slighter local
strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen
comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted
age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin
laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone
that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule
and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her
rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his
motto "All or Nothing," persistently, almost tiresomely, like a
modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea.
More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not
white-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran
theologians, a prototype of violent strength.

Yet Brand's own mission remains undefined to him--if it ever takes exact
shape--until Agnes reveals it to him:--

Choose thy endless loss or gain!
Do thy work and bear thy pain....
Now (he answers) I see my way aright.
In _ourselves_ is that young Earth,
Ripe for the divine new-birth.

And it is in Agnes--as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love
for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience
endures all the cruelties of her husband's fanaticism--it is in Agnes
that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered
note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a
nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure,
Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are
the delicate offspring of Italy.

Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which
saw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once
welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen,
and the poet's audience was thus very considerably widened. The satire
of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexels
preached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _The
Daughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were analyzed.
Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light and
shade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of
_Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it took
its place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few books
which cont