Chapter 4 THE THREE EPICS

BRAND (1866), PEER GYNT (1867), EMPEROR AND GALILEAN (1873)

In his three epical works,-for epics they are,-Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen reached poetic heights that he has never since revisited. The spiritual fermentation attendant upon his first visit to Italy in May, 1864, gave Norway, indeed all Scandinavia, its first modern epic. And it is not strange that this Italian journey should produce such monumental results. Goethe 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 Norwegian government. Yet, instead of turning to antiquity, he penned Brand, one of the few great epics since Milton and Goethe, and then as a satiric pendant let loose the demoniac powers of his ironic fantasy in Peer Gynt. In this vast symphony, Brand is the first sombre movement, Peer Gynt a brilliant Mephistophelian scherzo, while Emperor and Galilean is the solemn and mystic last movement.

Brand places Ibsen among the great mystics beginning with Dante and including the names of Da Vinci, Swedenborg, mad naked Blake, and Goethe. Unlike the poet of the Divine Comedy he set his hell on the heights, for the hell of the defeated is the story of that stern Brand who left his church in the valley, summoned his flock to follow him and found an Ice Church on the high hills. Only Hamlet and Faust are recalled to the reader as they see this soul warped by its ideal of "All or Nothing," and in the spiritual throes of doubt, even despair. His God is the merciless Jahveh of the later Hebraic dispensation, not the Eloihim of the earlier. Weakness of will is the one unpardonable sin. Heroic as a Viking, he stands for all the Norwegian race was not when Ibsen wrote his poem. Life broken into tiny fragments, waverers and compromisers, he lashes his countrymen so that across these pages you seem to hear the whistle of the knotted thongs. Conventional religion comes in for its share of abuse from the tongue of this new Elijah. The wife Agnes, one of the poet's most charming creations, is at first 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 bosom. He would drive these blasphemers from the sacred precincts of the temple. It is his realization of the hopelessness of reforming men by the old means that sends him to the mountains. He has built a church, for the old church is too small. But the new, a symbol of the soaring soul, is misunderstood. It is a gift from Brand to his people, and so horrified is he with his failure to stir these petty souls that he throws the church key in the river and summons the multitude to follow him upward, up there in the clouds, where the true God abides away from the vileness of mart and palace. Some follow, many mock, and he is finally stoned and deserted. A crazy creature, Gerd, who symbolizes wildness, an egotist who scorns human ties; she it is who is appointed by the poet to open Brand's eyes. His spiritual pride has been his downfall, for while thinking of others he has not "found salvation for his own soul." The avalanche which she starts overwhelms them both, but not before he hears a voice answer his prayer-does mankind's will, then, count for nothing. "He is the God of Love," is the reply.

Havelock Ellis thinks that "we have to look back to the scene in the death of Lear" to attain a like imaginative height in literature. Ibsen has set his character in a most life-like milieu. His people are painted with a broad, firm hand. The mayor, the 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 revolt from orthodoxy may have supplied the poet for his portrait. He, however, more than half hints that it was Gustav Lammers who was the original of Brand, a fiery nonconformist man who built his own church and seceded from the current evangelicism.

But, after all, Brand is Ibsen's own portrait, is a mask for Ibsen himself. The beauty, grim as it is, and the picturesque variety of this great poem almost match its ethical grandeur.

The Ice Church is too cold for humanity, Brand's ideal too inhuman. Yet he has willed, he has not wholly failed. His error was in its application-in not willing enough for himself. "Be what you are," he exhorts 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 answer to this perplexing problem? Ibsen does not give it. In his phraseology "to be oneself is to lose oneself." And Brand, who was for "All or Nothing," severed his dearest ties and finally was destroyed himself.

The complexity must not repel the student. Mr. C. H. Herford's translation with the illuminating introduction is well worth the reading. He thinks that the "Norwegian priest is tortured ... 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-assertion.... Unless appearances wholly deceive, Shakespeare drew in Hamlet the triumph of impulses which agitated without dominating his nature." Ibsen had lived Brand, he confesses it.

But as a stage play, and it has been played, it is not a success. It lacks condensation. A battle-field of two tense souls-for Agnes's almost matches Brand's at times-it is too long and too loosely constructed in 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 is dead can live by that destroying phrase, 'All or Nothing.' The principle which slays the saintly Agnes, and drives her heroic husband mad, fits the miserable Einar like a glove; he is happy and at home with it."

Self-realization through self-surrender is the fundamental organ-tone of the masterly, overarching epic. And note the symbolism of the church, the church in the valley, and Gerd's Ice Church! This symbol of architecture reappears in The Master Builder, just as the avalanche motive reappears in When We Dead Awaken. The mountain-tops are the abodes of Ibsen's heroes,-who are his thoughts,-and there he scourges the human soul on this lofty Inferno.

In Brand, Ibsen girded against the weaklings, the men of half-hearted measures, the conventional cowards of civilization. In Peer Gynt he makes a hero of such a one, a lying, boastful fellow. The poem is one of the most audacious and fantastic ever written. Yet with all its shifting phantasmagoria, it so stands four-square rooted in the old, brown earth. Peer is a rascal, but a lovable one; a liar from the first page to the last. He "is himself" without a deviation from the crooked paths of selfishness. Again Ibsen puzzles, for the very keystone of his ethical arch is individuality. Peer is a compromiser 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 cosmopolitan; "has got his luck from America, his books from Germany, his waist-coat and manners from France, his industry and keen eye for the main chance from England, his patience from the Jews, and a touch of the dolce far niente from the Italians." He makes friends, for he is successful. They maroon him on a savage shore, but blow up his yacht. He thanks God for the swift retribution-as others have done in similar predicaments-though he thinks the Lord is not very economical. Many adventures ensue, from the episode with the dancing girl Anitra to the crowning in a madhouse of Peer as Emperor of Himself.

At last, old, ruined, he returns to Norway. In the mountains, in the identical hut, he finds the patient Solveig, who has always loved him. He has met the Button-moulder, Death, who tells him that he is doomed to the melting-pot, there to be re-minted. He has never been himself, he the thrice-selfish Peer Gynt. His old 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 path, and listened to its whispered "Go round." He always skirted difficulties, never faced them, a moral coward, a time-server. Yet he may escape the Button-moulder, for Solveig has believed in him. "Where have I been with God's stamp on my brow?" he asks her, bewildered before the dawning perception of his worthlessness.

"In my faith, in my hope, in my love," she smilingly answers. The Button-moulder calls without the house; "we meet at the last cross-way, Peer, and then we shall see-I say no more." But Solveig guards him as he sleeps.

The curse of Peer Gynt is his overmastering imagination coupled with a weak will. It proves his downfall. "To be oneself, is to slay oneself," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is the same as in Brand,-self-realization through self-surrender. This parody of Don Quixote and Faust was never the real Peer Gynt until the end.

The musical setting of Peer Gynt by Eduard Grieg gives no adequate idea of the poem's dazzling humour, versatility, poetic power, malice, swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the possible exception of the episode of Peer's mother's death, has written in a sheer melodramatic vein. Brand and Peer Gynt brought to Ibsen the fame he deserved, though it was thus far confined to Norway.

The huge double drama, Emperor and Galilean, with the sub-title, a World Historic Drama, is in a theatrical sense one of Ibsen's few failures, though epical literature would sadly miss this vast and hazardous undertaking devoted to C?sar's apostasy and the Emperor Julian, all in its ten acts. Naturally enough, even Ibsen's admirers admit that the work lacks dramatic 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, for it is said that he was not deeply read in the classics. Dr. Emil Reich finds in Julian something decadent, a prevision of the familiar Parisian type noted by Huysmans. Rather have Huysmans and Ibsen gone to ancient Rome for their figures-Julian has a touch of the Neronic cruelty and lust, just as he has that monstrous artist's C?sarean madness of dominion.

It is the scholar Julian listening to the teachings of the seer Maximus who most attracts. Maximus predicts the advent of the Third Kingdom, the kingdom which is neither that of the Galilean nor of the Emperor. It is an empire that 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 kingdom of the spirit,-and God in that of the flesh." This mystic thought recalls that Joachim of Flora, whose prophecies of the approaching Third Kingdom were approved bythe Franciscans, by that section which was called the Spirituals.

There are some superb "purple patches" in Emperor and Galilean, particularly in the second drama. Jealous of the Redeemer, for he would be a world builder, he asks Maximus:-

"Where is he now? What if that at Golgotha, near Jerusalem, was but a wayside matter, a thing done, so to speak, in passing, in a leisure hour? What if he goes on and on, and 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 creation desolate, as it was on that day when the spirit moved alone on the waters?" A second Alexander this, not groaning for more worlds to conquer, but eager to slay the Son of Man.

Maximus has told him that, "You have tried to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final, any more than the youth is.

"You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth-to hinder him from becoming a man. O fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be-against the third empire in which the twin-natured shall reign."

After bewailing that the Galilean will live in succeeding centuries to tell the tale of the Emperor's defeat, Julian sees blood-red visions, the hosts of the Galilean, the crimson garments of the martyrs, the singing women, and all the multitudinous sent to overthrow him. In the ensuing battle he dies with the historic exclamation upon his lips,-"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!"

Wicksteed points out that Julian is a pedant, not a prophet. Again we may see operating in another environment a Peer Gynt on the throne, a Skule of the 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. Emperor and Galilean has all the largeness of an epic and much of that inner play of spiritual functions which may be seen amplified in its two predecessors.

The double drama was performed for the first time in its original language at the National Theatre, Christiania, March 20, 1903. It was played in German in connection with the celebration of Ibsen's seventieth birthday in Berlin in 1898, and earlier in 1896 at Leipsic.

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