with others in case of necessity. No better training could be devised for the members of a free state. Moreover, it must be added that mountaineers the world over have usually been independent of foreign rule and equal amongst themselves.

But above all other influences (and this it is which statesmen might well study) must be counted the system of the Almend, the system by which a part, at least, of the land in every Gemeinde or commune has not been allowed to fall into the hands of private owners, but has been reserved for public use. We have a reminiscence of this in the common of England and New England, though the resemblance does not go very far; for the Swiss Almend, in its wide sense, consists of forest, pasture, and meadow land, and according to the nature of the ground sometimes also of marshy land for rushes and peat. The use of this domain is governed by rules, which vary in different cantons and often in neighboring Gemeinden: in some it is the common property of all; in others, of a privileged class, generally the lineal descendants of the original settlers. Etymologists are not yet agreed whether the name " Almend" meant originally common land or fodder land, and historians are debating whether the use of it was intended in the beginning to be communistic or not. These are questions for the specialists to decide, but the result which has been attained is patent to all. There can be no doubt that this system has contributed more than any other factor towards making the great extremes of wealth and poverty impossible in the primitive cantons, and giving every man an interest in the soil.

The reason for this becomes obvious when we consider that great wealth, in its ultimate analysis, almost always springs from the exclusive control of certain natural opportunities; or, more briefly, from the monopolization of land, with all which that term implies. These

rustics, by treating at least some of the total supply of land as common property, exclude the possibility of the complete monopolization of land, and the resulting concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. It is true that they have by no means reached a radical solution of the land question. There are landlords in Uri, as elsewhere, and they are no better and no worse than elsewhere, since their conduct is governed by economic laws which are not of their own making; but even this partial treatment of land as common property secures to the people certain solid advantages. Nor must this public property be regarded merely as a provision for the poor, since all alike have a share in it.

Hence it is that when the voters come together in their assembly, they are equal, as I said above, not only from a political, but also, in a measure, from an economic standpoint. This is the secret of the Landesgemeinde; and should this comparative equality ever be disturbed by the working of modern industrial forces, the Landesgemeinde will lose its identity, will become a mere form, and eventually an impossibility.

Historical and political comparisons are apt to be risky and unsatisfactory, since exactly the same conditions can never be repeated in different countries and at different periods. We will, therefore, entertain no illusions on the subject. Our millions of voters cannot meet in an open-air assembly, nor can the affairs of our vast country be managed as simply and expeditiously as are those of that little commonwealth; but nevertheless youth can always profit by the experience of age, and we in America can learn something from Uri, the oldest democracy in existence. It seemed to me, as I watched the ancient assembly, that the Landesgemeinde confirmed a principle of inestimable value. History teaches that all democracies. sooner or later end in anarchy or are

DURING the last two years of his life in Norway Ibsen felt as though he were standing on the verge of his grave. The atmosphere of Christiania oppressed him like the air of a charnel-house. This city, although the political capital of the realm, is not and never has been a centre of artistic and literary culture. At the beginning of the present century it numbered less than ten thousand inhabitants; now it has a population of considerably over one hundred thousand. But this rapid growth has not improved its intellectual character, nor rendered it a whit less provincial than it was ninety years ago.

It is a significant fact that no Norwegian poet, except Henrik Wergeland, has ever sung the praises of Christiania ; and even he only expresses a certain pleasure in its material prosperity. His His sister, the well-known authoress, Camilla Collett, in her novel The Bailiff's Daughters (Amtmandens Döttre), denounces in the bitterest terms the mean and petty spirit prevailing there. The city is large enough, she says, to peck slowly to death, with its thousands of malicious beaks, all at whom it takes offense, but not large enough to afford one such unfortunate person a nook in which he can hide himself from calumny. Whoever takes the trouble to examine the files of the Kristianiapost of 1858, and the Morgenbladet and Aftenbladet of 1863, may see what absurd strictures, mingled with personal abuse, appeared in the columns of those journals under the guise of criticism, and will appreciate fully the feelings of disgust and the immense sense of relief with which Ibsen shook off the dust of Christiania from his feet, and bade what he hoped would be a final farewell to his fatherland.

No man can ever forget his mother country, although he may cease to re

member it with pleasure. As Ibsen states in his poem Brændte Skibe, the column of smoke rising from his burnt ships blew northward, and formed a bridge over which a rider swiftly sped every night

"To the snowy land

From the sunny strand." In another poem he compares himself to an eider which

66 Plucks its breast

To feather its nest"

on a wild Norwegian fiord. Thrice it makes the attempt, but each time the nest is despoiled of its soft down by greedy fishermen, until, in despair, the injured bird spreads its wings, and

66

With bleeding breast to the south it flies,— To the south with its brighter and kinder skies."

The manner in which the memory of Norway excites him to literary activity reminds him of the bear which is trained to dance by being made to stand in a large kettle heated by a slow fire; as the tortured beast leaps up and down a merry melody is played. Ever afterwards, when Bruin hears this tune, he associates it with scorched paws, and begins to dance. It was by painful reminiscences that Ibsen's imagination was stimulated to creative productivity during the first few years of his life abroad.

To the Norse poet, emerging from the mist and gloom of his native Niflheim, Italy was a new and marvelous revelation. It seemed to him that he had never before seen the sun. Nature, who had hitherto appeared to him with sombre visage and clad in sober gray, now wore a bright and joyous face, and arrayed herself in gorgeous colors far surpassing the limitations of her melancholy and monotonous Scandinavian wardrobe. This feeling is very clearly reflected in Brand, his first drama

written on foreign soil and under the influence of foreign impressions. The Norwegian landscape, as described in this play, is rude, inhospitable, and utterly unattractive. Drifting snow, raging storms, inaccessible glaciers, threatening avalanches, and narrow valleys inclosed by rocky walls, and seldom visited by a ray of sunlight, fill the scene. The soft, summery air of the highlands, resplendent with "the lustre of gold and amber," which he celebrated in his earlier poems, finds no mention here.

In Rome, too, the remains of classical antiquity, the ruins of a past civilization, excited in him the same lively interest and admiration that they had before awakened in the minds of Gibbon and Goethe. The emotions of wonder and insatiable curiosity, says Vasenius, with which the northerner at first regards the new and the unknown in this southern land, grew upon him from day to day, and soon developed into sentiments of warm sympathy and love. Unlike the majority of his countrymen and companions, he now thought of the Eternal City as a permanent abode, and there were moments when he spoke with bitterness of his determination never again to see his fatherland. The hot summer months he passed in the Alban Mountains or on the coast of Naples. His hours of work extended from early morning till far into the afternoon; the rest of the day and evening he gave to walks and social recreation. He was a frequent and always welcome guest of the Scandinavian Club in the Via dei Pontefici, whose members, consisting chiefly of artists, were disposed to lionize him. "A lion among ladies," says Bottom, "is a most dreadful thing; but not more so, perhaps, than among youthful and enthusiastic wielders of the mahl-stick. Indeed, under any circumstances, as the same honest weaver remarks, "there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living." this case the lion positively refused to

In

roar, and said by modest reserve as plainly as Snug the joiner could have done by words, "If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing. I am a man as other men are." He very rarely referred to any of his published works, and evidently disliked to make them a topic of conversation. Still less could he be induced to discourse about any projected and unfinished play. This sort of author's coyness has increased with the lapse of years, and he never permits even his most intimate friends to take a peep into the laboratory of his brain, where the half-formed creations of his imagination are being gradually turned into shape and endowed with life and individuality.

Three dramatic poems, Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), and Emperor and Galilean (planned probably before leaving Norway, but not completed till 1873), belong to the transition period of Ibsen's intellectual and poetic development chronologically coincident with his sojourn in Rome. The first two of these plays are distinctively dramas with a purpose, and portray two different phases of the Norwegian national character. Indeed, they are, strictly speaking, like Goethe's Faust, not so much dramas as dramatic poems; more suitable to be read than to be represented on the stage.

Brand is what has been called "the tragedy of the categorical imperative." The protagonist of the play is the stern personification of the uncompromising spirit, which demands "all or nought, and refuses to admit half measures of any kind, or to make the slightest concession to the foibles and infirmities of human nature. He leaves his old mother to die alone without spiritual consolation, "unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,” because she is unwilling to renounce, before her death, all the earthly possessions which she had accumulated as his inheritance. He sacrifices his wife and

child to an exalted idea of his mission. Even the sad and tender affection which the mother cherishes for the garments of her dead boy he censures as idolatry, and is not content until she gives these sacred souvenirs of her sorrow to a wandering gypsy. The sublime and sterile mountain peaks and glaciers among which he first appears, and finally disappears, symbolize the unattainable and unfruitful heights of his almost superhuman ideals and aspirations. He is the embodiment of an iron will, hard and inflexible, bruising whatever it comes in contact with, and stands in striking contrast to the weak and wishy-washy Norwegian liberals who had excited Ibsen's contempt, and provoked his satire in the melodrama Norma.

Peer Gynt, on the other hand, represents the opposite element of weakness in the Norwegian character, namely, the injurious influence of an exuberant and undisciplined fantasy upon the normal growth and proper exercise of the moral faculties. The very first line of the play, in which his angry mother exclaims, "Peer, du lyver!" is the sharp and succinct expression of the qualities of this inveterate liar, and assigns the piece a place in literature by the side of Corneille's Menteur, Goldoni's Bugiardo, and La Verdad Sospechosa of Alarcon y Mendoza. In no other work has Ibsen given such free rein to his merciless sarcasm and caustic humor, and exemplified so fully the Horatian maxim concerning the force and fruitfulness of indignation as a source of poetic inspiration.

Peer is well up in Jägerlatein, and the descriptions of his hunting exploits and his ride on the reindeer are worthy of the immortal Münchhausen. He is a sturdy youth, and has a strong arm for "drawing a long-bow." He makes himself the hero of every strange adventure he has ever heard of or read about in fairy tales. This kind of illusion, which converts figments of the imagina

tion into realities, is by no means a rare psychological phenomenon; it is a sort of chronic calenture, which, so far from being confined to mariners exposed to the heat of the tropics, finds its victims among seamen and landsmen alike in every zone.

The action in Peer Gynt comprises the whole lifetime of the hero from the beginning of the century to the present day, and the scenes shift with kaleidoscopic facility and variety from the highlands of Norway to the coast of Morocco, the desert of Sahara, the streets of Cairo, the plantations of South Carolina, and back again to the seaports of the Baltic and the German Ocean. These constant changes bring us in contact with all classes and conditions of men, boors, "patches and rude mechanicals," sailors and shippers, wedding guests, old hags and youthful maidens, fairies and trolls, the weird sisters in the guise of herdswomen (sæterjenter), Bedouins, fellahin, slave-traders, lunatics, thieves, robbers, wandering minstrels; and numerous allegorical persons, such as the English, French, and German types, Master Cotton, Monsieur Ballon, and Herr von Eberkopf. Huhn from Malabar, who advocates a return to the primitive tongue of the orang-outangs, is a caricature of Norwegian purists and linguistic reformers (maalstræverne); and the wretched fellah, who carries on his back the mummified corpse of an old Egyptian monarch, is a satire on the Swedes, who are always praising, but never imitating, the heroic achievements of Charles XII.

In 1867, Ibsen's feelings of resentment towards the Swedes for their passive attitude during the Dano-German war were still fresh, and he presents them to us personified in Herr Trumpeterstraale, who limits his activity to wordy protests, and is ever ready to drain his goblet in a skaal to the Swedish sword, which he has not the courage to wield.