703 THE DRxiMA 



sometimes a very baffling and confusing effect. Partly this is no 

 doubt due to the fact that some of his earlier dramas were written 

 under the inspiration of a Danish thinker, Soren Kirkegaard, an 

 influence which evaporated when he executed his later studies. The 

 tragedy of " Brand " and the work " Love's Comedy," which, thanks 

 to Professor Herford, those of us who do not know Norwegian can 

 now peruse for ourselves, are especially overshadowed by the thoughts 

 of Kirkegaard. I say " overshadowed," because of all the thinkers 

 who have made life difficult for us mortals this Danish philosopher is 

 the most paradoxical. He is an idealist, who seems to have begun 

 in the school of Kant, but his paradoxes are even more remarkable 

 than those famous antinomies of reason and experience which made 

 the German philosopher of Konigsberg so full of hard sayings even 

 for a Teutonic audience. In " Brand," for instance, the Kirke- 

 guardian god, whom the hero worships, is a deity who demands the 

 most appalling sacrifices of all human ties and associations before 

 he can be approached and understood, or subsequently revealed as 

 a deus caritatis. Brand lets his mother go to hell, is the cause of the 

 death of his own child, and finally sacrifices his wife all in the pursuit 

 of an ideal righteousness, a peculiar state of will, wholly remote from 

 our actual life in some impossible transcendental sphere. How a 

 god who required such sacrifices as these, who demanded so urgently 

 and cruelly that all human feelings should be eradicated, can be 

 afterwards proclaimed as the god of love, when his sovereign power 

 had emptied such a word of all meaning, is impossible to understand. 



Observe, too, a curious cynicism with which this pursuit of para- 

 doxical idealism manifests itself in " Love's Comedy." In a board- 

 ing house are collected a number of young men and maidens, mostly 

 ordinary and conventional, under the care of a lady who boasts her- 

 self to be one of the most successful match-makers of her time. 

 But there is one thinker, Falk, and one true woman, Swanhild, who 

 stand out above the common herd. They are the predestined lovers, 

 because each has understood in the other where the need of true com- 

 panionship lay, and because they had real spiritual affinities. Never- 

 theless, when this love is mutually confessed, they decide to separate, 

 and Swanhild elects to marry a practical elderly merchant, Guldstad. 

 Why ? Because love is such a rare thing, it has such a delicate 

 essence of its own, that when caught in the nets of matrimony it is 

 only too apt to disappear. It is better to have loved and to remem- 

 ber, than to love and get married. Love which prompts the need of 

 union is apparently the very thing which dies when the union is 

 consummated. 



Of course such a doctrine has an obvious common sense truth of its 

 own, but for the idealist it is based on a confusion between the ma- 

 terial form and the spiritual essence of love. Passion, being a fugi- 



