ebbel
published in 1862, in which the struggle between pagan and Christian
ideals of conduct is analyzed, with Ibsen's _Emperor and Galilean_.] He
remained, in later years, persistently ignorant of Zola, and of Tolstoi
he had read, with contemptuous disapproval, only some of the polemical
pamphlets. He said to me, in 1899, of the great Russian: "Tolstoi?--he
is mad!" with a screwing up of the features such as a child makes at the
thought of a black draught.

If he read at all, it was poetry. His indifference to music was
complete; he had, in fact, no ear whatever, and could not distinguish
one tune from another. His efforts to appreciate the music which
Grieg made for _Peer Gynt_ were pathetic. But for verse his sense was
exceedingly delicate, and the sound of poetry gave him acute pleasure.
At times, when his nerves were overstrained, he was fatigued by the riot
of rhymes which pursued him through his dreams, and which his memory
vainly strove to recapture. For academic philosophy and systems of
philosophic thought he had a great impatience. The vexed question of
what he owed to the eminent Danish philosopher, Soeren Kierkegaard, has
never been solved. Brandes has insisted, again and again, on the
close relation between _Brand_ and other works of Ibsen and the famous
_Either-Or_ of Kierkegaard; "it actually seems," he says, "as though
Ibsen had aspired to the honor of being called Kierkegaard's poet."
Ibsen, however, aspired to no such honor, and, while he never actually
denied the influence, the relation between him and the philosopher seems
to be much rather one of parallelism than of imitation. Ibsen was a
poetical psychologist of the first order, but he could not bring himself
to read the prose of the professional thinkers.

In his attitude both to philosophical and poetical literature Ibsen is
with such apparently remote figures as Guy de Maupassant and Shelley; in
his realism and his mysticism he is unrelated to immediate predecessors,
and has no wish to be a disciple of the dead. His extreme interest in
the observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosity
about what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects.
Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the same
as that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or
had even turned over the pages of the _Criticism of Pure Reason_. It is
not necessary to suppose that he had done so. The peculiar as