At last, old, ruined, he returns to Norway. In the mountains, in the identical hut, he finds the patient Solveig, who has always loved him. He has met the Button-moulder, Death, who tells him that he is doomed to the melting-pot, there to be re-minted. He has never been himself, he the thrice-selfish Peer Gynt. His old thoughts come back to him materialized as balls of wool. "We are thoughts," they cry, "thou shouldst have thought us; hands and feet thou shouldst have lent us." So this scamp, who "lived his life" seemingly to the utmost, never lived it at all, blenches before the Boyg, the great, amorphous mass that blocks his path, and listened to its whispered "Go round." He always skirted difficulties, never faced them, a moral coward, a time-server. Yet he may escape the Button-moulder, for Solveig has believed in him. "Where have I been with God's stamp on my brow?" he asks her, bewildered before the dawning perception of his worthlessness.
"In my faith, in my hope, in my love," she smilingly answers. The Button-moulder calls without the house; "we meet at the last cross-way, Peer, and then we shall see—I say no more." But Solveig guards him as he sleeps.
The curse of Peer Gynt is his overmastering imagination coupled with a weak will. It proves his downfall. "To be oneself, is to slay oneself," says the Button-moulder. The lesson is the same as in Brand,—self-realization through self-surrender. This parody of Don Quixote and Faust was never the real Peer Gynt until the end.
The musical setting of Peer Gynt by Eduard Grieg gives no adequate idea of the poem's dazzling humour, versatility, poetic power, malice, swing, speed, and tenderness. Grieg, with the possible exception of the episode of Peer's mother's death, has written in a sheer melodramatic vein. Brand and Peer Gynt brought to Ibsen the fame he deserved, though it was thus far confined to Norway.
The huge double drama, Emperor and Galilean, with the sub-title, a World Historic Drama, is in a theatrical sense one of Ibsen's few failures, though epical literature would sadly miss this vast and hazardous undertaking devoted to Cæsar's apostasy and the Emperor Julian, all in its ten acts. Naturally enough, even Ibsen's admirers admit that the work lacks dramatic unity and that it is without culminating interest. Yet dramatic it is, this narrative of Julian, the so-called Apostate, who conceived the crazy notion of dragging from its grave the forms of a dead and dusty paganism. He hates the Galilean and finally becomes mad enough to crown himself a god. The vivid pictures testify to Ibsen's powers of evocation, for it is said that he was not deeply read in the classics. Dr. Emil Reich finds in Julian something decadent, a prevision of the familiar Parisian type noted by Huysmans. Rather have Huysmans and Ibsen gone to ancient Rome for their figures—Julian has a touch of the Neronic cruelty and lust, just as he has that monstrous artist's Cæsarean madness of dominion.
It is the scholar Julian listening to the teachings of the seer Maximus who most attracts. Maximus predicts the advent of the Third Kingdom, the kingdom which is neither that of the Galilean nor of the Emperor. It is an empire that will harmonize both the empire of pagan sensuality and the empire of the spirit and bring forth the empire of man. That will be the Third Kingdom; "he is self-begotten the man who wills.... Emperor God—God Emperor. Emperor in the kingdom of the spirit,—and God in that of the flesh." This mystic thought recalls that Joachim of Flora, whose prophecies of the approaching Third Kingdom were approved bythe Franciscans, by that section which was called the Spirituals.
There are some superb "purple patches" in Emperor and Galilean, particularly in the second drama. Jealous of the Redeemer, for he would be a world builder, he asks Maximus:—
"Where is he now? What if that at Golgotha, near Jerusalem, was but a wayside matter, a thing done, so to speak, in passing, in a leisure hour? What if he goes on and on, and suffers, and dies, and conquers, again and again, from world to world? O that I could lay waste the world! Maximus—is there no poison in consuming fire, that could lay creation desolate, as it was on that day when the spirit moved alone on the waters?" A second Alexander this, not groaning for more worlds to conquer, but eager to slay the Son of Man.
Maximus has told him that, "You have tried to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final, any more than the youth is.
"You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth—to hinder him from becoming a man. O fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be—against the third empire in which the twin-natured shall reign."
After bewailing that the Galilean will live in succeeding centuries to tell the tale of the Emperor's defeat, Julian sees blood-red visions, the hosts of the Galilean, the crimson garments of the martyrs, the singing women, and all the multitudinous sent to overthrow him. In the ensuing battle he dies with the historic exclamation upon his lips,—"Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!"
Wicksteed points out that Julian is a pedant, not a prophet. Again we may see operating in another environment a Peer Gynt on the throne, a Skule of the Pretenders. Julian doubted as did Skule his divine call; he did not really believe in himself, and under he went on his way to the Button-moulder. Emperor and Galilean has all the largeness of an epic and much of that inner play of spiritual functions which may be seen amplified in its two predecessors.
The double drama was performed for the first time in its original language at the National Theatre, Christiania, March 20, 1903. It was played in German in connection with the celebration of Ibsen's seventieth birthday in Berlin in 1898, and earlier in 1896 at Leipsic.
V
THE YOUNG MEN'S LEAGUE
(1869)
The Young Men's League is actually the first of the prose social dramas, though in Love's Comedy, published seven years earlier, we find the poet preoccupied with love and marriage. Politics and politicians fill the picture, an exceedingly animated one of the new play. Some critics pretend to see in the figure of Steensgaard a burlesque of Björnson, with whom about this time Ibsen had a quarrel. But this has been denied. Steensgaard is the ideal politician,—that is, the politician without ideals. He is carried away by the sound of his own sonorous voice, by the rumbling of his own empty rhetoric. Brought up in low environment, he snobbishly worships all this as base and vulgar. So we find him capitulating to the enemy at the first attack, a little flattery, a pleasant visit to an aristocratic house, a peep at the daughter, and Steensgaard has changed his political skin. He has so long misled himself that he misleads others. He is a phrase-monger, a parvenu, a turn-coat. He is, in a word, a politician all the world over. Thackeray would have delighted in the portrait of this blathering, self-confident, self-deceived—a Peer Gynt in politics, but without Peer's brilliant imagination. The characters grouped about him are very vital,—the pompous aristocrat, Chamberlain Bratsberg; the impressionable Selma; Monsen the swindler, Bastian and Ragna his children; the shrewd Dr. Fjeldbo; Daniel Heire and Madame Rundholmen—the latter one of those incomparably observed women of the lower middle classes so grateful to Ibsen's powers of depiction.
When the comedy was produced, a scandal ensued. The dramatist had spared neither high nor low. The piece was hissed and applauded until the authorities interfered. It is more local than any of the plays, though some of the characters are sufficiently universal to be appreciated on any stage, Steensgaard the lying lawyer-politician in particular.
VI
PILLARS OF SOCIETY
(1877)
Pillars of Society is the fifteenth play of Henrik Ibsen, several of which, among them Norma and The Warriors' Tomb, have not yet been published. Written in Munich, it appeared in the summer of 1877. The ensuing autumn saw the play on the boards of nearly all the Scandinavian theatres; Germany followed suit early the next year, and the success of this satiric social comedy ran like wildfire throughout the continent. It was not until December 15, at the Gaiety Theatre, London, that it had an English hearing.
There is something of Swift in its bitter strokes of sarcasm at the expense of the ruling commercial classes. The Northern Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in Pillars of Society a varied row of whited sepulchres. His attitude is never that of Thackeray: he never seems to sympathize with his snobs and hypocrites as does the kindly English writer. There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never harboured the milk of human kindness. This remote, objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely human. We are all of us so accustomed to the little encouraging pat on our moral hump that in the presence of such a ruthless unmasking of our weaknesses we are apt to cry aloud,—"Ibsen, himself, is an enemy of the people!"
It is an ugly, naked art, an art unadorned by poetic halos, lyric interludes, comic reliefs, or the occasional relaxation by wit of the dramatic tension. Love me, love my truth, the playwright says in effect; and we are forced to make a wry face as we swallow the nauseous and unsugared pill he forces down our sentimental gullets. His sinews still taut from the extraordinary labours of Emperor and Galilean, that colossal epic-drama of Julian the Apostate, the Scandinavian poet felt the need of unbending, so he wrote Pillars of Society. It is the second of that group of three dramas dealing with social and political themes in the large, external style of which he is the unrivalled possessor. Ibsen smelt corruption in all governments of the people by the people and against the people. He foresaw that King Log was more dangerous than King Stork. For him Demos has ever been the most exacting of tyrants, the true foe to individuality.
The student of social pathology will find much that is amusing in a grim sort of a way scattered throughout the scenes of Pillars of Society. There is much action, much swift dialogue, much slashing wit, and the general atmosphere is of a more breezy character than in the plays which follow this one. Cheerful it is not. Surgery, whether of the body or the soul, is not exactly pleasure-breeding. The story is not an involved one, though Ibsen has woven a sufficiently complex pattern to afford æsthetic interest in its disentanglement. If Consul Bernick had not been in need of money, he would not have married his meek wife, Betty, to whose elder half-sister he had previously pledged his faith. As a pillar of society in a thriving community, as the pillar of its church and commerce, Bernick could never afford to be caught napping. Once it had nearly happened. He had carried on an illicit love affair with a French actress. Her husband surprised the pair. Bernick contrived an escape. So his brother-in-law, who had slipped away to America, was blamed for the scandal, and you may easily imagine the tongue-wagging and head-nodding in this philistine town.
It seems that Ibsen levelled his shafts at a species of social hypocrisy peculiar to his native land. Here in America, where all is fair and naught is foul, his satire falls short of its mark, for our target is clean, and our sepulchres are unwhited! Probably this optimistic sense of being different—and better than our neighbours —fills us with satisfaction in the presence of an Ibsen play. Strangely enough the people in this very drama entertain identical opinions on the subject of their American brethren! Perhaps Pillars of Society is not so provincial in its character-painting as some of Ibsen's critics have imagined. Perhaps his shoe fits!
The return of the supposed fugitive Johan, Bernick's scapegoat brother-in-law, finds the Consul beloved and respected by his fellow-citizens. He has educated in his own household Dina Dorf, the daughter of that French actress with whom years before he had seen merry days—that is, if there is really any joy of life in those dull, drab Norwegian communities. With Johan returns Lona Hessel, the elderly sister-in-law. The Bernick household is dismayed at this rude invasion of the "Americans," and the tragi-comedy begins in earnest. Bernick has not improved with the years. He has become more grasping for wealth and power. He even conceives the idea of sending to sea an untrustworthy ship. Its rotten hulk almost carries off his young son, while the father imagines that the unwelcome visitors, Johan and Lona, are on board. To complicate matters, Dina, sick of the false odour of sanctity in the home of Bernick, loves Johan, and to the infinite scandal of every one she speaks out her mind. She will go to America, where people are not so good—alas! Ibsen didn't know that our national goodness is becoming as a rank, threatening vegetation upon the body politic.
Furthermore Bernick, so as to make himself pose as a self-sacrificing, deeply injured man, has insinuated that Johan was an embezzler as well as an immoral man. About the figure of the Consul there cluster several admirable hypocrites: Rector Rörlund, who keeps Bernick upon his pinnacle of self-righteousness; Hilmar Tönnessen, who goes about sniffing out other people's soul maladies and carrying with peevish pride the "banner of the ideal"; and several merchants, who are in with the Consul whenever a "deal," public or private, is possible. The minor characters, the women in particular, are individually outlined from the shipbuilder Aune, with his sturdy adherence to the interests of the Bernick house and his weak-kneed code of morals, to the veriest sketch of a clerk—all are human, brimming over with selfish humanity.
The catastrophe is led up to with a masterly gradation of incident. Confronted by Lona when in his darkest hour of despair and need, Bernick has the lying garments in which he invests himself for his family and friends torn away by the fearless words of Lona. She does not accuse him of committing the one unforgivable, biblical sin which Ella Rentheim throws at the desperate head of John Gabriel Borkman. No, Lona does not say, "You slew the love that was in me;" she tears up two incriminating letters, she declares that with Johan and Dina she will return to America; but—but Bernick must escape from the cage of lies in which, like a monstrous master-spider, he has been spinning a network of falsehoods for the world. He groans out that it is too late, that he must "sink along with the whole of the bungled social system"—he is not the first, nor the last man, who has attempted to shift upon society his individual sins. He calls himself the tool, not the pillar, of society, and you seem to see, as he talks, the plaster flaking off in great patches, and the ugly stains coming into view.
A grand demonstration by the town is made: torchlight, music, speeches, a presentation, and all the rest of the cheap, vain humbug of which we all disapprove so heartily in America—and indulge in it about once every hour. Bernick tells the truth, confesses that he is the real sinner, not Johan, and shocks his world immeasurably, especially the priggish Rörlund. That worthy rector, who would marry Dina in a pitying, pardoning way, is flouted by her. She leaves with Johan. Then, it may be confessed, there is a flat, conventional conclusion, "docked of its natural, tragic ending," as Allan Monkhouse truthfully declares. Bernick is in reality re-whitewashed at the close of this powerful, picturesque play.
One feels instinctively that more could be done with Lona and Bernick, more utilized from the strong scenes between Aune and Bernick. But in John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen later realized the wicked grandeur inherent in the character of a tremendous financial scoundrel; like Balzac's Mercadet, his Borkman is a figure hewn from the native rock. Bernick is a man you may meet in Wall Street, and certainly on any Sunday in any given church you enter. He is proud, pious, fat as to paunch, and lean-souled; and he drives a hard bargain with God, man, and devil. In a word, the average pillar of any society, one who believes in making religion and patriotism pay; a good father, a good husband, a good fellow, is the inscription chiselled on his marble mortuary shaft—and then the worms stop to smile archly at their eternal banquet! Truth is always at the bottom of a grave. And Ibsen is a terrible digger of graves when he so wills it.
As a matter of record it would not be amiss to state that Pillars of Society, written in 1877, was produced in America at the Irving Place Theatre, December 26, 1889, with Ernest Possart as Bernick, Frau Christien as Mrs. Bernick, and Frl. Leithner as Lona. In English it was first heard at the Lyceum Theatre, March 6, 1891, with George W. Fawcett as Bernick, Alice Fischer as Lona, and Dina Dorf played by Bessie Tyree. There was a third performance at Hammerstein's Opera House three days later. Wilton Lackaye and his company revived the piece at the Lyric Theatre, New York, April 15, 1904.
VII
A DOLL'S HOUSE
(1879)
Ibsen has been persistently confounded with those mannish women who, averse from marriage, furiously denounce it as a tyrannical institution. Strindberg, who was half mad at the time, accused the Norwegian poet of being a woman's rights advocate. Dr. Brandes has told us the contrary. Ibsen was never a woman's man; he did not like women's society, preferring men's. He did not admire John Stuart Mill's book on the woman question, and entertained an antipathy for those writers who declare, gallantly enough, that they owe much in their books to their wives. A sheer sense of justice impelled him to view the institution of matrimony as not always being made above. A woman is an individual. She has, therefore, her rights, not alone because of her sex, but because she is a human being. So he wrote A Doll's House to show a woman's soul in travail beset by obstacles of her own and others' making.
Thoroughly he accomplished his task. Nora Helmer, a lark-like creature in Act I, grows before our eyes from scene to scene until, at the fall of the curtain, she is another woman. In few dramas has there been such a continuous growth. The play seems a trifle outmoded to-day, not because its main problem will ever grow stale, but because of the many and conflicting meanings read into it by apostles of feminine supremacy. Ibsen declared in one of his few public speeches that he had no intention of representing the conventional, emancipated woman.
It is Nora as an individual cheated of her true rights that the dramatist depicts, for her marriage, as she discovers in the crisis, has been merely material and not that spiritual tie Ibsen insists upon as the only happy one in this relation. So she goes away to find herself, and her going was the signal for almost a social war in Europe. His critics forgot that Ibsen was a skilled deviser of theatric effects, and such an unconventional exit was not without its artistic values. This does not mean that he was insincere—Nora's departure is a logical necessity. Without it the play would be sheer sentimental, and therefore banal, nonsense. Nevertheless, that slammed door reverberated across the roof of the world, and not over the knocking at the gate in Macbeth was there such critical controversy.
One finds Nora Helmer a fascinating type of womanhood to study. To be sure, she is not new—neither is Mother Eve, but can we ponder the apple story too often or unprofitably? This Scandinavian Frou-Frou, bursting with joy of life, is confronted with a grave problem, and as she has been brought up perfectly irresponsible and a doll, she solves the problem in an irresponsible manner. She commits forgery, believing that the end justified the means, and you perforce sympathize with her as her act brought good, not evil—rather would not have brought evil if it had not been for the evil mind of Krogstad.
After the awakening Nora resolves to go away—away from husband, home, and children. That such a revulsion should occur in the nature of a gadabout and featherbrain like this girl, is not unnatural. Now Torvald is not a bad man. On the contrary, he is what the world calls a good man, and he is an insufferably selfish, priggish bore into the bargain. Nora knew that when she left him "the miracle of miracles" would never occur—that the leopard does not change his spots. The end of this human fugue, so full of passion and vitality, contains some of the strongest lines Ibsen penned. Nora is such a volatile, gay, frivolous, restless, perverse, affectionate, womanly, childish, loving, and desperate creature, that we hardly marvel at both her husband and her father petting her like a doll. The awakening was severe, and Torvald suffered, and it served him quite right. Dr. Rank forms "a cloudy background" to the happiness of the Helmer household. He is very interesting, with his cynicism and tragic resolves and passion. But he serves his purpose in indicating certain things to Nora. He first suggests, unconsciously, to her the thought of suicide, for Krogstad discovers this thought lurking in her mind at his second visit and just after Dr. Rank has made his confession of love to her. As for Krogstad, he is only a man of mixed impulses. He could have been a decent member of society; indeed, he tried hard to be. The unfortunate entrance into the Helmer family life of Mrs. Linden upset all of his calculations, and he became a blackmailer in consequence.
The afternoon of February 15, 1894, Mrs. Fiske played Nora in A Doll's House at the Empire Theatre. It was a benefit performance. Her support was unusually strong; W. H. Thompson, the Krogstad, won critical admiration for the manner in which he suggested the shades of a character whose possibilities for good and evil are perplexingly interwoven. Mrs. Fiske was, however, the surprise of the day. Shedding her Frou-Frou skin, she sounded every note on the keyboard of Nora Helmer's character. She was bird-like, evasive, frankly selfish, boiling with material enthusiasms, a creature of air, fire, caprice, gayety, and bitterness. Excepting Agnes Sorma no one has indicated with such finesse of modulation the awakened moral nature of the woman. And it is to be doubted if Mrs. Fiske ever bettered that first rapturous interpretation.
The ending is an unresolved cadence, though to the ear attuned to the finer spiritual harmonies it is not difficult to discern that the wife will suffer and grow—and be herself. But the children, cries the world! Ibsen, who has proved his love for the little ones, answers the question by another. Read Ghosts, and you will see what might have become of the Helmer children if Nora had stayed at home and continued in her life-lie.
As an acting rôle Nora has won the suffrages of such artists as Betty Hennings, Agnes Sorma, Hélène Odilon, Gabrielle Réjane, Friederike Gossmann, Lilly Petri, Modjeska, Mrs. Fiske, Irene Triesch, Hilda Borgström (a great Hilda Wangel), Stella Hohenfels, and Eleonore Duse.
Henrik Ibsen once attended a dinner given in his honour by the Ladies' Club of Christiania, and made a speech about himself in answer to a toast. Miss Osina Krog, in proposing Ibsen's health, spoke of him as a poet who had done much for woman through his works. Dr. Ibsen's reply was this:—
All that I have composed has not proceeded from a conscious tendency. I have been more the poet and less the social philosopher than has been believed. I have never regarded the women's cause as a question in itself, but as a question of mankind, not of women. It is most certainly desirable to solve the woman question among others, but that was not the whole intention. My task was the description of man. Is it to some extent true that the reader weaves his own feelings and sentiments in with what he reads and that they are attributed to the poet? Not alone those who write, but also those who read, compose, and very often they are more full of poetry than the poet himself. I take the liberty to thank you for the toast, with a modification, for I see that women have a great task before them in the field for which this ladies' association works. I drink the health of the club and wish it happiness and success.
I have always regarded it as my task to raise the country and to give the people a higher position. In this work two factors assert themselves. It is for the mothers to awake, by slow and intense work, a conscious feeling of culture and discipline. This feeling must be awakened in individuals before one can elevate a people. The women will solve the question of mankind, but they must do so as mothers. Herein lies the great task of women.
And this speech quite dissipates the notion that Ibsen had affiliations with the Feminists.
VIII
GHOSTS
(1881)
Following the scandal created by the first performance of A Doll's House, Ghosts seemed like a deliberate affront to his critics, a gauntlet hurled into their faces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen. Now, he said, in effect,—though he has never condescended to pulpit polemics or café Æsthetics,—here is a wife who resolves to endure who stays at home and bears that burden. Nora Helmer refused! Behold Mrs. Alving, the womanly woman, good housewife—malgré elle même—and good mother!
Ghosts, like much that is great in art, is a very painful play. So is Macbeth, so is Lear, so is Œdipus Rex. There are some painful pictures in the small gallery of the world's greatest art, and in music analogous examples are not wanting. Probably the most poignant emotional music thus far written is to be found in the last movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony. It is cosmic in its hopeless woe. Yet Ibsen gives the screw a tighter wrench, for he conceived the idea of transposing all the horror of the antique drama to the canvas of contemporary middle-class life.
He gives us an Orestes in a smoking jacket, the Furies within the walls of his crumbling brain. Naturally the academic critics cry aloud at the blasphemy. The ancients, Racine, Shakespeare, and the rest, softened their tragic situations by great art. As in a vast mirror the souls of the obsessed pass in solemn, processional attitudes; the contours are blurred; the legend goes up to the heavens in exquisite empurpled haze.
"Very well," grumbles in answer the terrible old man from Norway, "I'll give you a new Æsthetik. Art in old times is at two removes from life. I'll place it at one. I'll banish its opiates, its comic reliefs, all its conventions that mellow and anæstheticize."
Then he wrote Ghosts. It is terrible. The Orestean Furies are localized. They are no longer poetic and pictorial abstractions, but a disease. So you can accept the thesis or leave it. One thing you cannot do: you cannot be indifferent; and therein lies one secret of Ibsen's power. It is his aloofness that his audiences resent the most of all. If, like another master showman, Thackeray, Ibsen would occasionally put his tongue in his cheek, or wink his eye in an aside, or whisper that the story was only make-believe—there, dear ones, don't run away —why, the Ibsen play might not be avoided as if it were the pest. But there are no concessions made, and the sense of reality is tremendous and often nerve-shocking.
The blemishes in Ghosts are few, yet they are in full view. That fire is our old friend, "the long arm of coincidence." And what pastor of any congregation, anywhere, could have been such a doddering old imbecile as Manders with his hatred of insurance? Possibly he represents a type of evangelical and very parochial clergyman, but a type, we hope, long since obsolete. It is not well, either, to pry deeply into the sources of Oswald's insanity. Thus far it has not been accurately diagnosed. Let us accept it with other unavoidable conventions. The pity about Ghosts, which is in the repertory of every continental theatre, is that the Ibsenites made of it a stalking horse for all kinds of vagaries, from free love to eating turnips raw.
Ibsen holds no brief for free love, or for diseased mental states. You may applaud Mrs. Alving, you may loathe her; either way it is a matter of no import to this writer. To call Ghosts immoral is a silly and an illogical proceeding, for it is, if it is anything at all within the domain of morals, a dramatic setting of the biblical wisdom that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. This may be pure pathology; in Ibsen's hands it is a drama of terrible intensity.
Ghosts is a very simple but painful story. The dissolute Captain Alving, the father of Oswald, dies of his debaucheries before the play begins. His wife, the mother of Oswald, has believed it her bounden duty to hide from the world the cancer which is eating up her family life. She partially succeeds, and only when he brings shame to her very door does she weaken and fly to Pastor Manders, whom she once loved, and who presumably loves her. This worthy clergyman does only what his ideals have taught him. He refuses her refuge and sends her back to her husband, admonishing her that her duty is to accept the cross which God has imposed upon her and to reclaim her husband. Frozen up in heart and soul, Mrs. Alving begins a long fight with the beasts of appetite which rule her husband's nature. She sends away her son Oswald, she even adopts a bastard daughter of her husband's, and marries off the mother—a servant in her employ—to a carpenter, Jacob Engstrand by name. The girl grows up to womanhood; Oswald, her son, becomes a painter and lives in Paris. Captain Alving dies a miserable death, his vices a secret to all but a few, while his widow seeks a salve for her conscience by erecting with his money an orphanage. Naturally Pastor Manders takes much interest in this scheme, and when he meets Oswald fresh from Paris, he is struck by the resemblance the morbid, sickly-looking youth bears to his dead father.
But all has not been well with the young man. He has been told by a famous alienist in Paris that his days of sanity are numbered, and he is at a loss to conjecture why such a curse should be visited upon him. He always heard of his father's greatness and goodness. I know of few more touching scenes than the conversation between mother and son, and the horrible confession which follows. It is like a blast from a charnel house; but then, what power, what lucidity! The poor, tortured mother unburthens her heart to her pastor, and of course receives scant consolation. How could he, according to his lights, treat her otherwise than he did? Manders is a type, and he always faces the past; Mrs. Alving looks toward the west for the glimmer of the new light. Alas, it comes not I She only hears her son crying aloud, "Give me wine, mother!" It is the spiritual battle of the old and new. And the old order is changing.
Worse follows. The boy falls in love with Regina, his half-sister, as to whose identity he is in absolute darkness, for she has been brought up as a maid in his mother's house. But with his mind weakening he clutches at this straw to help him. "Isn't she splendid, mother?" he says, admiring the girl's superb animal development, and we can easily conjecture the agony of his mother. Weak she must appear in the pastor's eyes, for she almost hesitates about revealing the birth of Regina, and wavers on the question of Oswald marrying her. She has been too indulgent to the boy, and Manders does not scruple to tell her so. He is one of your iron-minded men who have a rigid sense of what is right and wrong, and one who would have no sympathy with fluttering souls like Amiel, Lamenais, Clough, or any of the spiritual band to whom dogmas are as steel clamps. Mr. Manders is outraged at Mrs. Alving, and proposes sending Regina away, but where? To her father, Jacob Engstrand, a cunning, low, hypocritical rascal? No, he is not her real father. At the end of the first act both overhear Oswald trying to kiss Regina in the dining room, and another such scene, in which Captain Alving and Regina's mother were the actors, flashes before her, and she cries "Ghosts!" as the curtain falls.
Everything then goes wrong. The Alving orphanage burns down, and there is no insurance because Pastor Mander believes that insuring a consecrated building against fire would be questioning Providence. But his human respect plays him into the hands of Jacob Engstrand, whose cunning is more than a match for the worthy priest. The dialogue between these two widely varying types is a masterpiece.
Mrs. Alving is at last goaded into telling Oswald and Regina of their blood relationship, and the girl, who is a bad, selfish lot, goes away—deserts the family at the most critical period. She upbraids Mrs. Alving for not having told her of her true station in life, and turns her back on the poor mumbling wretch Oswald. She then walks off defiantly and to her putative father's home, a sailors' dance house. Oswald's mind is completely unhinged by this dénouement, and he confides to his mother in stuttering, stammering accents—the sure forerunner of the crumbling brain within—that he has some poison to kill himself with; that he had relied on Regina to do it when he would be an absolute idiot; but, as Regina was at hand no longer, his mother must play the executioner.
The end is as relentless as a Greek tragedy. The boy chases his mother from room to room imploring and screaming at her to rid him of his pain; as she brought him into life without his consent, so should she send him forth from it when he bade her. It is all frightful, but enthralling. When Oswald cries aloud for the sun, the end has been reached. He is a hapless lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed mother, remembering her promise to him, searches frantically in his pocket for the morphine, and then a merciful curtain bars out from further view the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too deep and jars some hidden and diseased nerves, what shall we say? Rather can he not turn upon us and cry, "I but hold the mirror up to nature; behold yourselves in all your nakedness, in all your corruption!" Anatole France once wrote, "If the will of those who are no more is to be imposed on those who still are, it is the dead who live, and the live men who become the dead ones." And this idea is the motive of Ghosts.
IX
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
(1882)
Ibsen was called such hard names when Ghosts was produced that William Archer made a collection of all the epithets hurled at the dramatist's head and published them in the Pall Mall Gazette with the title Ghosts and Gibberings. Of course the Norwegian was indignant that his play should have been so grossly misunderstood, and in An Enemy of the People he undertook to show that the reformer—the true pioneer—is always abused and pilloried as a dangerous foe to society, and that the majority is always in the wrong. It is merely a case of Horace's odi profanum vulgus over again. But how did the playwright go about his task? Did he paint for us another Ajax defying the social lightning? Did he give us a modern Coriolanus? With his usual ideal-demolishing propensities this terrible old man makes his hero a fussy doctor—a man of the middle classes; a man who forgets the names of the servant girls; a man who loves to see his children feed on roast beef; a man who is economical in little things; a thorough professional gentleman, who explodes, fusses, fumes, fidgets, goes off continually at half cock; a crack-brained enthusiast, a fanatic, and a teller of disagreeable truths. But this doctrinaire with torn trousers is a mighty fellow after all, and by the supreme genius of his creator has quite as much right to live as any Homeric hero. Vitality is the most masterful test of a dramatist's characters; their vitality is their excuse for being. Every figure in An Enemy of the People is brimming with vitality, from the drunken man to Dr. Stockmann. Of course you can hardly be expected to take an overweening interest in the condition of the water pipes in that little town on the south coast of Norway. What are water pipes to Hecuba? Yet a world of principle is involved in these same germ-breeding conduits, and the crafty dramatist has, while apparently depicting local types, contrived to paint a large canvas. Have we not our Burgomaster Stockmanns, our Editor Hovstads, our timid meliorists like Aslaken, and our fire-eating Billings? Men, men all of them.
What a daring thing it was to write a play without a love scene, a play which is more like life than all the sensualistic caterwaulings, philanderings, and bosh and glitter of the conventional stage, which we fondly fancy holds the mirror up to nature! I have before dwelt on the frugality of his phrases, of the delicacy and concise cleaving power of his dialogues. He has broken with the convention of monologues, of mechanical exits—indeed, of everything which savours of old-time stage artifice. His acts terminate naturally, yet are pregnant with possibilities. You impatiently wait for the next scene, and all because a lot of nobodies in an out-of-the-way Norwegian health resort fight a man who is crazy to tell the truth—and ruin the place. But they are human beings even if they strut not in doublets and hose, and pour not out perfumed passion to the damosel on the balcony.
One cannot sympathize much with Dr. Stockmann. He, while being "the strongest man on earth," brought a calamity on his native place by his awful propensity for blabbing out the truth. Besides, Ibsen leaves us just a margin of doubt in the matter. Perhaps the worthy medical man was not correct in his diagnosis of the waters, and if this were so his conduct was inexcusable. But he fought for that most dangerous of ideals,—the truth, even though he flaunts in the face of the mob the fact that "a normally constituted truth lives, let me say as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years: at the outside twenty; seldom longer."
One recalls Matthew Arnold's lecture on Numbers, in which that essayist preached the evils of majority. Ibsen hits at democracy when he can—for him the mass of the people is led by the few. An Enemy of the People is an excellent repertory piece, though one feels the moral stress too strongly in it.
X
THE WILD DUCK
(1884)
The Wild Duck followed An Enemy of the People and preceded Rosmersholm, and is linked by similar inner motives, so these plays really can be grouped as a trilogy. Stockmann, the energetic denouncer of public dishonesty, is now Gregers Werle, just as earnest and sincere in his claims for the ideal and in his strictures upon the erring. But from what a different point of view, with what different results! If Stockmann is a public-spirited reformer, Werle is a sneak and a nuisance. Yet the two men's ideals coincide. Why this shifting of position on the part of Ibsen?
A period of depression, consequent upon his uninterrupted labours and their seeming futility, may have been one reason; the other is probably because Ibsen, charged with the spirit of bitter mockery and in a pessimistic humour, wished to show the obverse of his medal. From Brand to Stockmann his idealists had been heaven-stormers. Well, here is a heaven-stormer, an idealist, who is a dangerous man because he tells the truth. Is it well to blurt out the truth on all occasions? The result of this thesis is one of the most entertaining, one of the most tragic, plays of the series.
The Wild Duck has several drawbacks, the chief being the confusing mixture of satire and tragedy; the satire almost oversteps the limitations of satire, the tragic emphasis seems to be placed at the wrong spot. The two qualities mingle indifferently. And the act ends are not satisfying; they lack climax, especially after the catastrophe. But the dialogue as in The League of Youth is an admirable transcript from life. Each character speaks; nothing sounds as if written. The glory of The Wild Duck is its characterization. Even the implacable Dr. Nordau praises Gina Ekdal, calling her a female Sancho Panza. The comparison is a happy one, for her husband, Hjalmar Ekdal, is a Don Quixote of shreds and patches, a weak, vain, boastful, gluttonous, shiftless fellow, and, of course, an idealist. He raves of the ideal, and he is kept to an insane pitch of cloudy self-exaltation by Gregers Werle, who, discovering that Gina was a former mistress of his father, tells Ekdal with dire results. The little Hedwig, the most touching in Ibsen's gallery of children, is also worked upon by the mischief maker, so that she kills herself from a spirit of sacrifice—more of Werle's idealism.
Ekdal talks grandiloquently about shattered honour to Gina, who bids him eat bread, drink coffee—he has been out all night airing his woes to the storm. The woman's homely wit, solid common sense, and big heart are given with satisfying verisimilitude. Gregers' father, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Sörby; the garret of the photographer Ekdal, where his disgraced, old drunken father has rigged up a mock forest in which he hunts the "wild duck" and other tame fowl; the character of Relling, Ibsen again masked, whose sardonic humour, cruel on the surface, is in reality prompted by a kind heart—he makes people believe they are grander than they are and therefore makes them happier; all these figures in this amazing Vanity Fair are handled masterfully. The World-Lie is here in microcosmic proportions. Every one, except the stolid, unimaginative Gina, swaggers about in the sordid atmosphere of deception. Werle always makes matters worse, and on a painful note of tragedy the curtain falls. The tyranny of the ideal is clearly set forth.
XI
ROSMERSHOLM
(1886)
Rosmersholm was finished in 1886. It followed The Wild Duck, that ghastly mockery of Ibsen's own ideals, and in its turn it was followed by The Lady from the Sea. The astonishingly fecund imagination that drew Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck did not show symptoms of fatigue in the characterization of Rosmersholm. Its first representation occurred on January 17, 1887. Bergen, Norway, and later Berlin, heard it twenty-five times in one season. London had its taste of the strange combination of evil and good on February 23, 1891; Paris, October 4, 1893, with Lugné-Poë's company. All Europe witnessed with astonishment Rosmersholm, and New York had its first English performance March 28, 1904, at the Princess Theatre by the Century players.
Rosmersholm is not an agreeable drama. Why any one who prefers amusement should sit it out is strange: stranger still the impulse to abuse it because it does not give the same pleasure as the circus. Like Hamlet Rosmersholm has a long foreground—Emerson said the same of Walt Whitman. Hamlet comes before us after the mischief of his life has been worked, his father has been slain, his mother has married the slayer of her son's father, of her son's happiness. The first scene in Hamlet is illuminating; the first two acts of Rosmersholm are most perplexing to an audience unprepared for them by study. The technical error of the modern play lies here: until Act III we are left in darkness as to Rebekka's character and her ruling motives. Dr. Emil Reich proposed, merely as a matter of experiment, a schemata or a new scenario, in which the first two acts would show Rebekka West freshly arrived at Rosmersholm, her conduct with Beata Rosmer, the slow persecution of that unfortunate lady, and her death by suicide at the mill-dam. This idea has only one drawback—Ibsen did not follow it when he planned his work.
The truth is that, notwithstanding its mastery of character, Rosmersholm must not be viewed as a drama following any previous model. Emile Faguet declines to consider any longer the northern dramatist as a realist. In his early prose dramas, when he filled in his canvas with jostling throngs, Ibsen was a painter of manners; but as he grew, as his method became less that of his predecessors and more of his own, the action became more intense. The modern psychologic drama was born, the drama in which wills collide, but not the will for trivial things. It is the eternal duel of the sexes, the duel of the old and the new. In this sombre atmosphere, subjected to many pressures by the black and alembicated art of the dramatic wizard, the circumstances that occur externally are of little significance, the dialogue spoken not to be accepted unless for its "secondary intention." Bald on its surface, its cumulative effect discloses the souls of his people. Commonplace, even provincial as are their gestures, their surroundings, we presently see the envelope of humanity melt away, and soon exposed are the real creatures, the real men and women, exposed as in a dream. It is a cruel art this that unwraps leaf by leaf the coverings of the human soul. With the average dramatist, clever though he may be, his inspiration compared to Ibsen's is like fire in a sheaf of straw—the spark glows for an instant and then there is a vivid crackling of shallow flame. We witness the illuminated edge of an idea, and then it fades into the blackness. Ibsen's flame is more murky than brilliant; but it makes light the swamps he traverses on his irresistible progress to the mountains beyond.
Isolated then as is the milieu of Rosmersholm, its real territory is spiritual and not Rosmer's gloomy manor-house. The real and the ideal are indescribably blended. Only after much study does the character of Rebekka Gamvik, called West, yield its secrets. She was born in Finmark. Her mother, possibly of Lapp origin, had carried on an intrigue with Dr. West. Rebekka was its fruit. This she did not know until too late to avert a hideous catastrophe; it was not alone her illegitimacy that so horrified her when Rector Kroll informed her of it—there were depths which she did not care to explore farther, though she made the offer to Rosmer. Dr. West at his death bequeathed a small library to his adopted daughter, and this proved a Pandora box both to her and to Rosmersholm. Books of a "liberal" character filled the mind of the young woman with dangerous ideas; for like the disciple in Paul Bourget's novel, she speedily translated these ideas into action. As cunning as Becky Sharp, as amorous as Emma Bovary, as ambitious as Lady Macbeth, Rebekka West is the most complete portrait of a designing woman that we know of; she is more trouble-breeding than Hedda Gabler.
Vernon Lee speaks of "the certainty that something is going on, that certain people are contriving to live, struggle, and suffer, such as I am haunted with after reading Thackeray, Stendhal, or Tolstoy." She quotes William James's phrase, "the warm, familiar acquiescence which belongs to the sense of reality." All greatly imagined characters in fiction and drama have this "organic, inevitable existence," which persists in the memory after the book is closed, after the curtain has fallen. Rebekka West is among these characters. She is more terrible than one of Félicien Rop's etched "Cold Devils." She grows in the mind like a poisonous vegetation in the tropics. More magnificent in her power to will and execute evil than Hedda Gabler, she weakens at the crucial hour; this same will is paralyzed by the old faiths she had sneered away. Edmund Gosse considers the failure of Rosmer as an instance of new wine fermenting in old bottles. Equally, in Rebekka's case, the old wine spoils in the new bottles.
Taking her courage in both hands the comely young woman contrives to enter the household of Rector Kroll, whose sister Beata is married to Rosmer. Kroll is a sturdy schoolmaster, an orthodox Conservative, settled in his conviction that the world was made for good church-men with fat purses—by no means a ludicrous or a despicable character. As drawn by Ibsen, his is a massive personality,—sane, worldly-wise, a man who hates the things of the spirit just as he hates radicalism. But he doesn't know this. And it is the irony of his fate that he utters those smug phrases dedicated by usage to matters spiritual, while he walks in the way of the flesh. A tower of strength, Kroll is more than the match for such a dreamer as Johannes Rosmer. Brendel, besides being a fantastic adumbration of Ibsen, has propulsive power. He changes, at each of his two appearances, the current of Rosmer's destiny.
Rebekka intuitively discerns this little rift in the armour of Kroll, and flatters the worthy teacher, flatters his wife until she smuggles herself beneath the Kroll roof-tree. There she encounters Rosmer and his wife Beata. The latter is attracted by the fresh, vivacious stranger with the free manners. Life at Rosmersholm is dull; Johannes is a student of heraldry and a poor companion. Again Rebekka moves. She is soon mistress of Rosmersholm. Her quick brain makes her a delight to the master, her hypocritical sympathy an actual necessity to his wife. Then begins the systematic undermining of both. She lends Dr. West's books to the clergyman, and she insinuates into the feeble brain of Beata the deadly idea that because of her childlessness she is no longer worthy to remain Madame Rosmer. Slowly this idea expands, and its growth is accelerated when Beata sees Johannes falling away from the faith of his fathers. Sick in body, sick in brain, the deluded woman is led step by step to the fatal mill stream. Before the confession that Rebekka is disgraced and must leave Rosmersholm at once, Beata recoils, and quickly commits suicide. And now the curtain rises on Act I.
While these facts are revealed by subtle indications in the dialogue, a feeling of dissatisfaction is also aroused. Not until Act III do we learn of them completely, then through Rebekka's defiant confession. This confession is brought about by a simple result, the failure of Rosmer to reach her ambitious expectations. He is an idealist, a hero of dreams, one who longs to step into the noisy arena of life and "ennoble" men. Little wonder his brother-in-law Kroll mocks him. A Don Quixote without the Don's courage. Surely Ibsen was smiling in his sleeve at this milk-and-water Superman, this would-be meddling reformer to whom he adds as pendant the pure caricature of Ulric Brendel. Full of the new and heady wisdom garnered from Dr. West's library, Rosmer resolves to break away from his political party, his early beliefs, his very social order. The insidious teachings of Rebekka flush his feeble arteries. He defies Kroll, and the war begins. It is not very heroic, principally consisting in mud-throwing by rival newspapers. Ibsen's vindictive irony—for the episode was suggested by the disordered politics of Norway in 1885—has ample opportunities for expression in the character of Mortensgaard, the editor of the opposition journal, a man who has succeeded in life because, as Brendel truthfully says, he has managed to live without ideals. Mortensgaard is very vital. He is a scoundrel, but an engaging one in his outspoken cynicism. It is only in print that he hedges. As much as he desires the support of Rosmer, easily the most prominent man on the country-side, it is as Rosmer the priest and conservative and not Rosmer the radical. There are too many of the latter tribe!
This shifting of standards puzzles the clergyman; but when he learns that the editor has a letter written by Beata which might incriminate both Rebekka and himself, then he begins to see his false position, and also the peril of playing with such fire. Slowly he is undeceived as to Rebekka's character. He catches her eavesdropping, and is stunned by her confession of treachery and murder. In the last act the bewildered man hears another upsetting disclosure. On the eve of her departure for the north, and after Rosmer has made his peace with Kroll and his party, she blurts forth the fatal truth. She has long loved Rosmer, and that love, at first passionate, selfish, impelled her to crime; with the months came a great peace, and then, like a palimpsest showing through the corrupt training of her girlhood, her conscience asserted itself. Rosmersholm and the Rosmer ideals had begun their work of denudation and disintegration. If the Rosmer ideal ennobled, it also killed happiness, which really means that, the sting of her wickedness being extracted, the woman was powerless for good or for evil; she no longer had the inclination to descend into the infernal gulf of crime, nor had she the will power to live the higher life. The common notion is that Rebekka is converted by pure love. It is a suspiciously sudden conversion. Rather let us incline to the belief that the main-spring of her will was broken, even before Rosmer offered her marriage. Of a cerebral type, like the majority of Ibsen's heroines, the violence of her passion once cooled, she had nothing to make her life worth while. Her confession calmed her nerves; after it, like many notorious criminals, she was indifferent to the outcome.
In Rosmer the old churchly leaven began to work. Horrified by Rebekka's revelation, as disappointed in her as she was in him, he demanded why she had confessed her love. To give you back your innocence, she replied. Does he wish for another test?—then make one, she will not fear it. Straightway the stern priest awakens in him; he has never cast off, despite his blasphemies, the yoke of the Lord. This woman that he loves was the murderess of his wife Beata. An eye for an eye! Expiation must be by blood sacrifice! Does she dare go out on the bridge across the stream and—? Rebekka, worn out, sick of the vileness of her soul, weary of this life which can now promise nothing, eagerly assents. She will go, and go alone. Soon the last tremor of manhood is felt in the superstitious brain of Rosmer. No, she shall not go alone. Together as man and wife, sealed by a kiss, they will go to eternity. And then the male moral coward and the female companion of his destiny walk calmly to their fate. The housekeeper watches them fall in the raging pool, and she is not as much surprised as one would imagine.
"The dead wife has taken them," she exclaims, for, like every one at Rosmersholm, she believes in the triumph of the dead.
Rebekka West recalls to Georg Brandes the traits of a Russian woman, rather than a Scandinavian. This is true. She might have stepped out of a Dostoïevsky novel. She is far more interesting because far more complex than Hedda Gabler, while not so modish or so fascinating. She is less of a moral monster than Hedda, and far braver. She, at least, has tested life and found its taste bitter in the mouth. Her eroticism we must take for granted; in the play she displays nothing of it; all is retrospective and introspective. The woman never contemplated suicide; but that way out of the muddle is as good as a wretched existence in some Finnish village. Rosmer proposes the suicide, he dares not face his own wrecked ideals; it takes a man who is master of himself to master his fellows. Life is like running water in his hands; the woman he loved is a failure; all things come too late to those who wait. Of Rebekka's repentance Ibsen leaves us in no doubt; but that she would have elected self-slaughter for her end one strongly discredits. It is despair, not heroism, that exalts her. She committed crime for love, and now that crime she will expiate by self-surrender to her lover's wish.
Browning would have delighted in such a theme as this, and might have developed it into a second Ring and the Book. But dramatically the English poet could never have beaten and bruised the idea into shape. Ibsen has surmounted perilous obstacles in his dramatic treatment of a purely psychologic subject. We wish to witness a conflict of wills, and not the hearsay of such a conflict. Thus nearly two acts seem wasted before the real situation occurs at the close of Act II, when Rosmer proposes marriage. But so little does the poet care for incident, for detail, that Rosmersholm might be played in one scene; the main action takes place before the curtain goes up. The drama is a curious blending of several styles—there are two motives and two manners. Both Free Will and Determinism—not such Hegelian opposites as we imagine—have each a share; while a mingling of romance and realism is shown in the narration and in the background. The White Horse of Rosmersholm is a colourful bit of symbolism, recalling Walter Scott; the accessory characters are the homeliest and most natural imaginable. Auguste Ehrhard, Ibsen's French admirer, has pointed out that in his subsidiary figures the dramatist is very lifelike and his chief characters are usually the mouthpieces of his theories.
The protagonist of Rosmersholm is Beata. She is seldom long absent from each of the four acts. She peers over the edges of the dialogue, and in every pause one feels her unseen presence. An appalling figure this drowned wife, with her staring, fish-like eyes! She revenges herself on the living in the haunted brain of her wretched husband, and she exasperates Rebekka, slowly wearing away her opposition until the doleful catastrophe. There is something both Greek and Gothic in this spectral fury, this disquieting Ligeia of the mill-dam.
We find the old hero and heroine obsessed by fate, replaced by this neurasthenic pair. The antique convention is altered, ancient values depreciated. A hero is no longer interesting or heroic; the heroine, a criminal, is no longer sympathetic. Yet we are enthralled by this spectacle; for if cultivated man disdains the crude dramatic pictures of lust and cruelty admired of his ancestors, he, nevertheless, hankers after tragedy. And it is for the modern that Ibsen has devised a tragic, ironic drama of the soul. In doing this the dramatist is the slave of his own epoch, for, to quote Goethe again, a genius is in touch with his century only by virtue of his defects; he, too, must be an accomplice of his times.
Brandes has quoted Kierkegaard in relation to Ibsen's position: "Let others complain of this age as being wicked. I complain of it as being contemptible, for it is devoid of passion. Men's thoughts are thin and frail as lace, they themselves are the weakling lace-makers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful." Browning has expressed the same sentiment in his poem, The Statue and the Bust; Ibsen transformed it into drama. His men are dreamers, his women devils; both stop short of the great renunciation or the great revolt. It is the realization of his failure that drives Rosmer and Rebekka with him to death. As her strength of will once dominated him, so his weakness ultimately overmasters her. She is a woman after all, a woman in whom instinct has cried so imperiously that it wrecks her soul. A fiddle may be mended, says Peer Gynt, but a bell, never! A cracked bell might be the symbol of this extraordinary drama.
Rosmersholm has a planetary moral, and not a theologic one. And the moral law cannot be transcended, he teaches in his elliptical style. He is in the uttermost analysis an optimist.
Those self-indulgent weaklings who seek in Ibsen's dramas for confirmation of their mediocre ideals will be sadly mistaken. Ibsen, if he teaches anything, teaches that the ego is a source of danger. It is in the delicate relations of the sexes that he reveals himself the sympathetic poet and healer. And what greater tragedy on earth is there than an unhappy marriage? Ever the moral idea is the motive of his plays, the one overarching idea of our universe: man's duty to himself, man's duty to his neighbour! That has been the chief concern of all the great dramatists, and to its problems this poet-psychologist has added his burden of the discussion.
In Rosmersholm we see how the self-deceptions of the man and woman who disregarded the natural law and worldly wisdom ruined their lives.
Dr. Wicksteed concludes that "the strength and weakness of Ibsen's much-discussed treatment of marriage lie in the fact that he does not deal with it as marriage at all, but as the most striking instance of the ever recurrent problem of social life, the problem that we may hide in other cases, but must face here, the problem of combining freedom with permanence and loyalty, of combining self-surrender with self-realization."
Faguet scores Brandes for denying that Ibsen alone among dramatists has used the symbol in a peculiarly poetic manner, proving that if Ibsen is a realist he is also a psychologist, who with his lantern illuminates the recesses of the soul. "For example," writes M. Faguet, "in Rosmersholm, northern nature in its entirety, with its savageness, its immense expanse of space, its broad horizons, its lofty heavens, is the symbol, to my mind, of the moral liberty to which aspire several characters of the play, as, indeed, do half of Ibsen's characters." Finally, the symbol is above all a means for the dramatic poet to give full expression to the poetry in his soul ... in Ibsen it is essentially a direct product of the author's poetic faculty.... "Up to the present time Ibsen is the only dramatic poet to write symbolical dramas, that is to say, dramas into which a symbol is introduced occasionally by way of explanation or commentary, or as an element of beauty." The symbol, then, is not a sign of a weakened imagination, as some bigoted "psychiatrists" would have us believe.
And the interpretation of Rosmersholm! Not a half-dozen actresses on the globe have grasped the complex skeins of Rebekka West's character, and grasping them have been able to send across the footlights the shivering music of her soul. Thus far Scandinavian women have best interpreted her to the satisfaction of the poet. The Italians are too tragic, the French too histrionically brilliant; it is a new virtuosity, a new fingering of the dramatic keyboard, that is demanded.
XII
THE LADY FROM THE SEA
(1888)
Told with infinite technical skill, displayed on a canvas, the tints of which modulate from dull copper to the vague mistiness of a summer sea, this mermaid allegory of Ibsen had a charm that has almost vanished in the translation and vanishes still more at a performance. Ellida Wangel, The Lady from the Sea, is the second wife of Dr. Wangel, a sensible, healthy bourgeois. She is jealous of his dead wife, she is a neurotic creature given to reverie and easily impressed by the strange, the far-away, the poetry of distance. In a mood of fantastic excitement she once betrothed herself to a stranger, a sailor on an American ship. He comes back to claim her, and so perfectly adjusted are the atmospheric conditions of the drama, that we believe she should leave her home and go away with this slightly supernatural and old-time romantic figure.
In a stirring interview Ellida lets out the truths about her married life to the perplexed Wangel—who is a sort of elder brother to Helmer, though kinder of heart. "You bought me," she cries, her bosom overcharged with the truth. It is the truth, but then, who cares co face domestic truth? The worthy doctor is sadly taken aback. He had married Ellida because his children needed a mother; he had—and "you bought me all the same," is the cutting response. It is so. The man sees the case from a different angle, and listens to her story of the stranger. She will go when he returns, she says. He does return. He does claim her; and in the garden scene at the end we see a situation not unlike that last act of Candida. The stranger bids Ellida prepare for departure. Wangel, who knows women better than it would appear, tells her to go. "Now you can choose in freedom and your own responsibility." The woman wavers and finally sends the sailor about his business. The problem has been solved. Ellida can go to her husband of her own free will.
Wicksteed's comment is refreshing. "The mere freedom of choice in which Ellida Wangel and Nora Helmer lay such stress is but a condition, not a principle of healthy life.... Without the spirit of self-surrender free choice will never secure self-realization." This lady of the light-house—Ellida was brought up in one—has two stepdaughters, the eldest of whom contracts a loveless marriage, as does Svanhild in The Comedy of Love, for the sake of a comfortable home. This parallelism in the sub-plot is a favourite device of Ibsen—as though the children mimicked the parents. The younger daughter later becomes the celebrated Hilda Wangel who charms Master Builder Solness to his glory and ruin. There is little in her here that gives evidence of such potentialities. She is rather pert, wild, and self-conscious. The men of the play are all excellently sketched. The Lady of the Sea, too, presents, in a hazy symbol, the old lesson of individuality and free choice. But the parable has never been so poetically uttered except in Brand.
It is pleasant to record the impressions of a performance of this play at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, September 30, 1904. Director Otto Brahm has long been a noted Ibsenite, his brochure familiar to all students of the Scandinavian master. Ibsen, in German, plays decidedly smoother, with more sonority and an abundance of the much-decried "atmosphere." The stage settings, as is usual at this artistic playhouse, were beautiful. Yet one felt the danger of transferring to the boards such an imaginative idea. In the hands of Agnes Sorma the difficult rôle of Ellida would not have suffered. Irene Triesch, despite her unequivocal sincerity, is not temperamentally suited to the part. A mermaid who is given to morbid reveries and a fierce buccaneer-like stranger hardly convince us in this miracle-hating age. Each time the sailor appeared with his big cloak and melodramatic hat I expected to hear the theme of the Flying Dutchman intoned by an invisible orchestra. The human half of the story is more credible. Boletta and Hilda are real flesh and blood, while the tutor Arnholm, impersonated by that excellent character-actor, Emmanuel Reicher, was as big a bore as Ibsen probably intended him to be. The Lady from the Sea is an attempt to capture a mood in which Maeterlinck might have been more successful.
XIII
HEDDA GABLER
(1890)
Hedda Gabler is a great play, great despite its unpleasant theme, and also remarkable, inasmuch as its subject-matter is essentially undramatic—"the picture not of an action but of a condition," as Henry James puts it. The Norwegian poet usually begins to develop his drama where other writers end theirs. Yet so wonderful is his art that we are treated to no long explanations, no retrospective speeches; indeed, the text of an Ibsen play is little more than a series of memoranda for the players. Cuvier-like, the actor must reconstruct a living human from a mere bone of a word. These words seem detached, seem meaningless, yet in action their cohesiveness is unique; dialogue melts into dialogue, action is dovetailed to action, and fleeting gestures reveal a state of soul. Ibsen does not read as well as he acts. He is extremely difficult to interpret for the reason that the old technic of the actor is inadequate, as Bernard Shaw long ago declared.
One merit of the piece is its absence of literary flavour. It is a slice of life. In his prose dramas, Ibsen throws overboard the entire baggage of "literary" effects. He who had worked so successfully in the field of the poetic legendary and historic drama; who had fashioned that mighty trilogy Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, saw that a newer rubric must be found for the delineation of modern men and women, of modern problems. So style is absent in his later plays—style in the rhetorical sense. Revolutionist as he is, he is nevertheless a formalist of the old school in his adherence to the classic unities. In Hedda Gabler the action is compressed within a space of about thirty-six hours, in one room, and with a handful of persons. One is tempted to say that the principal action occurs before the play or "off" the stage during its progress. We may see that Hedda does little throughout. Yet, through some magical impartment of the dramatist, we seem to be in possession of the characteristic facts of her nature before she arrives on the scene. Concision does not alone explain this, it may be noticed in other plays of the Norwegian. It is the dramaturgic gift raised to its highest power, though that power be expended upon base metal. Why Ibsen preferred a Hedda to an Isolde is a question that would lead us into devious paths.
In Hedda Gabler all lyricism is sternly suppressed. As if the master had determined to punish himself for his championing of individualism in his earlier plays, he draws the portrait of one who might easily figure as a Nietzschean Super-Woman. Preaching that the state is the foe of the individual, that only revolution—spiritual revolution—can regenerate society, that the superior man and woman are lonely, that individual liberty must be fought for at all hazards,—liberty of thought, speech, action,—Ibsen then deliberately shows the free woman, one emancipated from the beliefs of her family circle and her country. She epitomizes the latter-day anti-social being and is rightfully considered by psychologists as a flaming sign of the times, a brief for the social democrats.
With remorseless logic and an implacable analysis Ibsen discovers to our gaze this bare soul. We see Hedda at school, a discontented, restless girl, envious of her companions, conscious of her own superiority, mental and physical, cruel and overbearing. Little, timid Thea Rysing, with the crown of white-gold hair, wavy, copious, excites anger in the breast of the badly balanced Hedda. She pulls the hair and would delight to see it burn. After all, is she not General Gabler's daughter, an aristocrat, though a poor one! She goes into society and has admirers. Few attract her. They are either too stupid or not rich enough. In this dangerous predicament, jelly-like and drifting, she encounters Eiljert Lövborg, a young man of genius—at least Ibsen says he is; he has certainly the temperament of erratic genius, though at no time does he betray the possession of higher gifts. Yet an interesting man, a romancing idealist, a deceiver of himself as well as of the women before whom he masquerades and poses in the rôle of the misunderstood and persecuted. He is first cousin to Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, one of those egotists of the self-pitying, elegiac kind who weeps when he regards in the mirror his own sentimental features.
Despite her hardness, vanity, selfishness, Hedda is taken in by this clever fellow. Like Emma Bovary (though socially more elevated) she is at heart an incorrigible romantic and very snobbish. Modish elegance is her notion of the universe, and a saddle horse with a man in livery discreetly following her as she dashes through the crowded park represents to her the top notch of mundane happiness. Lövborg is a born liar. He has personal address, is undoubtedly a man of brains, and dissipated as he is manages to surround his loose living with the halo of Byronism. His debauches, he believes, are the result of a finely strung nature in conflict with a prosaic world. Hedda sympathizes with this view. She does more. She becomes morbidly interested in his doings and asks imprudent questions which the man rightfully construes as evidences of desire for the life he describes. He makes his first error. It is Hedda's opportunity and she avails herself of it. Naturally theatric, she seizes her father's pistol—there is a brace of old cavalry pistols which play an important rôle throughout—and threatens Lövborg. He leaves her and pretends that he is going to the dogs, but in reality quits the city and takes a position in a country family, there to find a more credulous victim, Thea, now the wife of Sheriff Elvsted.
Remember that these experiences are not shown on the stage. Deftly conveyed by the dramatic stenography of Ibsen, the audience absorb the facts almost unconsciously; and when the curtain falls on Act II, we seem to have known the Gablers, Tesmans, Lövborg, and Thea for years. And all the time Ibsen is not overstepping the traditional territory of the drama; his Lövborg and Hedda, his Thea and George, his Brack—are they not, in their relative position, stock figures for any classic comedy? George Tesman is own brother to Georges Dandin and twin to Charles Bovary. He belongs to that large army of husbands called by Balzac "the predestined." His beard, eyes, nose,—above all his nose,—speech, gait, clothes, are they not so many stigmata of the man whose wife will deceive him? The beauty of the situation is that Hedda does not betray George, and yet she seems more criminal than the timid Thea, who boldly deserts her old husband to follow the scapegrace Lövborg. Hedda is the woman on the brink, the adulteress in thought, the eternal type of one whose will is weakened by egoism. Her soul, its roots nurtured in rank soil, has expanded secretly into a monstrous growth. Her whole life has been one of concealment. She has lied, presumably, in her girlhood, as she lies in the married state. She is never happy except when teasing a man. Laura Marholm paints her portrait as the détraquée: "Her wanton curiosity, her constant longing, inflame the decadent and appeal directly to his sensuality; but her cowardice and disinclination to satisfaction drive her forever from attack to flight, and no sooner has she retreated than she stretches forth her antennas and gropes for him again. To see man feverish—that is what she lives upon; if she cannot have this atmosphere about her, she becomes sallow, hollow-cheeked, and hysteric."
Here is Hedda Gabler sketched in a few words. A cold heart, a cool head, curious but not sensual, combined with a cowardly fear of the conventions—a snobbish tribute to virtues in which she does not believe—these sent Hedda Gabler to her destruction, to that Button-moulder who fashions anew the souls of the useless in his cosmic dust-heap. She went through her life with the chip of chastity on her shoulder; yet dare a man approach her and she is in the throes of mock virtue. She made Lövborg feel this. Brack, with the measuring eye of a worldly man, was not deceived by her tantrums; he saw the essential baseness of the creature.
Hedda stands for a certain order of her sex—not the "strong-minded" or "advanced"—that is, happily, in the minority. In Ibsen's judgment she is doomed to failure because she did not dare far enough. She feared to sin, not because of scrupulosity, but because of the world's opinion. If she ever allowed tender feelings to usurp the hard image of herself enthroned in her soul, they were for Lövborg. He struck in her a depraved chord of feeling. Both loved pleasure. Both took the seeming for actuality. If there is one thing that discredits Lövborg's claim as a man of genius, it is his worship of trivial things. The scholar, the philosopher, the poet, seek pleasure, seek the gratification of the senses; but Lövborg's attitude is too base. He is worthy of Hedda's admiration, and Hedda's only.
With his incomparable irony Ibsen gives the victory to the weak, to the stupid. We may foresee the future of George and Thea when the shock of battle has passed. Both, dull persons, plodding, painstaking, absolutely devoid of humour, settle down to a peaceful existence over the "great" work of the dead Lövborg. It is all piteous, all hopelessly banal—and it is also daily life to its central core.