3. On the Occasion of Ibsen's Seventieth Birthday

March 20, 1898

Fifty years ago, when the wild storms of revolution roared through Europe, Henrik Ibsen was twenty years old. He greeted the freedom movement with the strongest sympathy. The passion of the revolutionaries was closely related to the feelings that lived in his own soul. Looking back on this time, he later said:

"The time was very turbulent, the February Revolution, the uprisings in Hungary, the Schleswig War - all of this had a powerful impact on my development. I addressed thunderous poems to the Magyars in which I urgently exhorted them in the interests of freedom and human rights to persevere in the just struggle against the tyrants."

The revolution that the twenty-year-old experienced was a harbinger and symptom of a larger one, of the revolutionization of minds. The political revolution could not achieve what the spirits had promised. Movements to reshape the human order are only victorious if they are the expression of new-born world views. Christianity was able to establish a new order of human relations because it emerged from a revolution of the entire emotional life. Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed a new relationship to the world and life. He gave the human mind a new direction. The actual circumstances had to follow the changed direction of the heart. The revolution of the year forty-eight was a purely political one. It was not supported by any new world view.

It was not until ten years after this revolution that Charles Darwin proclaimed to people the gospel that they needed to give content to a new way of life. Goethe already possessed this gospel. He had already come to the great realization of the purely natural, unified entity that brought forth the dead stone, the silent plant, the unreasoning animal, and which also called man into existence, and beside which there is nothing divine in man. He regards man as the most perfect natural being. Nature has the power to bring forth the rational animal at its peak; no divine breath needs to be blown into this rational animal.¹

But Goethe gained his view of life as a spiritual aristocrat. Only through his individual course of development was it possible to read the book of nature in such a way that it made this revelation. Darwin proclaimed the same insight in a democratic way. Everyone could imitate his intellectual steps. It is not what he proclaims that makes a man a prophet, but how he proclaims it.

The great secret was revealed to Goethe at the sight of the Greek works of art in Italy. When he saw these works, he exclaimed: 'There is necessity, there is God. I have the suspicion that the artists, when they produced these works of art, acted according to the same laws according to which nature works, and which I am on the trail of. The work of man is only a continuation of the work of nature: Goethe recognized that at this moment. What man creates does not come to him as a gift of grace from heaven, but through the development of the same forces of nature that are active in plants and animals to a higher level. One would have to emulate Goethe's life if one wanted to arrive at his insight in the same way as he did. Darwin taught the same thing. But he pointed to common facts that express such truth - to facts that are accessible to everyone. He expressed in popular form what Goethe proclaimed for the select few.

It now became an absurdity to attribute to the creative power that comes from above what nature could obviously produce of itself. The entire human emotional life must change under the influence of the new world view. Man sees that he is something higher, something more perfect than that from which he has developed. He used to believe that someone above him had transplanted him into existence. Now his gaze can no longer be directed upwards. He is dependent on himself and on what is below him.

For centuries, the human heart has become accustomed to submitting to this upward gaze. Since Darwin's emergence, it has endeavored to wean itself off such a direction of sensation.

It is relatively easy for the mind to assimilate the new knowledge; it is infinitely difficult for the heart to transform itself in accordance with this knowledge. This is why the most difficult battles between mind and heart took place in the souls of the best minds of the last half-century. Unclear, disharmonious, doubting, searching natures are typical of this half-century.

Most of those who walk among us today with a more serious disposition still feel these struggles within them. And even the best only have the feeling that satisfaction is yet to come, but not that it has already arrived. Countless questions arise from these struggles; we only hope for answers in the future.

The future historian of our time will have to tell of wrestling, of questioning people. And if he wants to describe a single personality in whose soul all the struggles that have moved five decades have been reflected, he will have to describe Henrik Ibsen. All the questionable figures that our half-century had to produce: they confront us in Ibsen's dramas. And all the questions that this time raised: we find them again in these works. And because this time is one of questions to which only the future will provide answers, Ibsen's dramas end with questions; and that is why he had to say of himself:

"I usually ask, but answering is not my office."

One must give the truth its due and admit that Ibsen was not the man who knew the answers to the great questions of his time. He knew how to ask with all his might: he was unable to answer. He felt this himself when he said:

"For my part, I shall be satisfied with the success of my week's work if this work can serve to prepare the mood for tomorrow. But first and foremost, I will be satisfied if it can help to strengthen the spirits for the week of work that follows."

I would like to consider it fortunate that Ibsen is only a questioner. For by not being able to arrive at answers, he is able to question deeply and thoroughly. And because we taste with him the full, deep seriousness of the highest questions, those who follow will arrive at deeper answers. The brokenness and dissatisfaction that we carry within us today when we come from his dramas will turn into happiness for those who will untie what we tie.

This is how I understand Ibsen. To me, he is a nature that is strong enough to feel the problems of our time as its own pain, but not strong enough to realize our highest goals.

I see Ibsen as a master builder who builds the towers from which we are supposed to look out over our world, but who is overcome with vertigo when he himself is supposed to stand on the top of these towers.

I imagine that it must be difficult to be old in our time. Those who are young today believe that they can still keep up with the intellectual culture in which we live. To the old man of today, such a following seems impossible. Ibsen's heart is too deeply intertwined with the sentiments that past centuries have instilled in us for him to be satisfied with the proud tower of knowledge that he helped to create.

In his "Baumeister Solneß", he confessed in the manner of a great man that he was seized by dizziness at his own work.

I think the old master will be pleased if we tell him today, on his birthday, that we have understood him. In fifty years of work, he wanted to lead people to freedom. And we want to preserve our own freedom towards him. Not blind reverence; reverent knowledge is what he should see in us when we greet him on this day.