Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 3).djvu/19

 *wegian people. But Ibsen's own complexity of nature, and perhaps also his keen dramatic instinct interfered with this simple scheme. The ideal type grew human and individual; the Titan going forth with drawn sword against the world became a struggling and agonised soul, swayed by doubts and entangled by illusion; the vices he denounces are represented by men, drawn mostly with a genial and humorous, and, in the case of the "humane" old Doctor, with a kindly and sympathetic hand. The beautiful creation of Agnes serves the purpose of satire admirably in the Second Act, where her heroism is set off against the "faintheartedness" of the Peasants and Einar; but in the Third and Fourth Acts she has passed into the domain of tragedy; her heroism is no longer an example hurled at the cringing patriots of 1864, but a pathetic sacrifice to the idol which holds her husband in its spell. Thus the tragedy of Brand, the man, struggling in the grip of his formula, disengages itself from the "satire" of Brand, the Titan, subduing the world to his creed.

Brand is written throughout in one or other of two varieties of four-beat verse. "I wanted a metre in which I could career where I would, as on horseback," Ibsen said to the present translator in 1893. And in his hands the metre develops a versatility of tone, rhythm and rhyme arrangement for which Browning's Christmas Eve and Easter Day is the only proximate English parallel. But the two varieties—iambic and trochaic, instead of being deftly mingled, as in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, are kept strictly apart and used with felicitous effect to heighten the distinction between two classes of scene. The iambic is the measure of the more familiar and