444

p I have stated that under the conditions indicated by me our author’s negative attitude to politics testified to the nobility of his own aspirations. But it was this attitude also that involved him in the insoluble contradictions which I have listed in part and shall list in part below.

p The profound tragedy of Ibsen’s position lay in the fact that this remarkably integrated person who valued consistency above all else was doomed to be enmeshed forever in contradictions.

445

p “Have you ever pursued any thought to the end without coming up against a contradiction?"  [445•*  Ibsen once asked when he was among friends. Unfortunately we must assume that Ibsen himself very rarely succeeded in doing so.

p Everything flows, everything changes, everything bears within it the seed of its own disappearance. This course of things, when reflected in human minds, conditions the fact that each concept contains within it the seed of its own negation. This is the natural dialectics of concepts, which is based on the natural dialectics of things. It does not confuse those who have command of it but, on the contrary, gives their thinking flexibility and consistency. However the contradictions in which Ibsen became enmeshed do not bear the slightest relation to it. They are conditioned by the apolitical nature of his thinking, to which I have already referred.

p Ibsen’s revulsion for the baseness of petty-bourgeois life—private and public—compelled him to seek a sphere where his honest and integrated heart could find some rest. At first he found such a sphere in the past of his people. The Romantic school made him study this past, in which everything was unlike base pettybourgeois reality, in which everything was full of wild power and heroic poetry.

_p The mighty ancestors of the philistines of his day, the Norwegian Vikings, fired his creative imagination, and he depicts them in some of his dramatic works. The finest of these works is without doubt The Pretenders. Ibsen bore this work in his soul, so to speak. He conceived the plan for it in 1858, but it was not written until 1863. In it Ibsen sought, as de Colleville and Zepelin remark, before leaving his country "in which the children of the Vikings had become insipid and selfish bourgeois, to show them the full extent of their fall".  [445•**  But apart from this The Pretenders is also interesting for its political idea: the main hero of the play, King Haakon Haakonsson, leads the struggle for the unification of Norway. Thus, our author’s thinking ceases to be apolitical here. But it does not remain so for long. The modern age cannot live by the ideas of the long dead past. The ideas of this past had no practical significance at all for Ibsen’s contemporaries The latter wer-e fond of reminiscing about their bold Viking ancestors over a glass of wine, but naturally continued to live differently, in a new way. Vogt says in Brand:

_p “Great memories bear the seed of growth."

p To which Brand scornfully replies:

p “Yes, memories that to life are bound; but you, of memory’s empty mound, have made a stalking-horse for sloth."

446

p Thus the political ideas of the past proved to he powerless in the present, and the present did not give birth to any political ideas that could have inspired Ibsen. Therefore all that remained for him was to retire into the sphere of morality. And this is what he did. From his point of view, that of a man who was familiar only with petty-bourgeois politics and who despised this politics, it was natural that moral preaching—the preaching of abstract "purification of the will"—should seem incomparably more important than participation in the petty, corrupting mutual struggle of the petty-bourgeois parties that fight among themselves over trifles and are incapable of thinking of anything more significant than trifles. But the political struggle is conducted on the soil of social relations; moral preaching aims at the perfection of individuals.  By turning his back on politics and placing all faith in morality, Ibsen naturally adopted the viewpoint of individualism. And having turned to individualism he was naturally bound to lose all interest in everything that went beyond the confines of individual self-perfectionment. Hence his indifferent and even hostile attitude to laws, i.e., to the obligatory norms which in the interests of the society or the class that rules the society impose certain limits on individual initiative, and to the state as the source of these obligatory norms.  In the words of Fru Alving in Ghosts it often occurs to her that "law and order ... is what does all the mischief in this world of ours".

p True, she says this in connection with Pastor Manders’ remark that her marriage was made in full accordance with the law, but she has in mind all laws in general, all “conventions” that in some way or other bind the individual. In the German translation her reply reads as follows:

p 0 ja, Gesetz und Ordnung! Zuweilen meine ich,
die stiften in der Welt alles Unheil an.

p This means: "Oh, yes! Law and order! I often think that is what does all the mischief in this world of ours.” And it is this aspect of Ibsen’s world outlook that outwardly brings him close to the anarchists.

p Morality sets itself the aim of perfecting individuals. But its injunctions are themselves rooted in the soil of politics, if we understand by this the sum total of social relations. Man is a moral being only because he is, to quote Aristotle, a political being.

p Robinson Crusoe had no need of morality on his desert island. If morality forgets about this and is incapable of constructing a bridge which would lead from it into the sphere of politics, it lapses into a whole series of contradictions.

447

p Individuals perfect themselves, liberate their spirit and purify their will. That is excellent. But their perfectioning either leads to a change in the mutual relations of people in society, in which case morality becomes politics, or it does not touch upon these relations, in which case morality soon begins to mark time; then the moral self-perfectionment of individuals is an end in itself, i.e., it loses all practical aims, and then the perfected individuals no longer have any need to observe morality in their dealings with other people. And this means that morality then destroys itself.

p And this is what happened to Ibsen’s morality. He repeats "be yourself”; this is the supreme law, there is no greater sin than sinning against this law. But the dissolute court chamberlain Alving in Ghosts was himself; although this resulted in nothing but vileness. True, the injunction "be yourself" refers, as we know, only to “heroes” and not to the “crowd”. But the morality of heroes should also have some rules, and we do not find them in Ibsen. He says: "It is not a question of wanting this or that, but of wanting that which a man must do because he is being himself and cannot act differently. All else leads only to falsehood.” But the trouble is that this too leads to the most obvious falsehood.

p The whole question, which is insoluble from Ibsen’s point of view, is precisely what a person should want in "being himself”. The criterion of should lies not in whether it is absolutely binding or not, but in where it is leading. Only Robinson Crusoe on his island could always be himself, without taking into account the interests of others, and that only until the appearance of Man Friday. The laws to which Pastor Manders refers in his conversation with Fru Alving are in fact empty convention. But Fru Alving, i.e., Ibsen himself, is gravely mistaken in thinking that all laws are nothing but empty and harmful convention. Thus, for example, the law that limits the exploitation of hired labour by capital is not harmful but very useful, and can there not be more such laws? Let us assume that a hero is allowed to do everything, although, of course, he can only be allowed to do so with most important reservations. But who is a “hero”? He who serves the interests of the general, of the development of mankind, Wilhelm Hans replies for Ibsen.  [447•*  Very well. But in saying this we are going beyond the confines of morality, abandoning the viewpoint of the individual and adopting that of society, of politics.

p Ibsen makes this transition, when he does so, quite unconsciously; he looks for rules for the behaviour of the “chosen” in their own “autonomous” will,, and not in social relations. Therefore his theory of heroes and the crowd assumes a very strange form. His hero Stockmann, who values freedom of thought so highly, 448 tries to convince the crowd that it should riot dare to have its own opinions. This is hut one of the numerous contradictions into which Ibsen was "absolutely bound" to lapse, after confining his field of vision to questions of morality. Once we have understood this, the whole of Brand’s splendid character will be perfectly clear to us.

_p His creator could find no way out of the sphere of morality into that of politics. Therefore Brand too is "absolutely bound" to remain within the confines of morality. He is "absolutely bound" to go no further than purifying his own will and liberating his own spirit. He advises the people to "fight all your life, to the very end”. But what is the end? It is when you gain....

p “A will that’s whole!..."

p This is a vicious circle. Ibsen did not, and could not for the sociological reasons to which I have referred, find in the extremely ugly reality around him any firm ground for the application of a "“purified” will, any means for reconstructing this ugly reality, for “purifying” it. Therefore Brand is "absolutely bound" to preach the purification of the will and the revolt of the spirit as ends in themselves.

_p Further. The petty bourgeois is a born opportunist. Ibsen hates opportunism with all his heart and portrays it extremely clearly in his works. Suffice it to recall the printer Aslaksen (in An Enemy of the People) with his constant preaching of moderation, which, in his own words “(at least that’s my way of thinking”), is the greatest virtue in a citizen. Aslaksen is a typical petty-bourgeois politician who is penetrating even into the workingclass parties of the petty-bourgeois countries. And as a natural reaction against the "greatest virtue" of the Aslaksens, Brand’s proud motto "Nought or All!" appears. When Brand fulminates against petty-bourgeois moderation he is magnificent. But, not finding any application for his own will, he is "absolutely bound" to lapse into empty formalism and pedantry. When his wife Agnes, having given away all the clothes of her dead child to a beggar woman, wants to keep the bonnet in which the infant died as a memento, Brand exclaims:

p In thy idol-bonds abide.

p He demands that Agnes should give away the bonnet too. This would be absurd, if it were not so cruel.

p A true revolutionary will not demand unnecessary sacrifices of anyone. But he will not do so simply because he has a criterion which enables him to distinguish between necessary sacrifices and unnecessary ones. While Brand has no such criterion. The 449 formula "Nought or All!" cannot provide him with one; it must be sought elsewhere.

p ^porm deprives Brand of all content. In a talk with Einar he says, defending himself against the suspicion of being dogmatic:

_p Nothing that’s new do I demand;
For Everlasting Right I stand.
It is not for a Church I cry,
It is not dogmas I defend;
Day dawn’d on both, and, possibly,
Day may on both of them descend.
What’s made has “finis” for its brand;
Of moth and worm it feels the flaw,
And then, by nature and by law,
Is for an embryo thrust aside.
But there is one that shall abide;—
The Spirit, that was uncreated,
That in the world’s fresh gladsome Morn
Was rescued when it seem’d forlorn,
That built with valiant faith a road
Whereby from Flesh it climb’d to God.
Now but in shreds and scraps is dealt
The Spirit we have faintly felt;
But from these scraps and from these shreds,
These headless hands and handless heads,
These torso-stumps of soul and thought,
A Man complete and whole shall grow,
And God His glorious child shall know,
His heir, the Adam that He wrought!

p Here Brand is arguing almost like Mephistopheles:

_p A lies, was entsteht,
Ist wert, dass es zu Grunde geht.  [449•* 

_p And the conclusion of both of them is almost the same. Mephistopheles concludes:

p Drum besser war’s,

p Wenn nichts entstünde.  [449•**  ^^126^^

_p Brand does not say this directly, but he is indifferent to everything on which day has dawned and on which it may therefore descend at some time. He values only that which is eternal. But 450 what is eternal? Motion. Translated into Brand’s theological, i.e., idealistic language, this means that only "the uncreated spirit" is eternal. And so in the name of this eternal spirit Brand turns his back on all that is “new”, i.e., temporal. In the final analysis he has the same negative attitude to this temporal as Mephistopheles. But Mephistopheles’ philosophy is one-sided. This Geist, der stets verneint (spirit that always negates) has forgotten that if nothing arose there would be nothing to negate.  [450•*  In just the same way Brand does not understand that eternal motion “(the uncreated spirit”) manifests itself only in the creation of the temporal, i.e., the new. new things, new states and relations between things. His indifference to all that is new turns him into a conservative, in spite of his sacred hatred of compromise. Brand’s dialectics lacks negation of negation, and this makes it totally sterile.

p But why does it lack this essential element? Here again Ibsen’s environment is to blame.

This environment was definite enough to arouse in Ibsen a negative attitude towards it, but because it was too undeveloped it was not definite enough to engender in him a definite striving for something “new”. And that is why he did not have the strength to utter the magical words capable of conjuring up an image of the future. That is why he became lost in the wilderness of hopeless and sterile negation. Thus we have the sociological explanation of Brand’s methodological error.