THE FOE OF FORMULAS
Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink
strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois
morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of
Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and
large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a
fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was
one in the field of art.
He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship.
He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor
student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater,
which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy.
Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or
five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern,
penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes,
and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.
Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen
have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and
women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and
it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen’s plays it
works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be
guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of
authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is
in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress
the individual and thwart his full development. But you must not assume
that he is willing to make a formula out of self-realization;
straightway he will turn about and show you some selfish egotist engaged
in realizing himself and wrecking everyone else.
Ibsen wrote two long poems, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” into which he put
ideas resembling those of “Don Quixote.” Brand is a Norwegian preacher,
who has his formula of perfect righteousness, the sacrifice of the
individual to God. He acts as blindly as Don Quixote tilting at
wind-mills, and destroys a number of people, himself included. “Peer
Gynt,” on the other hand, is a scamp who, like Sancho Panza, fools
himself by those very qualities of which he is most proud, his ability
to take care of himself, his unwillingness to consider anything but his
own interest.
Ibsen also fell under the spell of gloomy materialistic science. Like
Maupassant, he sees men as the sport of circumstances. The difference is
that he believes, in spite of his theories, in fighting against
circumstance, and his whole being is absorbed in the task of helping men
and women to fight wisely and effectively.
He took the French device of the “well-made play,” a simple, unadorned
picture of reality, compressing a great mass of character and incident
into a small space. He used this art form to deal, not with the great
world of fashion, but with the middle-class people he knew in small
Norwegian towns: doctors and lawyers and clergymen and merchants, with
their wives and sons and daughters. They are wretchedly unhappy people,
and Ibsen shows how they make their own unhappiness, because their ideas
are false, because they are slaves of traditions which have no relation
to present-day reality. “The Pillars of Society” tells about a business
man who makes his life a string of lies in order to hide an offense he
has committed; he is helping to preserve civilization, by not letting
anybody know that a business man can do wrong. “A Doll’s House” tells
about a woman who discovers that she is a pet and an ornament in her
household, and leaves her husband and children and goes out into the
world to become an individual.
There are three stages in one’s attitude toward thesis plays of this
sort. First, the thesis is new, and whether it pleases you or angers
you, it rouses and stirs you. Second, you know the thesis by heart, and
have accepted it and lived it. At that stage the play bores you; you say
that you do not go to the theater for Sunday school lessons. The third
stage comes when the thesis has become so familiar that you no longer
think of the play in that way; it holds you then, if it holds you at
all, by the human realness of its characters and their fates.
Eighteen years ago I saw “A Doll’s House” acted. I was at the second
stage of development, and it seemed to me a tiresome little sermon, I
could not stay to the end. But a few days later I saw “Hedda Gabler,”
and this was different; I forgot the thesis, and was interested in a
psychological study of the modern parasitic female. We all know Hedda;
some of us have been married to her. She has been brought up in
idleness, she lives by vanity, she is bored, and preys upon men, not
because she is sexual, but because she wants attention and applause, and
cannot endure that anyone else should have these things in her presence.
One of Hedda’s victims is a poet; he has labored to produce a
manuscript, and in his despair over her he tears it up. When Hedda hears
of that she is thrilled to the depths, and cries: “A deed! A deed!” Let
that be a symbol of the art-for-art’s-sake attitude to life!
The greatest of Ibsen’s plays is “Ghosts.” It has a thesis so wicked
that the critics hardly yet dare to state it. This thesis happens to be
the exact opposite of the one in “The Scarlet Letter”: that a true and
good woman, unhappily married, who finds that she loves her clergyman,
ought to elope with the clergyman instead of staying with her husband.
In Ibsen’s play the woman stays with her husband, and helps to make him
comfortable, while he gets drunk and commits infidelities. She bears him
a son, and lavishes her love and devotion upon this son, only to see him
go the way of his father, and eventually die of syphilis.
This unpleasant disease had never before appeared upon the stage, and
when “Ghosts” was produced in the pious city of London in the year 1891,
the critics and newspapers went out of their minds. You may find a
record of their opinions in Bernard Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism”;
starting with the London “Daily Telegraph,” which called the play “an
open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a
lazar-house with all its doors and windows open ... candid foulness ...
bestial and cynical ... offensive cynicism ... melancholy and malodorous
world ... absolutely loathsome and fetid ... gross, almost putrid
indecorum ... literary carrion ... crapulous stuff.” All this referring
to a play now recognized as one of the great tragic masterpieces of all
time!
“An Enemy of the People” deals with Ibsen’s attitude toward politics and
social questions. The “enemy” is a young doctor in a Norwegian town, who
discovers that the famous baths, the basis of the town’s prosperity, are
infected with typhoid. The doctor insists upon making the facts public,
and so of course he has an unhappy time. Curiously enough, you will find
the same story in “The Goose-Step”; it happened at the University of
Oregon--quite a distance from Norway. The “enemy of the people” in this
latter case was a young professor, who was duly compelled to move on.
The world is forty years older than when Ibsen wrote this play; we have
had time to analyze the economic forces in our society, and we are no
longer satisfied with a crude distrust of democracy. It is true that the
people stone the prophets; but later on they build monuments to them;
and the world must be saved by the people, if it is to be saved at all.
Ibsen’s attitude is the natural one for an artist, who has to take care
of his own mind, and does not want anyone to tell him what to think. He
is distrustful of discipline, preaches individualism--and finds the
reactionaries glad to quote his words. But you see, all the poet has to
do is to portray the world; the masses have a more difficult job--they
have to change it. So they cannot rest in the anarchist attitude; they
have to have discipline and solidarity, they have to organize and find
leaders, and learn to stand by those leaders, and at the same time to
control them. All that is a new task, and calls for new types of
thinkers, not merely critical, but constructive.