-15-

This is what moved Rafael urbano to make an excerpt with them, an excerpt that "Los Nuevos Caminos" publishes, as an interesting document of the life of the great and vigorous playwright. Together they seem —says Urbano- something like one of those sensible interviews, where only the character focused on speaks, and the interviewee answers, with slight spaces of silence. But they are something else. They are a very noble course of aesthetics, of moral, of sociology. Intimate confessions, not ever thinking of the contingency of any publicity; like those who were inlove the last century, who made their encyclicals of love under the name of their loved one. La Sand and Alfredo de Musset thought too much about the audience, even in the most personal moments of the flesh.

It is about a correspondence that can only compare to the letters of Euler and Clarke, and, better still, between Sehiller and Goethe. The first letters from Ibsen are dated from that time, in which they begin blaming, due to the disatrous war with Prussia (1863-1864), the resurrection of the public movement in life and in the arts. —The Bursting of the South, that bursting in that should have been returned to Europe too soon in the most complete and accomplished way.

The letters of Brandes, answering the distinguished playwright, have not been published, but even if they are never published, -nbelievably- thy can live in private without taking any merit from this half correspondence, as interesting as it may be. With all the inevitable flaws with which the reconstructions of the old world are done, the answers we ignore can be reconstructed, at least in spirit. There is a man that speaks; but there is another who listens, that has said something some times.

-The poet, understanding his great role as a true definer of things, even more practically than the one Emerson grants him, enters fully in the world of his century and gathers, like his own thoughts, the wishes of the others, of every man. For that he will be understood and admired by all of them.

-Letter number IV ends affectionately like all fo them, and has a postscript with the poet promising to send the critic a portrait, as soon as he has a "proper photograph". This is in February 1871, and until May of the same year Ibsen does not pick up his pen again to write his good friend.

-The letter that is marked with tthe number VII ends asking above all the worries that were eating Brandes up in those moments a little attention for his work. In the letter to follow (May 31, 1871), Ibsen does not hesitate in cheering up the great critic, and tells him without beating around the bush: "Your mission should not be limited to the Scandinavian North." In effect, the work of Brandes left that narrow limit but nto out of his own impulse. His work "The Great Currents in Literature of the XIX Century," was known, and of its own praise, like of the same virtuality of that free and victorious test, rose a major movement. "The Journal of the XIX Century," is that which the Brandes brothers, Jorg and Edmund, published later on (1874).

-"Blesses, blessed thee, who have found the means to have friends"- says Ibsen in a letter to Brandes. And in this simple statement shines Ibsen's bright spirit, strong spirit, luminous, worked on and clairvoyant. Friendship —Prozor comments purposely on this phrase by Ibsen- is without a doubt beautiful and noble