Image provided by: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, NE
About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 1, 1892)
THE HESPERIAN a stir, a snapping ami crushing of boughs, and the rush of thundering hoofs. II nv I know not, but I slipped from my horse, and crept to the heart of the coppice, where I lay with my hands pressed over my ears till all was passed. It was not long. A thundering cry, "St. Andrew for Altrith," a shock of meeting horses, a heavy fall, then silence, save for the beat of the horse-hoofs echoing in the distance. There ho lay, face downward, close be side the brook. A little stream of dark red coiled out from under him. The hawk strug gled for a while and at last worked himself free and wont sailing away to the blue sky. The silver satiate bubbling of the brook was woven like a thread into the silence. HEN'RIK IBSEN. Realism is a protest against lies. Now the first thing to be noted is that we have no realism in England or America. Moreover, nowhere has the movement been attacked with such a mixture of violence and sanctimony as here. The creative power of thf movement seems to be confined to Rus sia, France, Denmark, and Norway. The popular critical accompanyment God save the mark docs not seem to have spread much beyond our own shores. I have a few observations to make on the Scandinavian phase of the movement, as represented spec ially by Ilenrik Ibsen. Ilenrik Ibsen and Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson in Norway, together with Holger Drachman and George Brandes in Denmark, form a group united by common beliefs and com mon hopes. The first three members of this group represent the creative powers of the movement which they stand for. To George Brandes has fallen the more thankless task of defending the work of his colleagues, to gether with the work of Zola, Flaubert, and the French school as a whole, on esthetic, moral, and philosophical grounds. That the iiu'ii are united by stroilg ties of friendship and esteem is proved by numerous expres sions of regard in the body of their writings. Ilenrik Ibsen lives in the popular Ameri can consciousness as a man with a fierce, un sympathetic countenance, bordered by a tringe of unruly hair and beard. Moreover, ho, equally with Zola, has had ability enough to write "bad hooks." What more is needed to antagonize a respectable American com munity, especially if what he says is true? Nevertheless, the conception is correct. Ilen rik Ibsen is such a man. But there was a time when he was not fierce and unsympa thetic. T have a picture before me, mado when he was in his twenties, which tells a very different story. This shows me a face saddened by the worldliness and materialism of the life that he found in Norway in the sixties. It shows me a man with courage enough to tell the truth, but without the experi ence of what it means to have courage to tell the truth. It shows a man of a frank and open nature, intensely and furiously honest, and without the experience of what it means to be intensely honest in this day and gen eration, lie was a man of ideals, but of a disposition to withdraw into himself the only place where he found his ideals existed. He was a man with an intense craving for sympathy which he never got. He was a man that had the misfortune to know certain truths and be unable to prove them an un pardonable offence. He was a man that felt the stirrings of genius; but then that is something people can never understand. The change denoted by the two pictures is the common lot of genius of the Gothic cast. Great men are called great because they possess the power to perceive truth. Ibsen will be called great because he possesses the power to perceive lico. Certainly his field is much the broader, and much less culti vated. Of all the old conventional lies that have come down to us through the centuries, none might hope to escape the scrutiny of his furious honesty. Nor was he a man that hesitated to announce his discoveries to the world. But ho made his mistake in suppos ing that a lie was sonthint? foul, something that would be thrown away in dibgust if only