¹ Eleven years later, in 1882, Ibsen is still carrying on in a similar vein: “I have not the gifts that go to make a satisfactory citizen….” he writes. “Liberty is the first and highest condition for me. At home they do not trouble very much about liberty, but about liberties—a few more, a few less, according to the standpoint of their party.” In The Playwright as Thinker, Eric Bentley suggests that Ibsen, like Shaw, was not only an individualist but a collectivist, “a believer in social, and even socialist organization”—but, aside from a few passages in Little Eyolf, I have been unable to find any evidence for this assertion. Shaw, however, attributes much the same views to Ibsen in his Quintessence of Ibsenism: “Thus we see that in Ibsen's mind … the way to Communism lies through the most resolute and uncompromising Individualism.” Shaw's failure or unwillingness to understand the anarchistic strain in Ibsen accounts partly for his confusing misrepresentation of the playwright. And if Ibsen still remains dangerous and unaccepted, while Shaw is growing to look more and more like a popular prophet of the Welfare State, then this is because Ibsen continued to concentrate on individual freedom while Shaw turned his attention to public and civic man. The two playwrights are really worlds apart, and the tendency to couple them is more misleading than helpful. The political differences between Ibsen and Arthur Miller are of a similar kind.

² I have used the term Messianic to describe a type of play for which, at present, there is no other name. Though prototypes can be found in plays like Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, the genre is typically modern, directly descended from Goethe's Faust—it is the most Romantic and extravagant of all rebel drama. Its form is usually epic and lengthy (double dramas, trilogies, and even “pentateuchs” are common); its language is verse or a highly charged prose; and its hero is a Superman who aspires to be God and who, therefore, comes in conflict with the prevailing Deities. In this type of the play, the dramatist often turns visionary and apocalyptic, for he labors to provide a new religious-philosophical scripture more appropriate to the modern world. Ibsen's Brand and, especially, his Emperor and Galilean are examples of the genre. So are Strindberg's To Damascus, Shaw's Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah, Wagner's Ring cycle, and O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed. But the Messianic impulse can be found even in relatively conventional works like The Master Builder.

³ It is astonishing to what lengths certain critics will go to make Ibsen conform to their interpretations of him. Mencken, for example, asserts without a shred of evidence that Ibsen “lost his mind” while working on John Gabriel Borkman, a fantasy he probably invented to account for the mystical qualities of that play, and of When We Dead Awaken which followed it. William Archer—also disturbed by the overt mysticism of Ibsen's last play—speculated about it in a similar (though more cautious) manner: “One could almost suppose [Ibsen's] mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the writing of the latter play.” Ibsen's so-called “mental breakdown” consisted of a stroke in which he lost control of his motor faculties. It occurred after the completion of When We Dead Awaken, and was definitely not an outbreak of insanity but rather a form of paralysis.

⁴ Shaw also reaches this conclusion by redefining words to suit his whims. For him, the “idealist” is one who worships existing conventions. The actual idealist—he who, like himself and Ibsen, would strip the mask from conventions and replace them with an unrealized ideal— he calls a “realist.” Shaw's cavalier treatment of words produces a semantic confusion as bewildering as the medieval confusion between the realist and the nominalist. Yet, although Shaw anticipated that “I shall be reproached for puzzling people by thus limiting the meaning of the term ideal,” the misapprehensions about Ibsen he contributed have now become rather largely accepted.

⁵ Janko Lavrin reports a conversation of Ibsen's in which the playwright suggested that any idea carried to its conclusion usually touches on its own contradiction. Clearly, Ibsen is less interested in ideas, as such, than in the conflict of ideas, which is why he is a dramatist and not a philosopher.

⁶ Twenty-five years before the writing of Brand, Emerson was making very similar judgments in “Self-Reliance” (1841): “The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me…. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.” Scholars seeking intellectual sources for Brandmight look to Emerson just as profitably as to Kierkegaard, for he yields parallels too close to be merely coincidental.

⁷ Cf.the last verse of Ibsen's poem, “On the Heights” (1859) which also celebrates, in Rousseauistic tones, the purity of the individual in natural surroundings, free from the corruptions of society:

⁸ Brand is made aware of the limitations on the human will after reflecting on the origins of his spiritual half-sister, Gerd, who is discovered to be the illegitimate daughter of a gypsy and that wooer rejected by Brand's mother. As Lavrin observes, this is an early embodiment of Ibsen's convictions about parental guilt—convictions he is later to expand in Ghosts. But even before this, Ibsen shows his awareness of the limitations on will. In Vikings at Helgeland (1858), for example, we find this passage: “Man's will can do this thing or that; but fate rules in the deeds that shape our lives….” The conflict between free will and determinism is an unresolved one that afflicts Ibsen throughout his career.

⁹ The phrase is used by Rebecca West in Rosmersholm. In that play, as in Peer Gynt—and most of Ibsen's work—love is the one ideal which the author does not question, primarily because it is the only force which the author thought capable of ennobling mankind “from without.”

¹⁰ See Ibsen's letter to Lucie Wolf (1883): “Verse has been most injurious to dramatic art… .It is improbable that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate future; the aims of the dramatist of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it. It is therefore doomed. For art forms become extinct, just as the preposterous animal forms of prehistoric times become extinct when their day is over… .I myself have for the last seven or eight years hardly written a single verse; I have exclusively cultivated the very much more difficult art of writing the genuine, plain language spoken in life.”

Ibsen, always very much the dramatic poet if no longer the poetic dramatist, is overstating his position here, as he admits a year later in another letter: “I still remember that I once expressed myself somewhat disrespectfully about the art of verse; but that was only the result of my own personal connection with this art form at that particular moment.”

¹¹ It is characteristic of Shaw, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, to see this technical flaw as Ibsen's greatest technical achievement and his major contribution to the modern drama.

¹² “In none of my plays,” writes Ibsen, in the course of denying his kinship with any of the characters in Ghosts, “is the author so extrinsic, so completely absent, as in this last one.“

¹³ “I shall hurl my ink-pot at their heads!” shouts Stockmann, in an apocalyptic rage, determining a little later to gather twelve ragamuffins about him as disciples to whom he will pass on the legacy of revolt.

¹⁴ It is not overlooked, however, by Hermann Weigand who devotes a penetrating analysis to this “mystery play,” as he calls it.

¹⁵ The similarity of Irene to Duerrenmatt's Claire Zachanassian in The Visit of the Old Lady is too striking to be overlooked. They not only share the same allegorical, non-human qualities but a number of specific qualities as well: Irene, like Claire, has been married many times (to a Russian, a South American, etc.), was forced into prostitution after the conclusion of her relationship, and has now dedicated herself to achieving revenge on the man who ruined her life.

¹⁶ This phrase stuck in the head of Ibsen's great admirer, James Joyce, who used it, in slightly altered form, in Ulysses. Joyce's own play, Exiles, is, in addition, very closely related to When We Dead Awaken in its structure, characters, and theme.