THE SATIRES (1857-67)
Temperament and environment combined at the period we have now reached
to turn Ibsen into a satirist. It was during his time of _Sturm und
Drang_, from 1857 to 1864, that the harshest elements in his nature were
awakened, and that he became one who loved to lash the follies of his
age. With the advent of prosperity and recognition this phase melted
away, leaving Ibsen without illusions and without much pity, but no
longer the scourge of his fellow-citizens. Although _The Pretenders_, a
work of dignified and polished aloofness, was not completed until
1863, it really belongs to the earlier and more experimental section
of Ibsen's works, and is so completely the outcome and the apex of
his national studies that it has seemed best to consider it with _The
Vikings at Helgeland_, in spite of its immense advance upon that drama.
But we must now go back a year, and take up an entirely new section
which overlaps the old, namely, that of Ibsen's satires in dramatic
rhyme.
With regard to the adoption of that form of poetic art, a great
difference existed between Norwegian and English taste, and this must
be borne in mind. Almost exactly at the date when Ibsen was inditing the
sharp couplets of his _Love's Comedy_, Tennyson, in _Sea Dreams_,
was giving voice to the English abandonment of satire--which had been
rampant in the generation of Byron--in the famous words:--
I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,
Nor ever cared to better his own kind,
Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.
What England repudiated, Norway comprehended, and in certain hands
enjoyed. Polemical literature, if seldom of a high class, was abundant
and was much appreciated. The masterpiece of modern Norwegian poetry
was, still, the satiric cycle of Welhaven. In ordinary controversy, the
tone was more scathing, the bludgeon was whirled more violently, than
English taste at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to
crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself,
and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw
"afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches," as
Dryden said.
Yet it was not an age of gross and open vices; manners were not
flagitious, they were merely of a nauseous insipidity. Ibsen, flown with
anger as with wine, could find no outrageous offences to lash, and all
he could invite the age to do was to laugh at certain conventions and to
reconsider some prejudicated opinions. He had to be pungent, not openly
ferocious; he had to be sarcastic and to treat the current code
of morals as a jest. He found the society around him excessively
distasteful to him, but there were no crying evils of a political or
ethical kind to be stigmatized. What was open to him was what an old
writer of our own defined as "a sharp, well-mannered way of laughing a
folly out of countenance."
Unfortunately, the people laughed at will never consent to think the way
well mannered, and Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste," that
vaguest and most insidious of accusations. We are told that he began his
enterprise in prose [Note: "_Svanhild_: a Comedy in three acts and in
prose: 1860," is understood to exist still in manuscript], but found
that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social crudity of
Norway. In writing satire, it is all-important that the form should
be adequate, and at this time Ibsen had not reached the impeccable
perfection of his later colloquial prose. He started _Love's Comedy_,
therefore, anew, and he wrote it as a pamphlet in rhyme. It is not
certain that he had any very definite idea of the line which his attack
should take. He was very poor, very sore, very uncomfortable, and he was
easily convinced that the times were out of joint. Then he observed that
if there was anything that the Norwegian upper classes prided themselves
upon it was their conduct of betrothal and marriage. Plato had said that
the familiarity of young persons before marriage prevented enmity
and disappointment in later years, that it was useful to know the
peculiarities of temperament beforehand, and so, being accustomed to
them, to discount them. But Ibsen was not of this opinion, or rather,
perhaps, he did not choose to be. The extremely slow and public method
of betrothal in the North gave him his first opportunity.
It is with a song, in the original one of the most delicious of
his lyrics, that he opens the campaign. To a miscellaneous party of
Philistines circled around the tea table, "all sober and all ----" the
rebellious hero sings:--
In the sunny orchard-closes,
While the warblers sing and swing,
Care not whether blustering Autumn
Break the promises of Spring;
Rose and white the apple-blossom
Hides you from the sultry sky;
Let it flutter, blown and scattered,
On the meadow by and by.
In the sexual struggle, that is to say, the lovers should not pause to
consider the worldly advantages of their match, but should fly in
secret to each other's arms. By the law of battle, the female should be
snatched to the conqueror's saddle-bow, and ridden away with into
the night, not subjected to the jokes and the good advice and the
impertinent congratulations of the clan. Young Lochinvar does not wait
to ask the counsel of the bride's cousins, nor to run the gantlet of her
aunts; he fords the Esk river with her, where ford there is none. Ibsen
is in favor of the _mariage de convenance_, which suppresses, without
favor, the absurdity of love-matches. Above all, anything is better than
the publicity, the meddling and long-drawn exposure of betrothal, which
kills the fine delicacy of love, as birds are apt to break their own
eggs if intruding hands have touched them.
This is the central point in _Love's Comedy_, but there is much beside
this in its reckless satire on the "sanctities" of domestic life. The
burden of monogamy is frivolously dealt with, and the impertinent poet
touches with levity upon the question of the duration of marriage:
With my living, with my singing,
I will tear the hedges down!
Sweep the grass and heap the blossom!
Let it shrivel, pale and blown!
Throw the wicket wide! Sheep, cattle,
Let them browse among the best!
_I_ broke off the flowers; what matter
Who may graze among the rest!
_Love's Comedy_ is perhaps the most diverting of Ibsen's works; it is
certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian
society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A
prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross,
unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body
the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was
unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen
definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait
of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks for
an audience, was not less deeply outraged by the want of indulgence
which he had shown for all forms of amorous sentiment, although Ibsen
had really, through his satire on the methods of betrothal, risen
to something like a philosophical examination of the essence of love
itself.
To Brandes, who reproached him for not recording the history of ideal
engagements, and who remarked, "You know, there are sound potatoes and
rotten potatoes in this world," Ibsen cynically replied, "I am afraid
none of the sound ones have come under my notice"; and when Guldstad
proves to the beautiful Svanhild the paramount importance of creature
comforts, the last word of distrust in the sustaining power of love had
been said. The popular impression of Ibsen as an "immoral" writer seems
to be primarily founded on the paradox and fireworks of _Love's Comedy_.
Much might be forgiven to a man so wretched as Ibsen was in 1862,
and more to a poet so lively, brilliant and audacious in spite of his
misfortunes. These now gathered over his head and threatened to submerge
him altogether. He was perhaps momentarily saved by the publication of
_Terje Vigen_, which enjoyed a solid popularity. This is the principal
and, indeed, almost the only instance in Ibsen's works of what the
Northern critics call "epic," but what we less ambitiously know as the
tale in verse. _Terje Figen_ will never be translated successfully into
English, for it is written, with brilliant lightness and skill, in an
adaptation of the Norwegian ballad-measure which it is impossible to
reproduce with felicity in our language.
Among Ibsen's writings _Terje Vigen_ is unique as a piece of pure
sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or
pungency. It is the story of a much-injured and revengeful Norse pilot,
who, having the chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and Milady,
saves them at the mute appeal of their blue-eyed English baby.
_Terje Vigen_ is a masterpiece of what we may define as the
"dash-away-a-manly-tear" class of narrative. It is extremely well
written and picturesque, but the wonder is that, of all people in the
world, Ibsen should have written it.
His short lyric poems of this period betray much more clearly the real
temper of the man. They are filled full and brimming over with longing
and impatience, with painful passion and with hope deferred. It is in
the strident lyrics Ibsen wrote between 1857 and 1863 that we can best
read the record of his mind, and share its exasperations, and wonder
at its elasticity. The series of sonnets _In a Picture Gallery_ is a
strangely violent confession of distrust in his own genius; the _Epistle
to H. O. Blom_ a candid admission of his more than distrust in the
talent and honesty of others. It was the peculiarity and danger of
Ibsen's position that he represented no one but himself. For instance,
the liberty of many of the expressions in _Love's Comedy_ led those
who were beginning a movement in favor of the emancipation of women
to believe that Ibsen was in sympathy with them, but he was not. All
through his life, although his luminous penetration into character led
him to be scrupulously fair in his analysis of female character, he was
never a genuine supporter of the extension of public responsibility to
the sex. A little later (in 1869), when John Stuart Mill's _Subjection
of Women_ produced a sensation in Scandinavia, and met with many
enthusiastic supporters, Ibsen coldly reserved his opinion. He was
always an observer, always a clinical analyst at the bedside of society,
never a prophet, never a propagandist.
His troubles gathered upon him. Neither theatre consented to act _Love's
Comedy_, and it would not even have been printed but for the zeal of the
young novelist Jonas Lie, who, to his great honor, bought for about
L35 the right to publish it as a supplement to a newspaper that he was
editing. Then the storm broke out; the press was unanimously adverse,
and in private circles abuse amounted almost to a social taboo. In 1862
the second theatre became bankrupt, and Ibsen was thrown on the world,
the most unpopular man of his day, and crippled with debts. It is true
that he was engaged at the Christiania Theatre at a nominal salary of
about a pound a week, but he could not live on that. In August, 1860,
he had made a pathetic appeal to the Government for a _digter-gage_,
a payment to a poet, such as is freely given to talent in the Northern
countries. Sums were voted to Bjoernson and Vinje, but to Ibsen not a
penny. By some influence, however, for he was not without friends,
he was granted in March, 1862, a travelling grant of less than L20
to enable him to wander for two months in western Hardanger and the
districts around the Sognefjord for the purpose of collecting folk-songs
and legends. The results of this journey were prepared for publication,
but never appeared. This interesting excursion, however, has left its
mark stamped broadly upon _Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.
All through 1863 his condition was critical. He determined that his only
hope was to exile himself definitely from Norway, which had become too
hot to hold him. Various private friends generously helped him over this
dreadful time of adversity, earning a gratitude which, if it was not
expansive, was lifelong. Very grudging recognition of his gifts was
at length made by the Government in the shape of another trifling
travelling grant (March, 1863), again a handsome sum being awarded to
Bjoernson, his popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair, to the
King himself, who conferred upon him a small pension of L90 a year,
which for the immediate future stood between this great poet and
starvation. The news of it was received in Christiania by the press in
terms of despicable insult.
But in June of this _annee terrible_ Ibsen had a flash of happiness.
He was invited down to Bergen to the fifth great "Festival of Song,"
a national occurrence, and he and his poems met with a warm reception.
Moreover, he found his brilliant antagonist, Bjoernson, at Bergen on a
like errand, and renewed an old friendship with this warm-hearted and
powerful man of genius, destined to play through life the part of Hakon
to Ibsen's Skule. They spent much of the subsequent winter together.
As Halvdan Koht has excellently said: "Their intercourse brought them
closer to each other than they had ever been before. They felt that they
were inspired by the same ideas and the same hopes, and they suffered
the same bitter disappointments. With anguish they watched the Danish
brother-nation's desperate struggle against the superior power of
Germany, and save a province with a population of Scandinavian race and
speech taken from Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom,
whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in spite of solemn promises,
refrained from yielding any assistance." An attack on Holstein (December
22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish War, to which a disastrous
and humiliating termination was brought in the following August.
In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his native
country. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well
as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Duepper alone
stood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the
indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Luebeck
and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached
that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the
arms of its antique repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjoernson,
"there is blessed peace," and he settled himself down to the close
contemplation of poetry.
The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter to
the glow and splendor of Italy acted on the poet's spirit like an
enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome's "azure
sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music," and at first the contrast
between the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almost
intolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air
and become as a little child. There has scarcely been another example
of a writer of the first class who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but
debarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, has
been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart of
unclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Shelley and
Keats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen broke
free from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his
life, was closing his romantic career.
Ibsen's earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomed
to at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The passion
of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered among
the vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modern
life, or their original significance. He missed the impress of the
individual on classic sculpture, as he had missed it--the parallel is
strange, but his own--on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He liked
a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt more
at home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architects
than with artists of a more archaic type. Shelley, we may remember,
labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets the
attractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavor
of the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen's admiration of a
certain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worth
recording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who made
that might have made the moon in his leisure moments.
During the first few months of Ibsen's life in Rome all was chaos in
his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the
amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an
art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend.
In September, 1864, he tells Bjoernson that he is at work on a poem of
considerable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_,
which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns call
it, an "epic" poem; although a sketch for the _Julianus Apostata_ was
already forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would,
sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife and
little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined
him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly
small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be
hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort
of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He
would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or
would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks
to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that
Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing
to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His
soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the
aching maladies of its youth.
He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters
and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress.
But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical
poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of
his country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude and
gloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded,
sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, and
already as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. But
two things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a passionate enthusiasm for
their art, and a rebellious attitude towards their immediate precursors
in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. The
friendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest
of their lives, for it was founded on a common basis.
A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusing
impression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, Christian
Molbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wandering
silently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets of
his invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation by
his sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering
the ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries by
a running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhat
unsympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a more
agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills,
planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed
ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the
vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly
be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and
self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin
wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of
these periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865,
that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took
final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In
July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end
of September he had completed it.
_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his
age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and
the graceful wit of _Love's Comedy_ was so great as to be startling.
Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations
are powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery from
being perceived at once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not exist,
for those who had eyes to see, and who were not blinded by prejudice,
it was plain that a very great writer had arisen in Norway at last.
Bjoernson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862)
was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart in
Scotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once
more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of
clearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and some
shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and
a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme,
there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as
manifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as it
is surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of
Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed, but in its own peculiar
province it has not been approached. It bears some remote likeness
to _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in the
literature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, of
course, _Peer Gynt_.
For a long while it was supposed that the difficulties in the way of
performing _Brand_ on the public stage were too great to be overcome.
But the task was attempted at length, first in Stockholm in 1895; and
within the last few years this majestic spectacle has been drawn in full
before the eyes of enraptured audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow
and elsewhere. In spite of the timid reluctance of managers, wherever
this play is adequately presented, it captures an emotional public at a
run. It is an appeal against moral apathy which arouses the languid. It
is a clear and full embodiment of the gospel of energy which awakens and
upbraids the weak. In the original, its rush of rhymes produces on the
nerves an almost delirious excitement. If it is taken as an oration, it
is responded to as a great civic appeal; if as a sermon, it is sternly
religious, and fills the heart with tears. In the solemn mountain air,
with vague bells ringing high up among the glaciers, no one asks exactly
what _Brand_ expounds, nor whether it is perfectly coherent. Witnessed
on the living stage, it takes the citadel of the soul by storm. When it
is read, the critical judgment becomes cooler.
Carefully examined, _Brand_ is found to present a disconcerting mixture
of realism and mysticism. Two men seem at work in the writing of it, and
their effects are sometimes contradictory. It has constantly been asked,
and it was asked at one, "Is _Brand_ the expression of Ibsen's own
nature?" Yes, and no. He threw much of himself into his hero, and yet
he was careful to remain outside. Ibsen, as we have already pointed out,
was ready in later life to discuss his own writings, and what he said
about them is often dangerously mystifying. He told Georg Brandes that
the religious vocation of Brand was not essential. "I could have applied
the whole syllogism just as well to a sculptor, or a politician, as to
a priest." (He was to deal with each of these alternations later on, but
with what a difference!) "I could quite as well," he persisted, "have
worked out the impulse which drove me to write, by taking Galileo, for
instance, as my hero--assuming, of course, that Galileo should stand
firm and never concede the fixity of the earth--or you yourself in your
struggle with the Danish reactionaries." This is not to the point, since
in fact neither Georg Brandes nor Galileo, as hero of a mystical drama,
could have produced such a capacity for evolution as is presented by the
stern priest whose absolute certitude, although founded, one admits, on
no rational theory of theology, is yet of the very essence of religion.
Brand becomes intelligible when we regard him as a character of the
twelfth century transferred to the nineteenth. He has something of Peter
the Hermit in him. He ought to have been a crusading Christian king,
fighting against the Moslem for the liberties of some sparkling city of
God. He exists in his personage, under the precipice, above the fjord,
like a rude mediaeval anchorite, who eats his locusts and wild honey in
the desert. We cannot comprehend the action of Brand by any reference
to accepted creeds and codes, because he is so remote from the religious
conventions as hardly to seem objectively pious at all. He is violent
and incoherent; he knows not clearly what it is he wants, but it must
be an upheaval of all that exists, and it must bring Man into closer
contact with God. Brand is a king of souls, but his royal dignity is
marred, and is brought sometimes within an inch of the ridiculous, by
the prosaic nature of his modern surroundings. He is harsh and cruel; he
is liable to fits of anger before which the whole world trembles; and it
is by an avalanche, brought down upon him by his own wrath, that he is
finally buried in the ruins of the Ice-Church.
The judicious reader may like to compare the character of Brand with
that extraordinary study of violence, the _Abbe Jules_ of Octave
Mirbeau. In each we have the history of revolt, in a succession of
crises, against an invincible vocation. In each an element of weakness
is the pride of a peasant priest. But in Ibsen there is fully developed
what the cynicism of Octave Mirbeau avoids, a genuine conception of
such a rebel's ceaseless effort after personal holiness. Lammers
or Lammenais, what can it matter whether some existing priest of
insurrection did or did not set Ibsen for a moment on the track of
his colossal imagination? We may leave these discussions to the
commentators; _Brand_ is one of the great poems of the world, and
endless generations of critics will investigate its purpose and analyze
its forms.
There is, however, another than the priestly side. The poem contains a
great deal of superficial and rather ephemeral satire of contemporary
Scandinavian life, echoes of a frightened Storthing in Christiania, of a
crafty court in Stockholm, and of Denmark stretching her bleeding hands
to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local
strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen
comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted
age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin
laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone
that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule
and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her
rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his
motto "All or Nothing," persistently, almost tiresomely, like a
modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea.
More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not
white-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran
theologians, a prototype of violent strength.
Yet Brand's own mission remains undefined to him--if it ever takes exact
shape--until Agnes reveals it to him:--
Choose thy endless loss or gain!
Do thy work and bear thy pain....
Now (he answers) I see my way aright.
In _ourselves_ is that young Earth,
Ripe for the divine new-birth.
And it is in Agnes--as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love
for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience
endures all the cruelties of her husband's fanaticism--it is in Agnes
that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered
note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a
nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure,
Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are
the delicate offspring of Italy.
Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which
saw the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once
welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen,
and the poet's audience was thus very considerably widened. The satire
of the poem awakened an eager polemic; the popular priest Wexels
preached against its tendency. A novel was published, called _The
Daughters of Brand_, in which the results of its teaching were analyzed.
Ibsen enjoyed, what he had never experienced before, the light and
shade of a disputed but durable popular success. Four large editions of
_Brand_ were exhausted within the year of its publication, and it took
its place, of course, in more leisurely progress, among the few books
which continued, and still continue, steadily to sell. It has always
been, in the countries of Scandinavia, the best known and the most
popular of all Ibsen's writings.
This success, however, was largely one of sentiment, not of pecuniary
fortune. The total income from four editions of a poem like _Brand_, in
the conditions of Northern literary life forty years ago, would not much
exceed L100. Hardly had Ibsen become the object of universal discussion
than he found himself assailed, as never before, by the paralysis of
poverty. He could not breathe, he could not move; he could not afford to
buy postage stamps to stick upon his business letters. He was threatened
with the absolute extinction of his resources. At the very time when
Copenhagen was ringing with his praise Ibsen was borrowing money for his
modest food and rent from the Danish Consul in Rome.
In the winter of 1865 he fell into a highly nervous condition, in the
midst of which he was assailed by a malarious fever which brought him
within sight of the grave. To the agony of his devoted wife, he lay for
some time between life and death, and the extreme poverty from which
they suffered made it difficult, and even impossible, for her to
provide for him the alleviations which his state demanded. He gradually
recovered, however, thanks to his wife's care and to his own magnificent
constitution, but the springs of courage seemed to have snapped within
his breast.
In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote a
letter to Bjoernson, "my one and only friend," which is one of the most
heart-rending documents in the history of literature. Few great spirits
have been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his
thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits' end to know what to
advise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway,
describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously came
the manifest success of _Brand_, and, for the first time, the Norwegian
press recognized the poet's merit. There was a general movement in his
favor; King Carl graciously received his petition of April 15, and
on May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a "poet's
pension," restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs.
The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where he
found it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills.
He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo Gratiosi, two thousand
feet above the sea. Thither he came, with his wife and his little son,
and there he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a
window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing
the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time
there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are
elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the
dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever,
the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away
like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he
knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the
heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the
autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him.
He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted
himself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which he
described as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one
of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of
_modern_ Norway."
He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was
a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually
composed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothly
until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the
island of Ischia. His own account was: "After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_,
as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at
Sorrento. So far away from one's readers one becomes reckless. This poem
contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth.
My own mother--with the necessary exaggeration--served as the model for
Ase." _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of
the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen. None
of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ now
afflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published in
November, 1867.
In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _Peer
Gynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it made
no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later
poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational
pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. "They have
discovered," he said, "much more satire in _Peer Gynt_ than was intended
by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I
wrote it." It has been, however, the misfortune of Ibsen that he has
particularly attracted the attention of those who prefer to see anything
in a poem except its poetry, and who treat all tulips and roses as
if they were cabbages for the pot of didactic morality. Yet it is
surprising that after all that the author said, and with the lovely
poem shaking the bauble of its fool's cap at them, there can still be
commentators who see nothing in _Peer Gynt_ but the "awful interest
of the universal problems with which it deals." This obsession of the
critic to discover "problems" in the works of Ibsen has been one of the
main causes of that impatience and even downright injustice with which
his writings have been received by a large section of those readers who
should naturally have enjoyed them. He is a poet, of fantastic wit and
often reckless imagination, and he has been travestied in a long
black coat and white choker, as though he were an embodiment of the
Nonconformist conscience.
Casting aside, therefore, the spurious "lessons" and supposititious
"problems" of this merry and mundane drama, we may recognize among
its irregularities and audacities two main qualities of merit. Above
everything else which we see in _Peer Gynt_ we see its fun and its
picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods,
there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted
admirers cannot explain away. The first act is an inimitable burst of
lyrical high spirits, tottering on the verge of absurdity, carried
along its hilarious career with no less peril and with no less brilliant
success than Peer fables for himself and the reindeer in their ride
along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and
fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances
under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless
and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in
this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown
ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boeig, gigantic
gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds in recklessness anything
else written since the second part of _Faust_. The third act,
culminating with the drive to Soria Moria Castle and the death of Ase,
is of the very quintessence of poetry, and puts Ibsen in the first rank
of creators. In the fourth act, the introduction of which is abrupt and
grotesque, we pass to a totally different and, I think, a lower order of
imagination. The fifth act, an amalgam of what is worst and best in the
poem, often seems divided from it in tone, style and direction, and is
more like a symbolic or mythical gloss upon the first three acts than a
contribution to the growth of the general story.
Throughout this tangled and variegated scene the spirits of the author
remain almost preposterously high. If it were all hilarity and sardonic
laughter, we should weary of the strain. But physical beauty of the most
enchanting order is liberally provided to temper the excess of irony.
It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that nowhere to the dramatic
literature of the world, not by Shakespeare himself, is there introduced
into a play so much loveliness of scenery, and such varied and exquisite
appeal to the eyes, as there is in _Peer Gynt_. The fifth act contains
much which the reader can hardly enjoy, but it opens with a scene so
full of the glory of the mountains and the sea that I know nothing else
in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest
shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the
cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush has
contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls
there is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian
paintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm." Pages might be filled with
praise of the picturesqueness of tableau after tableau in each act of
_Peer Gynt_.
The hero is the apotheosis of selfish vanity, and he is presented to us,
somewhat indecisively, as the type of one who sets at defiance his own
life's design. But is Peer Gynt designed to be a useful, a good, or even
a successful man? Certainly Ibsen had not discovered it when he wrote
the first act, in which scarcely anything is observable except a study,
full of merriment and sarcasm, of the sly, lazy and parasitical class
of peasant rogue. This type was not of Ibsen's invention; he found it in
those rustic tales, inimitably resumed by Asbjoernson and Moe, in which
he shows us that his memory was steeped. Here, too, he found the Boeig,
a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible,
capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that
this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish
national instability seems to have seized him later, and _Peer Gynt_,
which began as a farce, continued as a fable. The nearest approach to
a justification of the moral or "problem" purpose, which Ibsen's graver
prophets attribute to him, is found in the sixth scene of the fifth act,
where, quite in the manner of Goethe, thoughts and watchwords and songs
and tears take corporeal form and assail the aged _Peer Gynt_ with their
reproaches.
_Peer Gynt_ was received in the North with some critical bewilderment,
and it has never been so great a favorite with the general public as
_Brand_. But Ibsen, with triumphant arrogance, when he was told that it
did not conform to the rules of poetic art, asserted that the rules must
be altered, not _Peer Gynt_. "My book," he wrote, "_is_ poetry; and if
it is not, then it shall be. The Norwegian conception of what poetry
is shall be made to fit my book." There was a struggle at first against
this assumption, but the drama has become a classic, and it is now
generally allowed, that so long as poetry is a term wide enough to
include _The Clouds_ and the Second Part of _Faust_, it must be made
wide enough to take in a poem as unique as they are in its majestic
intellectual caprices.
[Note.--By far the most exhaustive analysis of _Peer Gynt_ which has
hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these
pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his
posthumous _Ueber die letzte Dinge_ (1907). This extraordinary young
man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where
Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently
deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising
and remarkable recruit. If I confess myself unable to see in _Peer Gynt_
all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in
Ibsen, unquestionably, time will _create_ profundities, as it has in
Shakespeare. The greatest works grow in importance, as trees do after
the death of the mortal men who planted them.]