terror, or in some swift antagonism of brightness and gloom, beauty is not Ibsen's end. His end, even in his earlier romantic plays, even in plays that are historical or semi-historical, is to free, arouse, dilate. He desires to bring the reader or spectator to some point-a point attained by effort -from which things may be seen more clearly or more deeply, even though this may be only a moment's standing place in some ascent which does not here cease; he desires to raise questions, even if no entirely satisfactory answer can as yet be given to them, to awaken those who slumber on the easy pillow of traditional opinion and conventional morals, to startle them from the false dream of custom, and, if need be, to combat, to censure, to satirize.

He was not pleased, indeed, to be regarded as a didactic poet; he asserted that his primary object was to see and to represent life, to create true and living men and women. But he did not deny that he attempted to attain and to express a philosophy of life, and undoubtedly his art suffered because that philosophy of life was not broad-based upon the attainments of the past, because it was not the inevitable growth of the national life surrounding him, because it was a philosophy of revolt, the protest of an individual, embodying only a fragment of truth, aggressive, polemical revolutionary. Hence his art was often marred by over-emphasis. The little towns upon the fjords seemed to Ibsen to be buried in sleep, though morning was growing broad. He would steam up the fjord from the open sea, and try whether the hooting of the foghorn would make them open their eyes. And certainly there followed widespreading reverberations, reverberations which passed across Europe.

"To realize oneself"-to bring into full being and action whatever force exists within us, this was Ibsen's chosen expression for what the Shorter Catechism terms "man's chief end." "So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself," he wrote to a friend in 1882,

"seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being." And again: "I believe that there is nothing else and nothing better for us all to do than in spirit and in truth to realize ourselves. This, in my opinion, constitutes real liberalism." He desired for his friend and critic George Brandes before all else "a genuine, fullblooded egoism," but he begged at the same time that this desire might not be taken as an evidence of something brutal in his nature.

Being an artist, Ibsen found selfrealization to mean for him the putting forth of all that was best within him in and through his art. Dramatic art for him was not so much a delightful play as an inexorable duty. Work which may seem wholly detached from his own personality, wholly imaginative and objective, was in fact intensely personal; not indeed in the dramatic action, the sequence of incidents, but in the view of life which gave a meaning and a unity to the incidents. The whole man, as he was for the time being, pressed into his work; but, while certain general characteristics run through all that he wrote, and constitute the Ibsen cachet, it happened not seldom with him, as it happened with Goethe, that the view of life embodied in this play or in that was one which Ibsen desired to master, to place outside himself, to escape from and leave behind him in his advance. Lessons of warning for the dramatic critic who would discover the mind of a dramatist through his art may be read in Ibsen's correspondence.

Thus while into the character of Brand he transposed certain things which he found in himself-things which he regarded as the best part of himself, discovered only in his highest moments-the poem "Brand" was partly written, as he declares to Laura Kieler, who attempted a continuation of the poem, because it became a necessity with him to free himself from something that his inner man had done with, by giving it a poetic form. A

canon of criticism founded upon such a confession, or upon similar confessions made by Goethe, would play havoc with many of the crude attempts to infer the mind and moods of Shakespeare from his dramatic compositions.

Precisely because he wrote "Hamlet," Shakespeare may have been delivered from the Hamlet mood and the Hamlet view of life, and may have lost interest in them for ever. Nothing can be created, in the true sense of that word, according to Ibsen, except it takes into itself some life-experience; but we see most clearly, he adds, at a distance; "we must get away from what we desire to judge; one describes summer best on a winter day."

Soon after his own happy marriage in 1858, Ibsen was engaged upon his "Comedy of Love," which, however, was not completed until four years later. Shall we say that his mockery of love-betrothals and love-marriagesor what are called so- and his pronouncement in the play in favor of a marriage of prudence and worldly wisdom expresses the whole of his mind at this time? Or may it not have been that his deeper sense of the worth of a true marriage of love urged him to take his revenge upon a state of society in which, with its half-heartedness and its feeble sentimentalities, the ideal marriage, as it seemed to him, had become almost impossible? Falk and Svanhild, with the terror before them of a Pastor Straamand and his Maren, a Styver and Miss Skjaere, a Lind and Anna, are incapable of trusting their own hearts, and without such a confident venture of faith it is better that Svanhild should be the sensible bride of a kind and sensible Guldstad. A lower view of marriage is set forth and justified perhaps for the precise reason that Ibsen had come to value the true romance above the pseudo-romance of a sentimental convention.

With much of the strenuousness, if not the severity, of the Northern temper, Ibsen was yet a lover of brightness and joy. The southern sunshine and

the color of the south gave him a sense of happy expansion. But where could he find the joy of life in his earlier years? Hardly anywhere except in his own consciousness of strength; and sometimes he lost heart and courage. He was poor and he was proud. He pounded drugs at Grimstad to earn a scanty living, stung his enemies and even his friends with epigram or lampoon, fashioned his youthful verses in stolen hours, and meditated in his "Catiline" on the discrepancy between our desires and our power of giving them their satisfaction. He repelled others and was in turn repelled. He retreated into himself, and there he heard the "call," about which his poems in dramatic fashion tell us much. And his ambition, his egoism leaped up and responded to the call. There are men whom an unfavorable environment crushes and destroys. But Ibsen was not one of these. He grew stronger through opposition, and the surface of his mind, like the face of a sea captain, hardened in the rough weather. Through resistance he came to understand his own powers, he came to attain self-definition.

Harder to bear than any direct opposition were the narrowness, the pettiness, the death-in-life of the society in which, "like a seven-sealed mystery," he moved. Storm for him was always inspiriting, but fog was stifling. The Vikings of elder days had been transformed into a grocer, an innkeeper, a barber, and he himself was pounding his drugs in an apothecary's shop. The common excitement which now and again may have stirred his eight hundred fellow-townsfolk was like the flurry in a very small ant-hill. They pried, and gossipped and slandered; they found their law in the artificial proprieties; they sentimentalized and had their ineffectual pseudo-passions. Religion was the mummy of ancient faith, eviscerated and swathed; the pastor was only a spiritual beadle. The State was represented by an official or two, who earned a salary by wearing

the approved blinkers and pulling the old cart through the old rut. If liberalism existed, it spent its enthusiasm in vacuous words and high-sounding phrases. The best persons were no more than fragments of a whole man, who held together the fragments by some illogical compromise, and perhaps named this compromise "morality."

Ibsen, the Norwegian poet, was never quite at home in the land of his birth. Long afterward, when he had sunned himself among Italian vines and felt the stupendous life of Rome-life over which in those days there seemed to rest an indescribable peace the heimweh that drew him back to Norway was not a desire to revive the sentiment of his early life, but his deep, unconquerable passion for the sea. Yet he tells his friend Björnson that when he sailed up the Fjord he felt a weight settling down on his breast, a feeling of actual physical oppression: "And this feeling," he goes on, "lasted all the time I was at home; I was not myself" -not his own man, as we say "under the gaze of all those cold, uncomprehending Norwegian eyes at the windows and in the streets."

And in 1897 he writes to Brandes from Christiania: "Here all the sounds are closed in every acceptation of the word-and all the channels of intelligence are blocked. Oh, dear Brandes, it is not without consequence that a man lives for twenty-seven years in the wider, emancipated and emancipating spiritual conditions of the great world. Up here, by the fjords, is my native land. But-but-but! Where am I to find my home-land?"

It was natural that Ibsen should sigh for a revolution, or rather-since sighing was not his mode-that he should work toward it. But in the programme of political liberalism he took little interest. A people might-like that of Norway-be free, yet be no more than a congeries of unfree persons. "Dear friend," he cried to Brandes in 1872, "the Liberals are freedom's worst enemies. Freedom of thought and spirit

thrive best under absolutism; this was shown in France, afterward in Germany, and now we see it in Russia."

While Björnson, like a good member of the Liberal party, said, "The majority is always right," Ibsen, an admirer, as was Edmund Burke, of the natural aristocracy, was ready to maintain that right is always with the minority. Dr. Stockmann, of the Baths, is in a minority of one; not only does officialdom hunt him down; the "compact majority" of middle-class citizens and the public press turn against him; yet Stockmann-somewhat muddleheaded hero as he is-has the whole right and the whole truth upon his side. The rhetoric of a Stensgaard can always gather a party of so-called progress around him, yet Stensgaard, eloquent for freedom, has no conception of that wherein true freedom lies. The Mayor in "Brand" is busily employed in ameliorating the lot of his fellow-men by the prescribed methods of social "progress," only he has not yet conceived what a man and the life of a man truly means.

"Liberty," wrote Ibsen in 1882, "is the first and highest condition for me. At home they do not trouble much about liberty, but only about liberties -a few more or a few less, according to the standpoint of their party. I feel, too, most painfully affected by the crudity, the plebeian element in all our public discussions. The very praiseworthy attempt to make of our people a democratic community has inadvertently gone a good way toward making us a plebeian community." As for the peasantry, Ibsen found them in every country very much alive to their own interests; in no country did he find them liberal-minded or self-sacrificing.

The revolution for which he hoped was not a revolution of government. He desired, indeed, as immediate measures-so he writes to Björnson in 1884 -a very wide extension of the suffrage, the statutory improvement of the position of women, and the emancipation of national education from all kinds of

medievalism; but these were valuable, he thought, only as means to an end. Governments, States, religions will pass away, but men will remain.

As for the State, Ibsen regarded it sometimes with almost the hostility of an anarchist. He pointed to the Jewish people "the nobility of the human race" as a nation without a State, possessing an intense national consciousness and great individual freedom, but no organized government. Perhaps he overlooked the fact that the national consciousness is based upon the common faith and common observances of a unique and highly organized religion. Ibsen's starting-point and his goal was the individual man or woman. The struggle for liberty which interested him was not the effort to obtain political "rights," but the constant, living assimilation by each individual of the idea of freedom.

When December, 1870, came, he rejoiced that "the old, illusory France" had collapsed. "Up till now," he wrote, "we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolution table of last century, a food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians will not understand; and therefore I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions in externals, in politics, etc. But all this is mere trifling. What is all important is the revolution in the spirit of man." Like Maximus in "Emperor and Galilean," Ibsen dreamed of the third empire.

The third empire will come when man ceases to be a fragment of himself, and attains, in complete self-realization, the fulness of the stature of the perfect man. Julian, Emperor and apostate, as Ibsen conceives him, is a divided nature, living in a time of moral division. As a youth he has heard the terrible, unconditional, inex

orable commands of the spirit, declared through the religion of Christ; but they have always been without and not within his heart; at every turn the merciless god-man has met him, stark and stern, with some uncompromising "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not," which never became the mandate of his own will.

And the old pagan passion for the beauty and the joy of terrene life is in Julian's blood. He is pedant enough to seek for spiritual unity through the schools of philosophy, and man enough to find the shadows of truth exhibited in the schools vain and impotent. Christianity, as he sees it in Constantinople, is not a faith but an unfaith-made up of greeds, ambition, treachery, distrust, worldly compromises, external shows of religion, "Do you not feel disgust and nausea," he cries to Basileus, "as on board ship in a windless swell, heaving to and fro between life, and written revelation, and heathen wisdom and beauty? There must come a new revelation. Or a revelation of something new." He can dream of the rapture of a martyr's death-but martyrdom for what? All that he had learned in Athens can be summed up in one despairing word"The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true."

But the need of action compels him, if not to make a choice in the full sense of that word, at least to take a side. The shouts of the soldiery at Vienna are ready to hail him as Emperor. On the one hand are life and the hope of a rehabilitation of beauty, the wisdom of Greece, the recovery of joy. On the other hand are the Nazarene, the cross, the remorseless demands of the spirit, and all for sake of what the Christianity of his time had proved to be a lie. The instinct of the blood decides for Julian that he shall be the apostate. Life is at least better than a lie.

There follows in Ibsen's second drama the record of Julian's failure, his illusions, his partial disillusioning, and the darkening of the light within

him. The patron of free speculation is transformed into a persecutor. The philosopher grows greedy of the adulation of courtiers. He is led on before the close to the madness of self-divinization. He will restore joy and beauty to the world; with the panther-skin upon his shoulders and the vine wreath on his head he plays the part of Dionysus amid a troop of mummers and harlots, and he himself loathes this mockery of beauty and of joy. He will reform the world-for he has still the pride of pedantry-with a treatise. He takes his guidance in action from ambiguous oracles and the omens of priests. He dies with a dream of a triumphal entry into Babylon and a vision of beautiful garlanded youths and dancing maidens.

Yet all the while Julian knows that he cannot revive what is long withered, and he is aware of some great power without him and above him which is using him for its own ends. The worldspirit, in truth, has made Julian its instrument. The old era of the flesh had passed away. The new era of the spirit had come. And to quicken it to true life, the spirit, incarnated in the religion of Christ, needed the discipline of trial and suffering and martyrdom which Julian had devised for its destruction. "Christ, Christ." exclaims Basileus, "how could Thy people fail to see Thy manifest design? The Emperor Julian was a rod of chastisement -not unto death, but unto resurrection." And so the Galilean has conquered.

The Galilean, however, according to the mystic Maximus, through whom evidently Ibsen expresses his own thought, is not to rule for ever. From the empire of the flesh, through the empire of the spirit, the world must advance to the third empire, which does not destroy but rather includes both its predecessors. Both the Emperor and the Galilean-such is the prophecy of Maximus-must succumb; at what time he cannot tell; it will be on the day when the right man ap

pears, who shall swallow up both Emperor and Galilean. The fulness of the perfect man must succeed the unconscious joy of childhood and the unqualified ideality of youth, and resume them both in itself. "You have tried," says Maximus, addressing Julian, "to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final any more than the youth is. You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth-to hinder him from becoming a man. Oh, fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be against the third empire in which the twinnatured shall reign!"

For a time at least, Ibsen regarded "Emperor and Galilean" as his chief work. That positive theory of life, which the critics had long demanded from him, might here, he believed, be found; "the play," he wrote to Brandes, "will be a kind of banner." Part of his own spiritual life went into this dramatic history; he labored at the "herculean task" of reviving a past age with a fierce diligence; while, at the same time, he held that the subject had "a much more intimate connection with the movements of our own time than might at first be imagined"; the establishment of such a connection-so he tells Mr. Gosse-he regarded as "imperative in any modern poetical treatment of such a remote subject, if it is to arouse interest at all." The great drama of the Franco-German war delivered Ibsen from his narrow Scandinavian nationalism, and gave him that wider conception of the march of events which he needed in dealing with historical matter of colossal dimensions.

With a clear perception of the leading ideas set forth in "Emperor and Galilean," a reader of the earlier "Brand" can without difficulty assign to this poem its due position in the series of Ibsen's works. Brand is the hero of the second empire the empire of the spirit. Ibsen had escaped from