"Defend thyself!
Böjgen is not mad!
Strike!
Böjgen never strikes!
Fight! Thou shalt!
The mighty Böjgen wins without e'er fighting!
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The mighty Böjgen wins all things through gentleness."
To extricate the race from "Böjgen's" stifling embrace, to capture the spirit of compromise, force it into a casket and hurl it into the deepest part of the sea,—this is the goal at which Ibsen, as a poet, has aimed. This extrication of the individual from compromise, and from the mighty "Böjgen," is the revolution that is his own.
I once asked Henrik Ibsen, "Is there among all the Danish poets a single one about whom, in your present stage of development (1871), you concern yourself in the least." After leaving me for some time to vain conjectures, he replied: "Once upon a time there was an old man in Seeland who stood behind his plough in a peasant's smock, and who had viewed mankind and the world with angry eyes. I rather like him." Is it not a significant fact that Bredahl is the Danish writer who of all others is nearest Ibsen's heart? Bredahl, too, was an indignation pessimist,—no deep-seeing psychologist, it is true, but a thinker in whose pathos may be found, as it were, the thunder which precedes Ibsen's lightning. Bredahl sees only the exterior tyranny and hypocrisy, while Ibsen searches these out in the hidden recesses of the heart. His standpoint is that of Ibsen's revolutionary orator,—
"He looks after the inundations for the world's meadows."
His great successor goes more thoroughly to work,—
"He takes delight in placing torpedoes under the ark."
If, then, I have designated Ibsen as a revolutionary nature, I need scarcely defend myself from the charge of having declared his to be one of those natures that are enthusiastic for violent exterior convulsions. Far from it! Indeed, quite the contrary! For, isolated as he is and feels himself to be, reluctantly opposed to all parties, simply as parties, stately, polished, reserved, "awaiting the approach of time in a spotless wedding garment," he is, so far as exteriors are concerned, strictly conservative, although his conservatism is of a peculiar nature; that is, it proceeds from radicalism, because he expects nothing from special reforms. In the depths of his soul he is a decided revolutionist, but the revolution he raves about and labors for is the purely spiritual one I have pictured. The reader will not have overlooked the concluding words of the letter of December, 1870, "What is really needed is a revolting of the human spirit." I have never been able to forget these words; for they contain, in a measure, Ibsen's entire poetic programme—an admirable programme for a poet.
I should, however, fail to be true to myself if I said that Ibsen's view of life seemed to me to possess more than a powerful element of truth. It is a view of life by virtue of which one may think and produce poetic creations, but not act, which, indeed, strictly considered, cannot even be put into plain language in the world, as it is, because it is calculated to instigate others to action, which in this instance means—capital offence. Whoever, through a yearning for great, decisive, sweeping overthrows, is led to look indifferently or contemptuously on the slow, insignificant changes of the natural course of development; on the tardy, gradual, petty improvements, the compromises, with which the practical worker must be content, because through them alone he can hope to attain the partial realization of his ideal; on the associations without which it is impossible for any one who is not in a position of brutal command to transmit a single thought into the reality of life,—such a man must relinquish all hopes of raising a finger in practical life. Like Sören Kierkegaard, like Brand, he can do nothing but point helplessly at the yawning gulf that separates existing reality from the ideal. To attempt to act himself or induce others to act in harmony with the desired goal, would simply mean to lead his followers headlong over the brink of that dizzy abyss which parts what exists from what is desired, and to expose himself to immediate arrest. Indeed, even the poet can only express so ideal a view of life indirectly, insinuatingly, ambiguously, in the drama; only through thoroughly responsible personages, and thus with a certain reservation, so far as the author himself is concerned. Only the rudest kind of opponents could possibly have taken the hideous jest about the torpedoes beneath the ark for literal, bloodthirsty earnest. This mode of contemplating life involves and necessitates, therefore, a dualism between the theoretic and the practical, between the individual and the citizen, between spiritual freedom and that practical freedom which has the form of an obligation, a dualism that in actual life can only be carried out by a dramatic poet who lives in exile, who is not obliged to have the slightest dealings with state, society, politics, groups of human beings, parties, or reforms.
Therefore the ideal of intellectual reserve that has its origin in this mode of contemplating life seems not to me the highest. To be sure, a distinguished author provides best for his outward dignity when he is never found in a skirmish or amid an excited throng. It is unquestionably aristocratic to hold one's self aloof from the vulgar crowd, never to mingle in the turmoil of the day, never to write a newspaper article. Yet to my taste it savors of a still higher aristocracy to act as did the legitimist generals who reported themselves as simple soldiers in Condé's army, and who, notwithstanding their general's epaulettes, did not disdain to fight now and then on foot and in the first rank. Not one whit of true inner dignity is sacrificed by such a course.