The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The insoluble difficulty about the artist as a dramatic char­acter is that, since his relations with others are either momen­tary or timeless, he makes any coherent plot impossible. Peer Gynt is a fascinating play, but one cannot say its structure is satisfying. Practically the whole of the drama (and nearly all of the best scenes) is a Prologue and an Epilogue: the Prologue shows us how a boy comes to be destined for the vocation of poet rather than a career as a statesman or an engineer, the Epilogue shows us the moral and psychological crisis for a poet in old age when death faces him and he must account for his life. Only in the Fourth Act are we shown, so to speak, the adult poet at work, and in this act the number of scenes and the number of characters intro­duced are purely arbitrary. Ibsen uses the act as an oppor­tunity to make satirical comments on various aspects of Norwegian life, but Peer himself is only accidentally related to the satire.

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Two years before Peer Gynt, Ibsen wrote Brand. Both were composed in Italy, and Ibsen said of them:

May I not like Christoff in Jacob von Tyboe, point to Brand and Peer Gynt and say—See, the wine cup has done this.

The heroes of these two plays are related to each other by being each other's opposite. To Peer the Devil is a dangerous viper who tempts man to do the irretrievable; to Brand the Devil is Compromise.

Brand is a priest. Ibsen once said that he might equally well have made him a sculptor or a politician, but this is not true. In Rome Ibsen had met and been deeply impressed by a young Norwegian theological student and Kierkegaard en­thusiast, Christopher Brunn. At the time Ibsen was very angry with his fellow countrymen for having refused to come to the aid of Denmark when Germany attacked her and annexed Schleswig-Holstein. Brunn had actually fought as a volunteer in the Danish army and he asked Ibsen why, if he had felt as strongly as he professed, he had not done like­wise. Ibsen made the answer one would expect—a poet has other tasks to perform—but it is clear that the question made him very uncomfortable and Brand was a product of his dis­comfort.

Whether he had read it for himself or heard of it from Brunn, it seems evident that Ibsen must have been aware of Kierkegaard's essay on the difference between a genius and an apostle. In Peer Gynt he deals with the first; in Brand, which he wrote first, with the second.

An apostle is a human individual who is called by God to deliver a message to mankind. Oracles and shamans are divine mouthpieces, but they are not apostles. An oracle or a shaman is an accredited public official whose spiritual authority is recognized by all; he does not have to seek out others but sits .and waits for them to consult him—Delphi is the navel of the world. He receives a professional training and, in order to qualify, he must exhibit certain talents, such as an ability to enter into a trance state.

An apostle, on the other hand, is called to preach to others a divine message which is new to them, so that he cannot •expect others to come looking for him nor expect to have any official spiritual status. While oracle and shaman are, so to speak, radio sets through which at certain moments a god may speak, an apostle is an ordinary human messenger like a man who delivers mail; he cannot wait for certain divinely inspired moments to deliver his message and, if his audience should ask him to show his credentials, he has none.

In the case of any vocation of Genius, a man is called to it by a natural gift with which he is already endowed. A young man, for example, who tells his parents, "I am going to be a sculptor, cost what it may," bases his statement on the conviction that he has been born with a talent for making beautiful, three-dimensional objects. It makes no difference to his decision whether he is a Christian who believes that this talent is a gift of God or an atheist who attributes it to blind Nature or Chance for, even if he is a believer, he knows that he is called by his gift, not by God direcdy. Since the gift is his, to say "I must become a sculptor" and "I want to become one" means the same thing: it is impossible to imag­ine anyone's saying, "A sculptor is the last thing on earth I want to be, but I feel it is my duty to become one."