"Is it not impudent of the commune in Paris to go and destroy my admirable state theory, or rather no state theory? The idea is now ruined for a long time to come, and I cannot even set it forth in verse with any propriety. But it bears within itself a healthy core, that I see very plainly, and some day it will be practised without any caricature...."
It is in his maintenance of the sovereignty of the individual, that Ibsen comes to take a polemic stand in regard to the state idea as well as to the idea of society. I am not sure that I fully comprehend him on this point; his mode of thought is foreign to me. I can understand why there are those, as for instance, Lorenz von Stein, and after him Gneist, who recognize in the history of modern times a continual struggle between the state and society and who, proceeding from a new, energetic comprehension of the state idea, can turn in a polemic way against society; but I do not thoroughly understand the double front presented by Ibsen, nor am I quite sure that he is himself conscious that there is any double front in question.
But his anxiety, lest the sting of personality be dulled and its choicest treasures laid waste, extends still further. He firmly believes that the individual must stand alone, must be absolutely free, if all the fruitful possibilities of its nature are to be developed, and so his eyes are open to all the hindrances to individual growth that every association, even friendship, even marriage, bears within itself. I well remember his answer to a letter written by me in one of those melancholy moods to which youth so readily gives expression, and in which I declared, with a little sigh, as it were, that I had few or no friends. Ibsen wrote, March 6, 1870, as follows:—
"... You say you have no friends at home. So I have long thought. Any one who like yourself stands in close relation to his life-work, cannot reasonably expect to retain his friends. Friends are an expensive luxury, and he who invests his capital in a calling and a mission in this life has no means left wherewith to maintain friends. The cost of keeping friends does not consist in what we do for them, but in what we leave undone out of regard for them. Thereby many intellectual germs are stunted in their growth. I have experienced this myself, and that is the reason why I can look back on a number of years, during which I failed to succeed in becoming myself...."
Is not Ibsen's absolute need of independence and sense of isolation felt in the words "the cost of keeping friends"; and is there not in the words cited, the chief explanation of Ibsen's comparatively late outburst of originality. His career, as I have asserted before, was apparently begun without any high degree of self-confidence.
As friendship under certain circumstances may be a hindrance to the independence of the individual, so too may marriage. Therefore it is that Nora refuses to consider her duties toward her husband and children as her most sacred duties; for a far more sacred duty she believes she owes herself. Therefore it is that to Helmer's "You are before all else a wife and mother"; she replies:—
"I am before all else a human being,—or, at all events, I shall endeavor to become one."
Ibsen shares with Kierkegaard the conviction that in every single human being there slumbers the soul of a warrior, an invincible power; but he cherishes it in another form than Kierkegaard, for whom the worth of the individual is something supernatural, while with Ibsen, we rest on human grounds. He believes that the individuality of the human being is to be preserved for its own sake, not for the sake of higher powers; and since beyond all else the individual should remain free and whole, all concessions made to the world represent to Ibsen the foul fiend, the evil principle.
Here we touch upon the fundamental thought in "Brand." It is embodied in the passage where Brand speaks of all those scattered fragments of the soul,—those torsos of the spirit, those heads, those hands, from which one day a noble whole shall proceed: a hero, in whom the Lord shall recognize man, His greatest work, His Adam, young and strong.
Thus, "all or nothing" becomes Brand's apparently inhuman motto. Therefore the "spirit of compromise," even in the hour of his death, is nothing to Brand but a fair temptress who demands a little finger, in order to gain possession of the whole hand; and, therefore, the spirit of compromise returns in "Peer Gynt" as the mighty "Böjgen," the incarnation of all that is cowardly and pliable in human nature, all that readily bends and curves.