740 THE DRAMA 



Brand is a young Norwegian clergyman, to whom the heroic age 

 has vanished, and who regards his contemporaries as a paltry, tim- 

 orous, and sordid race, who plead their own self-inflicted feebleness as 

 the excuse for shrinking from every sacrifice, who believe they have 

 been stamped as farthings in the mint of God, and are content to 

 have it so, and who are yet not content to give up all pride in the 

 past, and all aspirations for the future, and frankly own themselves 

 the slaves of earth. He finds them striving to be a little of every- 

 thing, to have a little faith and earnestness for use on Sundays, a 

 little patriotism for national anniversaries, a little hilarity and good- 

 fellowship for festive occasions after work, a little recklessness and 

 abandon in making promises, a little caution and sobriety in fulfilling 

 them, a little attachment to the good old times and their customs and 

 memories, a little perception of the changed spirit of their own day. 

 Their life is all broken up into fragments, and each fragment ham- 

 pers, contradicts, deadens all the rest so that they can never live a 

 full life. 



Their religion is in perfect keeping with all this. One might per- 

 haps, think that their very materialism had, at least, given unity to 

 their lives but no, it is haunted and broken by memories of a spirit- 

 ual religion that make a discord with it. Men still repeat the Lord's 

 Prayer, but there is a line of it that is winged with will and has in 

 it such deep and anxious insistence of demand as will launch it 

 heavenwards with the full ring of prayer, save the fourth petition: 

 "Give us this day our daily bread." This has become the people's 

 war-cry and the password of the world. Wrenched from its context 

 and stamped upon every heart this prayer remains the storm-tossed 

 spar that tells of the wreck of faith ! Yet this very survival is the testi- 

 mony that men are not contentedly and whole-heartedly material. 

 They snip and trim the kingdom of God till it can all get inside the 

 Church walls, but they must have "a little" of it. They have none of 

 the fresh manhood of faith that can bridge over the chasm between 

 spirit and flesh, but they still haggle for "a little" of the spiritual 

 consolations now dealt out in retail by the ecclesiastical hucksters. 

 "A little" idealism and spiritual exaltation is quite essential as an 

 element in their existence. 



Into such a society Brand leaps with his awful and heroic motto, 

 "All or nothing," and in the name of the jealous deity who "will have 

 no other gods by his side," seeks to build up human nature into unity, 

 to remake, out of these stumps of soul and torsos of spirit, out of 

 these scattered heads and hands, such a whole that God may be able 

 to recognize once more his noblest work in man. 



For the current religion Brand has neither sympathy nor even pity 

 nothing but scorn. The God men worship is a superannuated and 

 feeble dotard, that did miracles long ago, and was once a jealous God, 



