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About The Hesperian / (Lincoln, Neb.) 1885-1899 | View Entire Issue (Nov. 1, 1892)
THE HESPERIAN 9 and hns always folt the hand of fate lying heavily upon him. The Emjmvrs is Gothic to the core. He was a poot with all the poet's appreciation of types. Pa a Vt'ddernr is a poem of ideals. But it is gloomy and full of agony as befits the product of a Goth, lie was a man reverent and serious in his religious conceptions. He revolted at the unspirituality of the church as he found it in Norway. Especially repugnant to him was the usual materialistic conception of the Deity as an old man in a skull-cap and with gray hair and beard. He saw verbal pro fessions of belief bring honor and respect. Hut he felt he knew that people did not helieve what they professed. On the other hand, he saw honesty abused and ostracised for refusing to profess belief when there was no belief. In Brand the agony broke forth. No old man in a skull-cap there ! No honor in words and blasphemy in deed, no half hearted, time-serving Christianity there ! Not partly and when duly convenient, but wholly docs Brand serve God. Mother, wife, child, life are in turn sacrificed to make that service whole and complete. Brand is a revolt from the church. Pos-Mt-niolm is a revolt of another sort. In deed, Ibsen's whole life is a revolt. And the bitterness of such a revolt is intensified by the knowledge that it is for truth and against lies. For disagreeable truth cuts deeper than the surgeon's knife, and this truth cuts to the very bone. Posmershohn is a philosophical tragedy dealing with mat rimony. Like A PolVs JJome and Lore's Comedy, it maintains that marriages are con tracted on the most frivolous and fleeting impulses, and that these impulses have been idealized and lied about by poets and ro mancers under the name of love. The revolt against the church and the revolt against society are not supplemented by a revolt against law. IPdda Galder, Ibsen's latest work, is not a revolt. It is rather a psych ological study culminating in a suicide. And this suicide, alas, is a terrible non-Ki-fiuituv. I say alas for it marks the last great and calamitous change in our discov erer of lies. Lack of sympathy and affected sanctimony have reacted on a nature of more than ordinary sensitiveness. Cynicism and misanthropy have been the results, and Jlrdda Gaidar shows this in its fullest. Realism is frequently supposed (and by people who should know better) to be merely a bookish affectation. No literature that amounts to anything is ever a bookish affect ation. But it is the result of anguish and travail of spirit. Old Henrik Ibsen is one of the few living examples of what anguish and travail of spirit mean. He has burnt himself out even to the very soul. COLUMBUS. O master of all seamen and all seas, Who first dared set a sail toward sunset shores. Not as Odysseus sailed thou, for the love Of blue sea water, nor of the sweet sound Of surges smiting on thy vessel's prow ; Nor of the soft white bosom of thy sail Swelling against blue heaven. Unto thee The waters were but wastes that lay between Thee and thy prize. The stars of heaven, guides That pointed toward the ever-widening west. Prophet wer't thou, who saw in things that were Only the future, and thy soul was set To journey toward the west, like kings of old Who followed trom the east a western star. Most happy of all bards wert thcu, who saw Thy fancies take upon them form and shape Thy realized ideal in the line Of low, blue, coast that rose before thine eyes At last, as it had done so oft in sleep, In those low lengths of sunlit land that stretched Into the smoking sunset. Thou whose soul Saw what thine eyes, though fain, were weak to see; Upon the swift wings of thy dreams, a world Fast followed and thou didst create the west; Even as He, the All-Begetting, once, Sleeping his sleep of the eternities, Was restless, stirred uneasily in space. And into being dreamed the universe. W. Gather. EXECUTIVE EXCERPTS. "COLLEGE FUN." Nothing is more difficult of conquest than tradition ; and few traditions have greater ten acity of life than those which cluster about what is misnamed " College Fun," and which serve to perpetuate it. The age is growing more mild and more kindly every year. One of the surest proofs of advanc ing civilization is the increase of thoughtfulness and consideration in personal relations. He is