To assert that Hedda's acts were alone the result of her condition would be to place the drama within the category of the pathologic. Rather is the point made that, despite her approaching motherhood, Hedda's manifest disgust at any reference to it is a sign of her deep-seated depravity. She loathes children, especially a child of Tesman. She is too selfish to enter, even imaginatively, into the joys of maternity. Ibsen notes this when he puts into George's mouth the silly speech about young wives and the burning of the manuscript. Hedda is, on the contrary, less hysterical and more self-contained after marriage than before. Nothing could be more damnably cold-blooded than her deliberate manipulation of Lövborg's vain nature. Only at the grate as she burns the manuscript and in the outburst of wild music preceding her suicide are the demoniac forces of her nature unloosed.
The former act is, nevertheless, controlled by a slow, cautious hate, and the latter occurs off the stage; the pistol shot is the final punctuation mark to this destructive, restless existence. No, Ibsen aimed at something more profound than exhibition of maternal hysteria. The causes of Hedda's behaviour dated back to her girlhood. She was perverse, how perverse we see in her shameless confession that she had led George to an avowal simply because she wanted the comfortable Falk villa for a residence. Her revolt against life was bounded by her petty appetites, nothing more; and for this reason she is an invaluable "human document."
Removed from her cramping environments Hedda would have developed along more normal lines; and herein lies the beauty of Ibsen's problem, Ibsen who always asks questions—like Rembrandt in his Night Watch with its mystic daylight. Hedda might have become an actress or a circus rider, anything less evil than her position as the trouble-breeding wife of Tesman. By enclosing her within the Tesman walls, surrounding her with stupid and dissipated people, she was driven in upon herself, and passing from one mood of exasperation to another she finally became shipwrecked. As Allan Monkhouse writes, "Hedda Gabler is a personification of ennui, a daring effort of imagination, a great piece of construction, a study of essentials with all accidental human element omitted, a work indeed not of realism, though surrounded by realistic details, but belonging rather to such ideal art as the Melancholia of Albert Dürer." Mr. Monkhouse could have quoted La Bruyère about "opposition truths that illuminate one another," Hedda Gabler is one of those "opposition truths" that illuminate an entire section of her sex.
Technically, Ibsen has not surpassed himself in this work. Never has he woven his patterns so densely—the pattern of character and the pattern of action. As in a dream we divine the past of the humans he sets strutting before us, and we leave the theatre as if obsessed by an ugly nightmare. Those who condemn the characters are compelled perforce to admire the cunning workmanship, and no greater error can be committed than supposing the two may be disentangled. Study carefully the play, study carefully its performance, and then despair at separating the characterization from the purely formal elements. Here matter and manner are merged perfectly. We note a few symbolic catchwords, such as "vine leaves," but they serve their spiritual as well as their technical purpose. The pistols, too, are cunningly prepared agents of ruin. We also wonder why George is such a blind fool; why Thea so soon consoles herself, with Lövborg's body still warm; why Lövborg, who despises Tesman, should be anxious to show him his new work. But, to quote Mr. James again: "There are many things in the world that are past finding out, and one of them is whether the subject of a work had not better have been another subject. We shall always do well to leave that matter to the author; he may have some secret for solving the riddle, so terrible would his revenge easily become if he were to accept a responsibility for his theme." And further: "The 'use' of Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others, and that even her most disagreeable qualities have the privilege, thoroughly undeserved doubtless, but equally irresistible, of becoming a part of the history of others. And then one isn't so sure that she is wicked, and by no means sure that she is disagreeable. She is various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen different interpretations, to the importunity of our suspense...."
This seems to be a final judgment—if judgments of Ibsen can be final—upon a woman, who, all said, is human enough to suffer, suffer principally because she feared to sin. She is not a caricature of the "modern" woman. If she had become conscious of the claims of others, in a word the modern, unselfish, emancipated woman, her life would have been different—and the theatre deprived of a most fascinating and enigmatic figure, with her pallid skin, her haunting gray eyes, her sweet, studied languor, and her delicate air of one to whom life owes its richest gifts.
Dr. Wicksteed, in his admirable lectures on Ibsen, remarks: "I am convinced that it is in this typical significance of marriage, and not in any special interest in the so-called woman question as such, that we are to seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this theme. Suppress individuality and you have no life; assert it, and you have war and chaos.... Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was forced into marriage, but she deliberately and shamelessly paid the flattered and delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for opening to her a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and entry into the best career she could still think of as possible, and we see the result. Without the spirit of self-surrender, free choice will never secure self-realization."
Her death, sought because of cowardly reasons, is yet the one real fact in Hedda's shallow, feverish existence. Death could alone solve the discords of her life's cruel music.
(1892)
The doctor of the madhouse at Cairo, in which Peer Gynt crowns himself Emperor of Himself, said of his "patients": "Each one shuts himself up in the cask of self, plunges down deep in the ferment of self. He's hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the well of self. None has a tear for another's woes, none has a sense for another's ideas. Ourselves—that's what we are in thought and in speech; ourselves to the outmost plank of the springboard."
Such a sealed soul was that of Halvard Solness before Hilda Wangel knocked at his door to demand of him the fulfilment of his promise. Ten years earlier he had promised to make her a princess. She was then a child and had excitedly waved a flag when she saw Solness in the pride of his manhood, the greatest of the architects, climb to the top of the scaffolding that surrounded the newly completed church and hang a wreath on the weather-vane. Her enthusiasm had pleased the artist, and a kiss was given with the promise. Her knock is as revolutionary as the open door of Nora's house of dolls. As Hilda enters she brings with her brilliant young womanhood, the fresh breeze of the new century. It was needed in the unhappy Solness household.
Halvard lost his former home through a fire; it was the beginning of his luck in life and also the date of his unhappiness. His children died soon after the affair, and his wife's mind became morbid over the loss.
"Is it not frightful," he tells Hilda, "that I must now go about and reckon it up, pay for it?—not with money, but with human happiness. And not merely my own; with that of others, too. Do you see that, Hilda? That is what my artistic success has cost me—and others. And every livelong day I must go about and see the price paid for me anew. Again, and again, and still again."
Several fixed ideas haunt this man's brain. He has become moody, even surly, because he suspects the younger generation of treason to him. As he supplanted old Brovik, the broken-down architect in his employ, so he fears that the son, Knut Brovik, will supplant him. He has, being a man loved by women, won power over Knut's betrothed. He believes that he has the rare gift of willing a thing, a telepathic power. He is not mad but overwrought, and Hilda's visit is in the nature of a rescue. She is the fairy princess who is to rescue him from the evil Ego, in which he is imprisoned as if in an ogre's cage.
Georg Brandes writes of The Master Builder: "It gives at one and the same time a sense of enthralment and a sense of deliverance. This is a play that echoes and reëchoes in our minds long after we have read it.... Great is its art, profound and rich in its symbolic language.... Ibsen's intention has been to give us by means of real characters, but in half-allegorical form, the tragedy of a great artist who has passed the prime of life."
And as the Danish critic aptly remarks, in his—Ibsen's—case, "Realism and symbolism have thriven very well together for more than a score of years. The contrasts in his nature incline him at once to fidelity, to fact, and to mysticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling naïveté of the dialogue, externally so simple that it delights children. Symbolic figures are employed throughout, with repetitions of motives as in a symphonic composition. These buttress up a structure that might otherwise dissolve in fantastic smoke, so aerial is its thesis.
The various acts are mainly composed of a duologue between Hilda and Halvard. Gradually she obtains by her terrible intensity and child-like belief in him complete control of his self-absorbed will. She drives him to sign a letter of praise for the youthful architect, Knut, his possible rival; she sends the other girl away; she is kind to Aline, the unhappy wife. Hilda is, as Ibsen said, a reversed Hedda Gabler. She has much of Rebekka West in her, with added youth and a nature buoyant enough to triumph over the Solness ideals, just as she would have compelled Rosmersholm to go down into the world and ennoble men. She discovers Solness's intention to build no more, to climb no more to the top of high turrets. It pains her to think that her part, her master builder, the incarnation of her maidenly dreams, dares no longer mount in company with his ideals. He will build no more churches, only houses for human beings. There may be a castle in the air where he will find his happiness—with Hilda.
"I'm afraid you would turn dizzy before we got halfway up," she says.
"Not if I can mount in hand with you, Hilda," he replies.
"Then let me see you stand free and high up." But alone, he must mount to the top of the new tower. She urges him after the manner of Peter Skule in The Pretenders, as did Rebekka in Rosmersholm. She will not stand between Aline and Halvard, for she now knows Aline. Otherwise her moral life is as free as Nietzsche's. So Solness marches up the scaffolding, up the ladder to the very pinnacle, forgetting that life has but one pinnacle to scale, and never a second. Her ecstasy as she watches him reach the top, be once more the old genius, his real self, Halvard Solness, that she cheers him and—he falls. Unconscious that he is dead, apparently not caring for the woe brought to this house, Hilda calls out until the curtain hides her from view:—?
"My—my master builder!" And he is really hers, for she has created his soul anew. That is the meaning of this difficult and lovely fable,—though he fell to his death, Solness once more stood alone on the heights.
Maurice Maeterlinck has written most clearly on the theme of this play.
"Some time ago," he says in The Treasure of the Humble (translated by Alfred Sutro), "when dealing with The Master Builder, which is the one of Ibsen's dramas wherein the dialogue of the second degree attains the deepest tragedy, I endeavoured, unskilfully enough, to fit its secrets.... 'What is it,' I asked, 'what is it that, in The Master Builder, the poet has added to life, thereby making it appear so strange, so profound, so disquieting, beneath its trivial surface? The discovery is not easy, and the old master hides from us more than one secret. It would even seem as though what he has wished to say were but little by the side of what he has been compelled to say. He has freed certain powers of the soul that have never yet been free, and it may be that these have held him in thrall.'
"'Look you, Hilda,' exclaims Solness, 'look you! There is sorcery in you, too, as there is in me. It is this sorcery that imposes action on the powers of the beyond. And we have to yield to it. Whether we want to or not, we must. There is sorcery in them as in us all.' Hilda and Solness are, I believe, the first characters in drama who feel, for an instant, that they are living in the atmosphere of the soul; and the discovery of this essential life that exists in them, beyond the life of every day, comes fraught with terror. Hilda and Solness are two souls to whom a flash has revealed their situation in the true life.... Their conversation resembles nothing that we have ever heard, inasmuch as the poet has endeavoured to blend in one expression both the inner and outer dialogue. A new, indescribable power dominates this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the sources of an unknown life."
A true interior drama then is The Master Builder, full of the overtones, the harmonies, of mundane existence. Never has Ibsen's art been so clairvoyant.
(1894)
Little Eyolf is a moving drama of resignation. It does not sparkle with the gem-like brilliancy of Hedda Gabler, it is not so swiftly dramatic, nor has it the sombre power of Ghosts, nor yet the intimacy of A Doll's House; but it is profoundly pathetic, and the means employed by Ibsen to produce his greatest effects are simple in the extreme.
The story is this: Alfred Allmers has married a girl with "gold and green forests"; Rita is her name. They have one child, Eyolf, a sweet little boy, but lame from a fall. The sister of Allmers is named Asta. She has the true savour of the Ibsen woman. She visits the Allmers at their country home. Alfred has just come back from an excursion of six weeks in the mountains, a lonely, self-imposed tour. He is a delicate young man of lofty ideals, not as yet realized in his work. There is something incomplete about him. He reminds one a trifle of Hedda Gabler's husband, but while he is about as talented he is not quite so dense. He has a life work, a volume to be written, which he calls Human Responsibility. But he is a dreamer and has done little with it. He is wrapped up in his boy and dedicates his life to him. In Little Eyolf shall happily blossom all the painful buds of his own impotent ambitions Alfred Allmers has the vision, but not the voice. He is a type.
But his wife, a full-blooded, impetuous woman, feels that she is being denied her rights through this absorbing passion of the father for his son. Her nature hungers for more than child love. She loves her husband fiercely and fails to understand his coolness. Then what Ibsen calls a Rat-Wife appears. The Rat-Wife is only a woman with a dog that goes about catching and killing rats. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she plays upon a little pipe and the rats follow her to the water and are drowned. "Just because they want not to—because they're so deadly afraid of the water—that's why they've got to plunge into it," says this horrid old bel-dame of the naughty perverse rodents. She has lured other game—human game—in her early days, and Little Eyolf is transfixed by her glittering eye, as Coleridge hath it.
He follows her music as far as the water and is drowned. The act is vital and searching in its analysis of character. With a few powerful strokes we get Rita, Asta, Alfred, the Rat-Wife; and the poor lame chap, with his hankering after a soldier's life, is very sad.
The contention between Alfred and Rita, husband and wife, in the next act, goes to the very springs of their souls. We learn that Rita is jealous of her little boy—the dead, drowned boy, whose open, upturned, and staring eyes haunt her. Alfred upbraids her for her neglect of the child, and declares that he would be alive if it were not for her carelessness. Being lame he was not taught to swim like other lads, and the lameness was caused by a fall from a table. Rita had left him asleep on the table, safe as she thought, and then the accident occurred. The husband protests in a low voice that he too forgot, "You, you, you, lured me to you—I forgot the child—in your arms."
The two lay bare their very thoughts. Alfred has really never loved Rita. Her gold and green forests and her beauty led him to marry her. His craze for the boy further removed him from his wife, and his intellectual life was not conducive to perfect sympathy. He wished his lad to be a prodigy. He meant him to do in the world all the father had not. The scene is a poignant one. The mother, very human woman of considerable temperament, is almost broken-hearted at the double loss. The child's death was a blow, but her husband's dislike drives her frantic. The child, young as he was, had repelled her. She felt barred from the wealth of love that flourished between father and child. She resented it. She resented the child's love for Asta, for Asta proves to be a very formidable factor in the play. She is jealous of everybody.
Alfred Allmers is just a bit of a prig, self-conscious like most people with a self-imposed mission in life, and doubtless possessing in full measure the scholar's peevishness. The sister Asta is a woman with an awful secret. She can give her suitor Borgheim no hopes. She loves her brother's child to distraction, and she knows of her mother's dishonour. To Rita she is not altogether sympathetic. She takes from her Eyolf's love, the love he should have bestowed on his mother, and she is evidently held in high intellectual favour by her husband. Naturally Rita, who has lifted up both the Allmers by her wealth, feels all this. She confesses it, too, to her husband. He has become morbid, unmanned, hysterical, since the accident. All his hopes are dashed to earth and shattered. He conceives a horrible fear for his wife. The interview is a prolonged one and intensely painful. It is written with supreme art and conveys volumes in half-uttered sentences. There are no really long speeches, the dialogue being crisp, and while the action is not rapid, three lives' histories are told with consummate art and unabated vigour.
Asta has then a scene with her brother. She tells him that she is not his sister; her mother was not all she should have been to his father. Brother and sister face each other, and their parting at the end of the act is another of those strangely affecting climaxes Ibsen builds so well. There is never shown a hint of warmer feelings between the two than their supposed relationship warrants. Eyolf, Eyolf! it is always the spirit of the child that directs the doings of this strange yet ordinary group of human beings.
Allmers later suggests suicide to his wife, and the awful contingency is discussed. The tone of Little Eyolf is distinctly optimistic. Hope is preached on every page. Alfred and Rita clasp hands and take up their life work as it lies before them in the squalid village that belongs to them. Asta goes away with Borgheim, leaving a flavour of the mystic behind her. She is a true Ibsen girl. Little Eyolf is the lodestar of Allmers ever after. The play seems on its surface to be a powerful preachment against dilettanteism. Writing a book about Human Responsibility is all well enough, but out in the thick of the fight is a man's place. Assume the responsibilities of common humanity. Do not talk about them. The relations of parents to children are fully exploited, and the lesson read is that parents owe much to each other, quite as much as to their children.
Ibsen has girded at the conventionalities of the marriage relation in other plays. This is his Kreutzer Sonata. He shows the selfishness of a parent's love. Rita and Alfred confess that they never truly understood Eyolf, for they never knew each other. It is a profound character study. Ibsen was writing for another theatre—the theatre of the twentieth century. He has, like Maeterlinck, abjured the drama of poison, mystery, conflict, violence, aye, even the drama of heroism. He is a sorcerer who reveals to us the commonplace of life in other symbols. We are surrounded by mystery. Life at its lowest term is a profound mystery. Science may tabu late, but the poet draws aside the veil.
To dip below the surface of Ibsen's lines is never a grateful task, especially if the dramatic idea is first taken into consideration. Psychology must play the principal rôle in any estimate of Little Eyolf as a play pure and simple. Language is symbolic, though with Ibsen the single word is never as important as it is with Maeterlinck. So we find little of that dripping repetition, that haunting reiteration which the Belgian writer may have borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe. The ellipsis in Ibsen is cunningly contrived, he subtly foreshadows coming events, but never by the Word Beautiful. Little Eyolf depicts the tyranny of passion.
(1896)
There is in John Gabriel Borkman logical, well-knit construction. There is an unflinching criticism of life—the attitude of a man who began life as a poet and ends it as a realist; there is a strange power, unpleasant power, a meagre intensity, yet unquestionable intensity, and a genius for character-drawing and development of character that is just short of the marvellous. That Ibsen has chosen his characters from the world about him—a provincial, narrow, hard, cold world,—is a commentary on his truthfulness, on his adherence to realistic principles. The curious part of this is the resemblance his bourgeois people bear to the bourgeois of nearly every civilized country.
John Gabriel Borkman is a play of great power, of a frugal, constructive beauty, and in it from first to last there sounds faintly but distinctly an antique note. There is also something of a Hamlet situation in the position of the young man who might have won back his father's kingdom, but quite like a modern Hamlet solved the knotty problem by going away to Paris; any place, far away from the bleak northern world where lived in a gloomy house his father, an ex-convict, his mother, a soured fanatic, and his aunt, an old maid and an idealist.
John Gabriel Borkman, thirteen years previous to the opening of the play, had been a gigantic speculator. All Norway, all the world, would have been at his feet if he had not failed at the moment when success seemed assured. By his downfall hundreds were enmeshed in ruin, and the man went to prison for five years, leaving behind a heartbroken wife and a young son. This boy, Erhart, was taken away and raised by a rich aunt, but is now at home, where he has lived for eight years when the curtain rises.
Mrs. Borkman is discovered in her old-fashioned drawing-room, in the house saved out of the wreckage by her twin sister, Ella Rentheim. She is longing for the return of her son Erhart, in whom she discerns the saviour of the family. Her sister enters, and in his own remarkable, sharp way Ibsen lets us witness the spiritual tragedy in the lives of the pair. They both love Erhart, as formerly Ella had loved his father, John Gabriel Borkman. The women hate each other, and their duel is fought out in half-uttered sentences, pregnant pauses, and deadly glances. It is the perfection of dialogue-writing and clear exposition. You catch dim perspectives of the past, the treachery of the husband of Mrs. Borkman, and of darker depths which are later explored. The mother—oh, such a pitiful, harsh, sorrowful, repellent mother, nursing her injuries until they become hissing vipers in her bosom—defies her sister to win away the love of her son, that son she has dedicated to the mission of rehabilitating the fortunes and good name of the Borkmans. With cutting humility she acknowledges that she eats the bread of her sister's charity, and then they hear footsteps. Is it Erhart returning? No; it is some one up in the long gallery overhead! It is the ex-convict, ex-banker, and swindler, John Gabriel Borkman, who has never left the house since his release eight years before. Mrs. Borkman cries:—
"It sometimes seems more than I can endure—always to hear him up there walking, walking. From the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night. And one hears every step so plainly! I have often felt as if I had a sick wolf up there, prowling up and down in a cage. Right over my head, too! Listen! there he goes. Up and down, up and down, the wolf is prowling."
Then Erhart, a lively young man of about twenty-three, enters, welcomes his aunt affectionately, his mother carelessly. With him is a Mrs. Wilton, a beautiful young woman, whose husband has deserted her. The pair are in love, although the mother does not quite see it. Mrs. Wilton wishes Erhart to go with her to a neighbor's house, a Mr. Hinkle's, but his duty is at home and she leaves him, the air being promise-crammed with tantalizing hopes of pleasure and caprice. The young man soon tires of the bickerings about him, and after declaring that his aunt should be in bed after her long journey, leaves his mother alone, and as the curtain falls she exclaims: "Erhart, Erhart, be true to me! Oh, come home and help your mother! For I can bear this life no longer."
Her mother's heart tells her that her boy is being drawn away from her, drawn by some force she cannot analyze.
In Act II we get a picture of the "sick wolf up there," John Gabriel Borkman himself. He is one of Ibsen's most veracious portraits. He clings with unshaken obstinacy to the belief that he only sinned against himself, that if he had been given time, that if he had not been betrayed by a false friend, he would have pulled through. All these facts are deftly brought out by conversation with the half-pathetic, half-ludicrous figure of an humble bank clerk, the only one of Borkman's friends who has clung to him in his reverses, although Borkman has swept away his poor earnings. The contrast of the pair—Borkman, almost satanic in his pride and his belief that he will eventually regain his position in society, and the feeble aspirations of the poor clerk, who is a poetaster—is wonderfully managed. There is a quarrel, and Borkman is left to his gloomy thoughts, and then Ella Rentheim comes in and one of the most powerful situations of the play ensues.
It has developed that Borkman has always loved Ella, but gave her up and married her sister because an influential man who could advance his interests was also in love with Ella. This man, not being able to marry her, betrayed Borkman and his schemes. His name is Hinkle, and at his very house that night, near Christiania (the scene of the play), Erhart Borkman is enjoying himself with Mrs. Wilton and not caring a rap for his sick-souled father, mother, and aunt.
When Borkman finally acknowledges to Ella that in his lust for power he has sacrificed his love of her, and has sacrificed it uselessly, she turns on him and cries "Criminal!" She goes on:—
"You are a murderer and you have committed the one mortal sin.... You have killed the love life in me. Do you understand what that means? The Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love life in a human soul.... You have done that. I have never rightfully understood until this evening what has really happened to me. That you deserted me and turned to Gunhild instead—I took that to be mere common fickleness on your part, and the result of heartless scheming on hers. I almost think I despise you a little in spite of everything. But now I see it! You deserted the woman you loved! Me, me, me! What you held dearest in the world you were ready to barter away for gain. That is the double murder you have committed! The murder of your own soul and mine!"
And again, "You have cheated me of a mother's joy and happiness in life—and a mother's sorrows and tears as well."
Then Ella tells Borkman that sorrow and disease have broken her down, and she intends leaving her fortune to Erhart, the only one she loves; her spiritual son, but he must give up the name of Borkman and take that of Rentheim. Mrs. Borkman appears at this juncture, and there is another clash as the curtain falls on three wretched people.
Act III treads closely on the heels of the preceding one, for the action of the entire play takes place during one dull winter's evening; and if there is unity of time, unity of place, there is unity of character, for like some vast but closely knitted polyphonic composition, the piece contains not a line, not a character, that is wasted or undeveloped. It is as far as form simply magnificent; an object lesson to young dramatists. But as to its theme; ah, I, too, would be sorry to see our stage always filled with these crabbed, sour, mean, loveless, and sad-visaged people! Little wonder that joyous Erhart Borkman, the selfish son of a union barren of love, goes away in Act III, after a climax that simply cuts into your nerves. Father and mother—oh, the agony of that poor, old, weak, deserted woman—appeal to him, but with Mrs. Wilton and a young girl, a daughter of the old clerk, he goes out into the world to see life, to seek love, to enjoy, to enjoy, to enjoy! It is the new laughing at the despair of the old, and the curtain falls on a group that seems frozen with antique grief.
Of Act IV and Borkman's death—his soul had been dead since he went to prison—I shall say but little. The end is silver-tipped with symbolical hintings, but there is nothing dark or devious for even the commonest comprehension.
The spiritual director of the Théâtre de l'œuvre, M. Lugné-Poë, once wrote of Ibsen thus:—
"I do not know any one but M. August Ehrhard who has, with such painstaking erudition, disengaged Ibsen's thought from his principal works. And although the learned critic committed the great fault of never attempting one single time to assimilate the rugged thought of the great dramaturge, it must, nevertheless, be allowed his conclusions were happy. I may cite this phrase from the letter to Ibsen which terminates his volume, 'In truth you will renew the miracle of Sophocles—at eighty years of age you will give us a new Œdipus.'
"To-day that which Ehrhard prophesied is already three-quarters realized. Since Hedda Gabler, Ibsen has given us The Master Builder, that heroic drama of pride, and John Gabriel Borkman, the secular legend of the human chimera."
Even an indifferent performance which I saw at the Schiller Theatre, Berlin, could not quite destroy the impression of a wounded Titan struggling against fate. John Gabriel Borkman is a prodigious figure, a second Mercadet, but fashioned by a Balzac of the theatre.
(1899)
Mr. William Archer sees in this closing drama of the social series little else than a resuscitation of the characters and motives that have done duty in his earlier plays. It is true that there is much familiar music, that the themes have been treated in the previous works; nevertheless the variation is of enthralling interest. This epilogue is closely related to The Master Builder. Solness the architect is differentiated from Arnold Rubek, the sculptor in character; but both men are successful artists; both men have failed in the one achievement worth the while—love. As in Brand, Rubek goes to the snow-covered heights with his only love—Brand's was an ideal; Rubek's is a woman—and the avalanche sweeps both to eternity. The Deus caritatis, whose voice thunders in the ears of the dying Brand, is in the epilogue the voice of the sister of mercy who cries, Pax vobiscum, as Rubek and Irene are whirled away.
Ibsen, always disdainful of stage settings, evidently experienced a change of mind, for, following Richard Wagner's example, he makes some exceedingly severe demands upon the ingenuity of the stage manager, beginning with The Lady from the Sea and John Gabriel Borkman.
The story of When We Dead Awake is simplicity itself. Arnold Rubek is a famous sculptor, in middle years married to Maja, a young woman full of the joy of life. The union proves unhappy. She is frivolous; he is failing as an artist. Years before he had designed his masterwork, The Day of Resurrection, and his model was the most beautiful woman in the world. The artist conquered the man and he allowed Irene to leave him, though she adored him. With her departure his fount of inspiration dried up. He made portrait busts and revenged himself on the indifferent world by maliciously modelling resemblances to ignoble animals in the countenances of his sitters—the pig, the goat, the ape, the hawk, were faintly suggested. This very modern trait has been paralleled in the case of a celebrated painter of our times. Henry James, in his own faultless way, has told the story in The Liar.
As is the case with the Ibsen plays, this train of happenings leads up to the first act at a northern watering-place. Rubek and Maja tell each other the truth of their mutual boredom. Then Irene comes upon the scene, a sinister apparition. She is half mad and is watched by a sister of mercy. She encounters Rubek, and the story of her love, which led to insanity, comes out. He sees that his art has blinded him to his real happiness. Like Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Irene accuses him savagely of murdering her love life through neglect. Maja has gone off with Ulfheim, a savage brute of a hunter, and together Rubek and Irene seek to attain the heights. But the inexorable law of their being bars the way. Only once in a lifetime is it vouchsafed to a man or a woman to touch the tall stars, and so they perish, but not before Rubek has cast off his life lie.
Eduard Brandes, the brother of the better known Georg, himself a critic and dramatist, has uttered eloquent words about this drama:—
Unquestionably, there will be many objections made against this magnificent drama because the high-sounding prose at times may seem vulnerable to the attack of logical analysis. And it is quite certain that the objections will gather themselves into the pertinent question, Why did Henrik Ibsen show Irene as insane and why does he let Rubek, who is not insane, prefer the abnormal woman to the beautiful and sensible Maja?
To this may be answered, If Ibsen with such violence desired to emphasize that life in its entirety, even the most artistic, is to be counted as death, and that only the life of love is real love, to both Irene and Maja, then he was forced to employ the most drastic pictures of the kind of death that life without love assuredly is. Insanity, without a doubt, is both mental and physical death: though the insane may exist, yet humanity does not consider such existence—life.
Had not Irene stood there, so heartbroken, so ill in mind and evil, so desirous and yet so afraid, with the black shadow of cell and restraint in her wake, the lesson of the play would not be too plain, Without love—no life.
It is Irene, of course, who is the star character in the play. It is far from being the undecisive Rubek who not until the hour of his death understood the love which Irene offered him, which in Maja's case was confined to the customs of conventional marriage.
That Henrik Ibsen stands untouched by his weight of years, this drama will ere long announce to the entire world. It is quite true that the structure of the play cannot be analyzed on the spur of the moment. The construction embodies a stage setting which will enhance the worth of the drama. Almost with the identical progress which Irene and Rubek make toward the mountain top the acts unfold themselves lucidly and are entirely comprehensible. The more the psychological problem is studied the better will it be understood why Ibsen is called great.
When We Dead Awake is a master's work and a masterpiece. Like none other is Ibsen—so grand, so mystical, and yet so entirely in agreement with the organic make-up of humanity. From the peak of the mountain he speaks to us, aged as to years, youthful in deed and daring. There is but one ruler, says Henrik Ibsen: the great Eros, and the poet is his prophet!
When We Dead Awake ends the cycle of the noble prose dramas of Henrik Ibsen. Despite Mr. Archer's criticism the play shows little falling off in intensity, even if the motives are thrice familiar. To will greatly is the touchstone of life, to will when you know that you are hedged in by overmastering destiny; to dare, though you know that free will is one of life's darling illusions—that is success in life.
To thy own self be true,
said Shakespeare, and no one has said it with such tragic intensity since him as has Henrik Ibsen.
"It has been a veritable misfortune for Æsthetics that the word 'drama' has always been translated by 'action,'" wrote Nietzsche. "Wagner is not the only one who errs here; all the world is still in error about the matter; even the philologists ought to know better. The ancient drama had grand pathetic scenes in view; it first excluded action (relegated it previous to the commencement, or behind the scene). The word 'drama' is of Doric origin, and according to Dorian usage signifies 'event,' 'history,' both words in a hieratic sense. The oldest drama represented local legend, the 'sacred history,' on which the establishment of the cult rested (consequently no doing but a happening....)"
And elsewhere Nietzsche declares: "The affirmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and most severe problems, the will to live life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I call Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle understood it), but beyond terror and pity, to realize in fact the eternal delight of becoming—that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilation."
He also pictures the great tragic artist offering a draught of sweetest cruelty to heroic men. Readers interested should study Lessing in his Hamburg Dramaturgy, Schopenhauer's essay on Tragedy, and Nietzsche's valuable contribution to the discussion, his early work, The Birth of Tragedy. The latter extols the Dionysian spirit of the drama—its ecstasy and its triumphant affirmation of life the eternal. Walter Pater should be consulted on the same lofty theme.
In form the perfected Ibsen tragedy follows Sophocles: anterior to the rising of the curtain the various motives have developed and collided in the dark chamber of the dramatist's brain. They are then incarnated for the spectator as they near their catastrophe; thus the most rigid economy of effects is practised, the three unities preached by Boileau are set before us with unerring logic. It is all in a single picture, this dénouement of his character's silent years. The method has its drawbacks, yet there is no denying its intensity, which like the fiery garment of Nessus envelops the dramatist's unhappy men and women. Determinate as is the motivation of these dramas, there is allowed the interval for action that might be described by the tick of the pendulum,—diastole, systole, ebb, and flow. But within that tiny mental territory man is monarch of his acts; moreover, as Ernest Renan suggests, "What we call infinite time is, perhaps, a minute between two miracles." Man dances on the rope of the present between the past and the future, says Nietzsche; the spectacle, brief as it is, has been recorded by Ibsen. Renan, who anticipated Nietzsche by his proclamation that man should be virtuous for virtue's sake alone, without regard for rewards attendant upon its performance, has also written in his preface to Caliban (1878):—
"Man sees clearly at the hour which is striking that he will never know anything of the supreme cause of the universe, or of his own destiny. Nevertheless he wishes to be talked to about all that." And Ibsen has talked to us much about all these things, following Goethe's axiom that "no real circumstance is unpoetic so long as the poet knows how to use it." The theatre director in Faust remarks, "He who brings much, brings something to every one."
Octave Uzanne wrote, "People the orchestra and galleries of a theatre with a thousand Renans and a thousand Herbert Spencers, and the combination of these two thousand brains of genius will not produce aught but the soul of a concierge."
So much for the power of collectivity. This theme which Gustave Le Bon has treated in The Mob and The Psychology of the Peoples—literally a drag-net psychology—? may be found lucidly discussed in Mr. A. B. Walkley's Dramatic Criticism. The modern audience, he says, is no longer a great baby, like the mediæval one, but an intelligent adult. "On this crowd depends our future hopes of the stage."
With all the authorities, apologists, and panegyrists, Ibsen remains a difficult nut to crack. His perversities of execution, aberrations in sentiment, contrarieties, and monumental obstinacy are too much for the average commentator's nerves—why, then, should he be enjoyed by the public when doctors of the drama disagree? His warmest admirers deny him the gift of humour, but we believe that he is the greatest humorist, as well as dramatist, of the nineteenth century. No man, not even Browning, has kept such rigid features in the very face of idiotic abuse and still more silly praise. Not a sense of humour! After A Doll's House came Ghosts, totally contravening the thesis, or supposed thesis, of that problem play; after Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, which declared for the rights of the individual; after this piece the maddening and angular ironies of The Wild Duck, in which he mocks himself, his theories; and then as if to explode the whole Ibsen mine, Rosmersholm appeared. Therein the reformer, whether idealist or of the ordinary peddling political stripe, is mercilessly flayed, and Rebekka West, his wonderful incarnation of passion, deceits, femininity, and renunciation, sacrifices her life to a false ideal, to "Rosmersholm ideals," and mocks herself as she joins in the double suicide. No humour! What, then, of Hedda Gabler, the young woman of to-day; shallow-cultured, her religious underpinning gone, vacillating, cerebral, all nerves full of a Bashkirtseff-like charm, this Hedda who is so modern, who peeps over moral precipices, shudders and peeps again—what preconceived theories of Ibsen did Hedda not upset?
Followed the fantastic Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awake, each mutually destructive of what we supposed Ibsen stood for, destructive of the fumbling decadent that spite depicts him. Not a humorist! Why, Aristophanes, Jonathan Swift, Dumas fils, and Calvin (who was fond of roasting his religious foes) rolled into one is about the happiest formula we can express for the tense-lipped old humorist of Norway!
Like the John Henry Newman of Apologia Pro Vita Sua, his chief concern is with the soul. To call him hard names is to betray the inner anxieties that assail us at some time of our existence. "What if this man were telling the truth?" we shiveringly ask. Then we incontinently proceed to stone him to death with scabrous adjectives!
Ibsen never condescended to newspaper polemics—usually the refuge of second-rate men. And his scorn and cruelty are but a disguised kindness; if he lays bare our rickety social systems, our buckram politics, exposes the falsetto of our ideals, the flabbiness of our culture, the cowardice of our ethics, the sleek optimism of our public counsellors, and the dry rot of loveless marriage, it is to blazon our moral maladies that we may seek their cure.
Like John Knox with Mary Stuart, he rudely raps at the door of our hearts, bidding us awaken and open them. He is a voice crying in the wilderness of shams—shams social, the shams of sentiment, of money-getting. And he sometimes fails to discriminate the sheep and goats, tweaking the foolish, self-satisfied noses of the former so sadly, that he has been accused of mixing his moral values. But like Tennyson he knows that there is often honest faith in doubt. His words and works may be compared to that serpent of brass erected by Moses in the midst of his ailing nation, which was at once a symbol and a prophylactic.
Ibsen, the cunning contriver of sinewy, vital dramas, swift in action, with all extraneous flesh lopped away like the muscular figure of a Greek athlete, this Ibsen of overarching poetic power, is a man disdainful of our praise or our blame, knowing, with the subtle prevision of genius, that one day the world will go to him for the consolations of his austere art.
To search for God and to find the Devil! that is what happened to me.—STRINDBERG'S Inferno.
A critic is a man who expects miracles. So it has become the general practice to ignore a poet in his totality and seek only for isolated traits. And then the trouble we take to search for what a man is not: the lack of humour in Shelley, the lack of spirituality in Byron, the lack of sanity in Nietzsche, the lack of melody in Richard Strauss! The case of Johann August Strindberg has also proved tempting to critical head-hunters. Long before we read his books we knew of his neurasthenia, and after his reputation as a many-sided man of genius had been established in Europe his matrimonial affairs were employed as an Exhibit A to divorce him from public and critical favour. And yet this poet, romancer, and novelist, who has created such a profusion of types as to be called "The Shakespeare of Sweden," this more than countryman of Swedenborg in his powers of intense vision, this seer and chemist, possesses such a robust, tangible personality that the world is hardly to be censured for being curious about the man before studying his works.
His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden. In the seventeenth century his ancestors were living in the little village of Strinne. Tremendous in physique and intermingled with clerical strains, Strindberg inherits both his big frame and sensitive conscience from his mixed forebears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that of Renan, Anatole France, Barrès, Bernard Shaw, as René Schickele has suggested. A simple pagan he is not; nor would his particular case have been so complicated. His lyric pessimism and his gift of distilling his bitter experiences into a tale or a play are to-day merged in the broad currents of his historical dramas and socialistic novels. Even his misogyny has become ameliorated,—those episodes in which are crystallized the petty misery of a married couple,—unpaid debts, unloved children, the bailiff knocking at the back door!—let us believe that they, too, were but a phase of his development. Played in Germany and France,—Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable, and its author as a confrère,—popular in Russia, recognized though not without many years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be said to have achieved what he set out to do,—"to search for God and find the devil," and once more to find his God.
Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German translator of Strindberg, related to me this anecdote. On the writing-desk of Ibsen there stands, or stood, a photograph of Strindberg the Swede, once Ibsen's foe. To a visitor's surprise, Ibsen, after gazing in silence for some time at the picture, said, "There is one who will be greater than I."
Whether this story be true or not Strindberg is a man of genius, a crazy one at times, fascinating as a writer and interesting as a psychiatric study. And he answers to the chief test of the dramatist—he is a prime creator of character. Edmund Gosse pronounced him to be "certainly the most remarkable creative talent started by the philosophy of Nietzsche"; and in speaking of his novel, Inferno, he says that it "is a record of wretchedness and superstition and squalor, told by a maniac who is a positive Lucifer of the intellect.... in France not only has he a large following, but he exercises a positive influence." Yet this erratic man has planned technical revolutions for the dramatic stage—on the mechanical as well as the spiritual side—that are as startling as were Richard Wagner's in the music drama. It is not necessary here to describe his scheme for presenting his long historical dramas without a change of front scene.
Strindberg is a man with an abnormal emotional temperament which he has often allowed to master his judgment. If he had been a composer, while his symphonies would have undoubtedly provoked abuse, they would not have scandalized moralists—such is the peculiar vagueness of that art in the domain of articulate thought. Some day the tone-symbols of music will become a part of our consciousness, and then we may confidently expect arrests, prosecutions, transportations, perhaps executions. Luckily for the bold and imaginative thinkers, music remains the only art, the last sanctuary wherein originality may reveal itself in the face of fools and not pierce their mental opacity.
August Strindberg is a name little known to the English stage or reading public. Yet his dramatic work dates back to 1872, when Meister Olaf was composed. In this youthful essay he anticipated by seven years the Nora type presented by Ibsen. His first novel appeared in 1879, and in 1884, when Giftas was published, the stories in this violent book nearly sent him to the Stockholm jail. It was 1888 before Gräfin Julie was put forth, and this play originally in three acts brought Strindberg European fame. Gläubiger, in 1889, confirmed the first critical impression that a writer and thinker of a high order was come. Strindberg's career has been a disordered one. Poverty interrupted his studies at the Upsala University, made him a "super" in a theatre, and drove him to journalism, and to become a doctor's assistant. Always unhappy in his relation with women, often quite mad, and usually living on the treacherous borderland of hallucination, his existence has been fevered and miserable, though his successes are brilliant. Sanity has not been his cardinal quality—he has more than once gone to the asylum, emerging in a few months cured, and, remarkable as it sounds, remembering the details of his mania. Détraqué, sick and cracked, he nevertheless plunged into the study of chemistry, searching for a universal solvent—a mad dream that would interest Balzac. Ideas almost consumed the brain of this cérébral.
But hard work calmed his nerves, as was the case with Dostoïevsky. Strindberg's scientific investigations are full of the flashes of divination that at times lend value to the theories of imaginative men. He has written an Introduction à une Chimie unitaire, which was favourably received. It was a conclusion foregone that his impulsive and overwrought emotional nature would lead him into extravagances. Inferno and the double drama, Nach Damaskus, reveal his eroticism, his exasperated imagination, his harsh atheism. He has confessed in one of his autobiographical outpourings—for he lays bare his soul with the same naïveté as did Tolstoy and Rousseau—that in his youth he was a believer, that the modulation to free-thinking and rank atheism was an easy one. Then, after a period of turbulence, he became the dispassionate ponderer; and finally socialism, with its remote horizons, its heroisms, its substitution of humanity for the old gods, caught his wandering soul.
He lives no longer in Paris, a whirlpool for a man of his nature, and since his third marriage, to Harriet Bosse, the popular Swedish actress, called by her admirers the "Scandinavian Duse," he has resided in Stockholm. There his great historical plays have been heard and praised and abused; there he shows in his later writings a mystic strain; there last autumn after some years of exaltation he agreed to separate from his wife, for the clash of two such opposing temperaments "hindered their free development"—so says his faithful biographer. The separation caused much commotion in artistic and dramatic circles. It was, however, a perfectly amicable one; Harriet Bosse declared that she needed more liberty, for she hopes to travel throughout Europe. A laudable ambition. Strindberg, notwithstanding his unhappy unions, is a staunch monogamist, and allowed the woman to go her way. He has already drawn her portrait in the powerful historical play Christine. Therein the soul of the actress is set before us as the counterfeit Queen of Sweden; winning and masculine, flattering and harsh, a heartless demon and a tender maiden begging for sympathy; anon a mocking tyrant, a wild cat, a second Messalina. It would appear that the poet lost no time in studying Fru Strindberg's characteristics. She, on her side, had made a contract with her manager not to appear in any of her husband's plays, though she has enjoyed triumphs in Fräulein Julie and Samum. Perhaps this was the first little rift in the domestic lute.
Biologists believe that after forty a man of genius—who is in Darwinian parlance a sport—returns to his tribe; resumes in himself the traits of his parents. Perhaps Strindberg has reached the grand climacteric and may give us less disturbing masterpieces. In 1902, under the title of Elf Einakter, a German translation of eleven of his one-act plays was published. This collection contains the ripest offering thus far of his unquestionable genius. It begins with Gräfin Julie, condensed by the dramatist into a one-act piece. "A tragedy of naturalism," he calls it. It is an emotional bombshell. The social world seems topsy-turvied after a first reading. After a second, while the gripping power does not relax, one realizes the writer's deep, almost abysmal knowledge of human nature. Imagine a Joseph Andrews made love to by a Lady Booby, youthful, fascinating. But Fielding aims light shafts of satire; Strindberg calls up ghosts with haunting eyes. Passion there is, and a horrible atmosphere of reality. You know the affair has happened; you see the valet, Jean, chucking his cook-sweetheart under the chin as she feeds him with dainties in the kitchen; you witness the appearance on the scene of Julie enamoured; frantic, unhappy Julie; and you view the crumbling of her soul, depicted as in one of those drawings of Giulio Romano from which you avert your head. The finale makes Ghosts an entertainment for urchins.
Everything is brought about naturally, inevitably. Be it understood, Strindberg is never pornographic, nor does he show a naked soul merely to afford charming diversion, which is the practice of some French dramatists.
What would our Ibsen-hating critics say after Gräfin Julie or Gläubiger! That kitchen—fancy a kitchen as a battlefield of souls!—with its good-hearted and pious cook, the impudent scoundrel of a valet eager for revenge on his superiors, and the hallucinated girl from above stairs—it is a tiny epic of hatred, of class against mass.
Julie is neurotic. She has coolly snapped the betrothal vows made with a titled young man of the district It is St. John's Eve. The villa of the Count, Julie's father, is empty save for the two servants, Jean and Christina—the latter is the cook. Julie, bored by her colourless life and fevered by a midsummer's madness, throws herself at the valet's head. He is frightened. His servant nature has the upper hand until the pair, forced to hide because of the intrusion of rough country folk, reappear. Then the male brute is smirking, triumphant. Justin Huntly McCarthy made a translation of the piece for an English magazine in 1892. Here is an excerpt:—
[JULIE enters, sees the disorder in the kitchen, and clasps her hands. Then she lakes a powder puff and powders her face.]
JEAN. [Enters excited] There, you see and you hear. Do you still think it possible to remain here?
JULIE. No, I do not. But what shall we do?
JEAN. Fly; travel; fly away from here.
JULIE. Travel? Yes! But where?
JEAN. To Switzerland, to the Italian lakes. Have you ever been there?
JULIE. No. Is it beautiful?
JEAN. An eternal summer. Orange trees, laurels—ah!
JULIE. But what shall we do there afterwards?
JEAN. We will start a first-class hotel for first-class guests.
JULIE. A hotel!
JEAN. That is the life to live, believe me. Always new faces, new languages, not a moment's leisure for worrying or dreaming, no seeking after employment, for work comes of itself. Night and day the bell rings, the trains whistle, the omnibuses come and go while the gold pieces roll into the till. That is a life to live.
JULIE. That is a life to live. And what of me?
JEAN. You shall be the mistress of the house, the ornament of the firm. With your appearance and your manners we are sure of a colossal success. You sit like a queen in the office and set your slaves in motion with one touch on the electric bell; the guests march past your throne and lay their treasures humbly on the table. You cannot imagine how people tremble when they get a bill. I will salt the accounts and you will sugar them with your most bewitching smile. Yes, let us travel far from here. He takes a time-table from his pockety Good. By the next train we are in Malmö at 6.30, in Hamburg at 8.40 to-morrow morning, from Frankfort to Basle in one day, and we are in Como by the St. Gothard route in, let me see, three days. Three days!
JULIE. That is ah very fine. But, Jean, you must give me courage. Say that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.
JEAN. [Hesitating] I would like to, but I dare not. Not here in this house. I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?
JULIE. YOU! Say "thou" to me. Between us there are no longer any barriers. Say "thou."
JEAN. [Troubled] I cannot. There are still barriers between us so long as we remain in this house. It recalls the past, it recalls the Count. I have never met any man who compelled such respect from me. I have only to see his glove lying on a table to feel quite small. I have only to hear his bell and I start like a shying horse. And when I look at his boots standing there so stiff and stately, it makes me shiver. [He pushes the boots away with his foot.] Superstition, prejudice, which has been driven into us from childhood, but which we can never get free of. If you will only come into another country, into a republic, then people shall kneel down before my porter's livery, people shall kneel down. But I shall not kneel down. I am not born to kneel, for there is stuff in me; there is character in me; and if once I reach the lowest branch, you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a lackey, but next year I am a proprietor; in a few years I shall have an income, and then I run off to Roumania, where I buy a decoration. I can—mark well that I say can—die a count.
JULIE. Beautiful, beautiful!
JEAN. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then you will be a countess, my countess.
JULIE. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you love me, or else—ah, what am I else?
JEAN. I will say it a thousand times—later on. But not here. And above all, no hysterics, or all is lost. We must manage the affair quietly, like sensible people. [He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and lights it.] Sit down there, and I will sit here, and then we can chat as if nothing had happened.
JULIE. Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?
JEAN. I! why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can command my feelings.
JULIE. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and now—
JEAN. [Coldly] Yes, before. But now we have something else to think about.
The scamp sounds her as to the money she possesses. She has none. He compels her to rob her father. He kills her bird. She curses him, for her poor brain is going under from the strain put upon it. She throws herself upon the mercy of the cook; but Christina, who is a good woman, repels and rebukes the sinner. The Count returns. He rings. Jean again becomes the servant, though not until he has given Julie his razor, bidding her use it. She goes out and kills herself, unable to resist the stronger will.
In this shocking drama is crystallized all the bitterness of Strindberg, for he once married a Countess; he, too, has lived in the Inferno. Again we say the ending revolts; in comparison, the coda of Ibsen's Ghosts is a mild exercise in emotional arpeggios. Strindberg's heavy fist smashes out music, sinister and murderous, in this ruthless play.
Julie is a close study of a girl whose blood is tainted before birth, whose education has been false, whose life in society has inflamed her passions. She falls easily when the cunning Jean tempts her at the psychologic moment. I saw Julie at the Kleines Theatre, Berlin, last autumn, Frau Eysoldt—Sorma suffering from a bruised arm—assuming the title rôle, deciphering with skill the abnormal hieroglyphics of the character.
In Gläubiger, a tragic comedy, Strindberg treats, with his accustomed omniscience, a sweet little story about a man who follows his runaway wife to a seaside resort and becomes acquainted with the new husband—unknown to the lady, who is away for a week. Here we catch a glimpse of another hell, the cruelty of a powerful intellect. The weaker man is a painter, turned sculptor, and—subtle irony—he models only his wife's figure. (This was published in 1889; Ibsen certainly read it—witness When We Dead Awake.) The snaring of the poor emotional wretch's soul is masterly. It is all over in an hour, the entire play, and again we feel as if we had mutely assisted at the obsequies of three human beings.
The first husband—who is discovered as such at the end of the play—meets his former wife, and her infamous nature is exposed. The artist hears the conversation, and his fate is not to be spoken of lightly. We pass on.
Paria is after a tale of Ola Hansson. It need not detain us. Poe is a child compared to Strindberg in the analysis of morbid states of soul. Samum is a shuddering ode to revenge. Finally we arrive at Die Stärkere, which met with such acclaim on the Continent. Its chief device of having one silent figure and making the other do the talking is sufficiently novel. But it is again the drama, always the drama with Strindberg. His picture, executed by a kindred and sympathetic interpreter, Edvard Munch, shows the face of one who, like Dante, has seen the nethermost hell.
Played by two artistic actresses, this sardonic little sketch, replete with irony, malice, hatred,—yet full of humanity,—would prove most attractive. It has many sly strokes of humour. The scene of the action is a café on Christmas Eve. Madame X talks to Mademoiselle Y, who remains absolutely silent, yet by glances and gestures contrives to send the other woman scudding along the road from idle, amenable chatter to outrageous recrimination. The two women love the same man. Madame X is his wife. Ferociously she exposes her secrets. Her husband at first has forced her to imitate Mademoiselle Y. But she is now the stronger. She has made him forget his early love, who sits in a dreary café alone on Christmas Eve, while she, his legal wife, will go home to the father and children! It is an ugly episode. In Das Band we reach a play revealing the better characteristics of the poet. It consists only of a court-room scene with jurymen, judge, and officers before whom a husband and wife make their petition for divorce—according to Scandinavian procedure. They are resolved to separate; but there is a child, a son, beloved by both. With this elemental stuff as a subject, Strindberg wrings the heart of you. At the end the parents damn themselves by their own admission, the child is taken from their custody, and they confront each other in the deserted, dim court room, their hearts bursting, their future a foggy, abandoned field. They recall the poet Aldrich's picture of No-man's land, where the soul sees its double, a doppelgänger.
"And who are you?" cried one agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light;
"I know not," said the second shape,
"I only died last night."
These two souls in the play, once hooked by the steels of marriage and parenthood, realize as they fall loathingly asunder that they are dead, that their life has passed on into the soul of their miserable boy. It is such a play as this that vindicates Strindberg's claim to the mastery of the drama. Here he is at his human best, freed from the bizarre, and his humour and wit illuminate the ghastly darkness with friendly flashes. The jurymen are excellent, and more comical still are the court officers. Many touches throughout would make the translation and performance of Das Band profitable. And not once is the child on the stage. Possibly, as America is a divorce-loving nation, it would reject with indignation the sight of so many bleaching family bones!
Mit dem Feuer Spielen is a comedy of a drastic kind. It shows Nietzsche's influence. The sister of Nietzsche, Frau Förster-Nietzsche, once assured me in Weimar that her brother enjoyed reading Strindberg's novels. And there are several references to Strindberg in the published correspondence of Georg Brandes and Nietzsche.
Debit and Credit also proves that, consciously or unconsciously, Strindberg is a Nietzschean. It is a rogue's comedy with original variations. The chief character evokes laughter, for through the grim and sordid rifts in the plot—it pictures a tawdry great man—we hear bursts of natural fun. There is humour, kindly and mocking. Very Shaw-like, except that it was written in 1892, is Mutterliebe. In Mrs. Warren's Profession, Mr. Shaw expanded the same grewsome idea. Elsewhere the Irish writer calls Strindberg "the only living genuine Shakespearian dramatist." Strindberg in his fifteen pages traverses a lifetime, and his ending is logical.
In the preface to Fräulein Julie, Strindberg makes a general confession—for him as for Tolstoy a psychologic necessity. "Some people," he says, "have accused my tragedy of being too sad as though one desired a merry tragedy. People call authoritatively for the Joy of Life, and theatrical managers call for farces, as though the Joy of Life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people who each and every one are suffering from St. Vitus's dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in the powerful, terrible struggle of life; and the capability of experiencing something, of learning something, is a pleasure to me. And therefore I have chosen an unusual but instructive subject; in other words, an exception, but a great exception, that will strengthen the rules which offend the apostles of the commonplace. What will further create antipathy in some is the fact that my plan of action is not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of it. An event in life—and this is rather a new discovery—is usually accompanied by a series of more or less deep-seated motives; but the spectator usually generally chooses that one which his power of judgment finds simplest to grasp, or that his gift of judgment considers the most honourable. For example, some one commits suicide: 'Bad business!' says the citizen; 'Unhappy love!' says the woman; 'Sickness!' the sick man; 'Disappointed hopes!' the bankrupt. But it may be that none of these reasons is the real one, and that the dead man hid the real one by pretending another that would throw the most favourable light on his memory."
The Father (produced in 1887 and translated into English by N. Erichsen) is in three short acts. It depicts the destruction of a man's brain through the machinations of his malevolent wife. Strindberg's misogyny is the keynote of his early work. He hates woman. He accuses Ibsen of gynolatry. "My superior intelligence revolts," he cries, "against the gynolatry which is the latest superstition of the free-thinkers." His own married life was so unhappy that he revenges himself by attacking the entire sex. Every book, every play, is a confession. He is the most subjective dramatist and poet of his age. In Comrades he synthesizes the situation:—
To wish to dethrone Man and replace him by Woman—going back to a matriarchy—to dethrone the true master of creation, he who has created civilization and given to the vulgar the benefit of his culture; he who is the generator of great thoughts, of the arts and crafts, of everything, indeed; to dethrone him, I say, in order to elevate "les sales bêtes" of women, who have never taken part in the work of civilization (with a few futile exceptions), is to my mind a provocation to my sex. And at the idea of seeing "arrive" these anthropomorphs, these half apes, this horde of half-developed animals, these women whose intellects are of the age of bronze, the male in me revolts. I feel myself stirred by an angry need of resisting this enemy, inferior in intellect, but superior by her complete absence of moral sense.
In this war to the death between the two sexes it would appear that the less honest and more perverse would come out conqueror, since the chance of man's gaining the battle is very dubious, handicapped as he is by an inbred respect for woman, without counting the advantages that he gives her in supporting her and leaving her time free to equip herself for the fight.
This sex-against-sex manifesto will not make him popular in America, a land peopled with gynolatrists; but his plays and novels may be read with profit; if nothing else, they illustrate the violent rebound of the pendulum in Scandinavia, where the woman question absorbed all others for a time. Besides, Strindberg is a good hater, and good haters are rare and stimulating spectacles.
Inferno is the very quintessence of Strindberg. Written between two attacks—his unstable nerves send him at intervals into retreat—it is the most awful portrayal of mental suffering ever committed to paper. Poe said in one of his Marginalia that the man who dared to write the story of his heart would fire the paper upon which he wrote. This Strindberg has dared to do with a freedom, a diabolical minuteness, that make the naïve stutterings of Verlaine and the sophisticated confessions of Huysmans mere literature. Because of their intensity you are forced to believe Strindberg, though his is only too plainly a pathologic case; the delusions of persecution, of grandeur, of almost the entire lyre of psychiatric woes, are to be detected in this unique book. An enemy, a Russian, haunts him in Paris and plays on the piano poisonous music which warns the listener that he is doomed. It is the history of Strindberg's quarrel with the Polish poet mystic and dramatist, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who really tracked the Swede because he was jealous of his own wife. Strindberg once wrote of Maupassant's La Horla, "I recognize myself in that, and do not deny that insanity has developed."
Margit is a five-act drama, with the sub-title La Femme du Chevalier Bengt. It is a historical play of the times of the Reformation, and it is modern in its glacial analysis of the feminine soul. The picture is more various than is the case with the eternal monologue or dialogues of his shorter pieces—and there is humour of a deadly kind. In Das Geheimnis der Gilde (1879-80) the theme of Ibsen's The Master Builder was anticipated. To enumerate the works of Strindberg would consume columns; Herr Schering of Berlin has literally devoted his life to the task of translating them. Already there are forty volumes of plays, tales, novels, essays, monographs, poems, fables. Even in these times of piping versatility, the many-sided activities of the Swede amaze. His Nach Damaskus reveals a tendency to drift Rome-ward, to that Roman church, the sanctuary for souls weary of the conflict. There is no denying the fact that Strindberg's later productions show a cooler head, steadier nerves, though the motives are usually madness or blood guilt. The latest volume at the time of writing is devoted to three plays,—Die Kronbraut, Schwanenweiss, Ein Traumspiel. Two of these are powerful and painful. The playwright paints the peasantry of his country with the sombre brush of Hauptmann. Ein Traumspiel is that wonderful thing, a real dream put before us with all the wild irrelevancies of a dream, yet with sober and convincing art. As a stage piece it would be superbly fantastic. Strindberg has a faculty, which he shares in common with E. T. W. Hoffmann and Edgar Poe, of catching the ghosts of his brain at their wildest and pinning them down on paper. In such moods he may be truly called a seer. Swedenborg alone equals him in the veracity and intensity of his visions.