want their own special revolutions--revolutions in externals,
in politics and so forth. But all this is mere trifling. What is
all-important is the revolution of the Spirit of Man.

This revolution, as exemplified by the Commune in Paris, did not satisfy
the anticipations which Ibsen had formed, and Brandes took advantage of
this to tell him that he had not yet studied politics minutely enough
from the scientific standpoint. Ibsen replied that what he did not
possess as knowledge came to him, to a certain degree, as intuition or
instinct. "Let this be as it may, the poet's essential task is to see,
not to reflect. For me in particular there would be danger in too much
reflection." Ibsen seems, at this time, to be in an oscillating frame of
mind, now bent on forming some positive theory of life out of which
his imaginative works shall crystallize, harmoniously explanatory; at
another time, anxious to be unhampered by theories and principles, and
to represent individuals and exceptions exactly as experience presents
them to him. In neither attitude, however, is there discernible any
trace of the moral physician, and this is the central distinction
between Tolstoi and Ibsen, whose methods, at first sight, sometimes
appear so similar. Tolstoi analyzes a morbid condition, but always
with the purpose, if he can, of curing it; Ibsen gives it even closer
clinical attention, but he leaves to others the care of removing a
disease which his business is solely to diagnose.

The _Poems_, after infinite revision, were published at length, in a
very large edition, on May 3, 1871. One reason why Ibsen was glad to
get this book off his hands was that it enabled him to concentrate his
thoughts on the great drama he had been projecting, at intervals, for
seven years past, the trilogy (as he then planned it) on the story of
Julian the Apostate. At last Brandes came to Dresden (July, 1871) and
found the tenebrous poet plunged in the study of Neander and Strauss,
Gibbon unfortunately being a sealed book to him. All through the
autumn and winter he was kept in a chronic state of irritability by
the intrigues and the menaces of a Norwegian pirate, who threatened to
reprint, for his own profit, Ibsen's early and insufficiently protected
writings. This exacerbated the poet's dislike to his own country, where
the very law courts, he thought, were hostile to him. On this subject
he used language of tiresome over-emphasis. "From Sweden, from Denmar