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
Brand into a self-torturing monster for whose sufferings we can feel pity but no sympathy. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the insistence of the Roman Church that its priests be celibate—The Church Visible, after all, requires administrators, theologians, diplomats, etc., as well as apostles —the apostolic calling, ideally considered, is incompatible with marriage. An apostle exists for the sake of others but not as a person, only as a mouthpiece and a witness to the Truth; once they have received the Truth and he has borne his witness, his existence is of no account to others. But a husband and wife are bound by a personal tie, and the demands they make upon each other are based on this. If a husband asks his wife to make this or that sacrifice, he asks her to make it for his sake, and his right to ask comes from their mutual personal love. But when an apostle demands that another make a sacrifice, it cannot be for his sake; he cannot say, "If you love me, please do this," but can only say, "Thus saith the Lord. Your salvation depends upon your doing this."
When Brand first meets Agnes, he is already convinced of his calling and aware that suffering, certainly, and a martyr's death, possibly, will be required of him. His words and his risking of his life to bring consolation to a dying man reveal to her the falseness of her relation to Ejnar. At this point I do not think she is in love with Brand, but she is overwhelmed with admiration for him as a witness to the truth and prepared to fall in love with him if he should show any personal interest in her. He does show a personal interest—he is lonely and longing for personal love—they marry, they are mutually happy and they have a son, Ulf. Then comes disaster. Either they must leave the fjord and his work as the village priest— an act which Brand believes would be a betrayal of his calling —or their child must die. Brand decides that they shall remain, and Ulf does die. One would have thought that the obvious solution was to send his wife and child away to a sunnier climate and remain himself (since he inherited his mother's money, he has the means) but this solution does not seem to have occurred to him. (Of course if it had, the big dramatic scenes which follow could not have been written.)
Later, he accuses Agnes of idolatry in not accepting Ulf's death as the will of God and makes her give away all his clothes to a gypsy child. Possibly she is guilty of idolatry and should give the clothes away for the sake of her own soul and, were Brand a stranger, he could tell her so. But he is both the husband whom she loves and the father of her child who took the decision which caused the child's death and so led her into the temptation of idolatry, so that when he tells her:
You are my wife, and I have the right to demand That you shall devote yourself wholly to our calling
the audience feels that he has no such right. This is only the most obvious manifestation of a problem which besets Ibsen throughout the play, namely, the problem of how to make an apostle dramatically interesting. To be dramatically viable, a character must not only act, but also talk about his actions and his feelings and talk a great deaclass="underline" he must address others as a person—a messenger cannot be a major character on the stage. For dramatic reasons, therefore, Ibsen has to allow Brand to speak in the first person and appear the author of his acts, to say "I will this." But an apostle is a messenger, and he acts not by willing but by submitting to the will of God who cannot appear on the stage. It is inevitable, therefore, that our final impression of Brand is of an idolator who worships not God, but his God. It makes no difference if the God he calls his happens to be the true God; so long as he thinks of Him as his, he is as much an idolator as the savage who bows down to a fetish. To me, one of the most fascinating scenes of the play is Brand's final encounter with Ejnar. Ejnar has had some sort of evangelical conversion, believes that he is saved, and is going off to be a missionary in Africa. Brand tells him of Agnes' death, but he shows no sorrow, though he had once loved her.
ejnar: How was her faith? brand: Unshakeable. ejnar: In whom? brand: In her God.
ejnar: Her God cannot save her. She is damned. . . . brand: You dare to pronounce judgment on her and me,
Poor, sinning fool? ejnar: My faith has washed me clean. brand: Hold your tongue. ejnar : Hold yours.
Ejnar, is, as it were, a caricature of Brand, but the likeness is cruel.
Though a direct portrayal of an aposde is not possible in art, there exists, though not in drama, one great example of a successful indirect portrayal, Cervantes' Don Quixote.
ill
The Knight-Errant
The Knight-Errant, whom Don Quixote wishes to become and actually parodies, was an attempt to Christianize the pagan epic hero.
O He possesses epic arete of good birth, good looks, strength, etc.
2,) This arete is put in the service of the Law, to rescue the unfortunate, protect the innocent, and combat the wicked.
His motives are three: a) the desire for glory
the love of justice
the love of an individual woman who judges and rewards.
He suffers exceptionally; first, in his adventures and collisions with the lawless; secondly, in his temptations to lawlessness in the form of unchastity; and thirdly, in his exceptionally difficult erotic romance.
In the end he succeeds in this world. Vice is punished and virtue is rewarded by the lady of his heart.