The Ice Church is too cold for humanity, Brand's ideal too inhuman. Yet he has willed, he has not wholly failed. His error was in its application—in not willing enough for himself. "Be what you are," he exhorts the weak Einar, "whatever it is, but be it out and out" No compromise with the powers of evil—yet Brand's doctrine led to his destruction. Not to will is a crime, to will too much leads to madness. What is the answer to this perplexing problem? Ibsen does not give it. In his phraseology "to be oneself is to lose oneself." And Brand, who was for "All or Nothing," severed his dearest ties and finally was destroyed himself.
The complexity must not repel the student. Mr. C. H. Herford's translation with the illuminating introduction is well worth the reading. He thinks that the "Norwegian priest is tortured ... as was Hamlet; Hamlet's power of resolve is depleted by the restless discursiveness of his intellect; Brand's failure in sympathetic insight hangs together with his peremptory self-assertion.... Unless appearances wholly deceive, Shakespeare drew in Hamlet the triumph of impulses which agitated without dominating his nature." Ibsen had lived Brand, he confesses it.
But as a stage play, and it has been played, it is not a success. It lacks condensation. A battle-field of two tense souls—for Agnes's almost matches Brand's at times—it is too long and too loosely constructed in its joints for effective dramatic representation. Dr. Wicksteed makes an acute point when he shows that Einar's smug conversion—which fills Brand with loathing—is missed by the priest, for "only a man whose heart is dead can live by that destroying phrase, 'All or Nothing.' The principle which slays the saintly Agnes, and drives her heroic husband mad, fits the miserable Einar like a glove; he is happy and at home with it."
Self-realization through self-surrender is the fundamental organ-tone of the masterly, overarching epic. And note the symbolism of the church, the church in the valley, and Gerd's Ice Church! This symbol of architecture reappears in The Master Builder, just as the avalanche motive reappears in When We Dead Awaken. The mountain-tops are the abodes of Ibsen's heroes,—who are his thoughts,—and there he scourges the human soul on this lofty Inferno.
In Brand, Ibsen girded against the weaklings, the men of half-hearted measures, the conventional cowards of civilization. In Peer Gynt he makes a hero of such a one, a lying, boastful fellow. The poem is one of the most audacious and fantastic ever written. Yet with all its shifting phantasmagoria, it so stands four-square rooted in the old, brown earth. Peer is a rascal, but a lovable one; a liar from the first page to the last. He "is himself" without a deviation from the crooked paths of selfishness. Again Ibsen puzzles, for the very keystone of his ethical arch is individuality. Peer is a compromiser at every station of his variegated career. He, too, treats his mother cruelly, though from different motives from Brand. He runs off with another man's bride, because he has been too lazy to win her lawfully. He does this in the face of a woman, Solveig, for whom he has entertained the first unselfish desire of his shallow existence; he goes to the trolls and lives in the swamps of sensuality—where Solveig follows him, but is left; he goes to America after his mother's death,—a most affecting page,—makes a fortune by selling Bibles, rum, and slaves, buys a yacht, sets up for a cosmopolitan; "has got his luck from America, his books from Germany, his waist-coat and manners from France, his industry and keen eye for the main chance from England, his patience from the Jews, and a touch of the dolce far niente from the Italians." He makes friends, for he is successful. They maroon him on a savage shore, but blow up his yacht. He thanks God for the swift retribution—as others have done in similar predicaments—though he thinks the Lord is not very economical. Many adventures ensue, from the episode with the dancing girl Anitra to the crowning in a madhouse of Peer as Emperor of Himself.
At last, old, ruined, he returns to Norway. In the mountains, in the identical hut, he finds the patient Solveig, who has always loved him. He has met the Button-moulder, Death, who tells him that he is doomed to the melting-pot, there to be re-minted. He has never been himself, he the thrice-selfish Peer Gynt. His old thoughts come back to him materialized as balls of wool. "We are thoughts," they cry, "thou shouldst have thought us; hands and feet thou shouldst have lent us." So this scamp, who "lived his life" seemingly to the utmost, never lived it at all, blenches before the Boyg, the great, amorphous mass that blocks his path, and listened to its whispered "Go round." He always skirted difficulties, never faced them, a moral coward, a time-server. Yet he may escape the Button-moulder, for Solveig has believed in him. "Where have I been with God's stamp on my brow?" he asks her, bewildered before the dawning perception of his worthlessness.
"In my faith, in my hope, in my love," she smilingly answers. The Button-moulder calls without the house; "we meet at the last cross-way, Peer, and then we shall see—I say no more." But Solveig guards him as he sleeps.
The curse of Peer Gynt is his overmastering imagination coupled with a weak will. It proves his downfall. "To be oneself, is to slay oneself," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is the same as in Brand,—self-realization through self-surrender. This parody of Don Quixote and Faust was never the real Peer Gynt until the end.
The musical setting of Peer Gynt by Eduard Grieg gives no adequate idea of the poem's dazzling humour, versatility, poetic power, malice, swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the possible exception of the episode of Peer's mother's death, has written in a sheer melodramatic vein. Brand and Peer Gynt brought to Ibsen the fame he deserved, though it was thus far confined to Norway.
The huge double drama, Emperor and Galilean, with the sub-title, a World Historic Drama, is in a theatrical sense one of Ibsen's few failures, though epical literature would sadly miss this vast and hazardous undertaking devoted to Cæsar's apostasy and the Emperor Julian, all in its ten acts. Naturally enough, even Ibsen's admirers admit that the work lacks dramatic unity and that it is without culminating interest. Yet dramatic it is, this narrative of Julian, the so-called Apostate, who conceived the crazy notion of dragging from its grave the forms of a dead and dusty paganism. He hates the Galilean and finally becomes mad enough to crown himself a god. The vivid pictures testify to Ibsen's powers of evocation, for it is said that he was not deeply read in the classics. Dr. Emil Reich finds in Julian something decadent, a prevision of the familiar Parisian type noted by Huysmans. Rather have Huysmans and Ibsen gone to ancient Rome for their figures—Julian has a touch of the Neronic cruelty and lust, just as he has that monstrous artist's Cæsarean madness of dominion.