Industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages_, will secure him a
professorship in a college. But he has a dangerous competitor in
Ejlert Lövborg, who has published a book on _The General March of
Civilization_. This work has already made a ‘great sensation,’ but the
sequel is far to surpass this, and ‘treats of the future.’ ‘But, good
gracious! we don’t know anything about that!’ someone objects. ‘No; but
there are several things though can be said about it, all the same....
It is divided into two sections. The first is about the civilizing
forces of the future, and the other is about the civilizing progress
of the future.’ Special stress is laid upon the fact that it lies
wholly outside the domain of science, and consists in mere prophecy.
‘Do you believe it impossible to reproduce such a work--that it cannot
be written a second time? No.... For the inspiration, you know....’ We
are acquainted, were it only through popular histories of morals such
as the _Democritus_ of Karl Julius Weber, with the strange questions
with which the casuists of the Middle Ages used to occupy themselves.
But that, in our century, such works as those of Tesman and Lövborg
could gain for their authors a professorship of any kind in either
hemisphere, or even the position of _privat docent_, is an infantile
invention, fit to raise a laugh in all academical circles.
In _The Lady from the Sea_ the mysterious sailor returns to find that
his old sweetheart has been for some years the wife of Dr. Wangel. He
urges her to follow him, saying she really belongs to him. The husband
is present at the interview. He shows the stranger that he is wrong in
wishing to carry off Ellida. He represents to the sailor that it would
be preferable if he addressed himself to him (the husband), and not
to the wife. He mildly remonstrates with the stranger for addressing
Ellida with the familiar ‘thou,’ and calling her by her Christian
name. ‘Such a familiarity is not customary with us, sir.’ The scene is
unspeakably comic, and would be worthy of reproduction in its entirety.
We will limit ourselves to quoting the conclusion:--
STRANGER. To-morrow night I will come again, and then I shall look
for you here. You must wait for me here in the garden, for I prefer
settling the matter with you alone. You understand?
ELLIDA (_in low, trembling tone_). Do you hear that, Wangel?
WANGEL. Only keep calm. We shall know how to prevent this visit.
STRANGER. Good-bye for the present, Ellida. So to-morrow night----
ELLIDA (_imploringly_). Oh, no, no! Do not come to-morrow night! Never
come here again!
STRANGER. And should you, then, have a mind to follow me over seas?
ELLIDA. Oh, don’t look at me like that!
STRANGER. I only mean that you must then be ready to set out.
WANGEL. Go up to the house, Ellida, etc.
And Ibsen depicts Wangel, not as a senile, debile old man, but in the
prime of life and in full possession of all his faculties!
All these crack-brained episodes are, however, far surpassed by the
scene in _Rosmersholm_, where Rebecca confesses to the doughty Rosmer
that she is consumed by ardent passion for him:--
ROSMER. What have you felt? Speak so that I can understand you.
REBECCA. It came over me--this wild, uncontrollable desire--oh, Rosmer!
ROSMER. Desire? You! For what?
REBECCA. For you.
ROSMER (_tries to spring up_). What is this? [Idiot!]
REBECCA (_stops him_). Sit still, dear; there is more to tell.
ROSMER. And you mean to say--that you love me--in that way?
REBECCA. I thought that it should be called love. Yes, I thought
it was love; but it was not. It was what I said. It was a wild,
uncontrollable desire.... It came upon me like a storm on the sea.
It was like one of the storms we sometimes have in the North in the
winter-time. It seizes you--and sweeps you along with it--whither it
will. Resistance is out of the question.’
Rosmer, the object of this burning passion, is forty-three years
old, and has been a clergyman. This makes it somewhat droll, but not
impossible, for erotomaniacs can love all sorts of creatures, even
boots.[327] What, however, is inconceivable is the way in which the
nymphomaniac sets about satisfying her ‘wild, uncontrollable desire,’
this ‘storm upon the sea’ which ‘seizes you, and sweeps you along
with it.’ She had become the friend of Rosmer’s sickly wife, and had
for eighteen months tormented her by hinting that Rosmer is unhappy
because she has no children, that he loves her, the nymphomaniac, but
has controlled his passion as long as his wife is living. By means of
this poison, patiently and unceasingly dropped into her soul, she had
happily driven her to suicide. After a year and a half! To appease her
‘wild, uncontrollable passion’! This is exactly as if a man driven wild
by hunger should, with a view to satisfying his craving, devise a deep
plan for obtaining a field by fraud, so that he might grow wheat, have
it ground, and afterwards bake himself a splendid loaf, which would
then be Oh, so delicious! The reader may judge for himself if this is
the usual way in which famished persons, or nymphomaniacs over whom
passion ‘sweeps like a storm upon the sea,’ satisfy their impulses.
Such are the presentations of the world’s realities as figured to
himself by this ‘realist’! Many of his infantile or silly lucubrations
are petty, superficial details, and a benevolent friend, with
some experience of life and some common-sense, could easily have
preserved him in advance from making himself ridiculous. Others of
his inventions, however, touch the very essence of his poems and
convert these into out and out grotesque moonshine. In _The Pillars of
Society_, Bernick, the man who calmly plans the murder of eighteen men
to maintain his reputation as a capable dock-owner (we may remark, in
passing, the absurdity of this means for attaining such an end), all
at once confesses to his fellow-citizens, without any compulsion, and
solely on the advice of Miss Hessel, that he has been a villain and a
criminal. In _A Doll’s House_, the wife, who was only a moment before
playing so tenderly with her children, suddenly abandons these children
without a thought for them.[328] In _Rosmersholm_ we are to believe
that the nymphomaniac Rebecca, while in constant intercourse with the
object of her flame, has become chaste and virtuous, etc. Many of
Ibsen’s principal characters present this spectacle of impossible and
incomprehensible metamorphoses, so that they look like figures composed
of odd halves, which some bungling artisan has stuck together.
After the lifelike truthfulness of Ibsen, let us inquire into the
scientific character of his work. This reminds us of the civilization
of Liberian negroes. The constitution and laws of that West African
republic read very much like those of the United States of North
America, and on paper command our respect. But anyone living in Liberia
very soon recognises the fact that these black republicans are savages,
having no idea of the political institutions nominally existing
among them, of their code of laws, etc. Ibsen likes to give himself
the appearance of standing in the domain of natural science and of
profiting by its latest results. In his plays Darwin is quoted. He has
evidently dipped, though with a careless hand, into books on heredity,
and has picked up something about medical science. But the scanty,
ludicrously misunderstood stock phrases which have remained in his
memory are made use of by him much as my illustrative Liberian negro
uses the respectable paper collars and top-hats of Europe. The expert
can never preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific and
medical knowledge.
Heredity is his hobby-horse, which he mounts in every one of his
pieces. There is not a single trait in his personages, a single
peculiarity of character, a single disease, that he does not trace
to heredity. In _A Doll’s House_, Dr. Rank’s ‘poor innocent spine
must do penance for “his” father’s notions of amusement when he was
a lieutenant in the army.’ Helmer explains to Nora that ‘a misty
atmosphere of lying brings contagion into the whole family. Every
breath the children draw contains some germ of evil.... Nearly all
men who go to ruin early have had untruthful mothers.... In most
cases it comes from the mother; but the father naturally works in the
same direction.’ And again: ‘Your father’s low principles you have
inherited, every one of them. No religion, no morality, no sense of
duty.’ In _Ghosts_ Oswald has learned from the extraordinary doctor in
Paris who told him he had softening of the brain, that he had inherited
his malady from his father.[329] Regina, the natural daughter of the
late Alving, exactly resembles her mother.
REGINA (_to herself_). So mother was that kind of woman, after all.
MRS. ALVING. Your mother had many good qualities, Regina.
REGINA. Yes; but she was one of that sort, all the same. Oh! I’ve
often suspected it.... A poor girl must make the best of her young
days.... And I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.
MRS. ALVING. Yes, I see you do. But don’t throw yourself away, Regina.
REGINA. Oh! what must be, must be. If Oswald takes after his father, I
take after my mother, I dare say.
In _Rosmersholm_ Rebecca’s nymphomania is explained by the fact that
she is the natural daughter of a Lapland woman of doubtful morals. ‘I
believe your whole conduct is determined by your origin,’ Rector Kroll
says to her (p. 82). Rosmer never laughs, because ‘it is a trait of his
family.’ He is ‘the descendant of the men that look down on us from
these walls’ (p. 80). His ‘spirit is deeply rooted in his ancestry’
(p. 80). Hilda, the stepdaughter of the ‘Lady from the Sea,’ says:
‘I should not wonder if some fine day she went mad.... Her mother
went mad, too. She died mad. I know that.’ In _The Wild Duck_ nearly
everyone has a hereditary mark. Gregers Werle, the malignant imbecile,
who holds and proclaims his passion for gossip as an ardent desire for
truth, inherits this craze from his mother.[330] Little Hedwig becomes
blind, like her father, old Werle.[331]
In the earlier philosophical dramas the same idea is constantly
repeated. Brand gets his obstinacy, and Peer Gynt his lively,
extravagant imagination, from the mother. Ibsen has evidently read
Lucas’s book on the first principles of heredity, and has borrowed from
it uncritically. It is true that Lucas believes in the inheritance even
of notions and feelings as complex and as nearly related to specific
facts as, _e.g._, the horror of doctors,[332] and that he does not
doubt the transmission of diseased deviations from the norm, _e.g._,
the appearance of blindness at a definite age.[333] Lucas, however,
whose merits are not to be denied, did not sufficiently distinguish
between that which the individual receives in its material genesis
from its parents, and that which is subsequently suggested by family
life and example, by continuous existence in the same conditions as
its parents, etc. Ibsen is the true ‘man of one book.’ He abides by
his Lucas. If he had read Weismann,[334] and, above all, Galton,[335]
he would have known that nothing is more obscure and apparently more
capricious, than the course of heredity. For the individual is, says
Galton, the result--the arithmetic mean--of three different quantities:
its father, its mother and the whole species, represented by the double
series, going back to the beginnings of all terrestrial life, of its
paternal and maternal progenitors. This third datum is the unknown
quantity--the _x_--in the problem. Reversions to distant ancestors may
make the individual wholly unlike its parents, and the influence of
the species so far exceed, as a general rule, those of the immediate
progenitors that children who are the exact cast of their father or
mother, especially with respect to the most complex manifestations
of personality, of character, capacities and inclinations, are the
greatest rarities. But Ibsen is not at all concerned about seriously
justifying his ideas on heredity in a scientific manner. As we shall
see later on, these ideas have their root in his mysticism; Lucas’s
work was for him only a lucky treasure-trove, which he seized on with
joy, because it offered him the possibility of scientifically cloaking
his mystic obsession.
Ibsen’s excursions in the domain of medical science, which he hardly
ever denies himself, are most delightful. In _The Pillars of Society_
Rector Rörlund glorifies the women of his côterie as a kind of ‘sisters
of mercy who pick lint.’ Pick lint! In an age of antiseptics and
aseptics! Let Ibsen only take into his head to enter any surgical ward
with his ‘picked lint’! He would be astonished at the reception given
to him and his lint. In _An Enemy of Society_ Dr. Stockmann declares
that the water of the baths with its ‘millions of bacilli is absolutely
injurious to health, whether used internally or externally.’ The only
bacilli which can be referred to in this scene, as throughout the whole
piece, are the typhoid bacilli of Eberth. Now, it may be true that
bathing in contaminated water may produce Biskra boils, and perhaps
béri-béri; but it would be difficult for Dr. Stockmann and Ibsen to
instance a single case of typhoid fever contracted through bathing in
water containing bacilli. In _A Doll’s House_ Helmer’s life ‘depended
on a journey abroad.’ That might be true for a European in the tropics,
or for anyone living in a fever-district. But in Norway there is no
such thing as an acute illness in which the life of the invalid depends
on ‘a journey abroad.’ Further on Dr. Rank says (p. 60): ‘In the last
few days I have had a general stock-taking of my inner man. Bankruptcy!
Before a month is over I shall be food for worms in the churchyard....
There is only one more investigation to be made, and when I have made
it I shall know exactly at what time dissolution will take place.’
According to his own declaration, Dr. Rank suffers from disease of
the dorsal marrow (it is true that he speaks of the dorsal column,
but the mistaken expression need not be taken too rigidly). Ibsen is
evidently thinking of consumption of the spinal marrow. Now, there
is in this disease absolutely no symptom which could with certainty
authorize the prediction of death three weeks beforehand; there is
no ‘general stock-taking of the inner man’ which the invalid, if he
were a doctor, could carry out on himself to gain a clear knowledge
of ‘when the dissolution’ was to take place; and there is no form of
consumption of the spinal marrow which would allow the invalid four
weeks before his death (not an accidental death, but one necessitated
by his disease) to go to a ball, drink immoderately of champagne, and
afterwards to take an affecting leave of his friends. Oswald Alving’s
illness in _Ghosts_ is, from a clinical standpoint, quite as childishly
depicted as that of Rank. From all that is said in the piece the
disease inherited by Oswald from his father can only be diagnosed
either as _syphilis hereditaria tarda_, or _dementia paralytica_.
The first of these diseases is out of the question, for Oswald is
depicted as a model of manly strength and health.[336] And even if,
in exceptional and extremely rare cases, the malady does not show
itself till after the victim is well on in his twenties, it yet betrays
itself from the earliest childhood by certain phenomena of degeneracy
which would prevent even a mother, blinded by love and pride, from
glorifying her son’s ‘outer self’ in the style of Mrs. Alving. Certain
minor features might perhaps indicate _dementia paralytica_, as, for
example, Oswald’s sensual excitability, the artless freedom with which
he speaks before his mother of the amours of his friends in Paris, or
gives expression to his pleasure at the sight of the ‘glorious’ Regina,
the levity with which, at the first sight of this girl, he makes plans
for his marriage, etc.[337] But together with these exact, though
subordinate, features there appear others infinitely more important,
which wholly preclude the diagnosis of _dementia paralytica_. There
is in Oswald no trace of the megalomania which is never absent in
the first stage of this malady; he is anxious and depressed, while
the sufferer from general paralysis feels extremely happy, and sees
life through rose-coloured spectacles. Oswald forebodes and dreads an
outburst of madness--a fact which I, for my part, have never observed
in a paralytic, nor found indicated by any clinicist whatever. Finally,
Oswald’s dementia declares itself with a suddenness and completeness
found in acute mania only; but the description given of Oswald in
the last scene--his immobility, his ‘dull and toneless’ voice, and
his idiotic murmuring of the words ‘the sun, the sun,’ repeated half
a dozen times--does not in the remotest degree correspond with the
picture of acute mania.
The poet has naturally no need to understand anything of pathology.
But when he pretends to describe real life, he ought to be honest.
He should not get out of his depth in scientific observation and
precision simply because these are demanded or preferred by the age.
The more ignorant the poet is in pathology, the greater is the test
of his veracity given by his clinical pictures. As he cannot, in his
lay capacity, draw on his imagination for them by combining clinical
experiences and reminiscences of books, it is necessary that he
shall have seen with his own eyes each case represented to depict it
accurately. Shakespeare was likewise no physician; and, besides, what
did the physicians of his time know? Yet we can to this day still
diagnose without hesitation the _dementia senilis_ of Lear, Hamlet’s
weakness of will through nervous exhaustion (_neurasthenic ‘aboalie’_),
the melancholia, accompanied with optical hallucination, of Lady
Macbeth. Why? Because Shakespeare introduced into his creations things
really seen. Ibsen, on the contrary, has freely invented his invalids,
and that this method could, in the hands of a layman, only lead to
laughable results, needs no proof. A moving or affecting situation
offers itself to his imagination--that of a man who clearly foresees
his near and inevitable death, and with violent self-conquest lifts
himself to the stoic philosophy of renunciation; or that of a young
man who adjures his mother to kill him when the madness he awaits with
horror shall break out. The situation is very improbable. Perhaps it
has never occurred. In any event, Ibsen has never witnessed it. But if
it occurred it would possess great poetic beauty, and produce a great
effect on the stage. Consequently Ibsen calmly turns out the novel and
unknown maladies of a Dr. Rank or an Oswald Alving, the progress of
which might make these situations possible. Such is the procedure of
the poet whose realism and accurate observation are so much vaunted by
his admirers.
His clearness of mind, his love of liberty, his modernity! Careful
readers of Ibsen’s works will not trust their eyes when they see these
words applied to him. We will at once put immediate and exhaustive
tests to the clearness of his thought. His love of liberty will
be revealed by analysis as anarchism; and his modernity amounts
essentially to this, that in his pieces railways are constructed
(_The Pillars of Society_), that there is a cackle about bacilli (_An
Enemy of the People_), that the struggles of political parties play a
part in them (_The League of the Young_, _Rosmersholm_)--all put on
superficially with a brush, without inner dependence upon the true
active forces in the poem. This ‘modern,’ this ‘apostle of liberty,’
has an idea of the press and its functions fit for a clerk in a
police-station, and he pursues journalists with the hatred, droll in
these days, of a tracker of demagogues in the third decade of this
century. All the journalists whom he sets before us--and they are
numerous in his pieces, Peter Mortensgaard in _Rosmersholm_, Haustad
and Billing in _An Enemy of the People_, Bahlmann in _The League of the
Young_--are either drunken ragamuffins or poor knock-kneed starvelings,
constantly trembling at the prospect of being thrashed or kicked out,
or unprincipled rascals who write for anyone who pays. He has so clear
a grasp of the social question that he makes a foreman mix with the
workmen and threaten a strike because machines are about to be used on
the wharves (_The Pillars of Society_)! He looks upon the masses with
the fine contempt of the great feudal landlords. When he mentions them
it is either with biting derision or a most aristocratic and arrogant
disdain.[338]
The greater part of his notions, moreover, belong to no time, but are
emanations from his personal perversity, and can, therefore, be neither
modern or not modern; the least uncouth of them, however, having
their root in a definite period, spring from the circle of ideas of a
Gothamist of the first third of the present century. The label ‘modern’
was arbitrarily attached to Ibsen by George Brandes (_Moderne Geister_,
Frankfurt, 1886), one of the most repulsive literary phenomena of the
century. George Brandes, a sponger on the fame or name of others, has
throughout his life followed the calling of a ‘human orchestra,’ who
with head, mouth, hands, elbows, knees, and feet, plays ten noisy
instruments at once, dancing before poets and authors, and, after the
hubbub, passes his hat round among the deafened public. For a quarter
of a century he has assiduously courted the favour of all who for
any reason had a following, and written rhetorical and sophistical
phrases about them, as long as he could find a market. Adorned with a
few feathers plucked from the stately pinions of Taine’s genius, and
prating of John Stuart Mill, whose treatise _On Liberty_ he has glanced
at, but hardly read, and certainly not understood, he introduced
himself among the youth of Scandinavia, and, abusing their confidence,
obtained by this means, has made their systematic moral poisoning the
task of his life. He preached to them the gospel of passion, and,
with truly diabolical zeal and obstinacy, confused all their notions,
giving to whatever he extolled that was mean and reprehensible the
most attractive and honourable names. It has always been thought weak
and cowardly to yield to base impulses condemned by judgment, instead
of combating and stifling them. If Brandes had said to the young,
‘Renounce your judgment! Sacrifice duty to your passions! Be ruled by
your senses! Let your will and consciousness be as feathers before the
storm of your appetites!’--the better among his hearers would have
spit at him. But he said to them: ‘To obey one’s senses is to have
character. He who allows himself to be guided by his passions has
individuality. The man of strong will despises discipline and duty, and
follows every caprice, every temptation, every movement of his stomach
or his other organs’; and these vulgarities, thus presented, no longer
had the repulsive character which awakens distrust and serves as a
warning. Proclaimed under the names of ‘liberty’ and ‘moral autonomy,’
debauchery and dissoluteness gain easy admission into the best circles,
and depravity, from which all would turn if it appeared as such,
seems to insufficiently informed minds attractive and desirable when
disguised as ‘modernity.’ It is comprehensible that an educator who
turns the schoolroom into a tavern and a brothel should have success
and a crowd of followers. He certainly runs the risk of being slain by
the parents, if they come to know what he is teaching their children;
but the pupils will hardly complain, and will be eager to attend
the lessons of so agreeable a teacher. By a similar method Brandes
acquitted himself of his educational functions. This is the explanation
of the influence he gained over the youth of his country, such as his
writings, with their emptiness of thought and unending tattle, would
certainly never have procured for him.
Brandes discovered in Ibsen a revolt against the prevailing moral law,
together with a glorification of bestial instincts, and accordingly
trumpeted his praises in spite of his astounding reactionary views, as
a ‘modern spirit,’ recommending Ibsen’s works, with a wink of the eye,
to the knowledge-craving youth, whom he served as _maître de plaisir_.
But this ‘modern,’ this ‘realist,’ with his exact ‘scientific’
observation, is in reality a mystic and an ego-maniacal anarchist. An
analysis of his intellectual peculiarities will enable us to discern a
resemblance to those of Richard Wagner, which is not surprising, since
a similarity in features is precisely a stigma of degeneracy, and for
this reason is common to many, or to all, higher degenerates.
Ibsen is the child of a rigorously religious race, and grew up in a
family of believers. The impressions of childhood have determined
the course of his life. His mind has never been able to iron out the
theological crease it got through nurture. The Bible and Catechism
became for him the bounds beyond which he has never passed. His
free-thinking diatribes against established Christianity (_Brand_,
_Rosmersholm_, etc.), his derision of the shackled pietism of
divines (Manders in _Ghosts_, Rörlund in _The Pillars of Society_,
the dean in _Brand_), are an echo of his teacher, the theosophist,
Sœren Kierkegaard (1815-55), a zealot certainly for quite another
Christianity than that ordained by the state, and provided with powers
of nomination and fixed salaries, but nevertheless an austere and
exclusive Christianity, demanding the whole being of man. Perhaps even
Ibsen looks upon himself as a free-thinker. Wagner did the same. But
what does that prove? He is not clear with regard to his own thought.
‘It is curious,’ writes Herbert Spencer,[339] ‘how commonly men
continue to hold, in fact, doctrines which they have rejected in name,
retaining the substance after they have abandoned the form. In theology
an illustration is supplied by Carlyle, who, in his student days,
giving up, as he thought, the creed of his fathers, rejected its shell
only, keeping the contents, and was proved by his conceptions of the
world, and man and conduct, to be still among the sternest of Scotch
Calvinists.’ If Spencer, when he wrote this, had known Ibsen, he would
perhaps have cited him as a second example. As Carlyle was always a
Scotch Calvinist, so Ibsen has always remained a Norwegian Protestant
of the school of Kierkegaard--that is to say, a Protestant with the
earnest mysticism of a Jacob Boehme, a Swedenborg, or a Pusey, which
easily passes over into the Catholicism of a St. Theresa or a Ruysbroek.
Three fundamental ideas of Christianity are ever present in his mind,
and about these as round so many axes revolves the entire activity
of his poetical imagination. These three unalterable central ideas,
constituting genuine obsessions, reaching up from the unconscious into
his intellectual life, are original sin, confession and self-sacrifice
or redemption.
Æsthetic chatterers have spoken of the idea of heredity influencing all
Ibsen’s works, an idea which cannot escape even the feeblest attention,
as something appertaining to modern science and Darwinism. As a matter
of fact, it is the ever-recurring original sin of St. Augustine, and
it betrays its theological nature, firstly by the circumstance that
it makes its appearance in conjunction with the two other theological
ideas of confession and redemption, and secondly, by the distinguishing
characteristic of hereditary transmission. As we have above seen,
Ibsen’s personages always inherit a disease (blindness, consumption
of the spinal marrow, madness), a vice (mendaciousness, levity,
lewdness, obduracy), or some defect (incapacity for enjoyment), but
never an agreeable or useful quality. Now what is good and wholesome is
just as frequently inherited as what is evil and diseased--even more
frequently, according to many investigators. Hence if Ibsen had really
wished to exhibit the operation of the law of heredity as understood
by Darwin, he would have offered us at least one example, if only one,
of the inheritance of good qualities. But not a single instance is to
be met with in all his dramas. What his beings possess of good, comes
one knows not whence. They have always inherited nothing but evil.
The gentle Hedvig in _The Wild Duck_ becomes blind like her father,
Werle. But from whom does she get her dreamy wealth of imagination, her
devoted loving heart? Her father is a cold egoist, and her mother a
clever, practical, prosaic housewife. Thus she can never have inherited
her fine qualities from either of her parents. From them she receives
only her eye-disease. With Ibsen heredity is only a visitation, a
punishment for the sins of the fathers; science knows of no such
exclusive heredity; theology alone knows it, and it is simply original
sin.
Ibsen’s second theological _motif_ is confession; in nearly all his
pieces such is the goal to which all the action tends; not, perchance,
forced by circumstances upon a dissimulating offender, not the
inevitable revelation of a hidden misdeed, but the voluntary outpouring
of a pent-up soul, the voluptuous, self-tormenting disclosure of an
ugly inner wound, the remorseful ‘My guilt, my deepest guilt!’ of the
sinner breaking down under the weight of his burdened conscience,
humbling himself to an avowal that he may find inward peace; in short,
genuine confession as required by the Church. In _A Doll’s House_,
Helmer informs his wife (p. 44): ‘Many a man can lift himself up
again morally if he openly recognises his offence and undergoes its
punishment.... Only just think how a man so conscious of guilt as
that must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an actor;
how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and even his wife and
children.’ For him not the guilt, but the dissimulation, is the great
evil, and its true expiation consists in ‘public avowal’--_i.e._,
in confession. In the same piece Mrs. Linden, without any external
necessity, and simply in obedience to an inner impulse, makes the
following confession (p. 87): ‘I, too, have suffered shipwreck.... I
had no choice at the time’; while later on she develops the theory of
confession once more (p. 90): ‘Helmer must know everything; between
those two there must be the completest possible understanding, and that
can never come to pass while all these excuses and concealments are
going on.’
In _The Pillars of Society_ Miss Hessel exacts a confession in these
terms (p. 70):
Here you are, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride,
in power and honour--you who have set the brand of crime upon an
innocent man.
BERNICK. Do you think I do not feel deeply how I have wronged him? Do
you think I am not prepared to make atonement?
LONA. How? By speaking out?
BERNICK. Can you ask such a thing?
LONA. What else can atone for such a wrong?
And Johan also says (p. 75):
In two months I shall be back again.
BERNICK. And then you will tell all?
JOHAN. Then the guilty one must take the guilt upon himself.
Bernick actually makes the confession demanded of him from pure
contrition, for at the time he makes it all proofs of his crime are
destroyed, and he has nothing more to fear from other persons. His
confession is couched in most edifying terms (p. 108):
I must begin by rejecting the panegyric with which you ... have
overwhelmed me. I do not deserve it; for until to-day I have not been
disinterested in my dealings.... I have no right to this homage; for
... my intention was to retain the whole myself.... My fellow-citizens
must know me to the core ... that from this evening we begin a new
time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its
lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like
a museum open for instruction.... My fellow-citizens, I will come out
of the lie; it had almost poisoned every fibre of my being. You shall
know all. Fifteen years ago _I_ was the guilty one, etc.
In _Rosmersholm_ there is hardly any other subject treated of than the
confession of all before all. In the very first visit of Kroll (p. 15)
Rebecca urges Rosmer to confess:
REBECCA (_comes up close to Rosmer, and says rapidly and in a low
voice, so that the Rector does not hear her_). Do it now!
ROSMER (_also in a low voice_). Not this evening.
REBECCA (_as before_). Yes, this very evening.
As he does not at once obey she will speak for him (p. 19):
REBECCA. You must let me tell you frankly.
ROSMER (_quickly_). No, no; be quiet. Not just now!
Rosmer soon does it himself (p. 28):
KROLL. We two are in practical agreement--at any rate, on the great
essential questions.
ROSMER (_in a low voice_). No; not now.
KROLL (_tries to jump up_). What is this?
ROSMER (_holding him_). No; you must sit still. I entreat you, Kroll.
KROLL. What can this mean? I don’t understand you. Speak plainly.
ROSMER. A new summer has blossomed in my soul. I see with eyes grown
young again; and so now I stand----
KROLL. Where? where, Rosmer?
ROSMER. Where your children stand.
KROLL. You? you? Impossible! Where do you say you stand?
ROSMER. On the same side as Laurits and Hilda.
KROLL (_bows his head_). An apostate! Johannes Rosmer an apostate!...
Is this becoming language for a priest?
ROSMER. I am no longer a priest.
KROLL. Well, but--the faith of your childhood----?
ROSMER. Is mine no longer.... I have given it up. I _had_ to give it
up.... Peace, and joy, and mutual forbearance must once more enter our
souls. That is why I am stepping forward and openly avowing myself for
what I am....
REBECCA. There now; he’s on his way to his great sacrifice.
(We may here note the purely theological designation given to Rosmer’s
act.)
ROSMER. I feel so relieved now it is over. You see, I am quite calm
Rebecca....
Like Rosmer, Rebecca also confesses to Rector Kroll (p. 86):
REBECCA. Yes, Herr Rector, Rosmer and I--we say _thou_ to each other.
The relation between us has led to that.... Come, let us sit down,
dear--all three of us--and then I will tell the whole story.
ROSMER (_seats himself mechanically_). What has come over you,
Rebecca? This unnatural calmness--what is it?
REBECCA. I have only to tell you something.... Now it must out. It was
not you, Rosmer. You are innocent; it was _I_ who lured Beata out into
the paths of delusion ... that led to the mill-race. Now you know it,
both of you....
ROSMER (_after a pause_). Have you confessed all now, Rebecca?
No, not yet all. But she hastens to complete to Rosmer the confession
begun to Kroll (p. 98):
ROSMER. Have you more confessions to make?
REBECCA. The greatest of all is to come.
ROSMER. The greatest?
REBECCA. What you have never suspected. What gives light and shade to
all the rest, etc.
In _The Lady from the Sea_, Ellida (p. 19) confesses to Arnholm the
story of her insensate betrothal with the foreign sailor. Arnholm so
little comprehends the need of this confession, made without rhyme or
reason, that he asks with astonishment: ‘What is your object, then, in
telling me that you were bound?’ ‘Because I must have someone in whom
to confide,’ is Ellida’s sole--and, moreover, sufficient--answer.
In _Hedda Gabler_ the inevitable confessions take place before the
commencement of the piece. ‘Yes, Hedda,’ Lövborg says (p. 123). ‘And
when I used to confess to you! Told you about myself--things that
nobody else knew in those days. Sat there and admitted that I had been
out on the loose for whole days and nights.... Ah, Hedda, what power
was it in you that forced me to acknowledge things like that?... Had
not you an idea that you could wash me clean if only I came to you in
confession?’ He confesses in order to receive absolution.
In _The Wild Duck_ confession is equally prominent, but it is
deliciously ridiculed. The scene in which Gina confesses to her husband
her early liaison with Werle is one of the most exquisite things in
contemporary drama (Act IV.).
HJALMAR. Is it true--can it be true that--that there was an--an
understanding between you and Mr. Werle, while you were in service
there?
GINA. That’s not true. Not at that time. Mr. Werle did come after me,
I own it; and his wife thought there was something in it ... so that I
left her service.
HJALMAR. But afterwards, then!
GINA. Well, then I went home. And mother--well, she wasn’t the woman
you took her for, Ekdal; she kept on worrying and worrying at me about
one thing and another. For Mr. Werle was a widower by that time.
HJALMAR. Well, and then?
GINA. I suppose you must know it. He didn’t give it up until he’d had
his way.
HJALMAR (_striking his hands together_). And this is the mother of my
child! How could you hide this from me?
GINA. It was wrong of me; I ought certainly to have told you long ago.
HJALMAR. You should have told me at the very first; then I should have
known what you were.
GINA. But would you have married me all the same?
HJALMAR. How can you suppose so?
GINA. That’s just why I didn’t dare to tell you anything then. I’d
come to care for you so much, you know; and I couldn’t go and make
myself utterly miserable....
HJALMAR. Haven’t you every day, every hour, repented of the spider’s
web of deceit you had spun around me? Answer me that! How could you
help writhing with penitence and remorse?
GINA. My dear Ekdal, I’ve plenty to do looking after the house, and
all the daily business----
Further on the idea of self-deliverance and purification through
confession is pitilessly travestied.
GREGERS. Haven’t you done it yet?
HJALMAR (_aloud_). It _is_ done.
GREGERS. It _is_?... After so great a crisis--a crisis that’s to be
the starting-point of an entirely new life--of a communion founded on
truth, and free from falsehood of any kind.... Surely you feel a new
consecration after the great crisis.
HJALMAR. Yes, of course I do--that is, in a sort of way.
GREGERS. For I’m sure there’s nothing in the world to compare with the
joy of forgiving one who has erred, and raising her up to one’s self
in love, etc.
On his way to the guillotine, Avinain, the French assassin, condensed
the experience of his life in the pithy saying, ‘Never confess.’ But
this is advice which only those of strong will and healthy minds
can follow. A lively idea vehemently demands to be transformed into
movement. The movement exacting the least effort is that of the small
muscles of the larynx, tongue, and lips, _i.e._, the organs of speech.
Anyone, therefore, having a specially lively idea experiences a strong
desire to relax those cell-groups of his brain in which this idea
is elaborated by allowing the transmission of their stimulus to the
organs of speech. In a word, he desires to speak out. And if he is
weak, if the inhibitive power of the will is not greater than the motor
impulse proceeding from the ideational centre, he will burst out into
speech, be the consequences what they may. That this psychological
law has always been known is proved by all literature, from the fable
of King Midas to Dostojewski’s _Raskolnikow_; and the Catholic Church
furnished one more proof of her profound knowledge of human nature
which she transformed the primitive Christian custom of confession
before the assembled congregation, which was to be a self-humiliation
and expiation, into auricular confession, which serves the purpose
of a safe and blissful alleviation and relaxation, and constitutes
for ordinary men a primary psychic need of the first order. It was
this sort of confession which Ibsen, probably unconsciously, had in
view. (‘Because I must have someone in whom I can confide,’ as Ellida
says.) Himself a degenerate, Ibsen can picture to himself only the
intellectual life of degenerates, in whom the mechanism of inhibition
is always disordered, and who, therefore, cannot escape from the
impulse to confess, when anything of an absorbing or exciting character
exists in their consciousness.
The third and most important theological obsession of Ibsen is the
saving act of Christ, the redemption of the guilty by a voluntary
acceptance of their guilt. This devolution of sin upon a lamb of
sacrifice occupies the same position in Ibsen’s drama as in Richard
Wagner’s. The _motif_ of the sacrificial lamb and of redemption
is constantly present in his mind, certainly not always clear and
comprehensible, but, conformably with the confusion of his thought,
diversely distorted, obscured, and, so to speak, in _contrapuntal_
inversion. Now Ibsen’s personages voluntarily and joyfully bear the
cross, in keeping with the Christ-idea; now it is put upon their
shoulders by force or artifice, which is, as theologians would say,
a diabolical mockery of this idea; now the sacrifice for another
is sincere, now mere hypocrisy; the effects Ibsen draws from the
incessantly recurring _motif_ are, agreeably with its form, now moral
and affecting, now comically base and repulsive.
In _The Pillars of Society_ there is a talk of some ‘scandal’ which
occurred years before the commencement of the piece. The husband of the
actress Dorf, on returning home one evening, found her with a stranger,
who, on his entrance, sprang out of the window. The affair caused
great excitement and indignation in the Norwegian Gotham. Immediately
afterwards Johan Tönnesen fled to America. Everyone looked upon him as
the ‘culprit.’ In reality, however, it was his brother-in-law, Bernick.
Johan had voluntarily incurred the blame of Bernick’s fault. On his
return from America the sinner and the sacrificial lamb discuss the
circumstance (p. 45):
BERNICK. Johan, now we are alone, you must give me leave to thank you.
JOHAN. Oh, nonsense!
BERNICK. My house and home, my domestic happiness, my whole position
as a citizen in society--all these I owe to you.
JOHAN. Well, I am glad of it....
BERNICK. Thanks, thanks all the same. Not one in ten thousand would
have done what you then did for me.
JOHAN. Oh, nonsense!... One of us had to take the blame upon him.
BERNICK. But to whom did it lie nearer than to the guilty one?
JOHAN. Stop! _Then_ it lay nearer to the innocent one. I was alone,
free, an orphan.... You, on the other hand, had your old mother in
life; and, besides, you had just become secretly engaged to Betty, and
she was very fond of you. What would have become of her if she had
come to know----?
BERNICK. True, true, true; but ... but yet, that you should turn
appearances against yourself, and go away----
JOHAN. Have no scruples, my dear Karsten ... you had to be saved, and
you were my friend.
Here the idea of the sacrificial lamb is normal and rational. But it is
soon afterwards introduced into the same piece in a distorted shape.
Bernick sends the rotten-keeled _Indian Girl_ to sea, to her certain
destruction, in spite of his foreman Aune’s opposition. While, however,
planning this wholesale murder, he also schemes for laying the burden
of his crime on the innocent Aune (p. 65):
KRAP. ... There is rascality at work, Consul.
BERNICK. I cannot believe it, Krap. I cannot, and will not believe
such a thing of Aune.
KRAP. I am sorry for it, but it is the plain truth.... All bogus! The
_Indian Girl_ will never get to New York....
BERNICK. But this is horrible! What do you think can be his motive?
KRAP. He probably wants to bring the machines into discredit....
BERNICK. And for that he would sacrifice all these lives?... But
such a piece of villainy as this! Listen, Krap; this affair must
be examined into again. Not a word of it to anyone.... During the
dinner-hour you must go down there again; I must have perfect
certainty.... We cannot make ourselves accomplices in a crime. I must
keep my conscience unspotted, etc.
In _Ghosts_ the idea of the lamb of sacrifice is equally travestied.
The asylum founded by Mrs. Alving has been burnt. The joiner,
Engstrand, that theatrical villain, succeeds in persuading the idiotic
pastor, Manders, that he--Manders--was the cause of the fire. And
as the pastor is made desperate by the possible legal consequences,
Engstrand goes to him and says (p. 184):
Jacob Engstrand isn’t the man to desert a noble benefactor in the hour
of need, as the saying is [!].
MANDERS. Yes; but, my good fellow, how----?
ENGSTRAND. Jacob Engstrand may be likened to a guardian angel--he may,
your reverence.
MANDERS. No, no; I can’t accept that.
ENGSTRAND. Oh, you will though, all the same. I know a man that’s
taken others’ sins upon himself before now, I do.
MANDERS. Jacob (_wrings his hand_). You are a rare character.
In _A Doll’s House_ the idea develops itself with great beauty. Nora
confidently expects that her husband, on hearing of her forgery, will
assume the blame, and she is resolved not to accept his sacrifice (p.
76):
NORA. I only wanted to tell you that, Christina; you shall be my
witness.... In case there were to be anybody who wanted to take the
... the whole blame, I mean ... then you will be able to bear witness
that it is not true, Christina. I know very well what I am saying; I
am in full possession of my senses, and I say to you, Nobody else knew
anything about it; I alone have done everything.... But a miracle will
come to pass even yet ... but it is so terrible, Christina! It must
not happen for anything in the world!
In the deepest excitement she looks for the expected miracle, the
renewal of Christ’s act of salvation in the narrow circumstances of a
small village--‘I am the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the
world.’ And, since the miracle does not come to pass, there takes place
the immense transformation in her nature which forms the real subject
of the piece. Nora explains this to her husband with the greatest
clearness (p. 116):
...The thought never once occurred to me that you could allow yourself
to submit to the conditions of such a man. I was so firmly convinced
that you would say to him, ‘Pray make the affair known to all the
world’; and when that had been done ... then you would, as I firmly
believed, stand before the world, take everything upon yourself, and
say, ‘I am the guilty person.’ ... That was the miracle that I hoped
and feared. And it was to hinder that that I wanted to put an end to
my life.
In _The Wild Duck_ the idea of the sacrificial lamb recurs no less
than three times, and is the moving force of the whole piece. The
infringement of the forest laws, of which the elder Ekdal was
convicted, was not committed by him, but by Werle:
WERLE. ... I was quite in the dark as to what Lieutenant Ekdal was
doing.
GREGERS. Lieutenant Ekdal seems to have been in the dark as to what he
was doing.
WERLE. That may be. But the fact remains that he was found guilty, and
I acquitted.
GREGERS. Yes, of course I know that nothing was proved against you.
WERLE. Acquittal is acquittal. Why do you rake up old troubles?...
I’ve done all I could without positively exposing myself, and giving
rise to all sorts of suspicion and gossip.... I’ve given Ekdal copying
to do from the office, and I pay him far, far more for it than his
work is worth.
Werle thus shuffles his fault on Ekdal, and the latter breaks down
under the weight of the cross. Afterwards, when Hjalmar learns that
little Hedwig is not his child, and disowns her, the idiot Gregers
Werle goes to the despairing maiden, and says:
But suppose you were to sacrifice the wild duck, of your own free
will, for his sake?
HEDWIG (_rising_). The wild duck!
GREGERS. Suppose you were to sacrifice, for his sake, the dearest
treasure you have in the world?
HEDWIG. Do you think that would do any good?
GREGERS. Try it, Hedwig.
HEDWIG (_softly, with flashing eyes_). Yes, I will try it.
Here, then, Hedwig is not to offer herself in sacrifice, but a pet
animal, thus abasing the idea from Christianity to paganism. Finally,
it crops up a third time. At the last moment Hedwig cannot make up her
mind to kill the duck, and prefers turning the pistol against her own
breast, thus purchasing with her own life that of the bird. This dismal
dénouement is worrying and foolish, because useless; the poetical
effect would have been fully attained if Hedwig, instead of dying, had
only slightly wounded herself; for in this way she would have furnished
equally strong proof that she was seriously determined to bear witness
to her love for her father by the sacrifice of her young life, and to
restore peace between him and her mother. But æsthetic criticism is not
my function; I willingly yield that to phrase-makers. All that I have
to indicate is the triple recurrence in _The Wild Duck_ of the idea of
the sacrificial lamb.
At its third appearance this idea suffers a significant transformation.
Hedwig sacrifices herself, not in expiation of an offence--for she
is ignorant of her mother’s guilt--but to accomplish a work of
love. Here the mystico-theological element of redemption recedes
into the background so far as to be almost imperceptible, and there
remains hardly more than the purely human element of the joy felt in
self-sacrifice for others--an impulse not rare among good women, and
which is a manifestation of the unsatisfied yearning for maternity
(often unknown to themselves), and at the same time one of the noblest
and holiest forms of altruism. Ibsen shows this impulse in many of
his female characters, the source of which in the religious mysticism
of the poet would not be at once noticed, if from the numerous
other conjugations of the root-idea of the sacrificial lamb we had
not already acquired the sure habit of recognising it even in its
obscurations. Hedwig constitutes a transition from the theological to
the purely human form of voluntary self-sacrifice. The over-strung
child carries renunciation to the orthodox extreme of yielding up her
life; Ibsen’s other women, to whose character Hedwig supplies the key,
go only to the point of lovingly active self-denial. They do not die
for others, but they live for others. In _A Doll’s House_ Mrs. Linden
has this hunger for self-sacrifice.
I must work in order to endure life [she says to Krogstad--p. 87]. I
have worked from my youth up, and work has been my one best friend.
But now I am quite alone in the world--so terribly empty and forsaken.
There is no happiness in working for one’s self. Nils, give me
somebody and something to work for....
KROGSTAD. What! you really could? Tell me, do you know my past?
MRS. LINDEN. Yes.
KROGSTAD. And do you know my reputation?
MRS. LINDEN. Did you not hint it just now, when you said that with me
you could have been another man?
KROGSTAD. I am perfectly certain of it.
MRS. LINDEN. Could it not yet be so?
KROGSTAD. Christina, do you say this after full deliberation?...
MRS. LINDEN. I need somebody to mother, and your children need a
mother.
Here the idea is not so disguised as to be unrecognisable. Krogstad
is a culprit and an outlaw. If Mrs. Linden offers to live for him,
it is certainly chiefly from the instinct of maternity. But in this
natural feeling there is also a tinge of the mystic idea of the
sinner’s redemption through disinterested love. In _The Lady from the
Sea_, Ellida wishes to return to her birthplace on the sea, Skjoldvik,
because she believes there is nothing for her to do in Wangel’s house.
At the announcement of her resolution her stepdaughter, Hilda, evinces
a profound despair. Then for the first time Ellida learns that Hilda
loves her; there is then born in her the thought that she has someone
to live for, and she says dreamily: ‘Oh, if there should be something
for me to do here!’ In _Rosmersholm_ Rebecca says to Kroll (p. 8):
So long as Mr. Rosmer thinks I am of any use or comfort to him, why,
so long, I suppose, I shall stay here.
KROLL (_looks at her with emotion_). Do you know, it’s really fine for
a woman to sacrifice her whole youth to others, as you have done.
REBECCA. Oh, what else should I have had to live for?
In _The Pillars of Society_ there are two of these touching
self-sacrificing souls--Miss Martha Bernick and Miss Hessel. Miss
Bernick has reared the illegitimate child Dina, and has consecrated her
own life to her (p. 52):
MARTHA. I have been a mother to that much-wronged child--have brought
her up as well as I could.
JOHAN. And sacrificed your whole life in so doing.
MARTHA. It has not been thrown away.
She loves Johan, but as she sees that he is attracted by Dina she
unites the two. She explains herself in regard to the incident in an
exceedingly affecting scene with Johan’s half-sister (p. 95):
LONA. Now we are alone, Martha. You have lost her, and I him.
MARTHA. You him?
LONA. Oh, I had half lost him already over there. The boy longed to
stand on his own feet, so I made him think _I_ was longing for home.
MARTHA. That was it? Now I understand why you came. But he will want
you back again, Lona.
LONA. An old stepsister--what can he want with her now? Men snap many
bonds to arrive at happiness.
MARTHA. It is so, sometimes.
LONA. But now we two must hold together, Martha.
MARTHA. Can I be anything to you?
LONA. Who more? We two foster-mothers--have we not both lost our
children? Now we are alone.
MARTHA. Yes, alone. And therefore I will tell you--I have loved him
more than all the world.
LONA. Martha! (_seizes her arm_). Is this the truth?
MARTHA. My whole life lies in the words. I have loved him, and waited
for him. From summer to summer I have looked for his coming. And then
he came, but he did not see me.
LONA. Loved him! and it was you that gave his happiness into his hands.
MARTHA. Should I not have given him his happiness, since I loved him?
Yes, I have loved him. My whole life has been for him.... He did not
see me.
LONA. It was Dina that overshadowed you, Martha.
MARTHA. It is well that she did! When he went away we were of the
same age. When I saw him again--oh, that horrible moment!--it seemed
to me that I was ten years older than he. He had lived in the bright,
quivering sunshine, and drunk in youth and health at every breath; and
here sat I, the while, spinning and spinning----
LONA. The thread of his happiness, Martha.
MARTHA. Yes, it was gold I spun. No bitterness! Is it not true, Lona,
we have been two good sisters to him?
In _Hedda Gabler_ it is Miss Tesman, aunt of the imbecile Tesman, who
plays the pathetic part of the sacrificial mother. She has brought
him up, and when he marries gives him the largest part of her modest
income. ‘Oh, aunt,’ bleats the poor idiot (p. 18), ‘you will never be
tired of sacrificing yourself for me!’ ‘Do you think,’ replies the good
creature, ‘I have any other joy in this world than to smooth the way
for you, my dear boy--you who have never had a father or a mother to
look after you?’ And when subsequently the paralytic sister of Miss
Tesman is dead, Hedda and she hold this conversation (p. 196):
HEDDA. It will be lonesome for you now, Miss Tesman.
MISS TESMAN. The first few days, yes. But that won’t last very long.
Dear Rina’s little room will not always be empty, that I know.
HEDDA. Indeed! Who is going to move into it, eh?
MISS TESMAN. Oh, there is always some poor invalid or other who needs
to be looked after and tended, unfortunately.
HEDDA. Will you really take such a burden upon you again?
MISS TESMAN. Burden! God forgive you, child! that has never been a
burden to me.
HEDDA. But now, if a stranger should come, then surely----
MISS TESMAN. Oh, one soon becomes friends with sick people. And I must
positively have someone to live for, too.
The three Christo-dogmatic obsessions of original sin, confession,
and self-sacrifice, filling Ibsen’s dramas, as we have seen, from the
first line to the last, are not the only tokens of his mysticism. This
betrays itself by a whole series of other peculiarities, which shall be
briefly indicated.
At the head of these stands the astoundingly chaotic nature of his
thought. One cannot believe one’s eyes while reading how his fulsome
flatterers have had the audacity to extol him for the ‘clearness’ and
‘precision’ of his thought. Do these individuals, then, imagine that
no one capable of forming a judgment will ever read a line of Ibsen? A
clearly-defined thought is an extraordinary rarity in this Norwegian
dramatist. Everything floats and undulates, nebulous and amorphous,
such as we are accustomed to see in weak-brained degenerates. And
if he once succeeds, with toil and stress, in grasping anything and
expressing it in a moderately intelligible manner, he unfailingly
hastens, a few pages later, or in a subsequent piece, to say the exact
opposite. A talk is made of Ibsen’s ‘ideas on morality’ and of his
‘philosophy.’ He has not formulated a single proposition on morality, a
single conception of the world and life, that he has not himself either
refuted or fittingly ridiculed.
He seems to preach free love, and his eulogy of a licentiousness
unchecked by any self-control, regardless of contracts, laws, and
morality, has made of him a ‘modern spirit’ in the eyes of Georg
Brandes and similar protectors of those ‘youths who wish to amuse
themselves a little.’ Mrs. Alving (_Ghosts_, p. 158), calls a ‘crime’
the act of Pastor Manders in repulsing her, after she has quitted her
husband and thrown herself on the pastor’s neck. This highly-strung
dame pushes Regina into the arms of Oswald, her son, when in shameless
speech he informs her that it would give him pleasure to possess the
girl. And this very same Mrs. Alving speaks in terms of the deepest
indignation of her dead husband as ‘profligate’ (p. 146), and again
designates him in the presence of her son as a ‘broken-down man’
(in the original it is ‘et forfaldent Menneske,’ an epithet usually
bestowed on fallen women), and why? Because he had had wanton relations
with women! Well, but is it in Ibsen’s opinion permissible, or not
permissible, to gratify carnal lust as often as it is awakened? If
it is permissible, how does Mrs. Alving come to speak with scorn of
her husband? If it is not permissible, how dared she offer herself
to Pastor Manders, and be the procuress between Regina and her own
half-brother? Or does the moral law hold good for man only, and not
for woman? An English proverb says, ‘What’s sauce for the goose is
sauce for the gander.’ Ibsen evidently does not share the opinion of
popular lore. A woman who runs away from her legal husband and pursues
a lover (Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert Lövborg, in _Hedda Gabler_), or who
offers to form an illicit connection with a man, although nothing
prevents their marrying without further ado like other rational
ratepayers (Mrs. Linden and Krogstad in _A Doll’s House_)--such women
have Ibsen’s entire approbation and sympathy. But if a man seduces a
maiden and liberally provides for her subsequent maintenance (Werle and
Gina in _The Wild Duck_), or, again, if he has illicit relations with
a married woman (Consul Bernick and the actress Dorf in _The Pillars
of Society_), then it is so heinous a crime that the culprit remains
branded his whole life, and is nailed by the poet to the pillory with
the cruelty of a mediæval executioner.
The same contradiction finds its expression in another and more general
form. At one time Ibsen contends with ferocious, impetuosity that
everyone is ‘a law unto himself’ alone, _i.e._, that he should obey
every one of his caprices, nay, even of his diseased impulsions; that,
as his commentators idiotically put it, he should (_sich auslebe_)
‘live out his life.’ In _The Pillars of Society_ Miss Bernick says to
Dina (p. 94):
Promise me to make him [her betrothed] happy.
DINA. I will not promise anything. I hate this promising; things must
come as they can [_i.e._, as the circumstances of the moment may
suggest to the wayward brain].
MARTHA. Yes, yes; so they must. You need only remain as you are, true
and faithful to yourself.
DINA. That I will, Aunt Martha.
In _Rosmersholm_, Rosmer says admiringly of the scoundrel Brendel (p.
28): ‘At least he has had the courage to live his life his own way. I
don’t think that’s such a small matter after all.’ In the same piece
Rebecca complains (p. 97): ‘Rosmersholm has broken me.... Broken me
utterly and hopelessly. I had a fresh, undaunted will when I came here.
Now I have bent my neck under a strange law.’ And further on (p. 102):
‘It is the Rosmer view of life ... that has infected my will.... and
made it sick, enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before.’
Ejlert Lövborg laments in like fashion in _Hedda Gabler_. ‘But it is
_this_--that I don’t want to live that kind of life either. Not now,
over again. It is the courage of life and the defiance of life that
she’ (Thea Elvested, with her sweet, loving constraint) ‘has snapped in
me.’ Quite in opposition to these views, Ibsen, in his _Ghosts_, makes
Regina proclaim her ‘right to live out her life’ in these words (p.
189): ‘Oh! I really can’t stop out here in the country and wear myself
out nursing sick people ... a poor girl must make the best of her young
days.... I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.’ Mrs. Alving
replies: ‘Alas! yes.’ This ‘alas’ is bewildering. Alas? Why ‘alas’?
Does she not obey her ‘law’ if she satisfies her ‘joy in living,’ and,
as she forthwith explains, enters the house of ill-fame for sailors
set up by the joiner Engstrand? How can Mrs. Alving utter this ‘alas,’
when she also was ‘obeying her law’ in offering herself as the mistress
of Pastor Manders, and since she wished to aid her son in ‘obeying his
law,’ when he had set his eyes on Regina? It is because Ibsen, in his
lucid moments, feels that there may be something of danger in ‘obeying
one’s law,’ and this ‘alas’ of Mrs. Alving escapes him as a confession.
In _The Wild Duck_ he ridicules his own dogma in the most liberal
style. In that piece there is one Molvig, a candidate for a University
degree, who also ‘obeys his law.’ This law prescribes that he shall
learn nothing, evade his examinations, and pass his nights in taverns.
The scoffer, Relling, asserts (p. 317) that it ‘comes over him like a
sort of possession; and then I have to go out on the loose with him.
Molvig is a demoniac, you see, ... and demoniac natures are not made to
walk straight through the world; they must meander now and then. And in
order that there shall be no doubt as to what Relling means by this,
he subsequently explains (p. 361): ‘“What the devil do you mean by
demoniac?” “It’s only a piece of hocus-pocus I’ve invented to keep up
a spark of life in him. But for that the poor harmless creature would
have succumbed to self-contempt and despair many a long year ago.”’
That is true. Molvig is a pitiable weakling, unable to conquer his
indolence and passion for drink; abandoned to his own devices, he would
recognise himself for the miserable creature he is, and despise himself
as profoundly as he deserves; but Relling arrives on the scene, and
gives his lack of character the title ‘demoniac,’ and now ‘the child
has a fine name,’ which Molvig can make a parade of to himself and
others. Ibsen does exactly the same thing as his Relling. The weakness
of will, incapable of resisting base and pitiable instincts, he praises
as the ‘will to live out one’s life,’ as the ‘freedom of a spirit who
obeys his own law only,’ and recommends it as the sole rule of life.
But, unlike Relling, he is for the most part ignorant of the fact that
he is practising a deception (which I by no means regard in Relling’s
light as pious and charitable), and believes in his own humbug. That
is, for the most part; not always. Here and there, as in _The Wild
Duck_, he recognises his error and scourges it severely; and his inmost
feeling is so little influenced by his self-deceptive phrase, fit for
a weak-willed degenerate, that he involuntarily and unconsciously
betrays, in all his productions, his deep abhorrence of men who ‘obey
their own law in order to live out their life.’ He punishes Chamberlain
Alving in his son, and makes him cursed by his widow because he has
‘lived out his life.’ He imputes it as a crime to Consul Bernick and
the merchant Werle that they have ‘lived out their life,’ the former
in sacrificing his brother-in-law Johan to protect himself, and for
his intrigue with Mrs. Dorf, the actress; and the latter for allowing
Ekdal to bear the blame of his fault, and for seducing Gina. He
surrounds with an aureole the glorified heads of Rosmer and Rebecca,
because they did not ‘live out their life,’ but, on the contrary, ‘died
their death,’ if I may put it so; because they obeyed, not ‘their own
law,’ but that of others, the universal moral law that annihilated
them. Whenever one of his characters acts in accordance with Ibsen’s
doctrine, and does what is agreeable to himself regardless of morals
and law, he experiences such contrition and self-torment that he is
unable to find calm and joy until he has disburdened his conscience by
confession and expiation.
‘This living out one’s life’ makes its appearance in Ibsen in the form
also of a rigid individualism. The ‘self’ is the only real thing;
the ‘I’ must be cherished and developed, as, indeed, Barrès preaches
independently of Ibsen. The first duty of every human being is to be
just to his ‘I,’ to satisfy its demands, to sacrifice to it every
consideration for others. When Nora wishes to abandon her husband, he
cries (p. 112):
Only think what people will say about it!
NORA. I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is
necessary for me.
HELMER. Oh, it drives one wild! Is this the way you can evade your
holiest duties?
NORA. What do you consider my holiest duties?
HELMER. ... Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?
NORA. I have other duties equally sacred.
HELMER. ... What duties do you mean?
NORA. Duties towards myself.
HELMER. Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
NORA. I no longer think so. I think that before all else I am a human
being just as you are, or, at least, I will try to become one.
In _Ghosts_ Oswald says to his mother with triumphant brutality (p.
192): ‘I can’t be much taken up with other people. I have enough to do
thinking about myself.’ How in the same piece Regina emphasizes her
‘I’ and its rights, we have already seen. In _An Enemy of the People_,
Stockmann proclaims the right of the ‘I’ in face of the majority, and
even the race, in these words (p. 283): ‘It is a hideous lie: the
doctrine that the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses, are the pith
of the people--that, indeed, they are the people--that the common man,
that this ignorant, undeveloped member of society, has the same right
to condemn or to sanction, to govern and to rule, as the few people of
intellectual power.’ And (p. 312): ‘I only want to drive into the heads
of these curs that the Liberals are the worst foes of free men ...
that the considerations of expediency turn morality and righteousness
upside down until life is simply hideous.... Now I am one of the
strongest men upon earth.... You see the fact is that the strongest
man upon earth is he who stands most alone.’ But this very Stockmann,
who will hear nothing of ‘the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses,’
as he reiterates with insufferable tautology, who feels, his ‘I’
powerful only in a majestic solitude, calls his fellow-citizens ‘old
women who think only of their families,[340] and not of the general
good.’ And in the very same piece (_A Doll’s House_), in which Ibsen
evidently bestows loud applause on Nora for declaring that ‘her only
duties were to herself,’ and that she ‘could have no consideration for
anyone else,’ he stigmatizes her husband as a pitiable, low-spirited
weakling, because on his wife’s confession of forgery he first of all
thinks of his own reputation only, and hence of his ‘duty to himself,’
his only consideration being for himself, and not for his wife. Here
there recurs the same phenomenon as in Ibsen’s notions concerning
sexual morality. Unchastity in a man is a crime, but in a woman is
permissible. In the same way the rude emphasizing of the ‘I’ is a
merit only in the woman. The man has no right to be an egoist. How,
for example, Ibsen rails at egoism through Bernick (in _The Pillars
of Society_), whom he makes say naïvely, in reference to his sister
Martha, that she ‘is quite insignificant’ (p. 49), and that he does not
wish to have her otherwise!
You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some
steady-going person like her, whom one can put to anything that may
turn up.
JOHAN. Yes, but she herself?
BERNICK. She herself? Why, of course she has enough to interest
herself in--Betty and Olaf, and me, you know. People should not think
of themselves first, and women least of all.
And how severely Ibsen condemns the egoism of Mrs. Elvsted’s husband
(_Hedda Gabler_), when he puts these bitter words into her mouth (p.
52): ‘He is not really fond of anybody but himself. Perhaps of the
children a little!’
But the most remarkable thing about this philosopher of individualism
is that he not only expressly condemns egoism in the man as a low
vice, but unconsciously also admires disinterestedness in the woman
as an angelic perfection. In _A Doll’s House_ (p. 113) he brags that
‘my most sacred duties are towards myself.’ And yet the only touching
and charming characters in his pieces with whom this inflexible
individualist is successful are the saintly women who live and die for
others only--these Hedwigs, Miss Bernicks, Miss Hessels, Aunt Tesmans,
etc., who never think of their ‘I,’ but make the sacrifice of all
their impulses and wishes to the welfare of others their sole task on
earth. This contradiction, violent to the point of absurdity, is very
well explained by the nature of Ibsen’s mind. His mystico-religious
obsession of voluntary self-sacrifice for others is necessarily
stronger than his pseudo-philosophic lucubration on individualism.
Among the ‘moral ideas’ of Ibsen are counted his professed thirst for
truth. At least enough has been said and written on this subject. ‘Only
just think,’ Helmer says to Nora (_A Doll’s House_, pp. 44, 45), ‘how a
man so conscious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a
hypocrite, and an actor; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour,
and even his wife and children, his own children. That’s the worst,
Nora.... Because such a misty atmosphere of lying brings contagion
into the whole family.’ ‘Is there no voice in your mother’s heart
that forbids you to destroy your son’s ideals?’ asks Pastor Manders in
_Ghosts_ (p. 155), when Mrs. Alving has revealed to her son her defunct
husband’s ‘immorality.’ To which Mrs. Alving magniloquently replies,
‘But what about the truth?’ In _The Pillars of Society_, Lona Hessel
thus preaches to Consul Bernick (p. 57):
Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen
years you have stood upon a lie?
BERNICK. A lie?... You call that----
LONA. I call it the lie--the threefold lie. First the lie towards me;
then the lie towards Betty; then the lie towards Johan.... Is there
not something within you that asks you to get clear of the lie?
BERNICK. You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic
happiness, and my position in society?
LONA. What right have you to stand where you are standing?
And subsequently (p. 70):
LONA. A lie, then, has made you the man you now are?
BERNICK. Whom did it hurt, then?...
LONA. You ask whom it hurt? Look into yourself, and see if it has not
hurt you.
Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his confession there
takes place a highly edifying dialogue between him and the severe
guardian of his conscience (p. 98):
BERNICK. Yes, yes, yes; it all comes of the lie....
LONA. Then, why do you not break with all this lying?... What
satisfaction does this show and deception give you?
BERNICK. ... It is my son I am working for.... There will come a time
when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it
he shall found a happier life than his father’s.
LONA. With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving
your son for an inheritance.
In _An Enemy of the People_, words of truth are ever coming from the
mouths of the Stockmann family: ‘There’s so much falseness both at
home and at school,’ declaims their daughter, Petra. ‘At home you
mustn’t speak, and at school you have to stand there and lie to the
children.... We have to teach many and many a thing we don’t believe
ourselves.... If only I could afford it I’d start a school myself, and
things should be very different there.’ The courageous maiden quarrels
with an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity
(p. 255): ‘What I am angry with you for is that you have not acted
honestly towards my father. You told him it was only the truth and
the good of the community you cared about.... You are not the man you
pretend to be. And I shall never forgive you--never!’ ‘The whole of
our developing social life,’ cries the father Stockmann in his turn
(p. 242), ‘is rooted in a lie.’ And later on (p. 287) ‘Yes, I love my
native town so well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing
upon a lie.... All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like
vermin. You’ll poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to
such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.’ Now, all
this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this fervent
worship of truth is only one of the forms under which there appears in
Ibsen’s consciousness the mystico-religious obsession of the sacrament
of confession, and also, if he were not careful, conformably with
his habit, to destroy any too hasty belief in the sincerity of his
phraseology by himself ridiculing it. In Gregers Werle he has created
the best caricature of his men of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly
the same terms as Lona Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but
in his mouth the words are intended to excite laughter: ‘And look at
this confiding nature, this great child,’ he says of his friend Hjalmar
(p. 41). ‘See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under the
same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his home, as
he calls it, rests upon a lie.... At length I see an object in life.’
This object consists in operating on Hjalmar’s moral cataract. And he
does it, too. ‘You are sunk in a poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,’ Gregers
says to him (p. 101). ‘You have an insidious disease within you, and
you’ve sunk down to die in the dark.... Don’t be afraid; I will try to
help you up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.’ And shortly
afterwards he says to the father: ‘But Hjalmar I can rescue from all
the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to ruin.’ The scoffer
Relling treats no worse than he deserves the idiot who, in fulfilling
his ‘mission in life’ disturbs the peace between Hjalmar and his wife,
destroys their comfortable home, and drives Hedwig to her death.
Yours is a complicated case ... that troublesome integrity-fever [he
says to him--p. 360]....
I’m fostering the life-illusion [literally ‘the life-lie’] in him.
GREGERS. Life-illusion? Is that what you said?
RELLING. Yes, I said illusion. For illusion, you know, is the
stimulating principle.... Rob the average man of his life-illusion,
and you rob him of his happiness at the same time.
Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion? Is a man to strive for truth, or
to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with Relling? Ibsen
owes us an answer to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them
affirmatively and negatively with equal ardour and equal poetic power.
Another ‘moral idea’ of Ibsen, about which his choristers chatter
most loudly, is that of ‘true marriage.’ It is certainly not easy to
discover what his mystic brain conceives by these mysterious words,
but it is nevertheless possible to guess it from the hundred obscure
notions in his plays. He does not seem to approve of the idea that
the woman should regard marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In
nearly all his pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony
peculiar to him. In _Ghosts_, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life’s
unhappiness to the fact that she married the chamberlain for his
money--that she sold herself. ‘The sums which I have spent upon the
orphanage year by year make up the amount--I have reckoned it up
precisely--the amount which made Lieutenant Alving a good match in his
day.... It was the purchase-money. I do not choose that money should
pass into Oswald’s hands’ (p. 149). In _The Lady from the Sea_, Ellida
sings the same song (p. 139): ‘It could bring nothing but unhappiness,
after the way in which we came together.... Yes, we are (doing so), or,
at least, we suppress the truth. For the truth ... is, that you came
out there and bought me.... I was not a bit better than you. I accepted
the bargain--sold myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and
so absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the bargain
when you came and proposed to provide for me all my life.’ In almost
the same words Hedda says (_Hedda Gabler_, p. 86): ‘And then he would
go and make such a tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for
me. I did not know why I should not accept it.’ She did not know why;
but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final suicide, are the
consequence of her having allowed herself to be ‘provided for.’ The
regard paid to the ‘being provided for’ became also the lifelong misery
of another woman in the same piece--Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally
as ‘governess in the house of her future husband.’ She subsequently
undertook the management of the household. Then she allowed herself
to be married, although ‘everything around him is distasteful to me,’
and ‘we do not possess a thought in common.’ Ibsen condemns the man
who marries for money not less than the woman who allows herself to be
‘provided for.’ The cause of Bernick’s moral downfall (_The Pillars of
Society_, p. 56), is chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he
loved, but another. ‘It was for no new fancy that I broke with you; it
was entirely for the sake of the money.’
Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle to which every
rational and moral man will subscribe. But why should one marry? The
most reasonable answer can only be, ‘From inclination.’ But Ibsen will
have none of this either. The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a
love-match. It leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (_The Lady from the
Sea_) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly affirms it
(p. 108): ‘You had only seen me and spoken to me a few times. Then
you wanted me, and so....’ And then she feels herself a stranger to
him, and wishes to leave him. So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda
Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted, marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the
happiness of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundly
unhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, and pays
for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel marries a girl
because she pleases him, and as a reward she wishes to quit him and
her home. What conclusion is to be drawn from all this? That marriage
from prudence is bad, and marriage from love no better? That marriage
in general is worth nothing, and should be abolished? That would be at
least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen arrives.
Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case of Nora, it is
reciprocal. Something else is still necessary--the man must become the
educator of his wife. He must help her intellectually. He must let her
participate in all his concerns, make of her a companion possessing
equal rights, and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she
always remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no
‘true marriage.’ ‘I have no right to claim my husband wholly and solely
for myself,’ Ellida confesses (_The Lady from the Sea_, P. 57). ‘Why,
I, too, live in something from which others are shut out.’ In the same
piece Wangel blames himself in this way (p. 130): ‘I ought to have been
at once a father to her and a guide; I ought to have done my best to
develop and enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of
that.... I preferred her just as she was.’ In _The Pillars of Society_
Mrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): ‘For many years I believed that I had at
one time possessed you and lost you again. Now I know that I have never
possessed you.’ And Lona Hessel draws the moral from this story (p. 97):
And do you never think what she might have been to you--she, whom you
chose in my stead?
BERNICK. I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what
I required.
LONA. Because you have never shared your life-work with her; because
you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.
In _Rosmersholm_ Rector Kroll has treated his wife in the same way;
he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully surprised when
she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant who has extinguished
her mental light (p. 14). ‘My wife, who all her life long has shared
my opinions and concurred in my views both in great things and small,
is actually inclined to side with the children on many points. And
she blames me for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the
children. As if it weren’t necessary to. Well, you see how my house is
divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it as
possible. It’s best to keep such things quiet.’
Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. Most assuredly
should marriage be not merely a union of bodies, but also a community
of minds; most assuredly should the man help and educate the wife
intellectually, although it is to be remarked that this _rôle_ of
teacher and guardian assigned with justice by Ibsen to the man,
decisively excludes the full intellectual equality of the two married
parties equally claimed by him. But how can one reconcile with these
notions about the true relation between the man and his wife Nora’s
words to her husband (_A Doll’s House_, p. 111): ‘I must first try to
educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I must set to
work alone. And that is why I am going away from you now.... I must
be thrown entirely upon myself’? We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if
we have read aright. What, then, is the duty of the husband in ‘true
marriage’? Shall he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Bernick,
Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, and repels all
assistance. _Farà da se!_ She will educate and form herself. As though
this contradiction were not already sufficiently bewildering, Ibsen
still further mocks those pitiable souls, who would fain obtain rules
of morality from him, when, in _The Wild Duck_, he derides, as he is
wont, all that he has preached on the subject of ‘true marriage’ in
all the rest of his pieces. In that production a delicious dialogue
is brought about between the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer
Relling (p. 337):
GREGERS. [I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.
RELLING. So you don’t find Ekdal’s marriage good enough as it is?
GREGERS. No doubt it’s as good a marriage as most others, worse luck.
But a _true_ marriage it has never been.
HJALMAR. You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.
RELLING. All rubbish, my boy! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many ...
true marriages have you seen in the course of your life?
GREGERS. Scarcely a single one.
RELLING. Nor I, either.
And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar’s words
(p. 345): ‘Well, then, isn’t it exasperating to think that it’s not I,
but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?... Isn’t
the marriage between your father and Mrs. Sœrby founded upon complete
confidence, upon entire and unreserved candour on both sides? They
hide nothing from each other. Their relation is based, if I may put it
so’ (!) ‘on mutual confession and absolution.’ Hence no one has yet
seen a ‘true marriage’; and when by chance this miracle does happen
it is fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Sœrby--Mr. Werle,
who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young girls and sent old
friends to prison in his place--Mrs. Sœrby, who confides to her husband
that she has had illicit relations with every imaginable sort of man.
It is a tame imitation of the scene in _Raskolnikow_ by Dostojewski,
where the assassin and the prostitute, after a contrite confession,
unite their soiled and broken lives; except that in Ibsen the scene
is stripped of its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and
vulgar.
With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in ‘true
marriage,’ their husband suddenly becomes ‘a strange man,’ and, without
further ceremony, they abandon their home and their children, some,
like Nora, ‘to return to their birthplace,’ where ‘it will be easier
for me to get something to do of one sort or another’; others, like
Ellida, without giving a thought to what will become of them; others,
again, like Mrs. Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover
and throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously parodied
this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for he assigns
the laughable _rôle_ of the tragic runaway to a man. ‘I must out into
the snow and tempest,’ declaims Hjalmar (_The Wild Duck_, p. 166),
‘and seek from house to house a shelter for my old father and myself.’
And he really goes, but naturally only to return home the next day,
crestfallen, but stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need
be said against the idiocy of Nora’s high-flown leave-taking, which has
become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen spared
us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.
We have not yet done with Ibsen’s drivel on the subject of marriage. He
seems to exact that no girl should marry before she is fully matured,
and possesses an experience of life and a knowledge of the world and of
men (_A Dolls House_, p. 111):
NORA. And I--how have I been prepared to educate the children?... For
that task I am not ready.... I must first try to educate myself....
I cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with
what is in books.
HELMER. You don’t understand the society in which you live.
NORA. No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.
This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going in quest
of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the largest possible
number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, of a few men before
binding herself definitely. A young girl is thoroughly prepared for
marriage when she has attained to a respectable age, managed a few
households, perhaps also given birth to sundry children, and in this
way proved to herself and others that she understands the duties of
a housewife and a mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it
is the only reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole
series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he is
here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and rejected as
unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental marriage for a longer
or shorter period, the preference for brides endowed with a rich
experience in love-affairs and sundry children, all this has already
existed. Ibsen may learn all that he needs on this subject from
his half-compatriot, Professor Westermarck.[341] But he would be no
degenerate if he did not regard as progress the return to conditions
of the most primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not
mistake the far-away past for the future.
Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his dramas. There
should be no marriage from interest (Hedda, Mrs. Alving, Bernick,
etc.). There should be no marriage from love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage
of prudence is not a true marriage. But to marry because each pleases
the other is equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the
full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough
knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida). The man
should be the woman’s instructor and educator (Wangel, Bernick). The
wife should not allow herself to be instructed and educated by the
husband, but acquire the necessary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the
wife discovers that her marriage is not a ‘true marriage,’ she leaves
the husband, for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her
children, for children which she has had by a stranger are naturally
strangers also. She must, however, at the same time remain with the
husband, and endeavour to transform him from a stranger into her own
husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is not intended permanently to unite
two beings. When anything in the one is not agreeable to the other,
they return the ring and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving,
Ellida, Mrs. Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous
crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true marriage
(Relling). This is Ibsen’s doctrine concerning marriage. It leaves
nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It amply suffices for
the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian poet’s intellect.
Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering
contradictions, Ibsen’s mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in
absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. We have
seen in _The Lady from the Sea_ that Ellida wishes to abandon her
husband, because her marriage is not a true one, and because her
husband has become a stranger to her. Why is he a stranger to her?
Because he has married her without mutual close acquaintance. ‘You
had only seen me and spoken a few words to me.’ She ought not to have
let herself be provided for. ‘Rather the meanest labour, rather the
most wretched surroundings, so long as they were the result of free
will, of free choice.’ From this one can only reasonably conclude that
Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless the
woman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has had full
freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these conditions existed
in the case of the first claimant for her hand. ‘The first--that might
have been a complete and real marriage.’ Now, the same Ellida, a few
pages before (78), says that she knew absolutely nothing concerning her
lover; she did not even know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is
spoken of throughout the piece only as ‘the stranger.’
WANGEL. What else do you know about him?
ELLIDA. Only that he went to sea very young; and that he had been on
long voyages.
WANGEL. Is there nothing more?
ELLIDA. No; we never spoke of such things.
WANGEL. Of what did you speak, then?
ELLIDA. About the sea!
And she betrothed herself to him
Because he said I must.
WANGEL. You must? Had you no will of your own, then?
ELLIDA. Not when he was near.
So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason that,
previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly know him,
and she must go to ‘the stranger,’ of whom she knows nothing. Her
marriage with Wangel is no marriage, because she did not enter into
it with perfect freedom of will, but the marriage with ‘the stranger’
will be ‘perfect and pure,’ although when she betrothed herself to him
she had ‘no will of her own.’ After this example of his mental maze,
it is truly humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning
the intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted
by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet of the
future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself the labour of
referring to his other absurdities.
In this same _Lady from the Sea_, Ellida renounces her project of
leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the ‘stranger,’ as soon
as Wangel says ‘with aching heart’: ‘Now you can choose your own path
in perfect freedom.’ She remains with Wangel. She chooses him. ‘Whence
came the change?’ asks Wangel and the reader with him. ‘Ah, don’t you
understand,’ Ellida gushingly replies, ‘that the change came--was bound
to come--when I could choose in freedom!’ (p. 141). This second choice,
then, is intended to form a complete contrast to the first, in which
Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. But all the conditions, without a
single exception, have remained the same. Ellida is now free because
Wangel expressly gives her her freedom; but she was still freer on the
first occasion, because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did
not need to begin by setting her free. As little was external coercion
exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after marriage.
Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on herself. If at the
betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as she herself explains,
because she was at that time poor, and allowed herself to be enticed
by the alluring prospect of being provided for. But in this respect
nothing has changed. She has come into no property since her marriage,
so far as we know from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If
she quits Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found
insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, she is quite
as much provided for as she hoped to be when she betrothed herself
to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast between her former want of
liberty and her present freedom to explain the change? There is none.
It exists in the confused thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this
piratical story about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to
mean, or to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first
live a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself
definitively; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be free at
the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. The only meaning
of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy--experimental marriage.
We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental idea, in the
premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. In _Ghosts_ Oswald
Alving’s disease is represented as a chastisement for the sins of
his father, and for the moral weakness of his mother in marrying
for self-interest a man she did not love. Now, Oswald’s state is
the consequence of a complaint which may be contracted without any
depravity whatsoever. It is a silly antiquated idea of the bigoted
members of societies for the suppression of immorality that a
contagious disease is the consequence and punishment of licentiousness.
Doctors know better than that. They know hundreds--nay, thousands--of
cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no
other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is looked
upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection against such a
misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where doctors, nurses, etc.,
have contracted the malady in the discharge of their duties, and
without carnal transgression. Ibsen’s drivel proves nothing of that
which, according to him, it should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be
a monster of immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having
an insane son; and his son could be insane without more culpability
on the part of the father than is the case with all men who have been
unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives obtrusive evidence of
having had no wish to write a tract in praise of continence, by making
Mrs. Alving throw herself into the arms of Pastor Manders, and by
making the mother the intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock
between the son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth
of Oswald a panegyric on concubinage--one of the most incredible things
met with in the incredible Ibsen. ‘What are they to do?’ replies Oswald
Alving to the horrified pastor. ‘A poor young artist--a poor young
girl. It costs a lot of money to get married.’ I can only suppose that
the innocent Norwegian villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen
a ‘free union,’ and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths
of a nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order of
things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily opportunities for
getting insight into dozens and hundreds of free unions, will burst
into hearty laughter over Ibsen’s infantine fantasies, worthy of a
lascivious schoolboy. In no country in the world does civil marriage
cost more than a trifling sum, very much less than the first repast
offered by a young fellow to the girl he has persuaded to live with
him; and religious marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the
bridal couple a donation in money, clothes, and household articles,
if they are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which
expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist everywhere.
When persons form unions without the aid of the civil law or of
priests, it is probably never for the purpose of saving the expense of
marriage, but either from culpable levity, or because either one or
other of them makes a mental reservation not to bind him or herself,
but to enjoy something agreeable without undertaking any serious
duties; or, finally, in the few cases which a moral man may approve,
or, at least, excuse, because on one side or the other there exists
some legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love,
and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their intention
to be faithful to each other unto death.
But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital absurdity
of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for his illicit indulgence
in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and in his children Oswald
and Regina. That is very edifying, and would, doubtless, meet with
approbation at a conference of clergymen, although nonsensical and
inaccurate to the highest degree. We will only mention in passing that
Ibsen constantly recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ‘living out
one’s life.’ But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of
her husband? That all should remain chaste and pure, an idea worked out
by Bjornson in his _Glove_? No. She is led by it to the conclusion that
the existing order of morals and the law are bad. ‘Oh, that perpetual
law and order!’ she exclaims (p. 154); ‘I often think it is that which
does all the mischief here in the world.... I can endure all this
constraint and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work
my way out to freedom.’ What in the world has Alving’s story to do
with ‘law and order?’ and how does ‘freedom’ enter into this _Credo_?
What connection with the piece have the silly speeches of this woman,
unless it be that they are lugged in to tickle the radical patrons
of the gallery into applause. In Tahiti neither ‘order’ nor ‘morals’
reign in the sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties
have all the ‘freedom’ to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ‘work her way
out,’ and the men so ‘live out their lives’ that ships’ officers,
not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. And in that very
region Chamberlain Alving’s disease is so widespread that, according to
Ibsen’s medical theory, all the young Tahitians must be Oswalds.
But this is a constant habit of Ibsen’s, evidenced in all his pieces.
He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used for effect by
orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, having nothing in the
least to do with the piece. ‘I don’t know what religion is,’ Nora says
in the well-known scene where she leaves her husband (p. 114). ‘... I
know nothing but what our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He
explained that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away
from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter too.
I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true.... I have now
learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I thought they were;
but I can’t convince myself that they are right.’ Now her case has no
relation to the religious doctrine of Pastor Hansen and the excellence
or badness of the laws. No law in the world concedes the right to a
child to sign her father’s name to a cheque without his knowledge, and
all the laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire
into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes Krogstad
the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39): ‘The laws inquire little into
motives.’ The whole of this scene, in view of which, however, the piece
was written, is foreign to the play, and does not originally spring
from it. If Nora wishes to abandon her husband, it can only be on the
supposition that she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly
as she had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters
an inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which
are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and absence of
love in her husband), and departs like a feminine Coriolanus shaking
her fist at her fatherland. In _The Pillars of Society_ Bernick,
wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces his avowal with the
words (p. 110): ‘Let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the
prediction that from this evening we begin a new time. The old, with
its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and
its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum,’ etc. ‘Speak
for yourself, Bernick, speak for yourself,’ one might well call out to
the old wind-bag, who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his
own individual case. ‘I wish to speak of the great discovery that I
have made within the last few days,’ exclaims Stockmann in _An Enemy
of the People_, ‘the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life
are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil
teeming with the pestilence of lies.’ That may in itself be true; but
nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive reasonably
at this conclusion. Even in Plato’s republic it might happen that a
ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, should refuse
to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could deduce from
this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of Philistines in
an impossible Norwegian village, the general proposition that ‘our
whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence
of lies.’ In _Rosmersholm_, Brendel says in an obscurely profound
prophetic tone, which shudders with foreboding (p. 23): ‘We live in a
tempestuous, an equinoctial age.’ This expression also, true enough
in itself, strikes one like a blow in the eye in the place where it
occurs, for _Rosmersholm_ has no connection with any definite period of
time; and it is not necessary to change a single essential word in the
piece, in order to transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the
age of the Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas--to any
age or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.
We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who wish to pick a
quarrel: ‘Sir, why did you look at me in that way?’ ‘Pardon me, I did
not look at you.’ ‘What! you say, then, that I lie?’ ‘I said nothing
of the sort.’ ‘You give me the lie a second time. You must give me
satisfaction.’ This is Ibsen’s method. What he wishes is to denounce
society, the state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases.
Instead, however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures,
he sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as
unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naïve farces of our fathers.
Cleanse Ibsen’s dramas of these pasted-on phrases, and even a Brandes
will no longer be able to trumpet them as ‘modern’ productions; there
will remain only a tissue of absurdities, belonging to no time or
place, in which here and there emerge single poetically fine scenes and
accessory figures, not changing in the least the atrociousness of the
whole. In fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis--_i.e._,
some anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events
which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, his
poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and men, are
insufficient. For he goes through the world without seeing it, and
his glance is always turned inward on himself. In contradiction to the
saying of the poet, ‘All that is human is alien to him,’ and his own
‘I’ alone occupies him and absorbs his attention. He himself proclaims
this in a well-known poem wherein he says, ‘Life is a battle with the
ghost in the vaults of the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold
judgment day over one’s own self.’[342]
The ‘ghost in the heart and brain’ is the obsessions and impulses in
conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate is certainly
spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is nothing but a
‘judgment day’ of the poet over himself, cannot be a mirror of
universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but simply the
intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, isolated
existence. He sees the image of the world with the eye of an insect;
a diminutive single feature which shows itself to one of the polished
facets of such a discoidal eye, and which he perchance perceives,
he firmly seizes, and renders with distinctness. But he does not
comprehend its connection with the whole phenomenon, and his organ of
vision is not able to span a large comprehensive picture. This explains
the fidelity to nature in petty details and quite accessory figures,
while the chief events and central characters are always astonishingly
absurd and alien to all the realities of the world.