done is to degrade an honest and 
 patriotic man. 
 
 Agnes he does not degrade. But he tortures her 
 to death. The love that she has taught him to feel 
 he dare not trust, in his dealings with others, lest it 
 should soften the sternness of his awful gospel. 
 
 No word is soiled with lies like that word " love." 
 Under its veil, with Satan's guile, men hide their want 
 of will, treacherously skinning over a life of dallying. 
 Is the way narrow, toilsome, steep ? Oh, cut it short 
 in " love ! " Does one tread the broad path of sin ? Yet 
 is there hope for him in " love." Seeing his goal, does 
 he shrink back from the strife ? He may still be vic- 
 torious in "love." Does he choose the wrong although 
 he knows the right ? There is a refuge still in " love." 
 
 God's love is not such. His love is hard even to 
 the horror of death ; it bids our caresses wound like 
 blows ; it let Jesus pray and pray in sweat and anguish, 
 " take this cup away," and then made him drink it to 
 the dregs. The God men worship now-a-days would 
 have shown his love by proclaiming a reprieve at the
 
 48 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 foot of the cross, and conducting the work of redemp- 
 tion by a diplomatic correspondence ! 
 
 So even when Brand feels sympathy he does not 
 show it, and so he lacks the tenderness that alone can 
 enable men to understand and guide their fellows. 
 And therefore when he rightly seeks to wean Agnes 
 from her tender idolatries, and when she herself longs 
 for his support and guidance, he has nothing but words 
 of stern rebuke for the "sorrows and memories and 
 flood of sinful longings," that possess her, and he tears 
 down her idol-temple with so hard a hand that she 
 must die. Feeling the heroic grandeur of her 
 husband's character in contrast with the pusillanimity 
 of those around him, feeling that he is bound by his 
 own life principle, and must not shrink from bearing 
 what he did not shrink from inflicting, with her pro- 
 tests overborne and her instincts trampled upon as 
 sinful, with her deep-seated love and loyalty recognis- 
 ing in her very tortures a higher life than she had ever 
 known in her light-hearted joy, Agnes rises to the 
 height of her husband's heroism, though she can not 
 bring him to the purity and truth of her own insight. 
 She seizes the heart of truth in his false-true gospel, 
 suppresses her own rebellious protest, and dies. 
 
 Yet another, and in some ways the most striking 
 condemnation of Brand's motto, is furnished by one 
 of those apparently capricious and wanton scenes in 
 which Ibsen not rarely hides his deepest teaching. 
 Just before the expected consecration of the Church, 
 (which, as we have seen, is the signal for Brand to break 
 away from all practical restraint, and accept the ab-
 
 " BRAND." 49 
 
 solute fanaticism which is the only legitimate outcome 
 of his principle), Einar Agnes's former lover comes 
 upon the stage once more. Brand turns to him with 
 the passionate longing to find some man with a living 
 heart and soul amongst all the cautious, self-seeking, 
 commonplace materialists by whom he is surrounded. 
 But he finds the gay poet and artist changed indeed. 
 Since last they met he has fallen into dissipated ways, 
 been ill, lost his joy in life, become " converted," and 
 is now a revivalist of the vulgarest and most offensive 
 type. At first he shows no interest in his old love 
 whatever ; but presently recalls " the young female 
 who held him in the net of desire before he was 
 cleansed in the bath of faith." Yes, he would like to 
 know how it goes with her but only the essential. 
 Brand tells him of her marriage, her wifehood, her 
 motherhood, her bereavement, and her death. But 
 what are all these mundane trivialities to the evange- 
 list? He wants to know the essential only. How 
 did she die ? " With hope in a coming dawn, with 
 the heart's rich treasure whole, with will unbroken 
 to the last, with thanksgiving for all that life had given 
 and taken away, she sank into her grave." Why waste 
 the evangelist's time with such stuff and nonsense ? 
 How did her faith stand ? " Unshaken." But on 
 whom? "On God." What ! only on him ? Then 
 she's damned more's the pity. And with a parting 
 shot at Brand as likely to share her fate the converted 
 sinner goes his way rejoicing that he is saved. 
 
 Here then is a man to whom his religion is " every- 
 thing," and his love and his humanity " nothing." Is 
 
 D
 
 50 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 this the whole and renovated man that God must re- 
 cognise as his noblest work? Here is one who lives 
 and thrives in peace and satisfaction on Brand's 
 formula of " all or nothing." What does Brand think 
 of him? He is filled with loathing for the creature 
 that dares to utter his blasphemies against heaven and 
 the sainted dead, but he never suspects that he has 
 here before him the only possible realisation of his 
 own life-slaying principle. For Ibsen is relentless in 
 picturing the blindness that shuts men's eyes to every 
 warning when they have once taken and persisted in 
 the wrong road. He shews us how often the enlighten- 
 ment of such is impossible with man, and (like the 
 Greek tragedians) hints only in quasi supernatural 
 scenes at the close that it is yet " possible with God." 
 
 Brand then does not see the meaning of Einar's 
 wretched existence. But surely we can. Only the 
 man whose heart is dead can live by that destroying 
 word "all or nothing." The principle which slays 
 the saintly Agnes and drives her heroic husband mad, 
 fits the miserable Einar like a glove ; "he is happy and 
 at home with it. 
 
 And lastly we return to the mad girl Gerd. She is 
 a kind of symbolic foreshadowing of what Brand him- 
 self must come to in the end. She shares his con- 
 tempt of the stifling atmosphere of the valley down 
 by the fiord ; she hates the mouldering little church ; 
 she speaks, with him, of a nobler and diviner edifice 
 where there is safety from the haunting foe against 
 which she wages ceaseless war but alas ! the beauty 
 of her church is cold. It is the avalanche and land-
 
 " BRAND." 5 1 
 
 slip that read the mass in it; the preacher is the wind 
 that blows over the snow-fields, whose preaching 
 sends the burning and the chill through the wor- 
 shipper, and the approach is marked by the whitening 
 bones of the living things that it has slain. 
 
 Step by step, throughout the poem, Brand is uncon- 
 sciously approaching this ice-church. When child and 
 wife are ^one, he still tries to make life one by the 
 formula of elimination, not of harmony, " all or 
 nothing." But he has already broken with all human 
 affections, broken with all the practical conditions of 
 life. No wonder that the church he has built appears 
 to him only a compromise and a lie. Driven by a 
 vague instinct to the full working out of his principle, 
 he leads his would-be followers away from the scene 
 of their daily toils, away from all means of livelihood, 
 up to the sublime but barren heights of the snow-fields ; 
 rejects the devotion that offers much but shrinks from 
 giving all ; and at last discovers that the goal, to which 
 he has been striving to lead them, and to which he 
 has attained alone, is the ice-church where he is 
 chilled to the bone, and feels himself a thousand 
 miles from the light and peace for which he longs. 
 
 Then comes to him the vision of that love which 
 he has quelled within his bosom, and he weeps the 
 tears which to Gerd's inspired imagination melt the 
 shroud of the snow-field, melt the surplice of the ice- 
 priest, melt the ice in her own heart. " Man ! Why 
 wept you not before ? " 
 
 And as the avalanche descends and the voice pro- 
 claims " He is the God of love," the ice-church seems
 
 52 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 to melt and thaw into Brand's ideal of a church as 
 wide as the life of nature and of man, the church that 
 they may yet build who, heroic as he, suffer their 
 heroism to be warmed and guided by love. 
 
 LECTURE III.-" PEER GYNT." 
 
 " BRAND " was published in 1866, and in 1867 " Peer 
 Gynt " followed. The fundamental themes and 
 motives of the two works are the same, but in other 
 respects they present a complete contrast. The 
 solemnity and monotony of " Brand " yield to a 
 dazzling variety and play of wit in " Peer Gynt." 
 The reader is fairly bewildered on a first or second 
 reading, and is unable to trace any leading purpose or 
 connection running through the grotesque contrasts 
 and wild fancies of the drama. But in reality it is a 
 simpler work than " Brand." The machinery is 
 immensely more complicated, but the unity of con- 
 ception is completer. It would be a paradox to call 
 " Peer Gynt " more compact than " Brand," but it 
 would be a paradox containing an important truth. 
 
 In " Brand " the hero is an embodied protest against 
 the poverty of spirit and half-heartedness that Ibsen 
 rebelled against in his countrymen. In " Peer Gynt " 
 the hero is himself the embodiment of that spirit. In 
 " Brand " the fundamental antithesis, upon which, as 
 its central theme, the drama is constructed, is the con- 
 trast between the spirit of compromise on the one
 
 PEER GYNT. 53 
 
 hand, and the motto " everything or nothing " on the 
 other. And " Peer Gynt " is the very incarnation of 
 a compromising dread of decisive committal to any 
 one course. In " Brand " the problem of self-realisa- 
 tion and the relation of the individual to his surround- 
 ings is obscurely struggling for recognition, and in 
 " Peer Gynt " it becomes the formal theme upon 
 which all the fantastic variations of the drama 
 are built.Kip. In both plays alike the problems of 
 heredity and the influence of early surroundings are 
 more than touched upon ; and both alike culminate 
 in the doctrine that the only redeeming power on earth 
 or in heaven is the power of love. 
 
 " Peer Gynt," as already stated, stands for the Nor- 
 wegian people, much as they are sketched in " Brand," 
 though with more brightness of colouring. Hence 
 his perpetual " hedging " and determination never so 
 to commit himself that he can not draw back. Hence 
 his fragmentary life of smatterings. Hence his per- 
 petual brooding over the former grandeur of his family, 
 his idle dreams of the future, and his neglect of every 
 present duty. Hence his deep-rooted selfishness and 
 cynical indifference to all higher motives ; and hence, 
 above all, his sordid and superstitious religion ; for to 
 him religion is the apothesis of the art of " hedging." 
 
 But Ibsen's allegories are never stiffly or pedanti- 
 cally worked out. His characters, though typical, are 
 personal. We could read " Brand," and could feel 
 the tragedy and learn the lessons of the drama without 
 any knowledge whatever of the circumstances or feel- 
 ings under which it was written, or the references to
 
 54 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 the Norwegian character and conduct with which it 
 teems. 
 
 So. too, with "Peer Gynt." We may forget the 
 national significance of the sketch, except where 
 special allusions recall it to our minds, and may think 
 only of the universal problems with which the poem 
 deals, and which will retain their awful interest when 
 Ibsen's polemic against his countrymen has sunk 
 into oblivion. The study of "Peer Gynt" as an 
 occasional poem should be strictly subsidiary and 
 introductory to its study as the tragedy of a lost 
 soul. 
 
 What is it to be one's self? God meant something 
 when he made each one of us. For a man to embody 
 that meaning of God in his words and deeds, and so 
 become in his degree a " word of God made flesh " is 
 to be himself. But thus to be himself he must slay 
 himself. That is to say, he must slay the craving to 
 make himself the centre round which others revolve, 
 and must strive to find his true orbit and swing, self- 
 poised, round the great central light. But what if a 
 poor devil can never puzzle out what on earth God 
 did mean when he made him ? Why, then, he must 
 feel it. But how often your " feeling " misses fire ! 
 Aye ! there you have it. The devil has no stauncher 
 ally than want of perception ! 
 
 But, after all, you may generally find out what God 
 meant you for if you will face facts. It is easy to find 
 a refuge from facts in lies, in self-deception, and in 
 self-sufficiency. It is easy to take credit to yourself
 
 "PEER GYNT." 55 
 
 for what circumstances have done for you, and lay 
 upon circumstances what you owe to yourself. It is 
 easy to think you are realising yourself by refusing to 
 become a "pack-horse for the weal and woe of others," 
 keeping alternatives open and never closing a door 
 behind you, or burning your ships, and so always re- 
 maining the master of the situation and self-possessed. 
 If you choose to do these easy things you may always 
 " get roymd " your difficulties, but you will never get 
 through them. You will remain master of the situa- 
 tion indeed, but the situation will become poorer and 
 narrower every day. If you never commit yourself, 
 you never express yourself, and your self becomes less 
 and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfish- 
 ness is the annihilation of self. 
 
 One of the most striking of the secondary characters 
 introduced into the play is a certain conscript peasant. 
 War has broken out and this peasant must serve in 
 the army. He can only escape by maiming himself, 
 and so branding himself with lasting shame and dis- 
 honour. But he is committed by character and 
 conduct to a life of peaceful industry. His relations 
 with the woman who has trusted him are such that to 
 leave her now would be to throw upon her the burden, 
 and even the shame, which he would escape. He 
 chooses to bear them himself; and Peer Gynt sees 
 him, when he thinks he is alone, deliberately chop off 
 a finger. Peer soliloquises, " One might think of it, 
 wish it, determine it even but do it ! no, that I can't 
 understand." And for that very reason Peer never 
 became what the poor maimed peasant was himself.
 
 56 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 But it is high time for me to introduce the hero of 
 whom I have already spoken so much. 
 
 Peer or Peter Gynt, then, is a young Norwegian 
 peasant sprung of a once wealthy family, and haunted 
 by dreams of future magnificence, but living with his 
 widowed mother in poverty, which his lounging 
 indolence only serves to aggravate. With more than 
 a touch of poetry in his soul, but with the narrow 
 horizon of a peasant, the wildest flights of his imagina- 
 tion always fettered by the scanty material of his 
 mental furniture, and his imagined grandeur incon- 
 gruously yoked with the coarseness and homeliness of 
 the only experiences out of which he can build it, Peer 
 Gynt always believes himself called to a greatness 
 which he never does anything to attain. The scanty 
 remnants of the family property go to ruin while Peer 
 fights and drinks, hunts and lies, always telling his 
 mother, Aase, she'll be proud of him yet, when he has 
 done " something really grand," and is made emperor ; 
 while she is sometimes half-carried away by his tales, 
 and sometimes limits her anticipations to a doubtful 
 hope that he may some time "get so far as having wit 
 enough to mend his own breeches." For this man 
 who imagines himself the hero of all the traditional 
 exploits on record, and in retelling them as fragments 
 of his own biography " makes it all so wild and grand," 
 weaves in such marvellous touches of poetry and spells 
 of terror that his own mother hardly recognises the 
 tales she has known from her childhood, and was her- 
 self maybe the first to tell her son ; this man who 
 regards himself as the natural superior of all around
 
 PEER GYNT. 57 
 
 him, and who demands their admiration and sub- 
 mission as his obvious due, is chiefly distinguishable 
 from his fellows, to the eye of sense, by his tattered 
 and disreputable exterior. 
 
 A single specimen of Peer's imaginary adventures 
 must suffice. He is lounging down a mountain path 
 
 with Aase. 
 
 
 
 Aase. Peer, you're lying. 
 
 Peer Gpnt. No, Pm not. 
 
 Aasc. Well, then, swear to it. 
 
 Peer Gynt. What should I swear for ? 
 
 Aase. Pooh ! you dare not. It's all stuff and non- 
 sense. 
 
 Peer Gynt. It's true ; every blessed word. 
 
 Aase. Aren't you ashamed to look in your mother's 
 face ? First, you're off to the mountains, months 
 on end, in the thick of harvest, stalking deer on the 
 snow-fields ; then you come home with a tattered 
 coat, without rifle, and without game ; and then you try 
 to make me swallow all your monstrous hunter's lies ! 
 Well, then, where did you come upon the stag ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. West by Gendin. 
 
 Aase. Yes, of course ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. A sharp wind was blowing towards me. 
 Hidden behind a clump of trees, he was scraping for 
 lichen under the snow with his hoof. 
 
 Aase. Oh, yes, of course ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. I held my breath, stood listening, heard 
 the crunching of his hoof, saw the branches of one of 
 his horns. Then cautiously I dragged myself forward 
 on my belly, and glanced up from my hiding-place 
 among the stones. Such a stag ! You never saw a 
 sleeker or fatter.
 
 58 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Aase. Just to think ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. Bang went the gun, and the stag plunged 
 down upon the slope. But at the very moment he fell, 
 I leapt across his back, seized his left ear, and was just 
 going to drive my knife into his neck behind his skull, 
 when the beast leapt up with a wild shriek, struck knife 
 and sheath out of my hand with a back cast, screwed me 
 fast round the loins, pinned his horns against my calves, 
 clipped me in a vice, and set out with a spring right over 
 Gendin-edge. 
 
 Aase. In the name of Jesus ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. Have you ever seen the Gendin-edge ? 
 It's good three miles in length, and as sharp as a scythe 
 on the top. Right over glaciers, screes, and slopes, and 
 grey boulder-stones, you can look plump down on either 
 side into the lakes that slumber, dark and heavy, more 
 than thirteen hundred fathoms below. Right along the 
 edge he and I cleft the air on our way. Such a colt I 
 ne'er bestrode before. . . Brown-backed eagles swam in the 
 vast, dizzy cleft, halfway betwixt us and the waters, and 
 dropped behind like motes. Ice-falls broke and crashed 
 upon the strand, but we could hear no sound, only the 
 sprites of the whirlwind leapt as in a dance, sang and 
 swung before our ears and eyes. 
 
 Aase. Oh, God help me ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. All at once, just at a desperate precipice, 
 a startled ptarmigan flashed, quacking, into the air, 
 from the crag that hid him, bang in front of the stag's 
 feet upon the edge. The stag swung half round, and set 
 out with a leap to heaven, right into the deep with the two 
 of us ! 
 
 Behind the black mountain wall, beneath the bottom- 
 less abyss. 
 
 First we cleft a bank of clouds, then we cleft a flock 
 of sea-gul!s that flew shrieking to every side to escape us.
 
 PEER GYNT. 59 
 
 Down without rest or stay we went, but in the depth 
 there glittered something whitish, like a reindeer's belly. 
 Mother ! it was our own reflection rising up through the 
 silent mountain tarn to the crust of the water, in the same 
 wild course with which we plunged downwards. 
 
 Aase. Peer ! God help me. Tell me quick ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. The stag from the clouds, and the stag 
 from the bottom, butted together at the same moment, 
 while the foam splashed round us. There we lay 
 floundering. And in the long-run, you, we managed to 
 get to land towards the north somehow. The stag swam, 
 and I clung on to him. So then I came home. 
 
 Aase. But the stag, you ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. Oh ! he's there still, I suppose. \_Snaps 
 his fingers and turns on his heel.'] If you can find him, 
 you may have him. 
 
 The incongruity between Peer's pretensions and his 
 appearance, and his measureless bragging and lying, 
 make him the scorn and sport of the whole neighbour- 
 hood. He feels it cutting into his very heart, and 
 though he thirsts for recognition and applause, yet he 
 is never really happy except when alone, or when, to 
 use his own quaint phraseology, he is "a bit lopsided" 
 i.e., in liquor. For then the scorn "does not bite." 
 At other times he perpetually hears the titter and 
 marks the sidelong glances of his mockers, and ever 
 and again the wild desire comes over him " to lay the 
 grip of a butcher on their throats and tear the con- 
 tempt out of their breasts." Then with burning cheek 
 he will fling himself upon his back and gaze into the 
 sky and float away into dreamland, tracing his own
 
 6O HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 form in some fantastic cloud, and seeing himself ride 
 in triumph over sea and land, while all the world gazes 
 on him in wonder, and " England's emperor and all 
 England's girls gather on the beach to do him honour." 
 He has a keen natural relish for social enjoyment, 
 in spite of his sensitiveness, and when he can forget 
 himself, that wonderful fascination which seems ex- 
 clusively to pertain to natures at once indolent and 
 powerful asserts itself. Naturally, his mother, though 
 she rates him soundly whenever she sees him, and is 
 always threatening dire vengeance on him for his 
 escapades, will not let any one else say a word against 
 her wonderful boy; and perhaps Ingrid, the only 
 daughter and heiress of the rich peasant at Haegstad, 
 is not the only girl to whom Peer Gynt would only 
 have to beckon if he wanted her. In Ingrid's case, 
 family opposition would of course have to be reckoned 
 on, but then " the old man can never stand up against 
 his child. He's obstinate enough in his way, but 
 Ingrid always comes over him in the end, and where- 
 ever she goes the old fellow comes, step by step, 
 hobbling and grumbling after her." So says Aase, 
 when reproaching her ne'er-do-weel son for having lost 
 his chances. It is too late now. Ingrid is to marry 
 Mads Moen to-morrow. This is news to Peer, who 
 has been no one knows where for six weeks or so, 
 and the name of that milksop Mads Moen in connec- 
 tion with a girl for whom he has himself perhaps had a 
 passing fancy, is too much for the future " emperor," 
 and there and then he dashes off to put a stop to the 
 proceedings !
 
 " PEER GYNT." 6 1 
 
 Haegstad is full of company. Dancing and singing 
 are in full swing as Peer Gynt, forgetting his mission, 
 and only longing to join in the frolic, leaps over the 
 fence, glowing with animation, but is met with pre- 
 concerted contempt and indifference by all the girls and 
 their partners. 
 
 At this moment Peer Gynt's good angel appears 
 upon the scene. A family recently come from an- 
 other neighbourhood joins the company. The decent 
 and pious old couple come on together ; and almost 
 touching her mother's skirt, glancing down at her 
 white apron and her shoes, with her psalm-book care- 
 fully wrapped in a cloth, after the fashion of Norwegian 
 maidens on all occasions of state, comes Solvejg, 
 hand in hand with her little sister Helga. She does 
 not know Peer by sight, and is not in the conspiracy. 
 She comes from another world, and brings another 
 life with her. " It makes it Sunday to look at her." 
 Here is Peer Gynt's u empire " if he is man enough 
 to enter into possession of it. He may do so, for 
 Solvejg's life is henceforth changed as well as his. 
 Begotten of God in her virgin bosom at that first 
 interview is an ideal Peer Gynt, such as God would 
 have him be. This child of her own pure heart will 
 grow till it becomes her very life, and, however sorely 
 tried, she will never desert it or cease to believe that 
 it exists. 
 
 Peer Gynt may ruin and annihilate his actual self; 
 his ideal self is beyond even his own reach, safe in 
 God's keeping and in hers. She at least knows what 
 God meant when he made Peer Gynt.
 
 62 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 When Solvejg hears her partner's name she hastily 
 withdraws her hand. She has just been forbidden by 
 her father to dance with him. Indeed, no one will 
 speak to him now save "the poor craven bridegroom," 
 against whom in tearful disdain Ingrid has shut her- 
 self up in the storehouse, and who, vaguely believing 
 in Peer's remarkable powers, and very definitely con- 
 scious of his own entire helplessness, makes a whim- 
 pering appeal to him for assistance. 
 
 So now our hero stands definitely at the parting of 
 the ways. He may enter upon his true empire in 
 Solvejg's heart and life, and realise himself. But he 
 will have to work for that. A shorter cut, by which 
 he may escape from the contempt he cannot endure, 
 presents itself. A desperate act of self-assertion may 
 ruin his life and Ingrid's, but it will at least put him 
 henceforth beyond the reach of contempt. 
 
 First an unsuccessful attempt to frighten and bully 
 Solvejg ; then one wild appeal, which comes too late, 
 for a prayer has no grace after a threat ; and too soon, 
 for the new leaven of love has not yet worked in her 
 heart. 
 
 In a few moments confusion and amazement reign 
 at Haegstad. Peer Gynt is seen leaping up the 
 precipitous rocks like a goat, carrying off Ingrid to 
 the forest by a path on which no one who values his 
 neck cares to follow him. 
 
 So closes the first act of " Peer Gynt." The four 
 acts which follow show us how that true self-realisation 
 which was so near at hand and so easy to attain, 
 at least in its initial stages, on the dancing green at
 
 " PEER GYNT." 63 
 
 Haegstad, fades away into the distance and becomes 
 ever harder and harder to recover, as self-assertion 
 and self-indulgence do their work. 
 
 The better self does not submit to its own destruc- 
 tion without a protest ; nor does Solvejg's image fade 
 at once from her lover's heart. It is the vision of her 
 beauty and purity which makes poor Ingrid's reign so 
 short ; vet when Ingrid is rejected, and returns to her 
 home, vowing vengeance, Peer yet further degrades 
 himself, still in mere loveless self-assertion, in coarse 
 amours with dissolute saeter girls. In moments of 
 physical depression and satiety he is visited, like other 
 sinners, with passing visions of nobler things : 
 
 There go two brown eagles sailing, and southward 
 the wild geese fly ; and here in the mire knee-deep must 
 I tramp and moil. [Leaps up.] Yea ! I will with them ! 
 Yea ! I will wash myself pure in the bath of the keenest 
 wind ! I will up ; I will plunge myself clean in the shin- 
 ing baptismal font. I will out o'er the saeter mountains ; 
 I will ride me all sweet in soul. 
 
 But the new dreams of purity soon fade into the old 
 dreams of grandeur, and the downward course is still 
 pursued. 
 
 Then, more damning in some respects than his car- 
 nal sins sins against purity, but not against love, for 
 there was not even unfaithful love in them comes his 
 frivolous and burlesque courtship with the trold- 
 maiden, the daughter of the old man of the Dovre- 
 fjeld, and the love, so lightly bestowed and lightly
 
 64 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 withdrawn, but indelible in its debasing influences, 
 which is to bring so fearful a retribution with it. 
 
 It is amongst the trolds that Peer finally learns 
 (while he believes himself to be rejecting) the art of 
 gaining and keeping self-respect by means of a self- 
 sufficiency that enables him to see all that is foul in 
 himself and his surroundings as though it were fair. 
 Thus he escapes from self-contempt and from the tor- 
 ture of his sensitiveness, but not by the only true path 
 the path, namely, of self-discipline and self-realisa- 
 tion. 
 
 We must pass over the grim struggle with the in- 
 visible spirit the sphinx-riddle of life, as is afterwards 
 hinted that no man can grapple with or slay, that 
 crushes all individuality out of Peer Gynt, teaches him 
 the lesson of "going round" instead of "going through," 
 and draws him inch by inch to spiritual self-oblitera- 
 tion. 
 
 Peer Gynt is now far gone on the way to perdition, 
 but the extremest consequences of his sins and weak- 
 ness have for the present been warded off; for Solvejg 
 has been a kind of guardian angel to him, and the 
 powers of evil have been partially baulked by her in- 
 fluence and Aase's. These two have been much to- 
 gether, and Solvejg has gradually learned the whole 
 story of her lover's early life. Every hint has served 
 to strengthen the mysterious power which draws her 
 to him, and as long as her devotion follows him, sym- 
 bolised in the church-bells which ring at her bidding, 
 and break the trold charm that bound him, so long 
 may the dark powers be baffled in their last attempts ;
 
 " PEER GYNT." 65 
 
 and Peer, on his side, though ever falling, still thinks 
 of Solvejg as the fairest and purest of earthly things, 
 still seeks occasion for sending her messages, and still 
 feels that if she does not forget him there is hope for 
 him yet. 
 
 Before his final apostasy the forces of good and evil 
 are to meet in open conflict. His ideal is to present 
 itself to him once more in its living warmth before it 
 fades away into a dim, half-forgotten tradition. 
 
 Peer Gynt is an outlaw the penalty of the rape of 
 the bride and it is at the peril of his life if he ven- 
 tures beyond the limit of the forest. He has built 
 himself a forest home with reindeer antlers over the 
 gable, and is making fast the great wooden lock when 
 Solvejg herself comes on her snow shoes over the 
 mountain stretches, obeying the mysterious impulse 
 which draws her to this man, her girlish bashfulness 
 yielding to a womanly faithfulness that can never be 
 broken, as with firm voice she says : x 
 
 God's blessing on thy toil ! Thou must not reject me. 
 At thy summons I come, and thou must receive me. 
 
 Peer. Solvejg ! It cannot be ! and you dare to ap- 
 proach me ? 
 
 Solvejg. A summons thou sentest me by little Helga, 
 and in storm and in stillness there came many after it. 
 All the words of thy mother were nought but a summons. 
 A summons that teemed when the dreams came upon me. 
 By heavy night and empty day was the same summons 
 borne that now I must come. It seemed as though life 
 were all stifled down there ; neither laughter nor tears 
 
 1 I give the dialogue in a much contracted form. 
 

 
 66 IIENRIK IBSF.N. 
 
 could come straight from the heart. I knew not, indeed, 
 what mind thou mightest cherish ; but I knew and knew 
 well what I should do and must. On my snow shoes I 
 came. When I asked for the way, and they said, 
 "Wherefore go'st thou ?" I said, " Tis my home ! " 
 
 Peer. So then away with plank and with nail ! What 
 need of defence from the haunting sprites ! Solvejg ! 
 Let me look at you no, not too near ! only look at you ! 
 Oh, but I will not smirch thee. With outstretched amis 
 will I hold thee away, O thou beauteous and warm ! 
 Nay, who would have thought it, that I could so draw 
 thee ? But oh ! I have longed for thee daytime and 
 night. See here, I have timbered and built me a house, 
 but down shall all come, 'tis too poor and too foul. My 
 princess ! Ay, now she is found and won ; full soon shall 
 the palace uprise from the rock ! 
 
 Axe in hand, Peer strides to the forest, but there he 
 is met by the trold-maid he had so lightly loved, be- 
 come in a few months a leering old woman with a 
 hideous imp, the offspring, by the weird law of trold- 
 land, of his wanton thoughts; for in that land thoughts 
 shape themselves relentlessly into outward fact, and 
 even the blindest is forced to see that they are indelible 
 as deeds. The trold-maid and imp have come to 
 claim him. Let him marry Solvejg to-morrow if he 
 will, but they will come and demand their share. 
 Where there is room for two there is room for three, 
 and where Peer Gynt and Solvejg sit, there will the 
 trold-woman find her way, and she and Solvejg will go 
 turn and turn about with him ! 
 
 er Cynt. There falls all my palace in ruins and
 
 PEER GYNT." 67 
 
 dust. A wall rises round her whom I was so near. All 
 the beauty is darkened and my joy is struck old. Go 
 round, lad ! You can ne'er find a way through, across 
 this, to her from thyself. Through ? Yet surely there 
 should be a way. There stands written a word, if I well 
 mind it, concerning repentance. But what ? what is it ? 
 I have not the book have forgotten it most and where 
 to get guidance out here in the forest ? Repentance? It 
 might be whole years e'er I tore through thit way. 
 'Twere a-sorry life. To break up what is pure and beaute- 
 ous and fair, and then tinker it up from the fragments 
 again ? It may do with a fiddle, but not with a bell. 
 Where the grass shall grow green why the feet must 
 ne'er trample. But it was a lie her and her elfish snout. 
 Now the foul stuff is all out of sight. Yes ! out of sight is 
 it, but not out of mind. Wriggling thoughts will follow 
 me in. Ingrid and those three [the saeter girls] that 
 came leaping over the hills, will they be there too ? And 
 with taunt and leer will they claim like her to be taken to 
 my heart, to be lifted OR tender and outstretched arms ? 
 Go round it, lad ; if my arms were as long as the pine- 
 tree's branch or the fir-tree's stem, I fear I should lift her 
 too near me still, to set her down stainless and unsmirched 
 again. I must get round this by what means I may, that 
 neither the gain may be mine nor the loss. Shove it 
 away and forget it all! \turns towards the house, but stops 
 short agaiii\. Go in after that, so befouled and ashamed? 
 Go in with all that trold-ship in train ? Speak, yet be 
 silent ; confess, yet conceal ? 'Tis the Sabbath eve to 
 go in and meet her, as I am now, were sacrilege. 
 Solvejg \in the door\. Are you coming ? 
 Peer. Go round. 
 Solvejg. What ? 
 
 Peer. You must wait ; it is dark here, and I have a 
 heavy load.
 
 68 IIENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Solvejg. Wait till I help you ; we'll share our burdens. 
 Peer. Nay, stay where you stand, I must bear it alone. 
 Solvejg. But it must not be long, you ! 
 Peer. Be patient, girl. Be the time long or short you 
 must wait. 
 Solvejg \nodding\ Yes, wait ! 
 
 [Peer Gynt crosses over into thejorest; 
 Solvejg is left standing in the half- 
 open door.] 
 
 So Peer, seeing that his sins have cut him off from 
 immediate and painless entrance upon the possession 
 of his better self, instead of seeking to purify himself, 
 says that when a thing is broken it is too late to mend it, 
 and goes on, therefore, to break more things ; says 
 that where the ground is once trodden no green grass 
 can grow, and goes on to tread more places bare ; says 
 that he must bear the burden all alone, and so throws 
 it all upon Solvejg ; will not commit the sacrilege of 
 going into the home made bright by her presence, 
 and so makes all his after life a desecration of her 
 love. 
 
 He is equally selfish in his relations with the other 
 woman that loves him. In the unrivalled pathos of 
 Aase's death-scene we see Peer at his best. But in 
 his best is revealed his worst his irredeemable 
 selfishness and shirking. 
 
 He has come to his mother for comfort, and she is 
 full of her own approaching death, the seizure of her 
 few properties in payment of Peer's fine for the rape
 
 " PEER GYNT." 69 
 
 of the bride, and allusions to Solvejg's desertion of 
 her home for Peer's sake. There is little comfort 
 in these themes, and Peer will not have any of 
 them. 
 
 The scene opens with Aase lying alone in bed. 
 Her neighbour, Kari, has told her not to expect her 
 son to trouble himself about her, but she is certain he 
 will come. 
 
 Aase. O Lord, will he never come ? Such a dreary 
 time I have waited. I've no one to send to fetch him, 
 and I've so much I want to say. There isn't a moment 
 to lose. So quickly ! Who would have thought it ! 
 Oh, if only poor Aase knew she hadn't been too hard 
 upon him ! 
 
 Peer Gynt \enter ing\. Good-even ! 
 
 Aase. God give you joy ! So you've come then, my 
 dear, dear boy ! But how dare you venture down here 
 where your life is in forfeit ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. Oh, as to my life, it's all one. I couldn't 
 choose but come and see round. 
 
 Aase. Yes ; now Kari will be put to shame ; and I 
 can go off in peace ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. Go off? What jabber is that? Why, 
 where do you want to go ? 
 
 Aase. Ah, Peer, the end is coming ; I haven't much 
 time left now. 
 
 Peer Gynt [with an impatient swing, as he crosses the 
 floor~\. Look at that ! When I'm trying to get out of 
 the worry, and thought I should be quit of it here ! Are 
 you cold in your hands and feet ? 
 
 Aase. Yes, Peer. It will soon be over. When you
 
 70 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 see my eyes glazing you must close them carefully to. 
 And then you must see to the coffin ; and be sure it's a 
 fine one, dear. Oh, no, I forgot. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Oh, shut up with that ! There's time 
 enough yet. 
 
 Aase. Yes, yes. [Looks uneasily round the room.] 
 
 You see the poor sticks they've left me. Just like them ! 
 
 Peer Gynt [with a lurch\ There again ! [In a hard 
 
 voice] Of course it's all my fault. But what's the use 
 
 of casting it up at me ? 
 
 Aase. Your fault ! No, it was the cursed drink that 
 all the mischief came from ! My poor boy, you were 
 drunk, and we don't know what we'ie doing then, do we ? 
 And so you rode on the stag ! Yes, yes, right enough ; 
 you were dazed. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Just let that tale drop, mother. There ; 
 let the whole thing be ! We'll put off all the worries till 
 afterwards till another time. [Sitting on the side of the 
 bed] Now, mother, let's chat together, but only of odds 
 and ends, and forget all that's bitter and crooked, and all 
 that is sore and sharp. No ; look now ! Why, sure 
 enough, there's the old cat ! He's alive yet, I see ! 
 
 Aase. Oh, he goes on at night so ! You know what 
 that means, you do. 
 
 Peer Gynt [turning it off~\. What's the news in the 
 place here ? 
 
 Aase [with a knowing smile]. They say there's a 
 girl somewhere, yearning for the mountains. 
 
 Peer Gynt [hastily]. And Mads Moen is he satis- 
 fied ? 
 
 Aase [continuing]. They say she's deaf to the two 
 old folks with their tears. You'd better go round and 
 call in there ; maybe you could do something, Peer. 
 
 Peer Gynt. But the smith, where has he come to 
 harbour ?
 
 "PEER GYNT." /I 
 
 Aase. We won't talk of the filthy smith. I'd sooner 
 tell you her name, lad ; the name of the girl, you 
 know. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Nay, now let us chat together, but only 
 of odds and ends, and forget all that's bitter and crooked, 
 and all that is sore and sharp. Are you thirsty ? Shall 
 I get you some drink ? Can you stretch ? The bed is 
 full short. Let me see why, don't I believe it's the 
 crib that I had as a boy ! Do you mind how oft of an 
 evenijig you sat by my bed and spread the skins over me 
 and sang and crooned me your songs ? 
 
 Aase. Yes ! don't you mind it how we played 
 sledges when your father was off on his journeys ? The 
 coverlet skin was the sledge-rug and the floor was a 
 frozen fiord. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Yes ; but the best of it all, mother, can't 
 you remember that too ? It was the gallant steed. 
 
 Aase. Yes, yes ; do you think I don't know ? It 
 was Kari's cat we borrowed. He'd sit on the old wooden 
 chair. 
 
 Peer Gynt. To the castle west of the moon, to the 
 castle east of the sun, to Soria-Moria castle, the way ran 
 high and low. A stick that we found in the cupboard 
 you took for whip handle. 
 
 Aase. How I perked myself there on the cushions ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. Yes, yes, and with loosened rein, you 
 turned yourself round as we travelled to ask me if I was 
 cold. God bless you, you ugly old darling, for you were 
 a tender soul. Why, what are you groaning about ? 
 
 Aase. My back ! The hard boards hurt it so. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Stretch yourself out, I'll support you. So, 
 so, now you're lying at ease. 
 Aase \uneasily\ No, Peer, I must flit ! 
 Peer Gynt. You must flit ? 
 Aase. Yes, flit ! That's what I keep wanting.
 
 72 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Oh, nonsense ! Spread the rug over you 
 and let me sit down by the foot-board. See now, we'll 
 shorten the hours by singing and crooning songs. 
 
 Aase. No ! better fetch the Good Box>k from the cup- 
 board. I'm so troubled in my mind. 
 
 Peer Gynt, In Soria-Moria castle there is feasting for 
 king and prince. You lie back upon the sledge cushions, 
 and I'll drive you there over the downs. 
 
 Aase. But, Peer, dear, am I bidden ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. Yes ! that we are, both the two. \7hrows 
 a string round the chair the cat is lying on, takes a stick 
 in his hand and seats himself on the foot-board ^\ Now 
 speed thee, my Blackie, now speed thee Mother, 
 you're not too cold ? Aye, aye, you can tell by the gallop 
 when Blackie is on the way ! 
 
 Aase. Peer, dear, what is it ringing ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. The glittering sledge-bells, mother. 
 
 Aase. Hu ! what a hollow clanging ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. We're driving over a fiord. 
 
 Aase. I'm scared by the rushing and sighing so 
 strange and so wild in my ears ! 
 
 Peer Gynt. It's the pine trees, mother. They're 
 soughing out over the downs as we pass. Only lie 
 still. 
 
 Aase. There's a glitter and gleaming out there afar. 
 What does it come from, the shining ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. From the castle's windows and doors. 
 Can you hear how they're dancing ? 
 
 Aase. Yes. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Outside is St. Peter standing and bidding 
 you walk in, mother. 
 
 Aase. Does he greet me ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. Yes, with all honour. And he pours out 
 the sweetest wine.
 
 "PEER GYNT." 73 
 
 Aase. Wine ? Has he cakes as well, then ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. I should think so ! A dish cram full. 
 And the late arch-deacon's lady is getting the coffee and 
 meat. 
 
 Aase. Oh, mercy ! then, shall I meet her ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. As often and snug as you please. 
 
 Aase. No ! think, Peer, to what a rejoicing you're 
 driving poor Aase in. 
 
 Peer Gynt [cracking his whip}. Hie! speed thee, my 
 Blackie, now speed thee. 
 
 Aase. ''Peer, dear, you're driving right ? 
 
 Peer Gynt {cracking his whip again]. We're on the 
 high road. 
 
 Aase. The journey has made me so weak and faint. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Now the castle rises before us, and soon 
 will the journey be done. 
 
 Aase. I will lie back and shut my eyes, then, and 
 leave all to you, my boy. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Now, speed thee, my Blackie, my charger. 
 In the castle is bustle and stir ; they crowd and they 
 swarm round the portals. And here come Peer Gynt 
 and his mother ! What say you now, Mr. Saint Peter? 
 Won't you let mother in ? I think you may search far 
 and wide, sir, e'er you find me an honester skin ! Of 
 myself I have little to say, I can turn me back from the 
 portal. If you give me a drink I'll say thank you. If 
 you don't, I shall never complain. [Here some apparent 
 reluctance on the part of the porter is at once quashea by 
 an appeal to the supreme authority^ Aye, didn't I know 
 it ; I tell you ! [To St. Peterl\ Now you'll dance to another 
 tune ! \Anxiously I\ Why does your eye seem glaz- 
 ing? Mother! Are you gone off your head ? \Goesup 
 to the bed-head.^ You mustn't lie there all staring ! 
 Speak, mother ; it's me, your boy ! \_Feels her brow and
 
 74 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 hands tenderly; then throws the string over the chair, 
 and in a low voice says ] So, then, you may rest now, 
 Blackie. We've come to the journey's end. [Closes her 
 eyes, and bows down over her.] Have thanks for each 
 day that thou lived'st; for spank and for lullabv ! But 
 now you must thank me back, mother. [Presses his cheek 
 against her mouth J] See there ! It was thanks for the 
 lift. 
 
 On Aase's death Peer leaves the country, and we 
 catch nothing but a few retrospective glimpses of his 
 subsequent adventures up to middle life ; for when 
 next we meet him he is a wealthy man of fashion 
 surrounded by a chorus of sycophants gathered from 
 all nations, to dance, as he tells them in a moment of 
 vinous candour, round his altar of the golden calf. 
 
 He is still the same man, but years of " hedging," 
 of self-sufficiency, and of lying, have carried him much 
 further forward on the path of insignificance, and his 
 Norwegian glow and colouring have faded away. He 
 is a commonplace, undistinguished, cosmopolitan 
 sinner, material, worldly-minded, and cynical. He has 
 picked up a great deal besides gold since last we saw 
 him, and it is his boast that he has remained himself 
 through all his changes of fortune. He has got his 
 luck from America, his books from Germany, his 
 waistcoat and his manners from France, his industry 
 and keen eye for the main chance from England, his 
 patience from the Jews, and a touch of the dolce far 
 nicnte from Italy. On his education he shall speak 
 for himself:
 
 "PEER GYNT." 7c( 
 
 I am, as I have mentioned to you before, entirely self- 
 taught. I have never studied anything methodically ; 
 but I have thought and speculated, and got up a little of 
 everything. I began in advanced age, and you know it's 
 rather hard work then to plough up and down the pages 
 and push along through thick and thin. History I've 
 taken in detachments. And since, in seasons of depres- 
 sion, one needs something firm to rest upon, I've taken 
 religion scrapwise. I think that's the way to make it 
 run. One shouldn't read just for the sake of devouring, 
 but to se what one can make available. 
 
 The most wonderful thing about this man now is his 
 religion. It is quite of the type satirised in " Brand," 
 only Peer Gynt has a strange gift of cynical frankness, 
 rising to the point of genius, which enables him fluently 
 and with shameless self-satisfaction to lay bare in his 
 own mind the workings of a base and self-seeking 
 religion, which other men live by but seldom openly 
 profess. To borrow a witticism from another quarter, 
 his religion is simply and solely an " insurance against 
 fire." It sets the crown upon his systematic hedging 
 operations. He made his money in the slave trade, 
 and by exporting idols to China. He had religious 
 scruples against both especially the trade in idols. 
 So he quieted his conscience by opening up another 
 branch of trade with China, which consisted in equip- 
 ping missionaries with Bibles and rum at a profit. 
 Things balanced in this fashion, he began after a time 
 to feel uncomfortable about the slave trade. The 
 philanthropic army was becoming formidable, and the 
 risks were great ; after all it was hardly a suitable
 
 76 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 trade "for one advanced in life." So his moral feeling 
 triumphed. He gave up the trade, kept the last cargo 
 for himself, turned planter, had his negroes religiously 
 and morally instructed (which turned out a very good 
 speculation), and when finally he sold the whole con- 
 cern, he gave out grog all round gratis, so that every 
 man and woman on the place had a spree. On the 
 whole, then, he hopes that his sins are more than 
 balanced, and that his account stands well with 
 heaven. 
 
 But the most remarkable of his religious utterances 
 I must give at length, once more premising that he 
 says what many another man seems to believe, but 
 what perhaps was never uttered by human tongue 
 before and never will be again ! 
 
 While he is asleep in a hammock en the coast of 
 Morocco, his treacherous friends seize his yacht, with 
 his treasure on board, and he wakes to see her putting 
 out at full steam to sea. 
 
 Nightmare ! Nonsense ! I shall wake up soon ! 
 She's off to sea, and at tearing speed. All nonsense ! I'm 
 dreaming, I'm drunk, and daft ! Oh, surely it's impossible 
 that I'm to die ! A dream ? Yes ! it shall be a dream. 
 Frightful ! Alas ! it's all true ! My beasts of friends ! 
 Oh,hear me, Lord God. Thou art so wise and so righteous ! 
 O Judgment ! It's me Peer Gynt ! O Lord God, think 
 on me. Protect me, O Father ; else I am undone ! 
 Make them reverse the engines. Make them lower the 
 gig. Stop the thieves ; entangle the rigging somewhere. 
 Listen to me. Let other folks' business alone. The
 
 " PEER GYNT." 77 
 
 world will shift for itself for a bit No, by God he's not 
 listening ! He's deaf as usual. A pretty state of things 
 indeed. A God that can't help a fellow out of a fix like 
 this [with a gesture towards heaven]. Wsh ! Haven't I 
 given up the plantations and negroes ? Haven't I sent 
 missionaries over to Asia ? One good turn deserves 
 another ! Get me on board ! [A flash shoots from the 
 yacht and a thick cloud rolls up, a hollow sound booms. 
 Peer Gynt utters a shriek and sinks upon the sand. 
 Little by-little the smoke clears away. The ship has dis- 
 appeared.^ 
 
 Peer Gynt [pale and with hushed voice~\. That was 
 the sword of vengeance ! Gone down, man and mouse, 
 in a moment. Blessings for ever on the stroke of chance 
 of chance ? No, it was more than that. I was to be 
 delivered and they destroyed. Oh, thanks and praise 
 that Thou hast protected me, that Thine eye was upon 
 me, despite all my sins. What a wonderful sense of 
 security and trust there is in knowing oneself to be indi- 
 vidually protected. But in the desert ? How shall I get 
 food and drink? Oh, I shall find something. It's His 
 business to see to that ! There's no such great danger. 
 [Insinuatingly.] Oh, it isn't His will that I, a poor little 
 sparrow, shall fall. Only let me be humble, and give 
 Him His time. Let the Lord rule. Don't be downcast. 
 Was that a lion roaring in the reeds ? No, it wasn't a 
 lion ! A lion ? Yes, certainly ! The beast, he'll take 
 care to keep his distance. It isn't so easy to fight with 
 
 your masters. They know that by instinct But 
 
 all the same, I should like to get up a tree. There are 
 some acacias and palms waving over there. If I can get 
 up I shall feel safe and sheltered especially if I can re- 
 member a few psalms as well. [Gets up and settles him- 
 self^ How delightful to feel one's spirit exalted. Noble
 
 /8 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 thoughts are better than wealth. Only build upon Him. 
 He knows what measure of the cup of affliction I am man 
 enough to drink. He feels like a father towards me, in 
 person. [Looking ruefully over the sea, where his yacht 
 and treasure have sunk.] But economical ? No ! That 
 he isn't. 
 
 The miscellaneous and somewhat disconnected 
 adventures that follow show us Peer Gynt in a variety 
 of characters, such as a company promoter interested 
 in developing the Sahara as an inland sea, a travelling 
 scholar and historian, and above all, a prophet in an 
 Arab community. It is in this last capacity that he 
 sinks lowest of all. He is disposed "graciously to fool" 
 Anitra, the chieftain's daughter, but owing to his im- 
 penetrable self-sufficiency she is able to fool him with 
 such completeness that even he for a moment con- 
 fesses himself " plucked and feathered," as Anitra 
 gallops off with his jewels and his purse, and leaves 
 him in the middle of the desert. 
 
 A few hours suffice to restore him, however, and in 
 the alchemy of his memory, the whole adventure 
 becomes a touching and noble " renunciation of the 
 joys of love " on his part for the disinterested pursuit 
 of truth. 
 
 And thus at each step he washes himself out more 
 and more completely, while boasting that he is still 
 " himself " ; and becomes more and more convinced 
 of his own virtue as his moral nature goes more and 
 more completely to ruin. 
 
 When we have conducted him to his lowest depth
 
 " PEER GYNT." 79 
 
 of insignificance, all the powers of earth, heaven, and 
 hell seem to concentrate themselves upon showing 
 him what he is, and in what sense his boast is true 
 that he is '' himself." 
 
 For instance, in Cairo he is taken into a madhouse 
 by the doctor who has himself gone mad, without any 
 one yet knowing it ; and on the strength of his de- 
 claration that he has always been "himself," he is 
 proclaimed emperor of the madmen. Peer objects 
 that the very thing about madmen is that they are 
 " not themselves," to which the doctor answers : 
 
 Not themselves ? Now there you're profoundly mis- 
 taken ! Here, I assure you, people are most damnably 
 themselves. Themselves and not a jot besides ! Here 
 they all go at full sail as themselves. Each one shuts 
 himself up in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the 
 ferment of self. He's hermetically sealed with the bung 
 of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. 
 None has a tear for another's woes, none has sense for 
 another's ideas. Ourselves that's what we are in thought 
 and in speech ; ourselves to outmost plank of the spring- 
 board. And so if an emperor is to reign, it's clear that 
 you're the appointed man. 
 
 Clear, indeed ! This is the way in which Peer has 
 been himself. 
 
 I will not go through the gruesome scenes in the 
 madhouse. They are all but lost on Peer. Now and 
 again, just for a moment, the meaning of it all seems 
 to hover before him. " Mad and sane are the same 
 misprint, " he exclaims bitterly ; but the vision, if it
 
 SO HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 comes near him, does not really touch him, and he 
 goes out of the madhouse sickened and horrified, but 
 not converted. 
 
 In the midst of his sins and selfishness we are 
 carried back for a moment to Norway, and hear 
 Solvejg's song : 
 
 Maybe there will pass both winter and spring, and the 
 next summer too, and the whole long year ; but at last 
 thou wilt come, I know it for truth, and I will still wait, 
 as I promised of yore. God strengthen thee whereso 
 thougoest on earth : God gladden thee if now by His foot- 
 stool thou standest. Here shall I wait till thou comest 
 again ; or, if thou waitest there, there meet we, beloved. 
 
 At last, after many wanderings and many changes 
 of fortune, Peer Gynt, an old man with the lines of 
 selfishness drawn yet harder upon his face, and certain 
 added traits of unloveliness conspicuous in his charac- 
 ter, turns his face to Norway. We must travel with 
 seven-leagued boots past the storm which throws him 
 penniless upon his native shore ; past the mysterious 
 and ghastly interview with the impersonation of 
 physical death and its terrors, which repels Peer Gynt, 
 but without wholesomely disturbing his self-sufficiency ; 
 past the revisiting of his old home, where he finds his 
 past history already a popular myth ; past his reflec- 
 tions on all the parts he has played during his life ; past 
 his obstinate self-sufficiency and now almost fiendish 
 selfishness. Everything and everyone holds up to him 
 the mirror that he may see what he has become, but,
 
 "PEER GYNT." 8 1 
 
 while shocked at the features he beholds, he never re- 
 cognises them as his own. 
 
 At last, in his wanderings he comes to the house he 
 himself built so long ago, and hears Solvejg's voice 
 as she sings her Whitsun-song within. 
 
 Then the clouds that have so long veiled the past 
 begin to roll away, and Peer Gynt, pale as death, re- 
 cognises the true seat of the "empire/' which he has 
 forgotten, hidden, and sported with so recklessly. 
 Still he tries to escape, and flees back into the forest. 
 There, as the grey mists lie sullenly over the desola- 
 tion left by a mountain fire that has swept over the 
 forest, he begins at last to see what he might have 
 been, and what he is. " Falsehood, dreams, and 
 dead-born knowledge " lie at the base of his pyramid 
 of life. It rears itself on terraces of lies. Shrinking 
 from earnestness and from the anguish of repentance 
 is its shield and device ; and the legend peals, as 
 through the trumpet of doom, " Petrus Gyntus Caesar 
 fecit." As he gazes, baby voices, between wailing and 
 singing, fall upon his ears. " We are thoughts ; thou 
 should'st have thought us ; hands and feet thou 
 should'st have lent us. ... Aloft we should have 
 soared as ringing voices ; here like grey worsted balls 
 must we roll and tumble." Withered leaves swept 
 past by the wind shriek : " We are watchwords. 
 Thou should'st have planted us ! See how torpor has 
 wretchedly picked at us. The worm it hath eaten 
 into every lobe of us ; and we never could spread like 
 a crown round the fruit." Sighs are borne through 
 the air : " We are songs ; thou should'st have sung 
 
 F
 
 82 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 us ! A thousand times thou hast smothered and 
 crushed us. In thy heart's mine \ve have lain and 
 waited, but ne'er were we summoned." The dew- 
 drops dripping from the branches are " tears that were 
 never shed," and the crushed straws "deeds that were 
 never done," which will stand up in judgment against 
 him on the last day. 
 
 Peer Gynt has never been himself. Indeed he has 
 not been anyone at all. And this introduces the 
 mysterious button-caster who is to melt his soul in his 
 spoon, as old metal, to coin fresh souls from. 
 
 Peer Gynt resents and resists with tooth and claw 
 the idea of this destruction of himself ; but the button- 
 caster points out to him that he has never been him- 
 self. Inasmuch as the stamp of individuality is entirely 
 effaced, he has really nothing to lose by extinction. 
 
 Indignant and incredulous, he first sets about 
 proving that he has always been his true self, as has 
 been his constant boast ; but a series of grotesquely 
 or grimly humorous scenes, of a terrible suppressed 
 earnestness, drive him first from the plea that he has 
 been his true self, and then from the plea that he has 
 been even his false and wicked self. 
 
 For it appears that if a man has expressed himself 
 negatively in strong, characteristic, and original sins, 
 he may be handed over to the proper functionary to 
 be further "developed" the treatment requiring 
 much sulphur and such like ingredients till the 
 " positive" likeness is recovered. But "it needs both 
 force and earnestness to sin," and Peer has been too 
 much afraid of committing himself to have qualified
 
 " PEER GYNT." 83 
 
 himself thus. Not only God's Peer Gynt but the 
 devil's Peer Gynt also is washed out. There has long 
 ceased to be anything decisive or individual in his 
 sins, and since he cannot get an authentic register of 
 them he must go into the melting-spoon. This is 
 what his "hedging" and compromise have brought 
 him to ! At last he sees and acquiesces in the justice 
 of the doom. He sees that he is in truth no one. 
 Clasping himself in horror and despair, as if to per- 
 suade himself by physical demonstration that there is 
 a Peer Gynt somewhere, he cries : 
 
 Is there no one, no one in all the turmoil ! no one in 
 the abyss, no one in heaven ! 
 
 So unspeakably poor may a soul then go, back into 
 the grey mists of nothingness. Thou beauteous earth, 
 be not wroth with me that I trod thy grass to no avail. 
 Thou beauteous sun, thou hast squandered thy shining 
 beams on a deserted cottage. There was no man therein 
 to be warmed and attuned. The owner they said was 
 never at home. Beautiful earth and beautiful sun, ye 
 were, fools to bear and to shine for my mother. Spirit is 
 chary, and Nature is prodigal ; and 'tis dear to pay with 
 one's li!e for one's birth. I will up, high up on the 
 steepest rock ; I will once more look on the sun as he 
 rises ; gaze myself weary on the promised land ; then get 
 the snowdrift heaped over me. They may write, " Here 
 lies no one buried," and then, after that, let it go as it 
 may. 
 
 Peer Gynt , is ready now to go into the melting- 
 spoon. He has come to know that he is already no
 
 84 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 one. But this very recognition is the first step on a 
 better way. As he meets the button-caster again he once 
 more hears Solvejg's voice, and sees the light in her 
 cottage. Then a kind of wild confidence returns. He 
 no longer looks for his lost empire ; but here at least 
 he may find his devil's self, and may be saved from 
 annihilation. Here he may find the register of sins 
 which will at least prove him to be some one. Facing 
 the anguish and shame of his remorse, for once he 
 will not "go round," but will break through, be the 
 way never so hard. " Like a wild and infinite wail is 
 this coming in, coming home, coming back !" 
 
 Peer Gynt cries out for the tale of his sins from 
 Solvejg, but as she gropes for him, a blind old 
 woman, she can only cry, "It is he ! it is he ! Now 
 blessed be God !" He has made her life a delicious 
 song. He has never wronged her. Blessed is he to 
 have come once again ! Then his last hope is gone 
 unless perchance Solvejg can tell him where his 
 true self has been. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Lost ! if you cannot guess riddles. 
 
 Solvejg. Ask them. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Ask them ? ay, verily ! Can you tell me 
 where Peer Gynt has been since last we met ? 
 
 Solvejg. Where he has been ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. With the mark of his destiny upon his 
 brow ; e'en as he sprang from God's thought ? Can you 
 tell me that ? If not, I must wend me home, must sink 
 into the land of mists. 
 
 Solvejg. Oh, that riddle is easy read. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Then say what you know. Where have
 
 " PEER GYNT." 85 
 
 I been, as myself, whole and true ? Where have I been 
 with God's stamp on my brow ? 
 
 Solvejg [smiling]. In my faith, in my hope, in my 
 love. 
 
 Peer Gynt [starting back\. What say you ? Ha ! they 
 are juggling words. To that boy in your heart you your- 
 self are the mother. 
 
 Solvejg. His mother I am. But who is his father ? 
 'Tis he who pardons at the mother's prayer. 
 
 Peer Gynt [as a ray of light from the rising sun falls 
 on hini]. My mother, my spouse, thou innocent woman ! 
 Oh shield me, shield me in thy bosom ! 
 
 [He grips fast hold of her and buries his face in 
 her lap. Long silence as the sun rtsesJ] 
 
 Solvcjg [sings softly]. Sleep thou, sleep, my darling 
 boy. I will rock thee, I will watch. The boy has sat on 
 his mother's lap. They two have played the whole live- 
 long day. The boy has rested on his mother's breast 
 the whole livelong day. God bless thee, my joy ! The 
 boy has lain so close to my heart the whole livelong day. 
 Now he is so tired. Sleep thou, sleep, my darling boy ! 
 I will rock thee, I will watch. 
 
 The Button-Caster's voice \_from behind the house}. 
 We meet at the last crossway, Peer ; and then we shall 
 see I say no more. 
 
 Solvejg [sings louder as the day strengthens]. I will 
 rock thee, I will watch. Sleep and dream, my darling.
 
 86 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 "EMPEROR AND GALILEAN," "LOVE'S 
 COMEDY," THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 
 
 " BRAND " and " Peer Gynt " were fierce invectives 
 against Norway, but they were welcomed with bound- 
 less enthusiasm by the very people they lashed. 
 
 It may be doubted whether such a phenomenon 
 has ever been paralleled. Dramas filled with scathing 
 satire and denunciation of the Norwegians have be- 
 come as it were the Norwegian national epics. They 
 have given Norway an exalted sense of national exist- 
 ence and national significance. They have been read 
 by high and low, are known almost by heart by hun- 
 dreds of Norwegians, and have enriched the thought, 
 the proverbial wisdom, the imagination, and the 
 language of Norway. To the wanderer over fell and 
 fiord, they are ever present ; their magic lines so 
 blending with the scenery they describe, that he see* 
 them in the snow-field and ice tarn ; and the author 
 of " Peer Gynt " and " Brand " is forgotten and lost- 
 absorbed into the invisible and impersonal genius of 
 the place which has become articulate through his 
 words. 
 
 But Ibsen's direct polemic against his people was 
 not yet completed. "Brand" and "Peer Gynt" were
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 87 
 
 followed by "The Youthful League " (1869), a satire 
 on the political parties and the political motives of 
 Norway. This brilliant play is naturally one that ill 
 bears transplanting, but English readers are in a 
 position to form their own opinion of its merits in an 
 English dress, and it is not my purpose to dwell upon 
 it further than to point out that it is the first of Ibsen's 
 plays written in that limpid simplicity of current 
 modern prose which stamps his dialogue in all his 
 later work with unsurpassed verisimilitude and natural- 
 ness in the original, and with the inevitable appearance 
 of baldness in even the best translation. 
 
 "The Youthful League" checked Ibsen's rising 
 popularity. It was received with indignation in his 
 native land. The philosophical observer may find 
 much food for reflection in the fact that the people 
 which not only admired, but positively exulted in 
 " Brand " and " Peer Gynt," indignantly resented the 
 " Youthful League." But this too passed away. 
 My copy bears the date of 1883, and shows that in 
 that year the work reached its fifth edition. 
 
 After writing these three plays, Ibsen at last re- 
 turned to "Julian the Apostate," and in 1873 ^ e two 
 dramas, respectively entitled, " Caesar's Apostasy " 
 and " The Emperor Julian," but also embraced under 
 the common title, " Emperor and Galilaean," made 
 their appearance. 
 
 In some respects this is the most ambitious, as well 
 as the most bulky, of Ibsen's works. It has great 
 merits, so great, indeed, that it would not be easy to 
 exaggerate them ; but yet it is almost the only one of
 
 88 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Ibsen's published works that can fairly be called an 
 artistic failure. Critics, I think, are substantially 
 agreed on both these points. The drama gives evidence 
 of a historic sense, the more remarkable since Ibsen 
 was presumably not much of a Greek scholar, and must 
 have depended largely upon translations and secondary 
 sources for his vivid reconstruction of the epoch of 
 Julian. The intolerable atmosphere of suspicion, 
 hypocrisy, and treachery in which Julian passed his 
 youth ; his own timid, feverish superstitious, yet at- 
 tractive character ; and the heroic potentialities which 
 never rise into heroism, the talent which never becomes 
 genius, the capacity which never ripens into greatness, 
 and the all-penetrating, all-corroding vanity that are 
 the distinctive characteristics of Julian, are thrown into 
 vivid relief in the first of the twin dramas. In the 
 second we witness the moral and intellectual collapse 
 of a fanatic who lacks inspiration. Julian is a pedant, 
 not a prophet ; and his pedantry swallows up his 
 humanity, and dictates actions as revolting and less 
 excusable than the wildest excesses of the Christian 
 fanatics. But he never can adopt the role of a per- 
 secutor with a whole heart. He is ashamed of him- 
 self, and is half conscious all along of the hollowness 
 of his own cause. He is engaged in a hopeless 
 struggle against fate, and its hopelessness does not 
 bring out the tragic grandeur of his nature, but saps 
 his force and vitality, and reduces him to insignifi- 
 cance, indecision, and at last to more helpless super- 
 stition and crazy arrogance. It is a relief to all, 
 a relief chiefly to himself, when he receives his death
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 89 
 
 wound, can drop the weary struggle, and can cry, 
 "Galilaean ! Thou hast triumphed." 
 
 The whole picture is drawn with deep insight both 
 historical and psychological. But it cannot be denied 
 that the dialogue often drags and sometimes over- 
 stays the climax; and that the second of the two 
 dramas has no sufficient development, and no sufficient 
 interest to sustain it at any rate through the first three 
 of its five, long acts. 
 
 But in spite of all this, there is, perhaps, not one of 
 Ibsen's works which the serious student of the social 
 plays can less afford to ignore than the " Emperor 
 and Galilsean," for here, if anywhere, Ibsen sets forth 
 his formal creed. 
 
 Julian perceives rightly enough that the official 
 Christianity of his day is hollow and hypocritical. It 
 does not make men spiritual, but it lays a ban upon 
 their earthly enjoyments, and corrupts and corrodes 
 them. It has quenched the beauty of the old pagan 
 religion of joy, and has planted in its place a grovelling 
 religion of superstition, of fear, of bargaining, arid of 
 treachery. 
 
 But now that it has once come and has made the 
 old religion wither, as under a blight, it is vain to en- 
 deavour to recover that old religion again. A man 
 may seek relief from the present by transporting him- 
 self into the past, but he cannot bring back the past 
 into the present and make it live again. 
 
 When Julian has been crowning his brow with vine- 
 leaves, and seeking the fresh life of joy and freedom 
 that reigned of old, and has then fallen into a con-
 
 90 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 versation that stirs in his heart thoughts of the 
 passionate earnestness of the early Christian spirit, he 
 cries out that the only real life is to be found in the 
 fire of martyrdom and the crown of thorns ; and as he 
 strikes his hand upon his brow, it falls upon the vine- 
 crown ! Sadly he removes it and gazes on it, then 
 flings it away with the bitter cry, " The new truth is 
 true no more, and the ancient beauty is no longer 
 beautiful ! " 
 
 And yet he perpetually strives to recover that ancient 
 beauty, though he feels that it is now hateful. As he 
 rides through the streets in Bacchic triumph with 
 the panther skin thrown over his shoulders and the 
 wild chorus of revellers round him, he tries to imagine 
 that he is restoring ancient beauty ; but no sooner is 
 he alone than he feels the hideous hollowness of the 
 whole thing. Is a band of drunkards and harlots paid 
 to sport in the streets, while the abashed or amused 
 crowd stares in bewilderment, or raises a mercenary 
 shout to please the Emperor, a shout with no joy, no 
 conviction, no ring in it is this beautiful ? 
 
 Beautiful? Nay, he cries out for a bath, a bath for 
 the body and the soul, to wash away the stench of it ! 
 
 And thus in the war of philosophy against super- 
 stition, of toleration against fanaticism, of beauty and 
 freedom against anxious earnestness, he has changed 
 sides without knowing it. He finds himself engaged in 
 a crusade against luxury, worldliness, and indifference. 
 He strives to lay a new consecration upon men, instead 
 of leading them back into frank and free enjoyment of 
 life. The Galilaean has laid a spell upon the world,
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 91 
 
 and his foe can no more escape it than his followers 
 can. 
 
 It is clear enough, then, where Julian is wrong. But 
 what would have been the right ? The Christianity he 
 knew was rotten. He could not acquiesce in it. But 
 the true way out of it into something better lay for- 
 ward, and not backward. 
 
 This doctrine is expounded in a jargon which, it 
 must be- confessed, severely tries our patience by the 
 mystic Maximus. The " Third Kingdom," which is 
 neither that of the Emperor nor that of the Galilean, 
 and yet is both, which is neither that of the flesh nor 
 that of the spirit, and yet both, neither of beauty nor 
 of truth, and yet both, the " Third Kingdom," the 
 consummation and harmony of its imperfect pre- 
 decessors, towards which all rebels against what is 
 have dimly felt their way, which none can describe 
 because none have seen the unborn this "Third 
 Kingdom " is to be reached through the past and the 
 present. Infancy has its beauty, which dies, but is 
 not lost when youth swallows it up. Youth has its 
 beauty, which dies, but is not lost when manhood 
 succeeds it. You cannot go back to recover infancy ; 
 you must go forward to preserve both it and youth 
 transfigured and embraced in manhood. 
 
 Thus decisively is the reactionary solution of social 
 and religious problems rejected. When the truths 
 that once inspired men have become mere catch- 
 words, salvation lies in an advance which will recover 
 and reincorporate, while transmuting and transforming, 
 their essential spirit, not in a retreat which will at-
 
 92 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 tempt to preserve the perishing or resuscitate the dead 
 formulae. 
 
 And again : the mere fact of any truth being ac- 
 cepted, recognised, formulated, patronised, enforced, 
 and established, itself tends to make it a lie ; for it 
 tends to become a convention instead of a formative 
 power, a tradition instead of a conviction, a profession 
 instead of a belief. Hence Julian's established 
 Paganism has all the vices of the established Chris- 
 tianity it superseded, in addition to its own reactionary 
 unreality ; and the only vivifying power which his 
 zeal for Paganism really exercises is its purifying in- 
 fluence upon the Christianity which he persecutes. 
 In this, and in this only, he is really effective ; for he 
 thus helps to reinvigorate the Christians, and push them 
 forward towards the new truths they had ceased to seek. 
 
 Such, I take it, is the meaning of the " Emperor and 
 Galilaean ;" and it will be seen how closely it all bears 
 upon the faiths and scepticisms, the advances and re- 
 actions of our own day ; and what a flood of light it 
 throws upon Ibsen's attitude towards all the problems 
 of modern life in the social plays. 
 
 And now my task draws to a close. It was two- 
 fold. I have tried, in the first place, to show some of 
 the grounds upon which I claim for Ibsen the name 
 of poet ; and in the next place to point out the clues 
 to the meaning of his later work, which are to be 
 found in his earlier lyrics and dramas. 
 
 Let me sum up the results so far obtained. We 
 have seen Ibsen at war with the society in which he
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 93 
 
 lived and with the country that gave him birth, 
 striving to find self-utterance under conditions of life 
 that were cramped and cramping, and traditions that 
 were worn out and sterile. We have seen him turn 
 for relief to an ideal past, but with a growing con- 
 viction that the true life must be lived, not in the 
 past, but in the present. We have seen his scorn for 
 sordidness and selfish half-heartedness pour itself out 
 in the lava streams of " Brand " and " Peer Gynt" ; 
 and through the storm and wail of these two un- 
 approachable dramas we have heard the passionate 
 demand for self-utterance and self-realisation melt 
 into notes of divine or romantic love ; but with a re- 
 bellious protest only half suppressed, and an idealism 
 closely akin to despair. We have seen, gradually 
 emerging and at last reaching clear self-consciousness, 
 the question of questions : " How shall the self- 
 abnegation demanded by society be combined with 
 the self-realisation that is the legitimate demand of 
 the individual, and the salt of society itself? How shall 
 social life and duty be made the support and the ex- 
 pression instead of the charnel house of the free in- 
 dividual life?" The answer has been borne in upon 
 us : " When the ideals of a community are living, the 
 common life will magnify and uplift the life of the 
 individual, and room for self-utterance will be found 
 in self-surrender. When the ideals of a community 
 are dead, and their place has been taken by conven- 
 tions and lies, then the common life will seek to choke 
 and do to death the life of him who dares to live." 
 We have seen that the escape from these dead and
 
 94 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 petrified conventional ideals and their resurrection into 
 a higher life lies in advance and not in retreat ; that 
 the dead matter must be cut off and cast away, the 
 corpse thrown overboard ; and that while he who can 
 wake new life and create a new ideal is the greatest, 
 he too is great who can save us from brooding over 
 the dead, and vainly striving to galvanise or lie it into life. 
 
 And thus we have come to understand the meaning 
 and the mission of the " poet of doubt." 
 
 Is it not enough after this merely to enumerate the 
 social plays ? " The Pillars of Society," " The Doll's 
 House," " Ghosts," " The Enemy of Society," " The 
 Wild Duck," " Rosmersholm," "The Lady from the 
 Sea," " Hedda Gabler." 
 
 Well has the " poet of doubt " fulfilled his mission. 
 If he were the mere cynic, with no eye to beauty, and 
 , no belief in nobility of character, who can only see, 
 and only cares to see, what is foul, mean, or repulsive, 
 he would, indeed, have little enough significance for 
 us. But we are speaking of the creator of Lona 
 Hessel and Martha Bernick and her sister, of Dr. 
 Stokman and his wife and daughter and sea-faring 
 friend, of Hedvig Ekdal and Juliane Tesman. For 
 myself I could add many more, but their names might 
 be challenged ; and these are enough to vindicate the 
 poet of doubt from the charge of indiscriminate 
 cynicism. 
 
 Again : the poet of doubt is not the poet of 
 negation. We have had many apostles of negation, 
 who thought they had found the formula of emancipa- 
 tion in the gospel of reason, and the negation of all
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 95 
 
 that reason cannot render an account of. How many of 
 them could stand before Ibsen's judgment-seat, and 
 come away with the same light-hearted conviction that 
 everything which they could not demonstrate was mere 
 superstition ? Surely the terrible poet of doubt will not 
 spare them any more than other believers. There is 
 many a one besides Fru Alving, who holds that any 
 feeling for which he cannot give a reason is a mere 
 " Ghost." Do they know the meaning of their creed ? 
 Let them go with her through the horrors of that night 
 in which she is called upon to judge whether every 
 instinct of her nature, and at last whether the very 
 central purpose and passion of her whole being is a 
 mere u ghost," and they will, at least, come forth from 
 that ordeal chastened and sobered, with the glib 
 confidence in their independence of the past shaken 
 as perhaps none but Ibsen could shake it, with the 
 knowledge that they have hardly begun to ask the 
 questions they thought they had already answered. 
 
 Or where can we find anything more searching than 
 the light thrown in " Rosmersholm " upon the self- 
 deceptions of a man and woman, who think that, in 
 their relations one with another, they can ignore the 
 garnered wisdom and experience of ages, and dismiss 
 as superficial conventions that have no reference to 
 them, the resultant beliefs and mandates of society ? 
 Or where can we find a bolder or more virile repre- 
 sentation at once of the necessity and of the danger of 
 the rupture with an established moral or religious 
 order already antiquated, but not yet replaced, than is 
 embodied in this same " Rosmersholm" ?
 
 96 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Or yet again : if you think you have got the formula 
 of life in a war cry against conventional reticence and 
 lies, and a belief in probing instead of skinning over 
 wounds, go with Gregers Werle on his crusade, and 
 learn how easy it is to think you are setting a man's 
 feet upon the rock of truth, when, in fact, you are 
 calling upon him to act on principles he only respects 
 at second hand, and to profess sentiments he neither 
 feels nor understands. 
 
 But where am I to stop ? There is scarcely one of 
 Ibsen's social plays which we can read without being 
 forced to admit that we had somewhere stopped short of 
 the full meaning of our own questions, and accepted 
 an answer that concealed from us the duty, and robbed 
 us of the strength, of deeper questioning. 
 
 The poet of doubt has, indeed, fulfilled his mission ! 
 But people say he is " immoral." What do they 
 mean ? 
 
 Do they mean that the moral nature is braced by 
 the habitual contemplation of noble and beautiful 
 things ; that it is dwarfed and poisoned by habitual con- 
 templation of horrible, foul, or ignoble things ; that 
 there are some who delight in unwholesome familiarity 
 with what is hateful, and some who are banefully 
 fascinated by it, even while they loathe it ; and 
 that Ibsen is therefore a depressing moral in- 
 fluence ? 
 
 If this is what is meant I believe there is truth in it. 
 I doubt not that Ibsen has done, is doing, and will do, 
 moral harm to some of his readers. The same may 
 be said of Thackeray. And for very different
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 97 
 
 reasons the same may be said of Goethe, of Carlyle, 
 and of many more. There are minds capable of 
 deriving harm, and perhaps incapable of deriving good, 
 from Ibsen as from these others. 
 
 But do people mean more than this when they say 
 that Ibsen is immoral ? Do they mean that he makes 
 vice seem attractive, or that he stimulates the imagina- 
 tion to vicious activity ? I cannot conceive of such a 
 charge being intended by any man who has read 
 Ibsen ; but, unhappily, many use language calculated 
 to convey to those who have not read him, the im- 
 pression that this is the charge they bring. 
 
 Or do they mean that Ibsen's writings tend to con- 
 fuse moral issues, and therefore to weaken moral 
 restraints ? Inasmuch as his works have a terrible 
 solvent power, they may indeed tend to reduce a man 
 to a condition of ethical agnosticism, with all its atten- 
 dant dangers ; but this may be said of all who challenge 
 accepted ideas ; and Ibsen is singularly free from the 
 sin of representing a tinsel nobility as genuine, or failing 
 to appreciate the true ore of humanity wherever it is 
 found. In Ibsen, as in Thackeray, the moral stress is 
 always true. 
 
 But what really lies at the basis of all morality ? 
 Is it not the sense of the magnitude of the issues of 
 our thoughts, words, and deeds ? He who saps, 
 deadens, or overbears the sense of responsibility, 
 is the really immoral writer. Will any one bring 
 this charge against Ibsen ? Who, in our day, has 
 brought home with greater force the significance to 
 others of what we do, what we think, and what we are, 
 
 G
 
 98 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 than Ibsen? Or who has made us feel the responsibility 
 sitting closer to us for frivolity in rejecting, or hypocrisy 
 in accepting, the current code and creeds of society ? 
 
 But enough of this cheap reproach of immorality. 
 Let us turn again to the central problem of Ibsen's 
 social plays. That problem I take to be the relation 
 of the individual to his social and personal surround- 
 ings. Everyone who has given a moment's serious 
 attention to social facts knows that our personal and 
 individual life comes to us in and through our "human 
 environment," and can only express itself fully and 
 richly when it goes out towards, and in some sense loses 
 itself in, the life of others. And yet this "life of 
 others" constantly presents itself to us as a hampering 
 and dwarfing power, forcing conventions and unver- 
 acities upon us, and preventing us from ever becom- 
 ing ourselves. " To be oneself is to slay oneself." 
 Yes, but, unhappily, there are many other ways of 
 slaying oneself besides self-realisation ; and many 
 there be that find them. 
 
 Now, there is one special case of this problem of 
 self-surrender and self-realisation so obvious and so 
 complex, that it cannot fail to have a quite specific 
 attraction for Ibsen ; and, moreover, conventional 
 morality and tradition choose persistently to ignore its 
 true nature. It is the problem of a woman's life when 
 she marries. Here is a special field for the bold 
 questioner, whose voice, once heard, may be cursed 
 or ridiculed, but cannot be forgotten. 
 
 If a woman has a life and individuality of her own 
 before she marries, she is called upon to reconcile
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 99 
 
 self-realisation with self-surrender in a manner so con- 
 spicuous that the blindest cannot fail to see it, when 
 once their attention is called to it. Fatherhood is an 
 incident. Motherhood is an occupation. A man 
 marries and apparently remains himself. When a 
 woman marries she becomes someone else. She 
 changes her name; she changes her home; she changes 
 her occupation ; and her new name, her new home, 
 and her new occupation, are determined by her hus- 
 band and her children. Hence marriage, regarded 
 from the woman's point of view, is the problem of 
 society, focussed and epitomised the problem of self- 
 realisation in and through self-surrender. The same 
 problem meets us all, men and women, in all the re- 
 lations of life ; but in none is it so obvious and so 
 tangible as it is here. Again, the change in a woman's 
 life when she marries is so great that it may seem to 
 offer her an almost complete escape from conditions 
 that oppress and confine, or haunt, or tease her. She 
 may have at least the appearance of reason on her 
 side if she separates herself from her circumstances 
 and refuses to believe that she is herself the greatest 
 and most important factor in her own life. She may 
 pant for an escape, and may believe that marriage will 
 give her a career. A man may look to marriage for 
 many things, but hardly as in itself opening a career 
 to him. Hence, a woman's temptation to a refined 
 form of mercenary motive in marriage. When she 
 seems to be giving her heart to the man who loves 
 her, she may be in truth bartering herself to him for a 
 position and a career.
 
 IOO HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Ellida. Now, just listen, Wangel. What is the use of 
 our lying to ourselves and to each other ? 
 
 Wangel. Lying, do you say? Is that what we are 
 doing ? 
 
 Ellida. Yes, that is what we are doing. Or, at any- 
 rate, we are hiding the truth. For the truth, the pure, 
 clean truth, is just this, that you came out there and 
 bought me. 
 
 Wangel. " Bought " ! do you say " bought " ? 
 
 Ellida. Oh ! I wasn't an atom better than you were. 
 I agreed to it. I went and sold myself to you. 
 
 Wangel. Ellida ! have you really the heart to call it 
 so? 
 
 Ellida. But what else can I call it ? You couldn't en- 
 dure the void in your house. You were looking about 
 for a new wife. 
 
 Wangel. And a new mother for my children, Ellida. 
 
 Ellida. Well, perhaps, incidentally, though you hadn't 
 the least idea whether I was fit for the position. You'd 
 only seen me and talked to me once or twice. And you 
 took a fancy to me, and so 
 
 Wangel. Yes ! call it whatever you please. 
 
 Ellida. And I, on my side there was I, all helpless 
 and resourceless, and utterly alone. It was so natural 
 for me to fall in when you came and offered to look after 
 me for all my life. 
 
 Ellida feels that she was forced into the transaction 
 which she calls a sale, and her husband calls a marriage. 
 At the very time she is speaking thus to him, Bollette 
 is arranging a transaction, very different in its terms 
 but identical in its nature, with Arnholm. Nora 
 Helmer and Fru Alving presumably drifted into
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. IOI 
 
 marriage, and promised to surrender themselves be- 
 fore they had come to any consciousness of who and 
 what they were. Not one of them had any real 
 choice, or knew what she was doing. If they had 
 had a choice they would have known that their pro- 
 blem was the problem of life to find oneself by losing 
 oneself. 
 
 I am convinced that it is in this typical significance 
 of marriage, and not in any special interest in the 
 so-called " woman question " as such, that we are to 
 seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this 
 theme. Suppress individuality and you have no life ; 
 assert it and you have war and chaos. The principle 
 of life is found when we can reconcile the strong 
 utterance of self with self-abnegation ; and the neces- 
 sity of harmonising these two is absolutely forced 
 upon us when we think of marriage. The mere 
 freedom of choice on which Ellida Wangel and Nora 
 Heliner lay such stress is but a condition, not a 
 principle of healthy life. Hedda Gabler neither 
 drifted nor was forced into marriage ; but she de- 
 liberately and shamelessly paid the flattered and 
 delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for 
 opening to her a retreat from the career she had ex- 
 hausted, and an entry into the best career she could 
 still think of as possible ; and we see the result. 
 Without the spirit of self-surrender free choice will 
 never secure self-realisation. 
 
 Ibsen may well say that his forte is asking questions, 
 not answering them ! In this particular matter his 
 questioning began early. And this brings me to the
 
 IO2 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 only part of my proper task which I have not yet 
 attempted. There is one of Ibsen's most celebrated 
 and most brilliant metrical dramas that I have not 
 yet so much as mentioned. It is his first work on the 
 conditions of modern society, his first satire, and the 
 first utterance that roused that indignant resentment 
 which has from time to time flamed out against him 
 from that day to this. 
 
 I refer to "The Comedy of Love," written in 1862, 
 when Ibsen was still living in Christiania. Its subject 
 is love, courtship, and matrimony, and its hero and 
 heroine are Falk (or Falcon), a young poet and author, 
 and Svanhild, the eldest daughter of the lady with 
 whom he boards. 
 
 To us Englishmen there is always something 
 supremely ludicrous in the approved Continental 
 customs and ideas concerning courtship ; and Ibsen's 
 relentless satire will be keenly enjoyed by all English- 
 men who are fortunate enough to be able to read it in 
 the original. But how can I give those who are not 
 in that happy position any conception of the bevies of 
 fluttering maids and matrons that thrill with delight at 
 the announcement of another engagement, of the 
 excitement which pervades them on the report of a 
 "little misunderstanding" between the newly-engaged 
 couple, of their officious zeal in bringing about a 
 "reconciliation," of their rapturous exclamations when 
 one of them sees Lind kissing Anna's glove, of their 
 vexation and disappointment when the lovers seem 
 tired of being exhibited, of their dismay when the 
 poor harassed "quarry," as his friend calls him,
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 103 
 
 escapes for a moment ; of the clergyman who seizes 
 every occasion of solemnly discanting on the beauty 
 and sanctity of domestic joys, and waves his hand to- 
 wards the eight daughters (out of twelve !) who are 
 on the scene, with their mother, as living tokens and 
 pledges thereof; of the sobbing matron, who, with her 
 handkerchief at her eyes, tenderly dwells upon her 
 " record " as a match-maker, " seven nieces and all 
 of them with boarders " ! 
 
 And yet, when the curtain falls upon husband and 
 wife and engaged couples, old and new, kissing each 
 other two and two, to a grand chorus of the " triumph 
 of love ! " it is difficult to exaggerate the sense of 
 desolation which swallows up and overwhelms all 
 amusement, and makes the concluding scene of 
 " Love's Comedy " one of the saddest pieces of writing 
 in Isben's works. 
 
 Falk has noted from the first with disgust and 
 scorn how all this " officialism," as it were, marks the 
 grave of love. As soon as a " lover " is promoted to the 
 recognised privileges of " my love/' the poetry is gone 
 out of life. Falk looks upon the parson, who braved 
 public opinion and risked all his future in early life, 
 for the girl he loved, and who is now the very em- 
 bodiment of commonplace, conventional, worldly re- 
 spectability ; upon Sty ver, who once wrote poetry by 
 the ream, and did not mend his pen, but tuned it, and 
 who now treats his fiancee with an almost more than 
 marital indifference; upon his friend Lind who was 
 intoxicated with love till his engagement was an- 
 nounced, and now forlornly seeks a moment's escape
 
 104 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 from Anna and her friends and aunts, he looks 
 upon all these as corpses. Only he and Svanhild who 
 do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, who so 
 far from parading their love have never uttered it 
 even to one another, and like a modern Benedick and 
 Beatrice are at perpetual war with each other, only 
 they are alive ! 
 
 But of course this cannot last. A misunderstand- 
 ing forces Falk into a passionate declaration lest he 
 should lose Svanhild too soon ; but his declaration 
 has in it the sublimity of masculine selfishness and 
 arrogance which Ibsen knows so well how to paint. 
 He is a Falcon, and he must fly against the wind ! 
 He needs Svanhild's support and inspiration to achieve 
 the height of his poetic calling. It is her glorious 
 mission to protect his belief in beauty and love from 
 " falling " like Adam, during all the spring of her life 
 and his ; and when she has performed this noble 
 mission and the leaves begin to fall in autumn, then 
 the world may claim her, and their ways will part. 
 The whole relation of course is to be a purely spiritual 
 one, the idealism of which will not be soiled by the 
 vulgar cares that make courtship and matrimony the 
 grave of love ! 
 
 Svanhild, in answer, reads Falk a lesson under 
 which he writhes. But the result of it is to make him 
 resolve with such intensity as he never put into any- 
 thing in life before, to win her as his wife, and prove, 
 up to the hilt, the falsity of the creed which he him- 
 self held but now. For true love need not shrink 
 from any test and strain of practical life ; and the
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 1 05 
 
 vital breath has deserted all these spouses and be- 
 trotheds, not because they have left the ideal for the 
 real, but because they themselves are of the earth, 
 earthy. He and Svanhild will prove that is so. 
 
 His satire becomes fiercer than ever now, but there 
 is a ringing tone of triumph in it, and when he gives 
 as his toast amongst all the pairs, married and to be 
 married, " the late lamented love," he knows that his 
 own love is victorious. 
 
 And so it is. Svanhild is won. She and Falk, side 
 by side, will wage war against the miserable conven- 
 tions and pretences of love, and will live the reality. 
 
 Then comes Guldstad, the rich middle-aged mer- 
 chant, and explains to Falk and Svanhild that marriage 
 is after all a very practical business, involving many 
 considerations that have not the least connection with 
 love. You are in love with a woman, you marry a 
 wife ; and a wife has to do and be many things that a 
 lover, blinded by his love, does not consider. Guld- 
 stad himself does not profess to be in love with 
 Svanhild, but he is convinced that she would make 
 him an excellent wife, and he can offer her the quiet 
 stream of a warm and friendly affection and respect, 
 a sense of the happiness of duty, the peace of home, 
 and mutual bending of will to will, a tender care to 
 smooth the path of life for her, a gentle hand to heal 
 her wounds, strong shoulders to bear, and a strong arm 
 to support and lift. Can Falk offer her as much? 
 If so let her take him, and he, Guldstad, who has no 
 belongings and no claims upon his wealth, will deal 
 with them as his son and daughter.
 
 IO6 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Then Guldstad leaves them together. Their love 
 cannot bear the test he has applied to it. Would it 
 last in all its triumphant glory, they ask, right on till 
 death? It is so much more than Guldstad has to 
 offer now, but if it should fade and pine, and 
 die down into mere friendship, what a fall were 
 there ! 
 
 " It will last long," says Falk. But Svanhild answers, 
 "'Long!' 'Long!' Oh wretched word of beggary! 
 How will 'long' serve love's turn? It is death's sen- 
 tence; mildew on the seed. 'I hold that love has life 
 eternal' shall no more be sung ; and the cry shall be, 'A 
 year agone I loved thee ! ' " 
 
 Will it really be more than this ? Who shall dare 
 to say ? Who shall dare to risk it ? Not Svanhild. 
 No ! Their love shall know no autumn. It shall 
 remain forever with its beauty undirnmed. Their 
 mid-day sun shall know no setting ! And Falk accepts 
 her decision. She is his love but must never be his 
 wife. Only by leaving and by loosing her can he win 
 her truly. 
 
 So he goes his way. The bevies of ladies eagerly 
 repeat the news, " She's rejected him ! she's rejected 
 him ! " Her mother presses Guldstad's eligible 
 offer upon her. She asks for a respite " till the 
 leaves are falling ; " and as all the " pairs " exult over 
 the discomfiture of the arch-enemy, Falk, who has met 
 his deserts at last from Svanhild, Guldstad offers her 
 his hand, which after an involuntary start, almost a
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. IO/ 
 
 shudder, she meekly accepts, and the curtain falls upon 
 " the triumph of love." 
 
 What did Ibsen mean by it all ? Was the creed of 
 Falk and Svanhild his own ? If so he here fairly 
 succumbed to the danger indicated in some of his 
 poems, and fell into the twin vices of sentimentality 
 and cynicism. For I take it that a man who regards 
 the passion of love as the richest and most beautiful 
 thing in life, and who also holds that familiar human 
 intercourse is essentially and necessarily destructive of 
 it, is at once a cynic and a sentimentalist. The real 
 is incapable of being idealised to him, and therefore he 
 is a cynic ; and his emotional life is essentially un- 
 real, therefore he is a sentimentalist. 
 
 But was this Ibsen's creed ? I cannot tell. In any 
 case " Love's Comedy " was a comparatively early 
 work, and though it bears a distinct relation to Ibsen's 
 maturer representations of love and marriage, yet it 
 does not embody them. 
 
 Guldstad's sober but earnest conception of marriage 
 as a deliberately considered choice, involving manifold 
 relations not to be entered into lightly, and affecting 
 every branch of practical life, remains the key-note of 
 Ibsen's treatment of the subject. And observe that, in 
 all this, marriage is a type of human relationships in 
 general. There is nothing specific or unique in it. 
 Now, the love that draws the opposite sexes one to 
 the other is something quite unique, but not specifically 
 human. It pierces right through the animal and vegetable 
 kingdoms. It is organic and pre-human in its origin.
 
 108 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Remember that profoundly suggestive saying of 
 Peer Gynt's. He had desecrated his relationship to 
 Solvejg, and he says it cannot be patched up again. 
 A fiddle can be mended, but a bell cannot. A riddle, 
 with its delicate mechanism, is constructed, and when 
 constructed it can be tuned, patched, replaced in 
 pieces, broken and mended. A bell is cast whole in 
 the one molten rush that creates it. It has one note, 
 a note that appeals to something in us deeper than all 
 art, not to be analysed, in one sense not to be de- 
 veloped, to live unchanged till the bell cracks, and 
 then to be gone for ever. 
 
 What we call " falling in love " rings the bell-note 
 in our lives. In its mysterious infra-and-supra-human 
 simplicity it thrills down to the very roots of our 
 organic nature, and yet fills us with the sense of a 
 more than human life. Where it is absent the union of 
 the sexes is unhallowed, and becomes what Ellida calls 
 it, a bargain and a sale ; and for men and women who 
 buy and sell in this matter there should be but one 
 name. But marriage is a great deal more besides this 
 " bell-ringing." It is a many-sided and complicated 
 human relationship, and the bell-note, however clear 
 and true it may ring, does not suffice for married life. 
 Details which you may call prosaic if you will enter 
 into the duties of husband and wife. They must be 
 to each other much that partners in business must be, 
 much that servants or other employe's must be, much 
 that friends and advisers must be. In a word, their 
 life together must be built up and constructed out of 
 many parts and pieces, to the harmonious fitting of
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. 1 09 
 
 which friendship, good-will, kindly forbearance, and 
 consideration are essential, but which are not secured 
 by "love" in the narrower sense, and may exist 
 without it. And if a man and woman who are " in 
 love," but are not suited to enter into the complicated 
 relations of husband and wife with each other, none 
 the less marry, there is indeed nothing unhallowed in 
 the fact of their union ; but the bell is pretty sure to 
 crack e'er long. And what is there left then ? 
 
 Off they go pall mall to the altar, set up a home in 
 the very shrine of happiness, pass a season in an orgie of 
 triumph and faith ; and then comes the day of reckoning, 
 and lo, and behold ! the whole concern is hopelessly 
 bankrupt. The wife's cheek is bankrupt in the bloom of 
 youth, and her heart bankrupt in the flowers of thought. 
 The husband's breast is bankrupt in victorious courage, 
 bankrupt in every glowing spark that was struck of old ; 
 bankrupt, bankrupt is the whole concern ; though they 
 two entered life as a first-class firm of love. 
 
 Then does Ibsen teach that because " falling in 
 love," though it be never so many fathom deep, 
 gives no sure promise of wedded happiness, therefore 
 the element of passion should be ignored in marriage ? 
 I cannot tell. But this is certain, that he lays the 
 stress of his representations not upon the truth that 
 being " in love " is essential to an ideal marriage, but 
 upon the other truth that it is not enough for an 
 ideal marriage. 
 
 He seems always to represent " love," in the roman- 
 tic sense, in its misleading and delusive character.
 
 IIO HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 Johan Tonnesen is in love, and in consequence he 
 does not " so much as see " Martha Bernick who had 
 been tried and found as true as steel, and who was 
 made to be the companion of his life ; and he marries a 
 girl of whom he knows nothing. Torvald Helmer is 
 in love note that in love after many years of mar- 
 ried life, still thrilled by the same magnetic influence, 
 still finding in Nora's society the same unreasoning 
 and unanalysable delight which first drew him 
 to her. And therefore he thinks himself a model 
 husband, when really his relations with his wife have 
 never risen above mere organic attraction, and have 
 never been human at all. Rebekka West is in love, 
 and her love leads her into depths of treachery and 
 cruelty that make "Rosmersholm " one of the most 
 appalling of Ibsen's dramas ; and Rosmer himself is 
 in love, and his love drives him to leap with Rebekka 
 into the dark pool below the foss. And lastly, Ellida 
 is in love, and in her the untamed, pre-human nature 
 of love, as Ibsen conceives it, comes out in its full sig- 
 nificance. Like the heaving of the sea to the moon, 
 like the craving of the stranded mermaid for the 
 deep ocean, unreasoning, and not to be reasoned with, 
 dark and deep and wild, this elemental drift and up- 
 heaval of our nature must be tamed and mastered, 
 that our relations, one with another, may be sober, 
 well-considered, and human. 
 
 And is this all ? Does Ibsen know that in con- 
 sidering marriage in this sober, human, rational style, 
 he is leaving out the specific element in it, and dealing 
 with it only as typical of all human relationships ?
 
 THE SOCIAL PLAYS. Ill 
 
 Does he ignore the truth that in the ideal marriage 
 the bell-note rings from first to last, and that all else is 
 dominated and glorified by it ? Does he know that 
 it is only that " love " which has its roots far down be- 
 neath our humanity that can raise marriage, as such, 
 into a truly human relationship ? I will not answer 
 for him. There are indications, deep rather than nu- 
 merous, especially in "The Doll's House" and in "The 
 Lady from the Sea," that he knows all this as well as 
 any of u^. But at any rate he does not choose to 
 dwell upon it. He chooses to dwell upon marriage 
 under its other aspects. And can we afford to be un- 
 grateful to him ? How many marriages are there that, 
 tried by the ideal standard, will not be found wanting ? 
 They may be few or many, but at least they are 
 something less than all. And what of the others? 
 The bell is cracked. Are husband and wife simply to 
 sit down and say that life is a failure, or at least that 
 they can be nothing to each other now ? Surely they 
 may be much. The tenderness of considerate friend- 
 ship, and the mutual helpfulness of loyal partnership 
 are not love, but in their measure they are beautiful 
 and life-giving ; neither is love a substitute for them, 
 even where love is. That the bell is sound, or that 
 the bell is cracked, is an equally foolish reason for not 
 mending the broken fiddle, or tuning its neglected 
 strings. 
 
 With respect to marriage, then, I do not find in 
 Ibsen the highest truth insisted on with any distinct- 
 ness or directness. He even leaves me in doubt 
 whether he is not profoundly mistaken in his teaching ;
 
 112 HENRIK IBSEN. 
 
 but he works out some aspects of the problem with a 
 piercing insight and a relentless truth, for which I 
 have no words but those of grateful admiration. If 
 I can find the husband and wife who show me that 
 they have read and understood "The Doll's House," 
 " Rosmersholm," and " The Lady from the Sea," but 
 that they had nothing to learn from them, then I will 
 lay down Ibsen, and ask leave to sit at their feet. 
 But I do not expect that this will be either to-day 
 or to-morrow. 
 
 In conclusion, then, the strength and the weakness 
 of Ibsen's much discussed treatment of marriage lies 
 in the fact that he does not deal with it as marriage 
 at all, but as the most striking instance of the ever 
 recurrent problem of social life, the problem that 
 we may hide in other cases, but must face here, 
 the problem of combining freedom with permanence 
 and loyalty, of combining self-surrender with self-reali- 
 sation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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