Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 3).djvu/18

 his own country too, a moral crisis which could be manfully met only in one way; and when the Storthing, by virtually refusing war, forced the King, to his bitter shame, to leave Denmark to her fate, Ibsen's heroic scorn broke into flame, and found its fiercest and keenest expression in the invectives of his hero, Brand.

Brand was no doubt originally intended to be simply an embodiment of Ibsen's own heroic ideal of character. He is represented as a priest of modern Norway. But Ibsen has himself declared that this was not at all essential for his purpose. "I could have applied the whole syllogism just as well," he told Georg Brandes, "to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest. I could quite as well have worked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for instance, as my hero—assuming, of course, that Galileo should stand firm and never concede the fixity of the earth;—or you yourself in your struggle with the Danish reactionaries." The gist of the whole is therefore ethical, in spite of its theological clothing, and in spite of the theological phraseology in which Ibsen's own ethical conceptions were as yet habitually entangled. The faith which inspires it is the faith in the spirit of man—"the one eternal thing," as Brand declares in a splendid outburst, that of which churches and creeds are only passing moods, and which, now dispersed and disintegrated among the torsos of humanity, shall one day gather once more into a whole.

Brand was to be the ideal antitype of the Nor-*