Iconoclasts

GYNT (1867), EMPERO

he was at heart never so German as in Italy; and Ibsen, one of the few names that will be coupled with the poet of Faust when the intellectual history of the past century is written, was never such a Northman as in Rome, though he had left his native land full of bitterness, a self-imposed exile, doomed to exist on the absurd stipend doled out to him with niggardly hands by the Norwegi

irst attracted by the shallow, artistic Einar. When she meets Brand her soul goes out to him. "Did you see him tower as he talked?" she asks her companion. Bat as he sacrificed his mother to his ideal, so he sacrifices his wife. Their child does not thrive in the gloomy valley where this cure of souls abides. No matter. He remains. God's will be done. The child dies. His clothes are sold to a gypsy because Agnes has shed tears over them-a human weakness. She opens her window in the evenings so that the lamplight will fall across the grave of her child. That consolation, too, is denied her. Be hard! might be the Nietzschean motto of her husband. And so she dies. His mother died saying, "God is not so hard as my son," because he refused her the sacraments. She had ill-gotten wealth. To make restitution was his demand-All or Nothing. He would not make bargains, be a paltry go-between for God and man. His nobility of character repels. People feel his power but find him unapproachable. The laissez-faire policy, the easy-going philosophy of the official servants of God, raises wrath in his boso

e schoolmaster, the doctor, the sexton, are living men, and their worldly natures are clearly indicated. Prophet Brand is, though Ibsen told Georg Brandes that he could have made him sculptor or politician, as well as priest. S?ren Kierkegaard and his

Ibsen himself. The beauty, grim as it is, and the picturesque

the weak Einar, "whatever it is, but be it out and out" No compromise with the powers of evil-yet Brand's doctrine led to his destruction. Not to will is a crime, to will too much leads to madness. What is the a

... as was Hamlet; Hamlet's power of resolve is depleted by the restless discursiveness of his intellect; Brand's failure in sympathetic insight hangs together with his peremptory self

its joints for effective dramatic representation. Dr. Wicksteed makes an acute point when he shows that Einar's smug conversion-which fills Brand with loathing-is missed by the priest, for "only a man whose heart

urch in the valley, and Gerd's Ice Church! This symbol of architecture reappears in The Master Builder, just as the avalanche motive reappears in Whe

promiser at every station of his variegated career. He, too, treats his mother cruelly, though from different motives from Brand. He runs off with another man's bride, because he has been too lazy to win her lawfully. He does this in the face of a woman, Solveig, for whom he has entertained the first unselfish desire of his shallow existence; he goes to the trolls and lives in the swamps of sensuality-where Solveig follows him, but is left; he goes to America after his mother's death,-a most affecting page,-makes a fortune by selling Bibles, rum, and slaves, buys a yacht, sets up for a cosmopolit

d thoughts come back to him materialized as balls of wool. "We are thoughts," they cry, "thou shouldst have thought us; hands and feet thou shouldst have lent us." So this scamp, who "lived his life" seemingly to the utmost, never lived it at all, blenches before the Boyg, the great, amorphous mass that blocks his pat

-moulder calls without the house; "we meet at the last cross-way, Peer,

o be oneself, is to slay oneself," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is the same as in Brand,-self-realiza

malice, swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the possible exception of the episode of Peer's mother's death, has written in

amatic unity and that it is without culminating interest. Yet dramatic it is, this narrative of Julian, the so-called Apostate, who conceived the crazy notion of dragging from its grave the forms of a dead and dusty paganism. He hates the Galilean and finally becomes mad enough to crown himself a god. The vivid pictures testify to Ibsen's powers of evocation,

will harmonize both the empire of pagan sensuality and the empire of the spirit and bring forth the empire of man. That will be the Third Kingdom; "he is self-begotten the man who wills.... Emperor God-God Emperor. Emperor in the ki

ilean, particularly in the second drama. Jealous of the R

suffers, and dies, and conquers, again and again, from world to world? O that I could lay waste the world! Maximus-is there no poison in consuming fire, that could lay creatio

ain. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spiri

ecoming a man. O fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is

-red visions, the hosts of the Galilean, the crimson garments of the martyrs, the singing women, and all the multitudinous sent

Pretenders. Julian doubted as did Skule his divine call; he did not really believe in himself, and under he went on his way to the Button-moulder. Empe

l Theatre, Christiania, March 20, 1903. It was played in German in connection with the ce