The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Brand replies with an outburst against the popular use of the word love as a veil to cover and excuse weakness, but this does not refute the doctor because the latter, by risking his life to ease the suffering of a dying woman, has proved that he means something quite different by the word. There is, how­ever, no dialectical relation between his position and Brand's because his ethics are those of his profession. Brand has just refused to go and give his dying mother the sacrament be­cause she will not renounce her property. To the Doctor this seems gratuitous cruelty because he can only think about the care of sick souls in terms of the cure of sick bodies. In his world of experience a patient is either in pain or not in pain, and every patient desires to be well. He cannot grasp, because it is outside his professional experience, that, in the soul, a desire may be the sickness itself. Brand's mother clings to her possessions with passionate desire, and to relinquish them will cause her great suffering but, unless she suffers, she can never know true joy. (The analogy to surgery does not hold. The patient must suffer now at die hands of the surgeon in order that he may be free from pain in the future, but he already knows what it means to be free from pain. The sinner does not know what it means to be spiritually happy; he only knows that to give up his sin will be a great suffering.)

In the character of Brand Ibsen shows us an individual of heroic courage who exemplifies in his own life what he preaches and who suffers and dies for what he believes, but, as a religious hero, he won't quite do. Our final impression is of a tragic hero of the conventional kind whose field of action happens to be religion, but his motives are the same pride and self-will that motivate the tragic heroes of this world.

If, as an apostle, Brand fails to convince us, the fault, I helieve, is not due to lack of talent on Ibsen's part, but to his mistaken approach. While, when he came to write Peer Gynt, he approached the dramatic portrayal of a genius in­directly, in tackling the portrayal of an aposde, he tried a direct approach and this was bound to fail.

Thus, he gives us a picture of Brand's childhood. Unlike Peer, poor Brand did not have women behind him, and in the end he has to drag Agnes after him. His mother had re­nounced marriage to the man she loved in order to marry one who was expected to make money. He failed and died, and she had denied all love and happiness both to herself and her son and devoted herself with absolute passion to the acquisition and hoarding of wealth. The relation between mother and son is one of defiant hostility mingled with re­spect for the other's strength of will and contempt for senti­mentality masquerading as love. In preferring damnation to the surrender of all her goods, she shows herself every bit as much a believer in All-or-Nothing as Brand does in refusing to give her the Sacrament unless she renounces her idol. Psy­chologically, mother and son are alike; the only difference be­tween them is in the God whom each worships.

Such a situation is dramatically interesting and psycho­logically plausible, but it inevitably makes us suspect Brand's claim to have been called by the True God, since we perceive a personal or hereditary motivation in his thought and con­duct. Peer's relation to his mother is a possible psychological background for a certain class of human being, the class of artist-geniuses. But every aposde is a member of a class of one and no psychological background can throw any light on a calling which is initiated by God direcdy.

It is very difficult to conceive of a successful drama with­out important personal relations, and of such, the most in­tense is, naturally, the relation between a man and a woman. The scenes between Brand and Agnes are the most exciting and moving parts of the poem, but their effect is to turn