Henrik Ibsen

( Originally Published 1896 )

THERE is now living at Munich a middle-aged Norwegian gentleman, who walks in and out among the inhabitants of that gay city, observing all things, observed of few, retired, contemplative, unaggressive. Occasionally he sends a roll of MS. off to Copenhagen, and the Danish papers announce that a new poem of Ibsen's is about to appear. This announcement causes more stir than perhaps any other can among literary circles in Scandinavia, and the elegant Swedish journalists point out how graceful an opportunity it would be for the illustrious poet to leave his voluntary exile and return to be smothered in flowers and flowery speeches. Norwegian friends, expressing themselves more tersely, think that the greatest Norse writer ought to come home to live. Still, however, he remains in Germany, surrounded by the nationality least pleasing to his taste, within daily earshot of sentiments inexpressibly repugnant to him, watching, noting, digging deeper and deeper into the dark places of modern life, developing more and more a vast and sinister genius.

A land of dark forests, gloomy waters, barren peaks, inundated by cold sharp airs off Arctic icebergs, a land where Nature must be won with violence, not wooed by the siren-songs of dream-impulses, Norway is the home of vigorous, ruddy lads and modest maidens, a healthy population, unexhausted and unrestrained. Here a man can open his chest, stride onward upright and sturdy, say out his honest word and be unabashed : here, if anywhere, human nature may hope to find a just development. And out of this young and sturdy nation two writers have arisen who wear laurels on their brows and are smiled on by Apollo. Bjornson is well known by this time to many Englishmen : he represents the happy, buoyant side of the life of his fatherland ; he is what one would naturally expect a Norwegian author to be rough, manly, unpolished, a young Titan rejoicing in his animal spirits. Ibsen, on the other hand, is a quite unexpected product of the mountain-lands, a typical modern European, a soul full of doubt and sorrow and unfulfilled desire, piercing downward into the dark, profound, Promethean a dramatic satirist.

Modern life is a thing too complex and too delicate to bear such satire as thrilled through the fierce old world. In Ezekiel we see the thunders and lightnings of the Lord blasting the beautiful evil body of Aholah ; in Juvenal, the iron clank of horse-hoofs is ringing on the marble pavement till, in crushing some wretched debauchee, they mingle his blood with the spilt wine and the vine-wreaths. But neither divine nor human invective of this sort is possible now it would not cure but kill. Modern satire laughs while it attacks, and takes care that the spear-shaft shall be covered up in roses. Whether it be Ulrich von Hutten, or Pope, or Voltaire, the same new element of finesse is to be found ; and if a Marston rises up as a would be Juvenal, the world just shrugs its shoulders and forgets him. As the ages bring in their advancements in civilisation and refinement, the rough old satire becomes increasingly impossible, till a namby-pamby generation threatens to loathe it altogether as having " no pity in it." The writings of Ibsen form the last and most polished phase of this slow development, and exhibit a picture of life so perfect in its smiling sarcasm and deliberate anatomy, that one accepts it at once as the distinct portraiture of one of the foremost spirits of an age. Ibsen has many golden arrows in his quiver, and he stands, cold and serene, between the dawn and the darkness, shooting them one by one into the valley below, each truly aimed at some folly, some affectation, in the everyday life we lead.

Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, at Skien, a small market town on the sea in the south-east of Norway. He began active life as an apothecary, with a joyous and fermenting brain, a small stock of knowledge and a still smaller stock of money. But poetry and scholarship were dearer to him than all things, and it is easy to conceive that the small world of Skien became intolerable to him. He wrote a tragedy, and met with a Maecenas who would publish it; and after some delay there appeared at Christiania, in 1850, Catilina, a drama in three acts, by Brynjolf Bjarme. Under this uncouth pseudonym a new poet concealed himself, but the public were none the wiser, and only thirty copies were sold. Catilina is the work of a boy; it is marked by all the erotic and revolutionary extravagances usual in the efforts of youths of twenty. The iambic verses are very bad ; the writer has evidently read little, and scarcely thought at all, but there is a certain vigour running through it which seduces one into reading it despite one's self. With this precious production under his arm, Ibsen came to the capital in 1851, and began to study at the University. He never attained to a very splendid career there he began too late for that but he did fairly well, being well grounded in Latin. Catilina shows that he had read his Sallust well in the old days at Skien. At the University he fell in with a clique of lads of earnest mind and good intelligence, several of whom have made a name in literature; Björnson was there, and Vinje, called the Peasant ; Botten Hansen, the bibliographer; and Frithjof Foss, the novelist. These young contemporaries schemed nothing less than an entire revolution in literature. They began to set about it by founding a newspaper, called, I do not know why, Andhrimner, which professed the same critical independence, and shared the same early fate, as the celebrated Germ among ourselves. Andhrimner was published by Botten Hansen, Ibsen, and Vinje, and contained nothing but original poetry, criticism, and aesthetics. After a sickly existence of nine months, it went out. Among Ibsen's numerous contributions was a long drama, Norma, or a Politician's Love, a most impertinent lampoon on the honourable members of his Majesty's Storthing, of which the first act is said to be in extremely witty and delicate verse. But Andhrimner has become a great rarity, a bibliographical prize, and I have never seen it. When it ceased, in 1851, Ibsen was so fortunate as to meet with a gifted man who at once perceived his genius, Ole Bull, the great violinist. At his intercession Ibsen became director of the theatre at Bergen, and held the post till 1857. In 1852 he travelled in Denmark and Germany, met Heiberg, the great poet-critic, at Copenhagen, and came back mightily dissatisfied with Norway and himself. The theatre was a source of constant vexation to him, and during the six years he spent at Bergen his genius seems to have been in some degree under a cloud. He wrote a great deal while he was there, but most of it has been destroyed, and what remains is unworthy of him ; he produced two or three plays on his own stage, but would not print or preserve them ; one little piece which he did print as a feuilleton to a Bergen paper in 1854 was rather flimsy in texture. In 1857 the younger poet, Björnson, took the direction of the Bergen house, and Ibsen came up to Christiania to direct the National Theatre there. He was now almost thirty years of age, and had not written one great work ; it is often the loftiest minds that attain man-hood most slowly. May-flies reach perfection in a day and another day sees their extinction, while great souls strengthen themselves in a long-drawn adolescence. But our poet had finished his chrysalis-life at last. For the next seven years he produced several historical dramas of great and increasing merit ; but I do not purpose at present to speak of these, nor of his political or miscellaneous poems, but only of his three great satires in verse. And forthwith let us pass to them.

It was not till 1863 that Ibsen discovered the natural bent of his genius. Until that year no one could tell that he was born to be a satirist. Now, after reading his great later poems, one can perceive traces of that lofty invective, which was to be his final culmination, even in the earlier and purely historical dramas. But when Kjaerlighedens Komedie ("Love's Comedy"), a satirical play of our own generation, first appeared in Norway, there were very few among the poet's admirers to whom it was not a great surprise to find him to be a master of so entirely new a style. The older pieces, being hewn out of an antique and lovely source, were fittingly robed in terse prose; this, being concerned with the prosaic trivialities of to-day, needed and received all the delicate finish of epigrammatic verse. The original is written in rhyme, but I have translated into blank verse ; a rhymed play being a shocking thing to English readers since Dryden's day, whereas it is still a familiar phenomenon in the classic literature of Scandinavia. The scene of Love's Comedy is laid in a garden in the suburbs of Christiania, in the summertime. A Mrs. Halm, a widow, having a large house, takes in lodgers, among whom are Hawk, the hero, and Lind, a theological student. Hawk, a young poet brimming over with revolutionary theories and revolting with his whole soul against the conventionality of the day with regard to amatory and aesthetic matters, has determined to give his life to the destruction of what is false and sterile in modern society. As it happens, the present moment is opportune for commencing the attack. At Mrs. Halm's there is gathered a congregation of Philistines of all sorts, and love, so called, is the order of the day. Unsuspicious of his intentions, the various pseudo-lovers sport and intrigue around him in what seems to him an orgy of hideous dulness and impotent conventionality. His scorn is lambent at first, a laughing flame of derision ; but it rises by degrees into a tongue of lashing, scathing fire that bursts all bonds of decorum. The scene opens in the evening, while the party sit about on the grass. Hawk has been asked to sing his last new song, and thus he proclaims the carpe diem that is his ideal

In the sunny orchard-closes,
While the warblers sing and swing,
Care not whether blustering Autumn
Break the promises of Spring ;
Rose and white the apple-blossom
Hides you from the sultry sky;
Let it flutter, blown and scattered,
On the meadows by-and-by.

Will you ask about the fruitage
In the season of the flowers ?
Will you murmur, will you question,
Count the run of weary hours?
Will you let the scarecrow clapping
Drown all happy sounds and words?
Brothers, there is better music
In the singing of the birds !

From your heavy-laden garden
Will you hunt the mellow thrush ?
He will pay you for protection
With his crown-song's liquid rush !
O ! but you will win the bargain,
Though your fruit be spare and late,
For remember, Time is flying,
And will shut your garden-gate.

With my living, with my singing,
I will tear the hedges down !
Sweep the grass and heap the blossom,
Let it shrivel, pale and brown !
Swing the wicket ! Sheep and cattle,
Let them graze among the best !
I broke off the flowers ; what matter
Who may revel with the rest !"

This song wakens a good deal of discussion. The ladies are against it on the score of economy; the gentlemen think the idea very good in theory. The first person who rubs against Hawk's susceptibilities is Stiver, a dull clerk, who is engaged in due form to a Miss Magpie, who is present. This Stiver confesses to have written verses.

" Sliver. Not now, you know ! all that was long ago,
Was when I was a lover.

Hawk. Is that past?

Is the wine-frenzy of your love slept off?
Sliver. Oh ! now I am officially engaged,
And that is more than being in love, I think !"

Some one speaks about " next " Spring, and Hawk ex-presses his hatred of "that wretched word "

" Hawk. It makes the shareholders of pleasure bankrupt !
If I were only Sultan for an hour,
A running noose about its coward neck
Should make it bid the joyous world good-bye!

Sliver. What is your quarrel with the hopeful word?

Hawk. This, that it darkens for us God's fair world !
In 'our next love' and 'when we marry next,'
In 'our next mealtime' and in our 'next life,'
'Tis the anticipation in the word,
'Tis that that beggars so the sons of Joy,
That makes our modern life so hard and cold,
That slays enjoyment in the living Present.
You have no rest until your shallop strikes
Against the shingle of the 'next' design,
And, that accomplisht, there is still a 'next,'
And so in toil and hurry, toil and pain,
The years slip by and you slip out of life,
God only knows if there is rest beyond.

Miss Magpie. How can you talk in that way, Mr. Hawk ?
My sweetheart must not hear a word you say!
He's only too eccentric now ! [To Sliver] My love !
Come here a moment !

Sliver [languidly, and stooping to clean his pipe]. I am coming,

dear !"

From the prosaic Stiver, for whom engagement has robbed love of its charm, we turn to Lind, who is in all the delicious ecstasy of a passion returned but unproclaimed. Referring to Lind's temporary glamour of poetical feeling, Hawk remarks that you can always "stuff a prosing fool "

" As pitilessly as a Strasburg goose,
With rhyming nonsense and with rhythmic humbug,
Until his lights and liver, mind and soul
(But turn him inside out), are found quite full
Of lyric fat and lard of rhetoric."

The company, becoming piqued, turn upon him, and charge him with neglecting poetry; they suggest that he should shut himself . up in an arbour of roses, and then he is sure to be inspired. He replies that the enjoyment of nature unrestrained prevents the creation of poetry; that the imaginative beauty thrives best in an imprisoned soul.

" Cover my eyeballs with the mould of blindness,
And I will celebrate the lustrous heavens;
Or give me for a month, in some grim tower,
A pang, an anguish, or a giant sorrow,
And I will sing the jubilee of life;
Or else, Miss Magpie, give me just a bride !"

They all cry out upon him, Love's blasphemer, for he exclaims that he desires a bride, that he may lose her.

" For in the very Bacchic feast of fortune
She might be caught into eternity.
I need a little spiritual athletics :
Who knows how such a loss might strengthen me I "

At this moment the two sensible people of the drama interpose Svanhild, who is the only woman with a soul in the piece, and Guldstad, a sober merchant. Svanhild proposes a high spiritual aim for Hawk ; Guldstad proposes to drive off his "morbid fancies " with a little manual labour. Hawk replies ---

" I'm like a donkey bound between two stalls;
The left hand gives me flesh, the right hand spirit;
I wonder which 'twere wisest to choose first !"

Then is introduced the third pair of pseudo-lovers the Rev. Mr. Strawman, an uxorious priest with an enormous family, who exemplifies the dullest type of the great parody of love. The description of his early life, romantic wooing, disappointed aims, are most amusingly given in brisk and witty dialogue, Hawk sneering ever more bitterly as the description proceeds. The wooing of Mr. Strawman was most sentimental --

" He loved her to the tones of his guitar,
And she responded on the harpsichord,
And first they lived on credit."

Among the troop of old and young gathered around him, it is in Lind's amour only that Hawk can take pleasure. Lind and Anna love one another, and no one but themselves and Hawk have guessed it. Suddenly Hawk is horrified by a suspicion that it is Svanhild that Lind loves. He turns away angry, and sick at heart. True love, reserved, tender, genuine, is not to be found ; the whole world is old and sterile; all good impulses and hopes are dead. This he says to Svanhild when they are alone, and she upbraids him with dreamy insincerity.

" Svan. Last year the Faith in Syria was menaced ;
Did you go out, a warrior for the Cross?
Oh I no; on paper you were warm enough,
And sent a dollar when the 'Church Times' asked it

[Hawk walks up and down.]

Hawk, are you angry ?

Hawk. No, but I am musing. See, that is all !

Svan. You have two different natures, And each unlike

Hawk. Oh yes! I know it well!

Svan. What is the reason?

Hawk. Reason? That I hate
To go about with all my soul uncovered,
And, like good people's love, a common thing,
To go about with all my heart's warmth bare,
As women go about with naked arms I
You were the only one you, Svanhild, you
I thought so, once but ah ! all that is past

[She turns and gazes.]

You listen—?

To another voice that speaks !

Hush! every evening when the sun goes down
A little bird comes flying do you hear?
Ah ! see, it flits out of the leafy shade
Now, can you guess what I believe and hold ?
To every soul that lacks the singing gift
God sends a little tender bird as friend,
For it created and for its own garden !

Hawk [takes up a stone].

Then if the bird and soul can never meet,
The song is never fluted out elsewhere?

Svan. No, that is true ! But I have found my bird.
I have no gift of tongues, no singer's voice,
But when my bird warbles from its green bower,
A poem seems to well up in my heart,
But ah ! the poem fades away and dies !

[Hawk throws the stone. Svanhild screams.]

Oh God ! you struck it ! Oh ! what have you done? Oh !
That was wicked, shameful I

Hawk [passionately agitated]. Eye for eye,
And tooth for tooth, pure legal justice,
Svanhild. Now no one greets you longer from on high,
And no more gifts come from the land of song.
See, that is my revenge for your ill deed !

Svan. For my ill deed?

Hawk. Yes, yours ! Until this hour
A singing-bird was warbling in my breast.
Ah ! now the bell may chime above them both,
For you have killed it !

Svan. Have I ?

Hawk. Yes, you struck My young and joyous conquering faith to earth When you betrothed yourself !"

Then she explains that Anna is really Lind's beloved. Hawk now is interested again in this affair, until Lind declares that he will publish the news, that they may be regularly engaged. Hawk shows this step to be suicidal; but Lind persists. The new couple are received with acclamation by the pseudo-lovers, to Hawk's infinite disgust. He cries to the company

" Hurrah l Miss Magpie, like a trumpet, tells you,
A brother has been born to you in Amor !"

the result being that the new couple are smothered in and nauseated with congratulations. Here is the description of Strawman and his wife --

" He also was a man of courage once,
And fought the world to win himself a woman ;
He sacked the churches of society;
His love burst into flower of passionate song!
Look at him now ! In long funereal robes
He acts the drama of the Fall of Man I
And look, that female of gaunt petticoat,
And twisted shoes, down-trodden at the heel,
She was the winged maiden, who should lead
His spirit into fellowship with beauty I
And what is left of love's pure flame ? The smoke !
Sic transit gloria amoris, Svanhild ! "

In utter desperation, Hawk proposes to throw every-thing to the winds, and leave modern society to rot into its grave. The only pure spirit he can find is Svanhild, and he tries to persuade her to revolt with him.

" We will not, like this trivial congregation,
Attend the church of dulness any more.
The aim and scope of individual action
Is just to stand consistent, true and free."

But he expresses too much. Svanhild conceives the idea that he is wooing her only that she may be a means to the attainment of his ideal.

" You look at me as children on a reed,
A hollow thing to cut into a flute,
And pipe upon awhile and throw away."

They part coldly, and the curtain goes down upon Hawk's boundless depression And dismay.

The second act is a day later in time. On Sunday afternoon a whole troop of friends, all intense Philistines, come down to Mrs. Halm's, and hold what Hawk calls "a Bacchanalian feast of tea and prose." Lind and Anna are beginning to be weary of their love; now that all the world expects them to be ardent, the charm of the mysterious passion is gone. All the three couples the fat priest and his spouse, the clerk and Miss Magpie, and those most newly betrothed become more and more ludicrously dull, and Hawk, waxing more and more angry, mutters

"See how they slay the poetry of Love!"

But we must hurry to the close, giving only one out of the exquisite and sparkling scenes. Hawk has gathered every one round him, and each person has mentioned some herb or flower that is like love, and at last it is his turn --

" Hawk. As many heads as fancies ! Very good I
But all of you have blundered more or less;
Each simile is crooked ; now, hear mine,
Then turn and twist it any way you wish !
Far in the dreamy East there grows a plant
Whose native home is the Sun's Cousin's garden

All the Ladies. Oh ! it is tea !

Hawk. It is !

The Ladies. To think of tea !

Hawk. Its home lies far in the Valley of Romance,
A thousand miles beyond the wilderness !
Fill up my cup ! I thank you ! Let us hold
On tea and love a good tea-table talk.
[nay gather round him.]
It has its home away in Fableland,
Alas! and there, too, is the home of Love.
Only the children of the Sun, we know,
Can cultivate the herb or tend it well,
And even so it is with Love, my friends:
A drop of sun-blood needs must circulate
Through our dull veins, before the passionate Love
Can root itself, or shoot and blossom forth.

Miss Magpie. But love and love are everywhere the same ;
Tea has varieties and qualities.

Mrs. Strawman. Yes, tea is bad or good or pretty good.

Anna. The young green shoots are thought the best of all.

Svanhild. That kind is only for the Sun's bright Daughters.

A Young Lady. They say that it intoxicates like ether !

Another. Fragrant as lotus and as sweet as almond 1

Guldstad. That kind of import never reaches us !

Hawk. I think that in his nature every one
Has got a little ' Heavenly Empire' in him
Where, on the twigs, a thousand such sweet buds
Form under shadow of that falling Wall
Of China, bashfulness ; where, underneath
The shelter of the quaint kiosk, there sigh
A troop of Fancy's little China dolls,
Who dream and dream, with damask round their loins,
And in their hands a golden tulip-flower.
The first-fruits of Love's harvest were for them,
And we just have the rubbish and the stalks.

And now the last point of similitude:
See how the hand of culture presses down
The 'Heavenly Empire' out in the far East;
Its Great Wall moulders and its strength is gone,
The last of genuine mandarins is hanged,
And foreign devils gather in the crops.
Soon the whole thing will merely be a legend,
A wonder-story nobody believes:
The whole wide world is painted grey on grey,
And Wonderland for ever is gone past.
But have we Love? Oh! where, oh ! where is Love?
Nay, Love is also banished out of sight.
Let us bow down before the age we live in !
Drink, drink in tea to Love discrowned and dead !"

There is intense indignation among the pseudo-lovers, and Hawk is driven out of their society, scarcely saved from the fate of Orpheus. Svanhild comes out to him, and for a little while they enjoy the exquisite pleasure of true and honest love. But, to hasten to the end, Hawk discovers that marriage would destroy the bloom and beauty of this sweet passion. He dreads a time when Svanhild will no longer inspire and glorify him, and the poem ends in a most tragical manner by the separation for ever of the only two hearts strong enough to shake off the trammels of conventionality. The Age weighs too heavily upon even them, and, to spare them-selves future agony, they tear themselves apart while the bond is still fresh and tender between them.

The whole poem its very title of Love's Comedy is a piece of elaborate irony. We may believe that it is rather Svanhild than the extravagant Hawk who speaks the poet's mind. It is impossible to express in brief quotation the perfection of faultless verse, the epigrammatic lancet-thrusts of wit, the boundless riot of mirth, that make a lyrical saturnalia in this astonishing drama. A complete translation alone could give a shadow of the force of the original

In 1864 Ibsen left Norway, and, as far as I know, has only once re-entered it. For a long while he was domiciled in Rome, and while there he wrote the book which has popularised his name most thoroughly. It seemed as though the poetical genius in him expanded and developed in the intellectual atmosphere of Rome. It is not that Brand is more harmonious in conception than the earlier works for let it be distinctly stated, Ibsen never attains to repose or perfect harmony but the scope was larger, the aim more Titanic, the moral and mental horizon wider than ever before. Brand, the hero of the book, is a priest in the Norwegian Church; the temper of his mind is earnest to the point of fanaticism, consistent beyond the limits of tenderness and humanity. He will have all or nothing, no Sapphira-dividings or Ananiasequivocations the whole heart must be given or all is void. He is sent for to attend a dying man, but in order to reach him he must cross the raging Fjord in a small boat. So high is the storm, that no one dares go with him : but just as he is pushing off alone, Agnes, a young girl of heroic temperament who has been conquered by his intensity, leaps in with him, and they safely row across. Brand becomes priest of the parish, and Agnes, in whose soul he finds everything that his own demands, becomes his wife. In process of time a son is born to him. The physician declares that unless they move to some healthier spot the parish is a noisome glen that does not see the sun for half the year the babe must die. Brand, believing that duty obliges him to stay at his post, will not leave it. His child dies, and the mother dies ; Brand is left alone. At last his mother comes to live with him, a worldly woman with a frivolous heart ; she will not submit to his religious supremacy, and dies unblessed and unannealed. Her property now falls into Brand's hands, and he dedicates it all to the rebuilding of the church. The satire now turns on the life in the village ; the portraits of the various officers, school-master, bailiff, and the rest, are incisively and scathingly drawn. All society is reviled for its universal worldliness, laziness, and lukewarmness. At last the church is finished. Brand, with the keys in his hands, stands on the door-step and harangues the people. His sermon is a philippic of the bitterest sort ; all the wormwood of disappointed desire for good; all the burning sense of useless sacrifice, vain offerings of heart and breath to a thankless generation, all is summed up in a splendid outburst of invective. In the end he throws the keys far out into the river, and flies up the mountain side away into desolation and solitude.1 As a piece of artistic work, Brand is admirable ; a drama of nearly three hundred pages, written in short rhymed lines, sometimes rhyming four or five times, and never flagging in energy or interest, is a wonder in itself. Eight large editions of this book have already been sold a greater success than any other work of the poet has attained. A very great number of copies were bought in Denmark, where, just now, religious writing is at the height of fashion, and doubtless the subject of Brand accounts in some measure for its extraordinary popularity in that country. The verse in which it is written is finished and lovely work of a high lyrical order.

The following song has attained a special popularity throughout Scandinavia : -

" Einar. Agnes, my exquisite butterfly,
I will catch you sporting and winging;
I am weaving a net with meshes small,
And the meshes are my singing.

Agnes. If I am a butterfly, tender and small,
From the heather-bells do not snatch me;
But since you are a boy, and are fond of a game,
You may hunt, though you must not catch me.

Einar. Agnes, my exquisite butterfly,
The meshes are all spun ready;
It will help you nothing to flutter and flap :
You are caught in the net already.

Agnes. That I am a butterfly, bright and young,
A swinging butterfly, say you?
Then ah ! if you catch me under your net,
Don't crush my wings, I pray you !

Einar. No ! I will daintily lift you up,
And shut you into my breast ;
There you may shelter the whole of your life,
Or play, as you love best."

It was among the lemon-groves of Ischia, under the torrid glare of an Italian summer, that Ibsen began his next, and, as I believe, greatest work. There is no trace of the azure munificence of sea and sky in the luxurious and sultry South about Peer Gym; it is the most exclusively Norwegian of his poems in scenery and feeling. Strange that in the "pumice isle," with the crystalline waves of the Mediterranean lapping around him, far removed from home faces and home influences, he could shape into such perfect form a picture of rough Norse life by fjord and fjeld. Peer Gynt takes its name from its hero, an idle fellow whose aim is to live his own life, and whose chief characteristics are a knack for story-telling and a dominant passion for lies. It is the converse of Brand; for while that drama strove to wake the nation into earnestness by holding up before it an ideal of austere but stainless virtue, Peer Gynt idealises in the character of its hero the selfishness and mean cunning of the worst of ambitious men. In form, this poem, like the preceding, is written in a variety of lyrical measures, in short rhyming lines; but there is a brilliant audacity, a splendour of tumultuous melody, that Brand seldom attained to. Ibsen has written nothing else so sonorous as some of the passages in Peer Gynt.

The hero is first introduced to us as playing a rough practical joke on his mother; he is a rude shaggy lad of violent instincts and utter lawlessness of mind. We find him attending a wedding, and, after dancing with the bride, snatching her up and running up the mountain-side with her. Then he leaves her to make her way down again ignominiously. For this ill deed he is outlawed, and lives in the caves of the Dovrefjeld, haunted by strange spirits, harassed by weird sensualities and fierce hallucinations. The atmosphere of this part of the drama is ghostly and wild; the horrible dreams of the great lad are shown as incarnate but shadowy entities. He grows a man among the mountains, and is introduced to the King of the Trolds, who urges him to marry his daughter and settle among them. Under the figure of the Trolds, the party in Norway which demands commercial isolation and monopoly for home products is most acutely satirised. At last Peer Gynt slips down to the sea-shore and embarks for America. These events, and many more, take up the first three acts, which almost form a complete poem in themselves ; these acts contain little satire, but a humorous and vivid picture of Norse manners and character. To a foreigner who knows a little of Norway and would fain know more, these acts of Peer Gynt are a delicious feast. Through them he is brought face to face with the honest merry peasants, and behind all is a magnificent landscape of mountain, forest, and waterfall.

With the fourth act there is a complete shifting of motive, time, place, and style. We are transported, after a lapse of twenty years, to the coast of Morocco, where Peer Gynt, a most elegant middle aged gentleman, entertains a select party of friends on the sea-shore. He has been heaping up fortune in America; he has traded "in stockings, Bibles, rum, and rice," but most of all in negro slaves to Carolina and heathen gods to China. In short, he is a full-blown successful humbug, unscrupulous and selfish to the last degree. While he is asleep, his friends run off with his yacht, and are blown up by an explosion into thin air. He is left alone and penniless on the African shore. He crosses the desert and meets with endless adventures : each adventure is a clear-cut jewel of satire. Here is a subtle lampoon on the way in which silly people hail each new boaster as the Man of the Future, and worship the idol themselves have built up. Peer the bubble, the humbug appears in an Arab camp, and is received as a manifestation of the divine Muhammad himself. A chorus of girls do homage to him, led on by Anitra, the very type of a hero-hunting woman :

" Chorus.

The Prophet is come !
The Prophet, the Master, the all-providing,
To us, to us, is he come,
Over the sand-sea riding !
The Prophet, the Master, the never-failing,
To us, to us, is he come,
Through the sand-sea sailing.
Sound the flute and the drum;
The Prophet, the Prophet is come !

Anitra. His steed was the milk-white flood
That streams through the rivers of Paradise;
His hair is fire and stars are his eyes,
So bend the knee ! Let your heads be bowed !
No child of earth can bear
His starry face and his flaming hair !
Over the desert he came.
Out of his breast sprang gold like flame.
Before him the land was light,
Behind him was night;
Behind him went drought and dearth.
He, the majestic, is come I
Over the desert is come !
Robed like a child of earth. Kaaba,
Kaaba stands dumb,
Forlorn of its lord and light.

Chorus. Sound the flute and the drum;
The Prophet, the Prophet is come ! "

Another episode introduces one of those ill-advised persons who strive to prevent the use of classical Danish in Norway, and substitute for it a barbarous language collected orally from among the peasants — a harsh, shapeless, and unnatural jargon. One of these writers is introduced to Peer in Egypt; he is flying westward, seeking for an asylum for his theories. He tries to win Peer Gynt's sympathy thus :

" Listen ! In the East afar
Stands the coast of Malabar.
Europe like a hungry vulture
Overpowers the land with culture,
For the Dutch and Portuguese
Hold the country at their ease.
Where the natives once held sway,
Now their chiefs are driven away;
And the new lords have combined
In a language to their mind.
In the olden days long fled,
Th' Ourang-Outang was lord and head,
He was chief by wood and flood,
Snared and slaughtered as he would;
As the hand of nature shaped,
So he grinned and so he gaped;
Unabashed he howled and yelled,
For the reins of state he held.
Out alas ! for Progress came,
And destroyed his name and fame;
All the monkey-men with ears
Vanished for four hundred years;
If we now would preach or teach,
We must use the help of speech.
I alone have striven hard
To become a monkey-bard;
I have vivified the dream,
Proved the people's right to scream,
Screamed myself, and, by inditing,
Showed its use in folk-song-writing.
Oh ! that I could make men see
The bliss of being apes like me ! "

It is said that these lines have had a greater effect in stopping the movement than all denunciations of learned professors and the indignation of philologists.

Between the fourth and fifth acts twenty years more elapse. Peer wins a new fortune in California, and finally comes back to Norway to enjoy it. The opening scene carries us up one of the perilous passages on the Norse coast, a storm meanwhile rising and at last breaking on the ship. All hands are lost save Peer, who finds himself in his fatherland again, but penniless and friendless. Solvejg, a woman who has constantly and unweariedly loved him all his life, receives him into her cottage, and he dies in her arms as she sings a dream-song over him.

Love's Comedy, Brand, and Peer Gynt, despite their varied plots, form a great satiric trilogy perhaps for sustained vigour of expression, for affluence of execution, and for brilliance of dialogue, the greatest of modern times. They form at present Ibsen's principal and foremost claim to immortality. Their influence over thought in the North has been boundless, and sooner or later they will win for their author the homage of Europe. He next published a very successful satiric play, The Young Men's Union, in 1869. This is a comedy in prose, the scene of which is laid in a little country town, perhaps Skien being meant, to judge by certain hints. The subject matter is taken from the ordinary political life in the provinces, and a good deal of airy satire is expended on the frivolity and short-sightedness of embryo politicians. The interest centres around a young lawyer, gifted with some brains, no tact, and boundless impudence, who builds up for himself a dream of successful ambition, and has it tumbled about his ears like a house of cards in the fifth act. This young man, Stensgaard, tries to win the sympathy of the lower classes, and especially of the turbulent youth, by denouncing the proprietary class. But by an accident he gets admitted himself into the society of this local aristocracy, and might, if he had a grain of decision or a particle of sound sense, hew out a path from this higher elevation. But he must needs grasp all, and loses everything. He forms a Forbund or Union, a collection of young men that meet to drink a health to Freedom, sing odes to Old Norway, and celebrate the 17th of May, the day of the independence of Norway. These absurdities were once a serious weakness to the State, but now they are banished from rational society, and are only cultivated in such crude assemblies as those our poet satirises. But Stensgaard, with shallow cunning, tries to manoeuvre for the support of both classes, and as the election times are approaching, he determines to canvas for a place in the Storthing. At the same time he urges a love-suit on three ladies at once, or rather by turns. To the least experienced playgoer it will be obvious that this complicated intrigue gives opportunity for plenty of comical incident, and accordingly the young lawyer builds his castles in the air for awhile till the political and amatory schemes are ripe, and then in a very amusing final scene all his tricks are exposed, and he himself vanishes into thin air. The dialogue is everywhere sprightly, and its limpid flow is seldom interrupted by those metaphysical subtleties which are the poet's too great delight. In the character of Stensgaard, Ibsen is more than half suspected of laughing at his rival Björnson, whose political freaks were, about the time when this play was produced, exciting remark for the first time.

Not a few of the critics of the great poet ventured to hope that he would select for his next work a subject less local than those purely Norwegian scenes which he was accustomed to draw, and which, however brilliantly painted, seemed to the world at large to be of comparatively trivial importance. In 1873 he appeared to respond to this hope in publishing a work of great ambition, the theme of which had certainly a European and a universal interest. This book, originally projected, according to report, as a trilogy, actually consists of two dramas of unusual length, covering together the period intervening between A.D. 351 and A.D. 363 that is, from the adolescence to the death of Julian the Apostate.

The subject undoubtedly is a very momentous and tragical one. It concerns itself with the effect of a single brain to carry into effect a kind of religious Renaissance, in opposition to that form of political Christianity which had just found a firm footing in the whole Roman Empire. All the great tragedies that art has known are engaged with the struggle of a gifted and noble nature against an invincible force to which it is wholly antipathetic. From Prometheus to Faust the great tragical figures of poetry have rung the changes on this theme. Ibsen has rightly judged that Julian's struggle against Christ, seen in the light of his slight apparent success and final ruin, collects around it ideas fit for a high philosophical tragedy. In effect he has hardly hit as high as he aimed; Kejser og Galilaeer (" Emperor and Galilean ") is a work full of power and interest, studded with lofty passages, but not a complete poem. But before discussing the causes of this partial failure we will briefly analyse the method in which one of the finest minds in Europe has chosen to bring before us the story itself.

The first of the two dramas is entitled julian's Apostasy. The action opens at Constantinople. We are introduced to one of the picturesque, vivid scenes that Ibsen understands so well how to manipulate. It is Easter, and outside the church doors a great throng of citizens is waiting to see the Emperor Constantius II. go in state to mass. Before he appears, the bystanders, who have in the beginning united in beating a few stray pagans, begin to quarrel among themselves, Manichaeans against Donatists, with furious abuse. In this way, at the very opening, the rotten state of doctrine in professing Christendom is laid bare; the chaos of raving schismatics and godless heretics that grouped themselves as Christians in the eyes of men like Julian is made patent to the reader. Constantius, timid, morbid, and moribund, makes his way through the crowd, accompanied by his courtiers, and amongst them Julian, the friendless kinsman whose parents he has murdered. Julian is rather suggested than sketched as a nervous, intellectual youth, of wavering temperament and almost hysterical excitement of brain. A lad of his own age, a healthy young Cappadocian whom Julian in earlier years has converted to Christianity, comes out of the crowd to greet him. They pass away together, and in their dialogue the poet finds occasion to unveil to us the condition of Julian's mind and soul. He has become conscious that a kind of classic revival is being suggested around him, and he is angry at being kept out of the way of it. He hopes to secure his own tottering faith by arguing with the men who are trying to restore the old philosophy. He accidentally meets the most active of these new teachers, Libanios, who is starting to found a new school at Athens. Julian obtains leave to go to Pergamos, hoping from thence to steal off to Athens, and stand face to face with the dreaded Libanios. In this act Julian is still a Christian, but the self consciousness of his assertions of faith reveals the tottering basis on which it rests. He is wavering; circumstances and the age are against him, but, as yet his difficulties are rather emotional and moral than intellectual.

The second act reveals Julian in the midst of the new school at Athens. He has made a melancholy discovery : "The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true." The efforts of the young apostates to restore the insouciance of classic times has resulted in mere bestial excess; Aphrodite and Iacchus are gods no longer, and to Julian the Christ also is a god no longer. A new change has come over him. He finds no rest in sceptical science ; the new philosophers are ambitious, greedy, impure persons, and yet he cannot return to the fold of Christianity. The old religion rots in its open grave, and the new religion seems to him to be false and cold and timid. Libanios disgusts him ; he hears of magical arts practised at Ephesus, very much as we nowadays hear of spirit-rapping, and he starts off in the hope of a new revelation and a new creed.

The next act is in the highest degree theatrical, but there is but little development of purpose. Julian is discovered at Ephesus, under the influence of a new teacher, Maximos the mystic. There is a great magic-scene, in which, to the sound of unseen instruments and under the flicker of resinous torches, a wild ceremony of incantation is gone through. Strange shadows cross the scene ; the figures of Cain and of Judas rise to the motions of the wizard's rod ; the whole affair is prolonged to an extreme length, and we do not see clearly the poet's purpose. The result, however, is distinct enough. Julian convinces him-self that spirits of the upper world have warned him to restore the old Greek Polytheism. At the moment of wildest cerebral excitement, the Emperor's messengers burst in upon him, with the news that Caesar Gallos, his brother, has been murdered, that Julian is nominated Caesar, and that the Emperor gives him his sister Helena in marriage.

He reappears in Gaul. After the celebrated victory at Argentoratum, he returns into Lutetia to Helena. A message from Constantius, accompanied by a present of fruit from Italy, reaches the camp at the same time. Helena, who has received him with every display of conjugal affection, eats some peaches which have been carefully poisoned, and rushes on to the scene raving. The passage which follows is as revolting as powerful. English views of propriety scarcely permit me to reproduce the peculiar tenor of the revelations she makes in her delirium. Suffice it to say that she proves her married life to have been a grossly unfaithful one, and that she names as the dearest of her lovers a Christian priest, who, by a not unparalleled fiction, has persuaded her to regard him as an impersonation of the Second Person of the Trinity. In an agony of shame and horror, Julian curses the Galilaean ; this uttermost indignity was needed to give him the power of perfect hatred against Christianity. But for the moment there is no time for reflection. His victory has won him the jealousy of the Emperor, and, threatened with the fate of Gallos, he only saves his life by leaping out of the window into the throng of soldiers. His appeal to their gratitude turns the scale violently in his favour; he is elected Emperor, and marches towards Constantinople. The central idea in this act is the moral force which the adultery of his Christian wife and the treachery of the Christian Emperor exert, in concert with circumstances, in driving Julian into active enmity against their faith.

The fifth act is occupied with the march through Italy.

The body of Helena, by reason of her purity, forsooth ! works miracles, to Julian's infinite disgust. On the other hand, he makes retreat impossible by publicly worshipping Helios, and marches victoriously eastward. So closes Julian's Apostasy, having scarcely flagged anywhere in interest and power, and leaving a distinct heroic central figure on the mind.

But the second drama, Julian the Emperor, from the very outset, is afflicted with a sense of flatness and deadness that the author in vain struggles to throw off. The moment we find Julian crowned at Constantinople he ceases to be an heroic figure at all. The vain effort to revive the Pagan cultus among the masses of the people, the trifling and annoying passages at Antioch, the intellectual meannesses of Julian, the terrible fiascos at Alexandria and Jerusalem, have nothing tragical in them. These long acts of Ibsen's drama are not without importance, but their interest is solely historical, or perhaps philosophical; they are utterly prosaic. The dramatist has been hampered by an overplus of historical and legendary material. No trifle is spared us, even that slight epigram against Apolinarius, 'Aveyvwv eyvwv Kareyvwv, is dragged in, losing all force in its Norse translation. We find little to praise or blame in the first three acts of this long drama, but when the fatal Persian march commences, the soul of the poet revives. His spirit remembers its august abodes, and Julian's figure recovers something of heroic dignity. It is almost inconceivable that Ibsen has chosen to dwell on the dirty habits of his hero; he has not spared us the traditional inky fingers, or the vermin-haunted beard. High talk about Helios and the Phrygian Mother consorts but ill with such terrible details. But with the fourth act our interest revives; we forget the importance of the historical Julian in the lofty dreamer and great warrior, who rises to the height of the occasion in the great eastward expedition against Persia. The story is told finely and graphically; we see the baffled and dejected Emperor pushing on unflinchingly, stung by the songs of the Christians, gnawed at heart with the sense of his ill-success against their Master, yet through it all, determined, calm, and resolute. The condition of his mind is illustrated by a dialogue with the mystic Maximos, of which we translate a part

"Maximos. The vine of the world is grown old, and yet you fancy yourself able, as before, to offer raw grapes to those who thirst after new wine.

Julian. Ah! my Maximos, who thirsts? Name me one man, outside our intimate circle, who is led by a spiritual enthusiasm. Unfortunate that I am, to be born into such an iron age !

Maximos. Blame not the age. Had the age been greater, you had been less. The soul of the world is like a rich man who has countless sons. If he parts his riches equally to all the sons, all are well-to-do, but none rich. But if he leaves them all penniless but one, and leaves all to him, then that one stands rich in a circle of poor men."

Here we find expressed Julian's hope and his despair. Ever pressing like a weight upon his spirit is the indifference with which the world receives his gift of the new wine. It is the most deadly of his reverses ; it is worse a thousand times than the army of King Sapores, worse even than the untiring zeal of his Christian adversaries. These his persecutions have roused into martyr-heroism and soldered together with brotherly love, but no passionate zeal burns in the dull hearts of the worshippers of Pan and Helios. Yet his one hope and consolation is that in himself all that is godlike centres, that when all foreign opposition is put down, the conscious divinity in himself will blaze out, to the discomfiture of the Galilaeans, and, above all, to the spiritual awakening of the Polytheists. Then follows the burning of the ships, and even till the middle of the last act Ibsen contrives to lose again the poet in the religious philosopher. But in describing the last night before the final battle, his genius suddenly takes fire, and he closes the poem in a white-light of imaginative sublimity. By a pool of dark water, in the midst of trees, Julian stands and consults with the faithful Maximos. He clings more vehemently than ever to the belief in his own divinity. He longs to die to become a god ; it even flashes over his brain to slip into the dark pool, and take his place at once "at home in the light of the sun and of all the stars." He is haunted by the unendurable vision of the Crucified. Without terror, without remorse, but with maddening hatred and horror, he sees wherever he goes the great figure robed in white stretching its bleeding hands to stop him in his course. In the midst of this weird augury the Persian army bursts at midnight on the camp. In the darkness the armies meet and thunder together; Julian unarmed leaps on horseback, and plunges into the foremost fighting. Through the night his unscathed figure is seen in the thickest of the battle, but just at daybreak he looks eastward, and there, where other men see only the crimson dawn shooting along the cold sky, Julian in an ecstasy of horror sees the colossal figure of Christ, robed in imperial purple, circled by singing women that string their bows with the light of his hair, storming down the awakened heavens to crush him into nothingness. He turns to plunge again into the battle, but his old foster-brother, Agathon, now becomes a furious fanatic, draws his bow, and wounds him deeply in the side. He falls, crying, " Thou hast conquered, Galilaean ! "

Now, to give briefly a notion of the causes that have militated against the positive success of this work. First and foremost, the technical imperfection of its style ; it is written from first to last in prose. It is hardly credible that Ibsen, a poet who has distinguished himself above all recent writers by his skill in adapting lyrical and choral measures to dramatic themes, should have deliberately abandoned his instrument when he undertook this tragical study. It is as if Orpheus should travel hellwards without his ivory lyre. Every charm of harmony and plastic art was needed to draw the buried figure of Julian out of the shameful oblivion of the ages. I earnestly trust that no idle words of that garrulous criticism which is only too ready to commend the indiscretions of popular poets will induce him to appear again in so serious a part without his singing-robes. But more important than this is the failure to support the heroic dignity of the principal character. If Julian does not fill the scene, who can ? Not Gregory, not Basil, who are mere lay figures; not Maximos, who wanes and waxes with the waxing and waning of his master. But perhaps the ultimate reason of failure is to be found in what lies out of the poet's reach the inherent quality of the theme. Julian was not the voice of his time ; he was an anachronism. In his brief life was exemplified how much can be done by one whole-hearted man in stopping the civilisation of a world, only to rush on with a fiercer current when he is taken out of the way. Julian attempted to restore, what had been tried in the balances of history and found wanting ; he had nothing new to suggest. The gods of AEschylus had dwindled down to the nymphs of Longus ; the "folding-Star of Bethlehem" had glared on them, and they had sickened and fled away. To resuscitate their ghosts was the dream of a morbid scholar, ignorant of the hearts of men, and blind to the deeper significance of all the signs of the times.