Let me call attention to certain of his unpremeditated oral utterances, illustrating the poet's intellectual life, in the form of a jest, a paradox, or a figure,—but which I do not claim to be absolutely correct, although they have been preserved in a faithful remembrance,—and to certain written remarks, communicated with Ibsen's consent. Thus some of the main outlines of a pen-and-ink sketch of this author may be attempted in a more faithful and life-like manner than from his books alone.
In 1870, when France lay maimed and bleeding at the feet of Germany, Ibsen, whose sympathies were at that time chiefly on the side of France, was far from sharing the dejection universally experienced in the Scandinavian countries on account of the sorrowful fact. While all other friends of France were exhausting themselves in outbursts of sympathy, Ibsen wrote, Dec. 20, 1870:—
"... Moreover, historic events are claiming a large share of my thoughts. The old illusory France is all slashed to pieces; and when the modern matter-of-fact Prussia shall also be cut into fragments, we shall have made a leap into the midst of a growing epoch. Oh! how ideas will then come tumbling about our heads. Verily, it is high time they should do so. All we have had to live upon up to the present date are crumbs from the revolutionary table of the past century, and even this fare has been masticated over and over again. These ideas of the past require new substance, new interpretation. Freedom, equality, and fraternity are no longer the same things they were in the days of the guillotine of blessed memory. This is what the politicians will not understand, and therefore it is I hate them. These people demand only special revolutions, revolutions in the outside world, in the sphere of politics. But all this is sheer nonsense. What is really needed is a revolting of the human spirit...."
No one can fail to discern in this letter the historic optimism I have indicated in Ibsen. Gloomy though his views may seem, he has the highest hopes, the greatest confidence in the new life that will be called into being through misfortune. Aye, still more; only so long as the misfortunes and calamities which accompany the entrance of ideas into the world hold the senses awake, does he esteem the ideas of actual worth. Even the sound of the guillotine's fall, far from terrifying him, rings harmoniously into his optimistic and revolutionary contemplation of the world. Not freedom as a dead condition, but freedom as a struggle, an endeavor, seems to him of value. Lessing said that if God should offer him truth with his right and truth-seeking with his left hand, he for one would grasp God's left hand. Ibsen would undoubtedly subscribe to the proposition if for "truth" could be substituted the word "freedom" If he despises politicians, it is because, according to his opinion, they conceive and treat freedom as something external and soulless.
From Ibsen's optimistic, and, so to speak, pedagogic conception of suffering, may in a large measure be explained his zeal to have Norway stand by Denmark in the Schleswig controversy. As a matter of course, he took for his starting-point, as did other Scandinavians, the kinship of the two countries, promises given, Denmark's right; but it was his optimism that led him to view the use of such aid as subordinate. To the outburst, "You would have had many a beating," he once replied, "To be sure, many a one; but what harm would that have done? We should have been brought into the movement, should have belonged to Europe. Anything in preference to remaining outside."
At another time—in 1874, I believe—Ibsen was praising Russia in a high strain. "A magnificent land," said he, smiling. "The oppression there is truly brilliant."
"How so?"
"Why, think of all the glorious love of freedom it engenders. Russia is one of the few countries on earth where men still love freedom, and offer sacrifices to it. That is the reason why the land stands so high in poetry and in art. Think of the Russians having a poet like Turgenief! And there are Turgeniefs among their painters, also. We do not know them, but I saw their paintings at Vienna."
"If all these good things are the result of oppression," said I, "we may well bestow our praises on it. But how is it with the knout? Are you enthusiastic about that, too? Suppose you were a Russian, would you have your little boy (and I pointed to his then half-grown son) receive stripes from the knout?" Ibsen was silent for a moment, while his countenance wore an impenetrable look. Then he replied, laughing, "No, he should not receive stripes, he should inflict them." This humorous sally is Ibsen through and through. He himself is all the time inflicting the knout on his contemporaries in his dramas. It is to be hoped that the eventual infliction of stripes in Russia, by way of change, might be bestowed on the oppressors.
It need be no matter of surprise that with such views, Henrik Ibsen was anything but enthusiastic when Rome was taken possession of by the Italian troops. In moody despondency, he wrote:—
"And so Rome has been taken from us human beings, and given to the politicians! Where shall we now seek refuge? Rome was the sole spot in Europe that was consecrated to freedom, the sole spot that enjoyed true freedom,—that is to say, freedom from political tyranny.... And then all the beautiful yearning for freedom,—that, too, is gone now. Ah, I may well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern me."
There is, it seems to me, something dual in this standpoint concerning politics. It is partly a reminiscence of ancient romance, that antipathy to utilitarianism, which is common to the romantic schools of all lands, partly something personal and characteristic,—faith in the power of the individual and inclination for radical dilemmas. The man who in "Brand" formulated the motto "All or nothing" could never in the world lend a willing ear to the practical politician's watchword, "A little step forward each day." I should really like to know if Ibsen's warm predilection for Russia did not originate in the fact that there is no parliament in that country. From the depths of his nature Ibsen abhors parliaments. He believes in the individual, in the single great personality. A single individual, according to him, can accomplish everything, and only a single individual. Such a body as a parliament is in his eyes an assemblage of speakers and dilettanti, which naturally does not prevent him from cherishing esteem for individual members of parliaments as such.
It is, therefore, a continual source of amusement to Ibsen when he reads in a newspaper: "And then a committee was appointed," or, "After this a club was formed." He sees a symptom of the enervation of modern times in the fact that as soon as any one has a plan, or a matter of business of any kind, his first thought is to have a committee appointed or a club formed for its benefit. Recall the scornful peals of laughter that resound through "De Unges Forbund" (The Young Men's Union).
I believe that Ibsen, in the inner recesses of his soul, forces his individualism to an excess, of which but a faint impression can be gained from his works. He goes even farther in this particular than Sören Kierkegaard, of whom in other respects he strongly reminds us. Ibsen is, for example, a decided opponent of the modern, strait-laced state idea. Not in the sense that would lead him to favor small states and narrow communities. No one can cherish a greater horror than he of the tyranny they exercise, and of the petty tendencies they lead in their train. Few have been more zealous than he in urging that the Scandinavian kingdoms should follow the example of Italy and Germany, and unite in one political whole. His most significant historic drama, "Kongs-Emneme," (The Pretenders) deals exclusively with the justification of the idea of a similar union. Ibsen goes so far in this respect, that he seems to me to overlook the dangers to the manifoldness and variety of intellectual life this endeavor for political unity conceals within itself. Italy has never stood higher in an artistic sense (and generally) than in the days when Siena and Florence represented two worlds, and Germany never stood higher intellectually (and generally) than when Königsberg (Kant) and Weimar (Schiller-Goethe) were centres. Yet in spite of his enthusiasm for unity, Ibsen's poetic brain dreams of a time when state power will afford a far greater measure of individual and communal freedom than at present, when the state, as it now is, will no longer exist. Although Ibsen reads little, and does not orient himself in the period in which he lives by means of books, it often seems to me as if he stood in a sort of secret correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the times. Once of late have I received a decided impression that thoughts which were in their outburst historic, but which were not yet recognized as such by others, occupied, and at the same time tortured him. Immediately after the close of the Franco-German war, at a time when all minds were occupied with it, and when the thought of such a thing as the commune in Paris had scarcely risen up in a single Northern brain, Ibsen presented to me as political ideals, conditions and ideas whose nature did not seem to me quite clear, but which were unquestionably akin to those that were proclaimed precisely one month later, in an extremely distorted form, by the Parisian commune. In reference to our diversity of opinions regarding freedom and politics, Ibsen wrote to me, Feb. 17, 1871:—
"... The struggle for freedom is to be sure nothing but the perpetual living appropriation of the idea of freedom. He who possesses freedom otherwise than as something for which he is striving, has a dead, soulless possession; for the idea of freedom bears that within itself which causes it to broaden and expand under appropriation, and if any one, during the struggle for its attainment, pauses and cries, Now, I have it,—he proves thereby that he has lost it. Yet it is just this dead stand-still in a certain grade of freedom that is characteristic of the body politic, and it is this that I have had occasion to censure. To be sure, there may be some advantage in the possession of the right of the ballot and a voice in regard to taxation, etc., but whom does it profit? The citizen, not the individual. There is, however, no rational necessity whatever for the individual to become a citizen. On the contrary. The state is the curse of the individual. How is the strength of the state of Prussia purchased? By the absorption of the individual into the political and geographic idea. The waiter makes the best soldier. The opposite case may be exemplified by the Jews, the nobility of the human race. How have they maintained their individuality in isolation, in poetry, notwithstanding all the brutality of the outside world? Through the fact that they have had no state burdens on their shoulders. Had they remained in Palestine, they would have gone to ruin in their construction long ago, as all other peoples have done. The state must be abolished. In a revolution that would bring about so desirable a consummation, I should gladly take part. Undermine the idea of the commonwealth, set up spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a union, and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value. Changes in the form of government are nothing else than different degrees of trifling, a little more, or a little less—absurd folly. The state has its root in time; it will attain its summit in time. Greater things than it will fall. All existing forms of religion will pass away. Neither moral conceptions, nor art forms have an eternity before them. To how much, after all, is it our duty to hold fast? Who will vouch for me that two and two do not make five on Jupiter?" Henrik Ibsen was certainly not aware of the ingenuous, yet paradoxical attempt of the anonymous author "A Barrister," to prove exactly how two and two might be considered to make five on Jupiter; nor was it likely that he was aware how vigorously Stuart Mill, and all other adherents of radical empiricism, would applaud the last-cited lines; the natural bent of his intellectual powers, however, has led him to universal scepticism, which, in his case, is so marvellously united with vigorous, practical faith. In as early a work as his "Brand," he put into his hero's month the words:—
"No dogma and no church shall everExalted be through my endeavor;They both have seen their natal day,'Twould, therefore, but in reason beThat both their final hour should see.For all that's made must pass away;It gathers moths, is gnawed by worms,And must, obeying laws and norms,Give place to other unborn forms."
The passage cited from his letter affords an energetic commentary on these words, and may readily be communicated as a proof of the presentiments of the hidden occurrences of the age, that were the natural outgrowths of Ibsen's genius, without the least danger of lowering the poet in the eyes of an honored public, since even Prince Bismarck has publicly recognized the "grain of sound reason" that was the kernel of the bewildered efforts of the commune. On May 18, 1871, Ibsen wrote:—
"Is it not impudent of the commune in Paris to go and destroy my admirable state theory, or rather no state theory? The idea is now ruined for a long time to come, and I cannot even set it forth in verse with any propriety. But it bears within itself a healthy core, that I see very plainly, and some day it will be practised without any caricature...."
It is in his maintenance of the sovereignty of the individual, that Ibsen comes to take a polemic stand in regard to the state idea as well as to the idea of society. I am not sure that I fully comprehend him on this point; his mode of thought is foreign to me. I can understand why there are those, as for instance, Lorenz von Stein, and after him Gneist, who recognize in the history of modern times a continual struggle between the state and society and who, proceeding from a new, energetic comprehension of the state idea, can turn in a polemic way against society; but I do not thoroughly understand the double front presented by Ibsen, nor am I quite sure that he is himself conscious that there is any double front in question.
But his anxiety, lest the sting of personality be dulled and its choicest treasures laid waste, extends still further. He firmly believes that the individual must stand alone, must be absolutely free, if all the fruitful possibilities of its nature are to be developed, and so his eyes are open to all the hindrances to individual growth that every association, even friendship, even marriage, bears within itself. I well remember his answer to a letter written by me in one of those melancholy moods to which youth so readily gives expression, and in which I declared, with a little sigh, as it were, that I had few or no friends. Ibsen wrote, March 6, 1870, as follows:—
"... You say you have no friends at home. So I have long thought. Any one who like yourself stands in close relation to his life-work, cannot reasonably expect to retain his friends. Friends are an expensive luxury, and he who invests his capital in a calling and a mission in this life has no means left wherewith to maintain friends. The cost of keeping friends does not consist in what we do for them, but in what we leave undone out of regard for them. Thereby many intellectual germs are stunted in their growth. I have experienced this myself, and that is the reason why I can look back on a number of years, during which I failed to succeed in becoming myself...."
Is not Ibsen's absolute need of independence and sense of isolation felt in the words "the cost of keeping friends"; and is there not in the words cited, the chief explanation of Ibsen's comparatively late outburst of originality. His career, as I have asserted before, was apparently begun without any high degree of self-confidence.
As friendship under certain circumstances may be a hindrance to the independence of the individual, so too may marriage. Therefore it is that Nora refuses to consider her duties toward her husband and children as her most sacred duties; for a far more sacred duty she believes she owes herself. Therefore it is that to Helmer's "You are before all else a wife and mother"; she replies:—
"I am before all else a human being,—or, at all events, I shall endeavor to become one."
Ibsen shares with Kierkegaard the conviction that in every single human being there slumbers the soul of a warrior, an invincible power; but he cherishes it in another form than Kierkegaard, for whom the worth of the individual is something supernatural, while with Ibsen, we rest on human grounds. He believes that the individuality of the human being is to be preserved for its own sake, not for the sake of higher powers; and since beyond all else the individual should remain free and whole, all concessions made to the world represent to Ibsen the foul fiend, the evil principle.
Here we touch upon the fundamental thought in "Brand." It is embodied in the passage where Brand speaks of all those scattered fragments of the soul,—those torsos of the spirit, those heads, those hands, from which one day a noble whole shall proceed: a hero, in whom the Lord shall recognize man, His greatest work, His Adam, young and strong.
Thus, "all or nothing" becomes Brand's apparently inhuman motto. Therefore the "spirit of compromise," even in the hour of his death, is nothing to Brand but a fair temptress who demands a little finger, in order to gain possession of the whole hand; and, therefore, the spirit of compromise returns in "Peer Gynt" as the mighty "Böjgen," the incarnation of all that is cowardly and pliable in human nature, all that readily bends and curves.
"Defend thyself!Böjgen is not mad!Strike!Böjgen never strikes!Fight! Thou shalt!The mighty Böjgen wins without e'er fighting!*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *     *    *    *    *The mighty Böjgen wins all things through gentleness."
To extricate the race from "Böjgen's" stifling embrace, to capture the spirit of compromise, force it into a casket and hurl it into the deepest part of the sea,—this is the goal at which Ibsen, as a poet, has aimed. This extrication of the individual from compromise, and from the mighty "Böjgen," is the revolution that is his own.
I once asked Henrik Ibsen, "Is there among all the Danish poets a single one about whom, in your present stage of development (1871), you concern yourself in the least." After leaving me for some time to vain conjectures, he replied: "Once upon a time there was an old man in Seeland who stood behind his plough in a peasant's smock, and who had viewed mankind and the world with angry eyes. I rather like him." Is it not a significant fact that Bredahl is the Danish writer who of all others is nearest Ibsen's heart? Bredahl, too, was an indignation pessimist,—no deep-seeing psychologist, it is true, but a thinker in whose pathos may be found, as it were, the thunder which precedes Ibsen's lightning. Bredahl sees only the exterior tyranny and hypocrisy, while Ibsen searches these out in the hidden recesses of the heart. His standpoint is that of Ibsen's revolutionary orator,—
"He looks after the inundations for the world's meadows."
His great successor goes more thoroughly to work,—
"He takes delight in placing torpedoes under the ark."
If, then, I have designated Ibsen as a revolutionary nature, I need scarcely defend myself from the charge of having declared his to be one of those natures that are enthusiastic for violent exterior convulsions. Far from it! Indeed, quite the contrary! For, isolated as he is and feels himself to be, reluctantly opposed to all parties, simply as parties, stately, polished, reserved, "awaiting the approach of time in a spotless wedding garment," he is, so far as exteriors are concerned, strictly conservative, although his conservatism is of a peculiar nature; that is, it proceeds from radicalism, because he expects nothing from special reforms. In the depths of his soul he is a decided revolutionist, but the revolution he raves about and labors for is the purely spiritual one I have pictured. The reader will not have overlooked the concluding words of the letter of December, 1870, "What is really needed is a revolting of the human spirit." I have never been able to forget these words; for they contain, in a measure, Ibsen's entire poetic programme—an admirable programme for a poet.
I should, however, fail to be true to myself if I said that Ibsen's view of life seemed to me to possess more than a powerful element of truth. It is a view of life by virtue of which one may think and produce poetic creations, but not act, which, indeed, strictly considered, cannot even be put into plain language in the world, as it is, because it is calculated to instigate others to action, which in this instance means—capital offence. Whoever, through a yearning for great, decisive, sweeping overthrows, is led to look indifferently or contemptuously on the slow, insignificant changes of the natural course of development; on the tardy, gradual, petty improvements, the compromises, with which the practical worker must be content, because through them alone he can hope to attain the partial realization of his ideal; on the associations without which it is impossible for any one who is not in a position of brutal command to transmit a single thought into the reality of life,—such a man must relinquish all hopes of raising a finger in practical life. Like Sören Kierkegaard, like Brand, he can do nothing but point helplessly at the yawning gulf that separates existing reality from the ideal. To attempt to act himself or induce others to act in harmony with the desired goal, would simply mean to lead his followers headlong over the brink of that dizzy abyss which parts what exists from what is desired, and to expose himself to immediate arrest. Indeed, even the poet can only express so ideal a view of life indirectly, insinuatingly, ambiguously, in the drama; only through thoroughly responsible personages, and thus with a certain reservation, so far as the author himself is concerned. Only the rudest kind of opponents could possibly have taken the hideous jest about the torpedoes beneath the ark for literal, bloodthirsty earnest. This mode of contemplating life involves and necessitates, therefore, a dualism between the theoretic and the practical, between the individual and the citizen, between spiritual freedom and that practical freedom which has the form of an obligation, a dualism that in actual life can only be carried out by a dramatic poet who lives in exile, who is not obliged to have the slightest dealings with state, society, politics, groups of human beings, parties, or reforms.
Therefore the ideal of intellectual reserve that has its origin in this mode of contemplating life seems not to me the highest. To be sure, a distinguished author provides best for his outward dignity when he is never found in a skirmish or amid an excited throng. It is unquestionably aristocratic to hold one's self aloof from the vulgar crowd, never to mingle in the turmoil of the day, never to write a newspaper article. Yet to my taste it savors of a still higher aristocracy to act as did the legitimist generals who reported themselves as simple soldiers in Condé's army, and who, notwithstanding their general's epaulettes, did not disdain to fight now and then on foot and in the first rank. Not one whit of true inner dignity is sacrificed by such a course.
The psychological analysis has now reached a point from which we can view this poetic mind in the light of the literary consciousness and endeavors of its contemporaries. I say expressly contemporaries, not people; for Ibsen is as strongly marked a European character as Björnson, notwithstanding his cosmopolitan culture, is national. A poet's attitude in regard to the consciousness of his contemporaries is indicative of his relation to the ideas and forms of his age. Every period has its own peculiar ideas, which in art appear in the shape of themes and ideals.
Ideas are not begotten by poets. They emerge from the labors of thinkers and inquirers; they come forward as large, genial presentiments of the laws and relations of realities; they develop and take form amid scientific investigations, amid historic or philosophic inquiries; they grow, become purified and strengthened through struggles for and against their truth, until, like the angels of the Bible, they become powers, thrones, kingdoms, and reign over the epoch.
Poets do not beget ideas; it is neither their vocation nor their business to do so. Genuine poets, however, become overwhelmed with ideas while these are still growing and struggling, and take their stand in the great conflict of the age at the side of these ideas. They are transported by them, nor can they do otherwise; they comprehend, and yet have never learned. Mediocre poets, those who possess no poetic quality unless it may be a transmitted or an acquired routine, have no ear for the hollow rumbling of ideas as they penetrate the subterranean passages of the earth, no ear for their pinion-beats in the air. In the preface to his "Neue Gedichte," Heine states that while engaged in writing these poems it seemed to him as though he could hear the flutter of a bird's wings above his head. "When I related this to my friends, the young Berlin poets," he continues, "they exchanged significant glances, and unanimously assured me that nothing of the kind had ever come within their experience." This whizzing sound, which the Berlin poets had never heard, was nothing in the world but the pinion-beat of those ideas.
Wholly without ideas, however, it is impossible for a poet to create. Even bad poets have at their command ideas, viz., those of the past; and these ideas that were invested by the masters of an earlier period with distinctly marked poetic expressions are reproduced by them in a feeble, ineffective way. The ideas of the age, as a rule, appear to them thoroughly "unpoetic." To evolve poetry from these ideas seems to them utterly impossible. But the poet who in his youth (in "The Pretenders") wrote the memorable sentence, "For you it is impossible; all you can do is to repeat the old story; but for me it is as easy as it is for the falcon to cleave the skies," could never have been permanently alarmed by the thoughts of his day. He has invested many new ideas with flesh and blood, and in thus incarnating them has aided in their dissemination; he has, moreover, given breadth and depth to many contemporary ideas by watering them from the well-springs of his own emotional nature. How profoundly he has felt the necessity of a vital relation to the germinating ideas about him may be conjectured from the superb lament of the balls of yam, withered leaves, and broken straws, to Peer Gynt:—
"Thoughts are we,Thou shouldst have thought us.*Â *Â *Â *Â *Â *Â *"We'd soar aloftAs songs consoling,Yet here as ballsOf yarn we're rolling."We are a watchword,Thou shouldst have proclaimed us;See how indifferenceHath seized and shamed us."We are duties,Thou hast neglected us.Doubts and hesitationsHave maimed and dejected us."
Words of reproach these are by which we may well fancy that the poet has been incited to action in periods of laxity, but which it is impossible to conceive of in the form of a Peer Gynt self-accusation. How in the world could poor Peer have given himself a watchword? How could he reproach himself with not having proclaimed it? Let us now see what topics and ideals are especially uppermost in the consciousness of the age. They may be divided, it seems to me, into the following groups:—
First, such ideals and topics as stand in direct relation to religion; that is to say, the reverential relation of men to ideas which in their eyes are powers,—to some outward, to some inward powers—especially those ideals and topics that have a bearing on the conflict between individuals who deem these powers outward and those who deem them inward realities.
Second, those topics and ideals that revolve about distinctions between two ages, past and future, ancient and modern, old and new, especially regarding distinctions and conflicts between two generations.
Next, those that have a bearing on the grades of society and their struggle for existence, on class distinctions,—especially those between rich and poor,—social influence, and social dependence.
Finally, a whole group of topics and ideals that revolve about distinctions between the two sexes, about the mutual erotic and social relation of man and woman, especially about woman's economical, moral, and spiritual emancipation.
Religious topics and problems are dealt with in our day in the most diverse ways, although always in the modern spirit. Allow some of the principal instances to pass in review before your mind. The greatest of the elder generation of poets in France, Victor Hugo, notwithstanding his passionate tendency to free thought, displays the remnants of a vague deism, colored with pantheism. Traces of the influence of the past century may readily be detected in him: religion is glorified at the cost of religions; love which unites is extolled in opposition to faith which parts and destroys. Most of the prominent authors of the present generation, as for instance Flaubert, represent religion with scientific coldness, but always from the dark side. To him, and to his spiritual kindred, the object of religion is a hallucination, in which one believes. The greatest English poet of our day, Swinburne, is a passionate heathen with a rich poetic vein, and he conceives Christianity to be a denial of nature, the enemy with whom he must do combat. In Italy, the greatest poet of the land, Leopardi, became absorbed in a sort of sublime metaphysical pessimism, which found vent in stoic resignation. Carducci, the foremost of Italy's living poetic thinkers, is quite as modern and even more polemic than he. In Germany, the most prominent poets, as Gottfried Keller, Paul Heyse, Fr. Spielhagen, have displayed in their works a soul-felt atheistic humanitarianism.
In the North the conditions were totally different. The Danish poets of the past generation had almost invariably paid homage to orthodoxy; the only philosophically inclined one among them, J. L. Heiberg, who had begun by protesting as a free thinker, ended by making at least apparent concessions to the teachings of the clergy; and the attempt in Denmark to undermine the authority of the church, namely, Kierkegaard's violent attack on the state church, had not been aimed at the truth of the dogmas taught, but exclusively at their professors, especially in cases where the lives of the priests failed to correspond with their teachings. This attitude of Kierkegaard has been a decisive one for Danish-Norwegian polite literature, down to the present day. Modern poetry in Denmark and Norway has rarely, if ever, touched the objective side of the question, the essence of religion, but almost exclusively its subjective side; hence the extraordinary wealth of priestly forms in this literature, both before and after its authors were emancipated from orthodoxy. The priests in Björnson's and in Magdalene Thoresen's peasant stories denote the standpoint before emancipation, the priests in Björnson's, Schandorph's, Kielland's, Ibsen's, Gjellerup's latest works the standpoint after emancipation.
Ibsen follows the clue given by Kierkegaard. Like all men of his generation in the North, who have grown up in the period of romance, his early relations to religion lack clearness. Moreover, there was in his nature a dual tendency, which must necessarily expose him to inner tumults: a native propensity to mysticism and an equally inbred inclination to sharp, dry common sense. Few poets who are capable of such almost convulsive flights of fancy as he, are able to linger as calmly as he can amid the prose of life. "Brand" and "Samfundets Stötter" (The Pillars of Society) differ as widely in main essentials as though written by different authors. The character of the first-named work is that of pure, unqualified mysticism, the other revolves about simple, unadulterated prose. Here boundless exultation; there good, wholesome, social morality.
No one who is familiar with the mental characteristics of the Norsemen can doubt that "Brand," which laid the foundation for Ibsen's poetic fame, excited universal attention merely because it was regarded as a sort of poetic sermon, a homily, a devotional work. It was not the real merits of the book that made it seem imposing to the public and caused the sale of so many editions; no, people streamed into the bookstores to purchase "Brand" precisely as people pour into church when a new and severely zealous priest appears. In a correspondence that Ibsen carried on with me regarding this book, he expressly stated that Brand's ministerial career was the purely exterior, incidental side of the question. In a letter, dated June 26, 1869, he writes:—
"Brand has been misunderstood, so far, at least, as my intention was concerned. The misconception is unquestionably rooted in the fact that Brand is a priest, and that the problem of the work is placed in the realm of religion. It would have been just as possible for me to apply the same syllogism to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest. I could just as well have given vent to the mood that impelled me to literary production, had I, instead of Brand, for instance, dealt with Galileo (with the trifling alteration in the latter's history, that he must, as a matter of course, remain firm and not concede that the earth stood still). Indeed, who knows, had I been born a hundred years later, I might with equal relish have treated yourself and your struggle with Rasmus Nielsen's philosophy of compromise. Taken as a whole, there is much more objectivity in Brand than has hitherto been discovered, and of this, as a poet, I am proud."
Although it is my wont carefully to withhold everything of a personal nature from these quotations, I have here permitted myself to retain a playful allusion to the literary warfare of those days, because it proves how little the mere idea of priesthood concerned Ibsen. A further proof of this is afforded by an expression in one of the letters I received from Ibsen during the time when I was brooding over the introduction to my book "Hovedströmninger i det 19de. Aarhundredes Litteratur" (The Main Currents of the Literature of the 19th Century). It reads as follows:—
"It seems to me you have reached the same crisis which I had attained in the days when I was about to write Brand, and I am convinced that you, too, will know how to find the healing drug that can expel disease from your body. In energetic production lies an admirable cure."
As the reader will see for himself, the emphasis in "Brand" is placed, according to the poet's own construction, upon the power of self-sacrifice and strength of character, not upon any special religious dogma. Now although Ibsen is, of course, the best, the only competent judge of his own design in the work, he nevertheless underrates, in my estimation, the weight of the unconscious power by which he was impelled to choose the precise materials he has chosen and no others. And this unconscious power, as I believe, was Ibsen's Norse-romantic tendency to mysticism. Yet even if "Brand" should be understood exactly in accordance with Ibsen's own interpretation of the character, the resemblance to religious phenomena in Northern religious life is equally obvious. It might look to the Danes as though Ibsen had Kierkegaard especiallyin mente; for he, too, laid the entire stress on personal sincerity. This would be due to our unfamiliarity with Ibsen's Norwegian models. Independent priests of Norway, Lammers, for instance, have had a larger share in the formation of the character of "Brand" than any direct influence from Denmark. Lammers, however, was himself led to the stand he took by the Kierkegaard agitation.
In "Kejser og Galilæer" (Emperor and Galilean), the influence of the Kierkegaard standpoint, although still strong, is on the wane. True, the passion for martyrdom is here set up as a measure for truth, and the psychological principle of the work is that no doctrine has intrinsic worth that is incapable of inspiring a spirit of martyrdom; but with this there is united a determinism that is half-mystic, half-moulded in the modern spirit; moreover, a Schopenhauer-like faith in the unconscious and irresistible world-will; finally, a modern prophecy that Christianity, as well as paganism, will one day be resolved into a third kingdom which will be an amalgamation of the two. It is characteristic of Ibsen's intellectualhabitusthat in both of his attempts at dealing with religious themes everything that savors of conflict and endeavor is infinitely more prominent and successful than portions touching on reconciliation and harmony. "The Third Kingdom" in his "Emperor and Galilean," stands quite as obscurely in the background as thatDeus caritatisat the conclusion of "Brand."
Themes that revolve about the relations between two successive ages or generations, or simply about the relations between different stages of life, which in Russia, Germany, Denmark, and Norway have been treated in so many different ways, have also occupied Ibsen, during his first period in "Kongs Emnerne" (The Pretenders), during the transition to his second period in "De Unges Forbund" (The Young Men's Union). Both these dramas are remarkable works, but the strength of neither lies in historic insight or historic impartiality.
"The Pretenders" is not really an historic drama; it displays no design on the part of its author to produce, through a series of pictures of the past, a portrayal of human nature as it appears under certain conditions at a defined period. The poet did not proceed from an historic standpoint; he simply used the historic as a pretext. The background of the play is mediæval, the foreground modern, for Skule Jarl is a modern figure. An historic construction would have led to the presentation of Skule as a full-blooded aristocrat, and Bishop Nicolas as a fanatical, yet thoroughly devoted and conscientious clergyman. Skule's conflict with Haakon denotes historically the last unsuccessful attempt of the aristocracy to limit the power of the king; and the bishop's conflict indicates that hatred, which was so well justified from a priestly point of view, against the enemy of the church and usurper Sverre and his race. Instead, Ibsen has transformed Nicolas into a monster, who symbolizes bigotry, envy, and dissension in Norway through long ages, and Skule into an ambitious person who, while striving to attain the highest goal, is at the same time tormented with a wretched doubt of his right and ability to reach it. Haakon and Skule are contrasted as representatives of two epochs,—the age of dissension and the age of union. But, as the poet's interest in the psychological is so much greater than his sense of the historic element, this contrast is thrust into the background by the contrast between the individual characters and their relation to ideas. Haakon represents "the king's thought," which he himself first conceived, and is wholly submerged in this relation. Skule represents no ancient historic idea, but simply lack of self-confidence. He steals Haakon's "king's thought" in order to procure for himself through it a right to the throne. He does not succeed. The skald declares to him that he cannot live for the life-work of another, and he himself recognizes the truth of this. The skald's thought is not expressed with any too great lucidity; for why could not a man live for the ideas of another, if he has himself endeavored to appreciate and transform them into his own flesh and blood, without stealing them, and causing them to pass for his own discovery? The theft, not the fact of living for the ideas of others, would make a person unhappy; and this it is which causes the unhappiness of Skule. The fact is, however, that Ibsen, with the whole intensity of his nature, interests himself more in the struggle that is taking place in the soul of the individual than in any struggle between historic powers. What attracted him to Skule, and made the latter the main personage of the play, was the "interesting" element in the character of Skule,—his complex nature, his struggling soul, which even when in the wrong eclipsed that of the simple-hearted Haakon with his certainty of coming victory. It is the despairing power in the great Nureddin which, in spite of his craving for the lamp, in spite of the theft of the lamp, is doomed to ruin. It is the representation of a soul whose aspiration is greater than its ability to rise; and this same representation it is that is varied in Bishop Nicolas, whose gigantic powers are wrecked in partly physical, partly spiritual, but wholly powerless yearning and craving. It is the relation between the ability and the desire, between the will and the possibility, in the soul of the individual, this relation which is already indicated in Catiline and in Gunnar in "The Warriors of Helgeland," which is brought forward anew in the relation of Skule to Haakon's thought. Skule stands in the same relation to the "king's thought" as Julian to Christianity. Filled with a foreboding of the greatness of the power he is combating, he holds an irreconcilably distorted relation to the great, victorious idea. The psychological interest completely routs the historic.
The relation between two succeeding generations is again represented in "The Young Men's Union," a drama which furnishes in an extremely witty manner a parody on the efforts of the younger generation, without at the same time offering any justification for these efforts. This work cannot be compared with such works as Turgenief's "Fathers and Sons," or "Virgin Soil," which unite relentless severity against the elder generation with their stem judgments on the younger, and at the same time extend to both thorough sympathy and comprehension. Ibsen's pessimism has repelled his sympathy. The sole honorable representative of the younger generation in the play last mentioned is Dr. Fjeldbo, a man of a thoroughly passive nature. That he is a physician is scarcely a matter of pure accident. The skilful physician plays, on the whole, a striking rôle in modern poetry; he is evidently the hero of the day. The cause of this is, doubtless, that he can be used as the incarnation of the ideals of the age, those strictly modern ideals, which are in respect to theory science, with its relationship to the true and the false, in respect to practice humanity, with its relationship to happiness and suffering, the opposing psychologic and social forces that claim the attention of the age.
In the dramas of Schiller, as well as in those of modern Germany, the struggle for political and spiritual freedom plays a prominent rôle. Class distinctions, too, are a favorite theme in various German dramas of an earlier period, even though it had not then become customary for poetry to deal with what is called at the present time the social problem. A glimmer of the latter appeared much earlier in the French drama, from the days of Beaumarchais to those of Victor Hugo, as this question had become a burning one in public discussion in France far earlier than elsewhere. In the polite literature of our day, the social question has gradually banished the political from its high seat. Modern poetry, in many lands, is inspired by sympathy with the poor and lowly; it reminds those who are well placed in life of their duties. The question is not one of those that have chiefly occupied Ibsen, and yet he has touched upon it. When he wrote "Catiline," he was too undeveloped to comprehend the social problem aright; but many years later, in "Samfundets Stötter" (The Pillars of Society), he aimed a blow at the leading circles of his fatherland. The play is wholly without a socialistic tendency, as is well known, yet so profound is its pessimism that those who are unfamiliar with Norwegian affairs, especially with the attitude of the poet to his public and to the various parties of his native land, might take it for granted that there was a tendency of the kind in the work. When it was played in Berlin, many spectators (and, it may safely be asserted, not those who were by any means lacking in judgment) yielded to the error that it was written by a socialist. I was myself obliged to assure many people that its author was, on the contrary, the favorite poet (at that time) of the conservative party in Norway. In "The Pillars of Society," which has the effect of a supplement to "The Young Men's Union," the two sides of the question are as little apparent as in the last-named comedy. Ibsen proceeds here, as everywhere else, from a one-sided point of view.
The relation between man and woman is one of those that has most intensely absorbed Ibsen, and in regard to which he has cherished the most original and the most modern sentiments.
In his first youthful works this relation is treated somewhat in the traditional way. He attacks in his "Gildet paa Solhaug" (Banquet at Solhaug) the same theme Björnson has chosen for his "Halte Hulda" (Lame Hulda); that is, the position of a young man between the woman a little older than himself whom he has loved in his youth, and the young girl whom he longs with his whole heart to make his bride,—a theme both human and universal, yet one that has frequently been varied. He next represents, in his "Catiline" and in his "Fru Inger til Österaat" (Mistress Inger at Österaat) the same rather forced yet stirring motive, how a man who had led a licentious life in his youth is punished through his love for a young girl who at the same time loves, abhors, and curses him, because he had betrayed her sister and sent her to her grave.
In his "Kjærlighedens Komedie" (Love's Comedy), Ibsen for the first time takes up the erotic condition of his fatherland for his theme. He had apparently received no trifling stimulus from contemporary Norwegian literature. While Björnson during his first period was influenced by popular tradition and popular poetry, Ibsen was incited to action in his early days by the most advanced thinkers of the time. There is something in the inspiration of "Love's Comedy" that may be traced back to Camilla Collet's "Amtmandens Dötre" (The Magistrate's Daughters). The latter daring book at that time occupied every Norwegian mind; and it contained the same witty, though rather less well planned attack on betrothals and marriages that in Ibsen's drama is conducted by a firm, manly hand. So far as similes and figures are concerned, the influence of Camilla Collet is very perceptible. Ibsen's celebrated "tea-comparison" is derived from her. In "The Magistrate's Daughters" we read of love, as follows:—
"Guard, O mankind, this our life's first bloom.... Heed its growth and its fruit.... Do not lightly disturb its tender, budding leaf, in the belief that the coarse blossoms that come later are good enough.... No; they are not good enough. There is as great a difference between the two kinds, as there is between the tea we ordinary mortals must be content with, and that which the emperor of the Celestial Kingdom drinks, and which is the only genuine tea; it is gathered first, and is so delicate and tender that it must be plucked with gloves, after the gleaners have washed twenty-four times."
Henrik Ibsen writes:—
"Ah, ladies, in your hearts, you one and allA special small Celestial Empire hold,Where many precious budding germs unfoldBehind your maidenhood's crumbling Chinese wall."
And the passage ends thus:—
"Behold, to us a second growth there faresThat with the first like hemp with silk compares;And stalks and rubbish 'midst the leaves we see;This is the blackened tea—It fills the market."
Ibsen has simply given further development to the simile and invested it with the solid mould of verse.
It is a well-known fact, that there is nothing clear in "Love's Comedy" except its mockery. The play presents a satire on marriage which imparts to the reader as little sympathy for the defenders of the conventional standard, as for its assailers, and from which it is impossible to detect whether in the poet's opinion it is better to maintain the present practices of society or to overthrow them. The only thing that is certain is his misanthropic view of the betrothals and marriages that have come under his observation. I remember a conversation with Ibsen in reference to this drama, which revolved about the ideal of love among betrothed couples in general. I said, "There are blighted potatoes and there are sound potatoes." Ibsen replied, "I very much fear I have never seen any of those potatoes that were sound."
Nevertheless, there runs through Ibsen's works a continually increasing faith in woman, and tendency to glorify woman. At times this appears in a rather revolting, dogmatic way, as when Solveig, in "Peer Gynt" after the traditional style of Goethe's "Faust" and Paludan-Müller's "Adam Homo," through her faithful love, saves the soul of her lover,—in this instance an altogether too unworthy being; but this faith in woman, with which Ibsen evidently desires to counterbalance his contempt for man, is ever present, and has been productive of a series of true and beautiful female characterizations, such as Margrete in "The Pretenders," who is represented by a few delicate strokes in imperishable beauty; or Selma in "The Young Men's Union," who may be regarded as the first draught of Nora. When this figure was new, I remarked in a review that the drama did not afford sufficient play for it, that an entire new drama should be written expressly for it. This was done in "Et Dukkehjem" (A Model Home).
As far as I can judge, the idea of woman's emancipation, in the modern acceptation of the phrase, was far from being familiar and dear to Henrik Ibsen at the outset of his career. On the contrary, he did not originally possess a large amount of sympathy for woman. There are authors who have a peculiar affinity for women, who have, indeed, a decided feminine element in their own natures. Ibsen does not belong to this class. I am quite confident he takes far more pleasure in conversation with men than with women, and he has certainly passed much less time in the society of women than is the wont of poets. Moreover, the attempt of modern literature to prove the justice of a change in woman's social status, was at first far from finding an enthusiastic admirer in him.. Mill's book on the woman question was, if I mistake not, actually repulsive to him in the early days of its appearance, and Mill, as a writer, inspired him with no sympathy whatever. Indeed, to Ibsen, with his marked individuality, Mill's statement, or rather confession, that he owed much in his writings, indeed the best they contained, to his wife, seemed absurdly ludicrous. "Only fancy," he said, smiling, "what it would be to read Hegel or Krause with the idea that it was quite uncertain whether we were following the thoughts of Mr. or of Mrs. Hegel, of Mr. or of Mrs. Krause!"
It does not seem to me that this aversion on the part of Ibsen was wholly without a connection with the poet's sentiments in regard to the woman question. I am rather inclined to think there was in his mind an opposition to the latter during its early stages, partly owing to the influences of his education, partly owing to a natural irritation at the caricature forms of female emancipation, but an opposition whose destiny it was to give place to passionate adherence. It is Ibsen's reason that has wrought the change in his emotional nature. Like a true poet, he is capable of becoming, with his whole soul, the organ of an idea which once had left him cold, the moment he feels this idea to be one of those battle-thoughts of the period that are fraught with rich meaning for the future. And when we read those words, that fall like sword-strokes, in the last scene of"AModel Home," Helmer's—
"There is no one who yields up his honor for those whom he loves,"
and Nora's—
"'Tis what hundreds and thousands of women have done,"
words in which a more hideous abyss yawns between the husband and wife that sit opposite each other at table than the nether world ever opened in the old dramas of romance, we feel, indeed, that Ibsen has not merely filled his soul with the thoughts of the age; he has fashioned them on a grander scale than any one else, he has ground them until they are sharper than in the hands of others, so that with his consummate art he can make them penetrate even the most hardened hearts. This drama produced a powerful, although alarming effect. For centuries society, through its priests and poets, had conceived of marriage, founded in love and undisturbed by the influence of a third person, as a sure haven of bliss, and had celebrated it as such in song. Now it was discovered that this haven was full of rocks and shoals. It actually seemed as though Ibsen had extinguished all the beacon lights.
"Gjengangere" (Apparitions) followed. Here, again, as in "A Model Home," a marriage was analyzed, the opposite of the one in the last-named drama. The grandeur and exquisite delicacy of "A Model Home" consisted chiefly in the fact that Ibsen had conceded so much to the husband. For what had he not conceded to this man! He is a thoroughly honorable, conscientiously upright man, an excellent provider for his family, a man who is properly jealous of his independence in his dealings with strangers and subordinates, a strict and loving father, a good-hearted, highly cultivated man,—and yet! Yet this man's wife was a victim, and his marriage a whited sepulchre.
The man into whose marriage we gain deep insight in "Apparitions" is a person of a totally opposite character; he is a coarse-natured drunkard, is recklessly dissolute, yet is endowed with so many of those qualities licentious men often have at their command with which to win hearts, and knows how to make himself so agreeable, that it is possible for his wife to screen his life and save appearances. By remaining with him, by giving herself to him, she not only sacrifices her own welfare and happiness, she also becomes the mother of a being whose life is wrecked from birth, a son who is overtaken by deadly impotence, despair, insanity, and idiocy, as he crosses the threshold of manhood,—and yet! Yet that portion of the community which is represented by Pastor Manders deems her sacrifice of herself and her son her simple duty, and her attempted revolt at her hideous fate a crime.
This is the pathos of the play, and this same pathos it was that terrified the great Philistine world more than "A Model Home" had done. This time it seemed as though the stars had been extinguished by Ibsen. "Not the faintest ray of light appears."
The relation between man and woman in "Apparitions" is placed in a totally new light, inasmuch as it is measured by responsibility to the child. The drama treats, in a poetic form, the thought of heredity, represents, on the basis of that determinism which is the latest word of modern science on the question, the dependence of the child's destiny on the parents, and gives this fact a background of a nature calculated to arouse profound thought and feeling by indicating the more universal fact to which the title points; namely, the hereditary transmission of emotions (and through these of dogmas) whose essential conditions are extinct, and have given place to others at variance with these emotions.
In close relation to Ibsen's psychological development there is associated a principal interest in this grasp or choice of themes, inasmuch as we here for the first time see the great dramatist break the circle it has been the wont of his disposition to cast about the single individual. In a letter of the year 1871, Ibsen wrote me the following words, which are indicative of much in his character:—
"To tell the truth, I have never had a very great fancy for solidarity. I have, indeed, only taken it into my cargo as a matter of traditional dogmatism. If we only had the courage to leave it entirely out of consideration, we might possibly become rid of the ballast that weighs most heavily on personality...."
Now, ten years later, his eyes are opened to the significance of solidarity; he has become thoroughly convinced that "courage" is of no avail in the attempt to cast it overboard, and that we are all from our birth consolidated with persons and things in a way we ourselves cannot control. Evidently, as years pass on, Ibsen enters into a more and more intimate relation with the fundamental ideas of the age.
Thus we see him, who at first, with almost all the now living older writers of the day, stood waist-deep in the romantic period, gradually work his way out of it, and become more and more modern, until finally he grows to be the most modern of modern writers. In my estimation, this is his imperishable glory, and will invest his works with enduring life. For the modern is not the ephemeral; it is the vital flame itself, the life-spark, the ideal soul of an age.
The ill feeling aroused by "Apparitions" in many circles, and the coarse criticism aimed at the drama, could have no power to repress Ibsen's literary productivity, but at first it had a very depressing effect on him. He wrote of it:—
"When I think how sluggish and dull and stupid affairs are in Norway, when I observe how superficial, how shallow, the entire mode of contemplation proves itself to be, a profound melancholy takes possession of me, and I feel inclined to put an immediate end to my literary activity. There is no demand at home for poetic works proper; people have all that is required in the "Storthing" organ and in the Lutheran weekly journal, and, besides, they have the party newspapers. I have not the least talent either for citizenship or for orthodoxy, and that for which I feel no talent I avoid. To me, freedom is the highest and first life requisite. At home, however, people do not concern themselves much about freedom; they care only for special liberties, for some more, for some less, according to party standpoint. Most painfully am I moved by this crude state of affairs, this vulgarism in our public discussions. Under the very laudable endeavor to transform our people into a democratic community, quite a long stretch of the road is being traversed that leads to plebeian conditions. The intellectual aristocracy seems to be on the decline at home...."
The storm aroused by "Apparitions" could exercise no other influence on Ibsen than one that strengthened him in his conviction of the stupidity of the majority. He wrote to me about this, Jan. 3, 1882, as follows:—
"Björnson says, 'The majority is always right,' and for a practical politician this is the proper thing to say. I, on the contrary, must necessarily say, The minority is always right. As a matter of course, I do not refer to that minority of people who are in a state of stagnation, and who are left in the lurch by the great intermediate party, with us called liberals; but I mean that minority which is the advance guard in the forward march toward a goal the majority is not yet in a condition to attain."[4]
A good omen for the future works of Ibsen is the fact that, in the same ratio that he becomes modern, his greatness as a literary artist increases. The ideas of the new era have not assumed the forms of symbols or of types with him, but of individuals. In his younger years, he had a proclivity for great symbolic ideals,—Brand, Peer Gynt, etc.; but, singularly enough, the more his store of thoughts increased, the clearer they became and the more artistic his presentation of them. His mastery of technicalities, of late years, has increased from work to work. In "A Model Home," he surpassed thetechniqueof the most celebrated French dramatists; and in "Apparitions" (notwithstanding certain unsatisfactory points), he displayed a dramatic firmness, simplicity, and delicacy, which recalls the antique tragedy in the hands of Sophocles (especially King Œdipus).
This continual progress is a matter dependent on Ibsen's artistic earnestness, his conscientious industry. He labors very slowly, writes and re-writes his works, until they appear in a neat-looking manuscript without a single correction, each page as smooth and as firm as a marble plate, on which the tooth of time can leave no impression. This never-ceasing ascent in perfection depends, too, even more closely on the fact that Ibsen is solely and entirely a poet, and has never wished to be anything but a poet. True, it may give the impression of coldness and undue reserve, when an author can be led by no outward recurrence whatever to mingle his voice in the universal debate; when nothing that occurs can irritate or inspire him to an outburst. The only newspaper articles Ibsen has written during the past five years are probably a few that bore on his rights in reference to his publishers, or his griefs in regard to the plunderings of his foreign translators,—therefore, on his personal and private interests; but it should not be forgotten that this reserve of his has permitted him to hold the mastery in his art unwaveringly before his eyes as a fixed idea, an ideal of which he never loses sight; and this mastery he has attained. A sharper contrast can scarcely be imagined than that which is presented by this poet, who remains alone in the South, shut off on every side from the surrounding world, free from all distraction, shaping and fashioning his artistic master-works; and his brother-poet in the North, who with full, perhaps too full hands, pours into the press his great and small articles on political, social, and religious questions, who is never afraid to let his name appear anywhere, who, paying no heed to the ordinary laws of prudence which prescribe that one should allow one's absence to be felt occasionally and one's presence to be desired, writes poems, makes public speeches, causes agitations, travels from one public gathering to another, and is most at his ease on the speaker's platform, with a thousand friends and a hundred enemies about him, holding them breathless with his daring and consummate art.
Henrik Ibsen bears no likeness to any other living poet, and is influenced by none. As minds that bear a somewhat distant relationship to him, may, perhaps with some justice, be mentioned the late German poets, Otto Ludwig and Friedrich Hebbel, both of whom, however, are far less modern in their tendencies than he. In the severity of his satire, too, there may be said to be a reminder of Dumas and Sardou. With Björnson, whose name almost insensibly falls from the pen when it busies itself with Ibsen, he has, notwithstanding all dissimilarities of nature, those things in common which naturally follow in the track of compatriots and contemporaries whose development has proceeded side by side, and who have been roused to emulation in the treatment of the same themes. That Ibsen had written "De Unges Forbund" (The Young Men's Union), gave Björnson an impulse to write dramas on civil conditions. When Björnson had written "En Fallit" (The Bankrupt), Ibsen was impelled to vary the subject in "Samfundets Stötter" (The Pillars of Society). Björnson was obliged, as he has informed me, to strike out a passage in the manuscript of his "Stöv" (Dust), because it appeared almost word for word in Henrik Ibsen's "Gjengangere" (Apparitions), which was issued before the story was printed. The fact is, the two poets have traversed an almost parallel path of development. Henrik Ibsen succeeded rather earlier than Björnson in working his way out of the old historic, legendary, and fantastic materials; for in the freer position he held, tom loose from home and standing amid the breakers of contemporary ideas, he had less to hold him back from following the call of his age, less naïveté, less reverence. But the difference in time between the transition of the two poets from the period when their materials were viewed from the standpoint of romance, to that where the realistic point of view predominated, was confined to a few years, and is lost sight of entirely, when we consider the remarkable uniformity of the stages of their poetic career. Björnson and Ibsen may be compared in this respect, as it seems to me, to the two old Norse kings, Sigurd and Eystein, in the famous dialogue furnished by the saga, and of which Björnson has availed himself in his "Sigurd Jorsalfar" (Sigurd the Crusader). The one has remained at home and there civilized his fatherland; the other has tom himself away from home, has journeyed far and wide, and in his bold, adventurous courses has won honor for his fatherland. Each has his admirers, each his martial suite, who elevates the one at the expense of the other. Still, they are brothers, even though for a season they were hostile brothers, and it is simple justice that the kingdom—as it is done in the drama of Björnson—should peacefully be divided between them.[5]