Act IV is short. We see the unhappy Oernulf lamenting his murdered son before a black grave mound. He sings his Drapa over the dead body. A storm arises. It is a night of terrors. Kara, the peasant, still unappeased, burns the home of Gunnar. Hjördis meets Sigurd and, after entreating vainly, shoots him with the bow and arrow she has made expressly for the purpose. A strand of her hair is entwisted in the bowstring. Sigurd, dying, tells her to her horror that he is not a pagan, that even in death he will not meet her "over there," for he is a Christian man; the white God is his; King Ethelstan of England taught him to know the new religion. (The epoch of the play is A.D. 933.) Despairingly, the strong-souled woman casts herself into a chasm and is translated into Valhall by her immortal sisters, the Valkyrs. This last scene is hopelessly undramatic and, as given at the Imperial, quite meaningless. After Hjördis commits suicide the curtains shut out the scene.
In the play, however, Oernulf, Dagny, Gunnar, and Egil are discovered watching the storm. Gunnar claims the protection of the man whose son he has slain. The body of Sigurd is found, and the arrow of Hjördis. "So bitterly did she hate him," whispers Dagny to herself with true Ibsenesque irony. Gunnar says aside, "She has slain him—the night before the combat; then she loved me after all." These sly, pitiless strokes would have proved too much to a British audience, sufficiently outraged by several of Hjördis's very plain speeches. The little Egil sees his mother on a black horse "home-faring" with the Valkyrs. The storm passes; peacefully the moon casts its mild radiance upon this field of strange conflict.
IV
THE THREE EPICS
BRAND (1866), PEER GYNT (1867), EMPEROR AND GALILEAN (1873)
In his three epical works,—for epics they are,—Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen reached poetic heights that he has never since revisited. The spiritual fermentation attendant upon his first visit to Italy in May, 1864, gave Norway, indeed all Scandinavia, its first modern epic. And it is not strange that this Italian journey should produce such monumental results. Goethe was at heart never so German as in Italy; and Ibsen, one of the few names that will be coupled with the poet of Faust when the intellectual history of the past century is written, was never such a Northman as in Rome, though he had left his native land full of bitterness, a self-imposed exile, doomed to exist on the absurd stipend doled out to him with niggardly hands by the Norwegian government. Yet, instead of turning to antiquity, he penned Brand, one of the few great epics since Milton and Goethe, and then as a satiric pendant let loose the demoniac powers of his ironic fantasy in Peer Gynt. In this vast symphony, Brand is the first sombre movement, Peer Gynt a brilliant Mephistophelian scherzo, while Emperor and Galilean is the solemn and mystic last movement.
Brand places Ibsen among the great mystics beginning with Dante and including the names of Da Vinci, Swedenborg, mad naked Blake, and Goethe. Unlike the poet of the Divine Comedy he set his hell on the heights, for the hell of the defeated is the story of that stern Brand who left his church in the valley, summoned his flock to follow him and found an Ice Church on the high hills. Only Hamlet and Faust are recalled to the reader as they see this soul warped by its ideal of "All or Nothing," and in the spiritual throes of doubt, even despair. His God is the merciless Jahveh of the later Hebraic dispensation, not the Eloihim of the earlier. Weakness of will is the one unpardonable sin. Heroic as a Viking, he stands for all the Norwegian race was not when Ibsen wrote his poem. Life broken into tiny fragments, waverers and compromisers, he lashes his countrymen so that across these pages you seem to hear the whistle of the knotted thongs. Conventional religion comes in for its share of abuse from the tongue of this new Elijah. The wife Agnes, one of the poet's most charming creations, is at first attracted by the shallow, artistic Einar. When she meets Brand her soul goes out to him. "Did you see him tower as he talked?" she asks her companion. Bat as he sacrificed his mother to his ideal, so he sacrifices his wife. Their child does not thrive in the gloomy valley where this cure of souls abides. No matter. He remains. God's will be done. The child dies. His clothes are sold to a gypsy because Agnes has shed tears over them—a human weakness. She opens her window in the evenings so that the lamplight will fall across the grave of her child. That consolation, too, is denied her. Be hard! might be the Nietzschean motto of her husband. And so she dies. His mother died saying, "God is not so hard as my son," because he refused her the sacraments. She had ill-gotten wealth. To make restitution was his demand—All or Nothing. He would not make bargains, be a paltry go-between for God and man. His nobility of character repels. People feel his power but find him unapproachable. The laissez-faire policy, the easy-going philosophy of the official servants of God, raises wrath in his bosom. He would drive these blasphemers from the sacred precincts of the temple. It is his realization of the hopelessness of reforming men by the old means that sends him to the mountains. He has built a church, for the old church is too small. But the new, a symbol of the soaring soul, is misunderstood. It is a gift from Brand to his people, and so horrified is he with his failure to stir these petty souls that he throws the church key in the river and summons the multitude to follow him upward, up there in the clouds, where the true God abides away from the vileness of mart and palace. Some follow, many mock, and he is finally stoned and deserted. A crazy creature, Gerd, who symbolizes wildness, an egotist who scorns human ties; she it is who is appointed by the poet to open Brand's eyes. His spiritual pride has been his downfall, for while thinking of others he has not "found salvation for his own soul." The avalanche which she starts overwhelms them both, but not before he hears a voice answer his prayer—does mankind's will, then, count for nothing. "He is the God of Love," is the reply.
Havelock Ellis thinks that "we have to look back to the scene in the death of Lear" to attain a like imaginative height in literature. Ibsen has set his character in a most life-like milieu. His people are painted with a broad, firm hand. The mayor, the schoolmaster, the doctor, the sexton, are living men, and their worldly natures are clearly indicated. Prophet Brand is, though Ibsen told Georg Brandes that he could have made him sculptor or politician, as well as priest. Sören Kierkegaard and his revolt from orthodoxy may have supplied the poet for his portrait. He, however, more than half hints that it was Gustav Lammers who was the original of Brand, a fiery nonconformist man who built his own church and seceded from the current evangelicism.
But, after all, Brand is Ibsen's own portrait, is a mask for Ibsen himself. The beauty, grim as it is, and the picturesque variety of this great poem almost match its ethical grandeur.