Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is
marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by
the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he
is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it
is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is
finally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church.
The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand with
that extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbe Jules_ of Octave
Mirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession of
crises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weakness
is the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developed
what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception of such
a rebel's ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers or
Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest of
insurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track of his
colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to the
commentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, and
endless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and analyze
its forms.
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