Finally, a whole group of topics and ideals that revolve about distinctions between the two sexes, about the mutual erotic and social relation of man and woman, especially about woman's economical, moral, and spiritual emancipation.
Religious topics and problems are dealt with in our day in the most diverse ways, although always in the modern spirit. Allow some of the principal instances to pass in review before your mind. The greatest of the elder generation of poets in France, Victor Hugo, notwithstanding his passionate tendency to free thought, displays the remnants of a vague deism, colored with pantheism. Traces of the influence of the past century may readily be detected in him: religion is glorified at the cost of religions; love which unites is extolled in opposition to faith which parts and destroys. Most of the prominent authors of the present generation, as for instance Flaubert, represent religion with scientific coldness, but always from the dark side. To him, and to his spiritual kindred, the object of religion is a hallucination, in which one believes. The greatest English poet of our day, Swinburne, is a passionate heathen with a rich poetic vein, and he conceives Christianity to be a denial of nature, the enemy with whom he must do combat. In Italy, the greatest poet of the land, Leopardi, became absorbed in a sort of sublime metaphysical pessimism, which found vent in stoic resignation. Carducci, the foremost of Italy's living poetic thinkers, is quite as modern and even more polemic than he. In Germany, the most prominent poets, as Gottfried Keller, Paul Heyse, Fr. Spielhagen, have displayed in their works a soul-felt atheistic humanitarianism.
In the North the conditions were totally different. The Danish poets of the past generation had almost invariably paid homage to orthodoxy; the only philosophically inclined one among them, J. L. Heiberg, who had begun by protesting as a free thinker, ended by making at least apparent concessions to the teachings of the clergy; and the attempt in Denmark to undermine the authority of the church, namely, Kierkegaard's violent attack on the state church, had not been aimed at the truth of the dogmas taught, but exclusively at their professors, especially in cases where the lives of the priests failed to correspond with their teachings. This attitude of Kierkegaard has been a decisive one for Danish-Norwegian polite literature, down to the present day. Modern poetry in Denmark and Norway has rarely, if ever, touched the objective side of the question, the essence of religion, but almost exclusively its subjective side; hence the extraordinary wealth of priestly forms in this literature, both before and after its authors were emancipated from orthodoxy. The priests in Björnson's and in Magdalene Thoresen's peasant stories denote the standpoint before emancipation, the priests in Björnson's, Schandorph's, Kielland's, Ibsen's, Gjellerup's latest works the standpoint after emancipation.
Ibsen follows the clue given by Kierkegaard. Like all men of his generation in the North, who have grown up in the period of romance, his early relations to religion lack clearness. Moreover, there was in his nature a dual tendency, which must necessarily expose him to inner tumults: a native propensity to mysticism and an equally inbred inclination to sharp, dry common sense. Few poets who are capable of such almost convulsive flights of fancy as he, are able to linger as calmly as he can amid the prose of life. "Brand" and "Samfundets Stötter" (The Pillars of Society) differ as widely in main essentials as though written by different authors. The character of the first-named work is that of pure, unqualified mysticism, the other revolves about simple, unadulterated prose. Here boundless exultation; there good, wholesome, social morality.
No one who is familiar with the mental characteristics of the Norsemen can doubt that "Brand," which laid the foundation for Ibsen's poetic fame, excited universal attention merely because it was regarded as a sort of poetic sermon, a homily, a devotional work. It was not the real merits of the book that made it seem imposing to the public and caused the sale of so many editions; no, people streamed into the bookstores to purchase "Brand" precisely as people pour into church when a new and severely zealous priest appears. In a correspondence that Ibsen carried on with me regarding this book, he expressly stated that Brand's ministerial career was the purely exterior, incidental side of the question. In a letter, dated June 26, 1869, he writes:—
"Brand has been misunderstood, so far, at least, as my intention was concerned. The misconception is unquestionably rooted in the fact that Brand is a priest, and that the problem of the work is placed in the realm of religion. It would have been just as possible for me to apply the same syllogism to a sculptor, or a politician, as to a priest. I could just as well have given vent to the mood that impelled me to literary production, had I, instead of Brand, for instance, dealt with Galileo (with the trifling alteration in the latter's history, that he must, as a matter of course, remain firm and not concede that the earth stood still). Indeed, who knows, had I been born a hundred years later, I might with equal relish have treated yourself and your struggle with Rasmus Nielsen's philosophy of compromise. Taken as a whole, there is much more objectivity in Brand than has hitherto been discovered, and of this, as a poet, I am proud."
Although it is my wont carefully to withhold everything of a personal nature from these quotations, I have here permitted myself to retain a playful allusion to the literary warfare of those days, because it proves how little the mere idea of priesthood concerned Ibsen. A further proof of this is afforded by an expression in one of the letters I received from Ibsen during the time when I was brooding over the introduction to my book "Hovedströmninger i det 19de. Aarhundredes Litteratur" (The Main Currents of the Literature of the 19th Century). It reads as follows:—
"It seems to me you have reached the same crisis which I had attained in the days when I was about to write Brand, and I am convinced that you, too, will know how to find the healing drug that can expel disease from your body. In energetic production lies an admirable cure."
As the reader will see for himself, the emphasis in "Brand" is placed, according to the poet's own construction, upon the power of self-sacrifice and strength of character, not upon any special religious dogma. Now although Ibsen is, of course, the best, the only competent judge of his own design in the work, he nevertheless underrates, in my estimation, the weight of the unconscious power by which he was impelled to choose the precise materials he has chosen and no others. And this unconscious power, as I believe, was Ibsen's Norse-romantic tendency to mysticism. Yet even if "Brand" should be understood exactly in accordance with Ibsen's own interpretation of the character, the resemblance to religious phenomena in Northern religious life is equally obvious. It might look to the Danes as though Ibsen had Kierkegaard especially in mente; for he, too, laid the entire stress on personal sincerity. This would be due to our unfamiliarity with Ibsen's Norwegian models. Independent priests of Norway, Lammers, for instance, have had a larger share in the formation of the character of "Brand" than any direct influence from Denmark. Lammers, however, was himself led to the stand he took by the Kierkegaard agitation.
In "Kejser og Galilæer" (Emperor and Galilean), the influence of the Kierkegaard standpoint, although still strong, is on the wane. True, the passion for martyrdom is here set up as a measure for truth, and the psychological principle of the work is that no doctrine has intrinsic worth that is incapable of inspiring a spirit of martyrdom; but with this there is united a determinism that is half-mystic, half-moulded in the modern spirit; moreover, a Schopenhauer-like faith in the unconscious and irresistible world-will; finally, a modern prophecy that Christianity, as well as paganism, will one day be resolved into a third kingdom which will be an amalgamation of the two. It is characteristic of Ibsen's intellectual habitus that in both of his attempts at dealing with religious themes everything that savors of conflict and endeavor is infinitely more prominent and successful than portions touching on reconciliation and harmony. "The Third Kingdom" in his "Emperor and Galilean," stands quite as obscurely in the background as that Deus caritatis at the conclusion of "Brand."