1875-82
While Ibsen was sitting at Munich, in this climacteric stage of his
career, dreaming of wonderful things and doing nothing, there came to
him, in the early months of 1875, two new plays by his chief rival.
These were _The Editor_ and _A Bankruptcy_, in which Bjoernson suddenly
swooped from his sagas and his romances down into the middle of sordid
modern life. This was his first attempt at that "photography by comedy"
which he had urged on Ibsen in 1868. It is not, I think, recorded
what was Ibsen's comment on these two plays, and particularly on _A
Bankruptcy_, but it is written broadly over the surface of his own next
work. It is obvious that he perceived that Bjoernson had carried a very
spirited raid into his own particular province, and he was determined to
drive this audacious enemy back by means of greater audacities.
Not at once, however; for an extraordinary languor seemed to have fallen
upon Ibsen. His isolation from society became extreme; for nearly a year
he gave no sign of life. In September, 1875, indeed, if not earlier, he
was at work on a five-act play, but what this was is unknown. It seems
to have been in the winter of 1876, after an unprecedented period of
inanimation, that he started a new comedy, _The Pillars of Society_,
which was finished in Munich in July, 1877, that summer being unique in
the fact that the Ibsens do not seem to have left town at all.
Ibsen was now a good deal altered in the exteriors of character. With
his fiftieth year he presents himself as no more the Poet, but the Man
of Business. Molbech told me that at this time the velveteen jacket,
symbol of the dear delays of art, was discarded in favor of a
frock-coat, too tight across the chest. Ibsen was now beginning, rather
shyly, very craftily, to invest money; he even found himself in frequent
straits for ready coin from his acute impatience to set every rix-dollar
breeding. He cast the suspicion of poetry from him, and with his gold
spectacles, his Dundreary whiskers, his broadcloth bosom and his quick
staccato step, he adopted the pose of a gentleman of affairs, very
positive and with no nonsense about him.
He had long determined on the wilful abandonment of poetic form, and the
famous statement made in a letter to myself (January 15, 1874) must be
quoted, although it is well known, since it contains the clearest of all
the explanations by which Ibsen justified his new departure:--
You are of opinion that the drama [_Emperor and Galilean_] ought to have
been written in verse, and that it would have gained by this. Here I
must differ from you. The play is, as you will have observed, conceived
in the most realistic style: the illusion I wished to produce is that of
reality. I wished to produce the impression on the reader that what he
was reading was something that had really happened. If I had employed
verse, I should have counteracted my own intention and prevented
the accomplishment of the task I had set myself. The many ordinary
insignificant characters whom I have intentionally introduced into
the play would have become indistinct, and indistinguishable from one
another, if I had allowed all of them to speak in one and the same
rhythmical measure. We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare.
Among sculptors there is already talk of painting statues in the natural
colors. Much can be said both for and against this. I have no desire
to see the Venus of Milo painted, but I would rather see the head of a
negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally,
the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the
representation. My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation;
what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not
let them talk "the language of the Gods."
This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877
Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est
en vers, et l'ennui s'y promene librement entre les rimes."
No poet, however, sacrificed so much, or held so rigidly to his
intention of reproducing the exact language of real life, as did Ibsen
in the series of plays which opens with _The Pillars of Society_. This
drama was published in Copenhagen in October, 1877, and was acted almost
immediately in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; it had the good fortune to
be taken up warmly in Germany. What Ibsen's idea was, in the new sort of
realistic drama which he was inventing, was, in fact, perceived at once
by German audiences, although it was not always approved of. He was the
guest of the theatromaniac Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and _The Pillars of
Society_ was played in many parts of Germany. In Scandinavia the book of
the play sold well, and the piece had some success on the boards, but it
did not create anything like so much excitement as the author had hoped
that it would. Danish taste pronounced it "too German."
For the fact that _The Pillars of Society_, except in Scandinavia and
Germany, did not then, and never has since, taken a permanent hold
upon the theatre, Mr. William Archer gives a reason which cannot be
controverted, namely, that by the time the other foreign publics had
fully awakened to the existence of Ibsen, he himself had so far outgrown
the phase of his development marked by _Pillars of Society_, that the
play already seemed commonplace and old-fashioned. It exactly suited
the German public of the eighties; it was exactly on a level with their
theatrical intelligence. But it was above the theatrical intelligence of
the Anglo-American public, and... below that of the French public. This
is of course an exaggeration. What I mean is that there was no possible
reason why the countrymen of Augier and Dumas should take any special
interest in _Pillars of Society_. It was not obviously in advance of
these masters in technical skill, and the vein of Teutonic sentiment
running through it could not greatly appeal to the Parisian public of
that period.
The subject of _The Pillars of Society_ was the hollowness and
rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose
which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was
accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have
fallen out of touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied in the
convex mirror of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to _The
Pillars of Society_ that in it, as little as in _The League of Youth_,
had Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the well-made play.
Gloomy and homely as are the earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way
out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the
"well-made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by
a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, which is very much of
the usual "bless-ye-my-children" order. The loss of the Indian Girl is
miraculously prevented, and at the end the characters are solemnized and
warned, yet are left essentially none the worse for their alarm. This,
unfortunately, is not the mode in which the sins of scheming people
find them out in real life. But to the historical critic it is
very interesting to see Bjoernson and Ibsen nearer one another in _A
Bankruptcy_ and _The Pillars of Society_ than they had ever been before.
They now started on a course of eager, though benevolent, rivalry which
was eminently to the advantage of each of them.
No feature of Ibsen's personal career is more interesting than his
relation to Bjoernson. Great as the genius of Ibsen was, yet, rating it
as ungrudgingly as possible, we have to admit that Bjoernson's character
was the more magnetic and more radiant of the two. Ibsen was a citizen
of the world; he belonged, in a very remarkable degree, to the small
class of men whose intelligence lifts them above the narrowness of local
conditions, who belong to civilization at large, not to the system
of one particular nation. He was, in consequence, endowed, almost
automatically, with the instinct of regarding ideas from a central
point; if he was to be limited at all, he might be styled European,
although, perhaps, few Western citizens would have had less difficulty
than he in making themselves comprehended by a Chinese, Japanese or
Indian mind of unusual breadth and cultivation. On the other hand, in
accepting the advantages of this large mental outlook, he was forced to
abandon those of nationality. No one can say that Ibsen was, until near
the end of his life, a good Norwegian, and he failed, by his utterances,
to vibrate the local mind. But Bjoernson, with less originality, was the
typical patriot in literature, and what he said, and thought, and wrote
was calculated to stir the local conscience to the depths of its being.
When, therefore, in 1867, Ibsen, who was bound by all natural
obligations and tendencies to remain on the best terms with Bjoernson,
allowed the old friendship between them to lapse into positive
antagonism, he was following the irresistible evolution of his fate, as
Bjoernson was following his. It was as inevitable that Ibsen should
grow to his full height in solitude as it was that Bjoernson should
pine unless he was fed by the dew and sunlight of popular meetings,
torchlight processions of students and passionate appeals to local
sentiment. Trivial causes, such as those which we have chronicled
earlier, might seem to lead up to a division, but that division was
really inherent in the growth of the two men.
Ibsen, however, was not wholly a gainer at first even in genius, by the
separation. It cut him off from Norway too entirely, and it threw him
into the arms of Germany. There were thirteen years in which Ibsen
and Bjoernson were nothing to one another, and these were not years of
unmingled mental happiness for either of them. But during this long
period each of these very remarkable men "came into his kingdom," and
when there was no longer any chance that either of there could warp the
nature of the other, fate brought them once more together.
The reconciliation began, of course, with a gracious movement from
Bjoernson. At the end of 1880, writing for American readers, Bjoernson
had the generous candor to say: "I think I have a pretty thorough
acquaintance with the dramatic literature of the world, and I have not
the slightest hesitation in saying that Henrik Ibsen possesses more
dramatic power than any other play-writer of our day." When we remember
that, in France alone, Augier and Dumas _fils_ and Hugo, Halevy and
Meilhac and Labiche, were all of them alive, the compliment, though a
sound, was a vivid one. Sooner or later, everything that was said about
Ibsen, though it were whispered in Choctaw behind the altar of a Burmese
temple, came round to Ibsen's ears, and this handsome tribute from
the rival produced its effect. And when, shortly afterwards, still in
America, Bjoernson was nearly killed in a railway accident, Ibsen
broke the long silence by writing to him a most cordial letter of
congratulation.
The next incident was the publication of _Ghosts_, when Bjoernson, now
thoroughly roused, stood out almost alone, throwing the vast prestige
of his judgment into the empty scale against the otherwise unanimous
black-balling. Then the reconcilement was full and fraternal, and Ibsen
wrote from Rome (January 24, 1882), with an emotion rare indeed for him:
"The only man in Norway who has frankly, boldly and generously taken
my part is Bjoernson. It is just like him; he has, in truth, a great, a
kingly soul; and I shall never forget what he has done now." Six months
later, on occasion of Bjoernson's jubilee, Ibsen telegraphed: "My thanks
for the work done side by side with me in the service of freedom these
twenty-five years." These words wiped away all unhappy memories of the
past; they gave public recognition to the fact that, though the two
great poets had been divided for half a generation by the forces of
circumstance, they had both been fighting at wings of the same army
against the common enemy.
This, however, takes us for the moment a little too far ahead. After the
publication of _The Pillars of Society_, Ibsen remained quiet for some
time; indeed, from this date we find him adopting the practice which was
to be regular with him henceforth, namely, that of letting his mind
lie fallow for one year after the issue of each of his works, and then
spending another year in the formation of the new play. Munich gradually
became tedious to him, and he justly observed that the pressure of
German surroundings was unfavorable to the healthy evolution of his
genius. In 1878 he went back to Rome, which, although it was no longer
the quiet and aristocratic Rome of Papal days, was still immensely
attractive to his temperament. He was now, in some measure, "a person of
means," and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formed
a small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed,
great care. The result could be seen long afterwards by those who
visited him in his final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of the
sumptuous flat in which he spent his old age and in which he died.
His taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of the
decline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must be
left for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondness
for the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only in
defiance of Ruskin.
In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was told him of an incident in
the Danish courts, the adventure of a young married woman in one of the
small towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts running on a new dramatic
enterprise. He was still curiously irritated by contemplating, in
his mind's eye, the "respectable, estimable narrowmindedness and
worldliness" of social conditions in Norway, where there was no
aristocracy, and where a lower middle-class took the place of a
nobility, with, as he thought, sordid results. But he was no longer
suffering from what he himself had called "the feeling of an insane man
staring at one single, hopelessly black spot." He went to Amalfi for the
summer, and in that delightful spot, so curiously out of keeping with
his present rigidly prosaic mood, he set himself to write what is
probably the most widely famous of all his works, _A Doll's House_. The
day before he started he wrote to me from Rome (in an unpublished
letter of July 4, 1879): "I have been living here with my family since
September last, and most of that time I have been occupied with the idea
of a new dramatic work, which I shall now soon finish, and which will
be published in October. It is a serious drama, really a family drama,
dealing with modern conditions and in particular with the problems which
complicate marriage." This play he finished, lingering at Amalfi, in
September, 1879. It was an engineer's experiment at turning up and
draining a corner of the moral swamp which Norwegian society seemed to
be to his violent and ironic spirit.
_A Doll's House_ was Ibsen's first unqualified success. Not merely was
it the earliest of his plays which excited universal discussion, but
in its construction and execution it carried out much further than its
immediate precursors Ibsen's new ideal as an unwavering realist. Mr.
Arthur Symons has well said [Note: The _Quarterly Review_ for October,
1906.] that "_A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in which
the puppets have no visible wires." It may even be said that it was the
first modern drama in which no wires had been employed. Not that even
here the execution is perfect, as Ibsen afterwards made it. The arm
of coincidence is terribly shortened, and the early acts, clever and
entertaining as they are, are still far from the inevitability of real
life. But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom,
dressed to go out, to Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when
the agitated pair sit down to "have it out," face to face across the
table, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born in
drama, and, incidentally, that the "well-made play" has suddenly become
as dead as Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of life, are amazing
in this final scene, where the old happy ending is completely abandoned
for the first time, and where the paradox of life is presented without
the least shuffling or evasion.
It was extraordinary how suddenly it was realized that _A Doll's
House_ was a prodigious performance. All Scandinavia rang with Nora's
"declaration of independence." People left the theatre, night after
night, pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging. The
inner being had been unveiled for a moment, and new catchwords were
repeated from mouth to mouth. The great statement and reply--"No man
sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves," "Hundreds of thousands of
women have done so!"--roused interminable discussion in countless family
circles. The disputes were at one time so violent as to threaten the
peace of households; a school of imitators at once sprang up to treat
the situation, from slightly different points of view, in novel, poem
and drama. [Note: The reader who desires to obtain further light on the
technical quality of _A Doll's House_ can do no better than refer to Mr.
William Archer's elaborate analysis of it (_Fortnightly Review_, July,
1906.)]
The universal excitement which Ibsen had vainly hoped would be awakened
by _The Pillars of Society_ came, when he was not expecting it, to greet
_A Doll's House_. Ibsen was stirred by the reception of his latest play
into a mood rather different from that which he expressed at any other
period. As has often been said, he did not pose as a prophet or as a
reformer, but it did occur to him now that he might exercise a strong
moral influence, and in writing to his German translator, Ludwig
Passarge, he said (June 16, 1880):
Everything that I have written has the closest possible connection
with what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personal
experience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual
emancipation and purification--for a man shares the responsibility and
the guilt of the society to which he belongs.
It was in this spirit of unusual gravity that he sat down to the
composition of _Ghosts_. There is little or no record of how he occupied
himself at Munich and Berchtesgaden in 1880, except that in March he
began to sketch, and then abandoned, what afterwards became _The Lady
from the Sea_. In the autumn of that year, indulging once more his
curious restlessness, he took all his household gods and goods again to
Rome. His thoughts turned away from dramatic art for a moment, and he
planned an autobiography, which was to deal with the gradual development
of his mind, and to be called _From Skien to Rome_. Whether he actually
wrote any of this seems uncertain; that he should have planned it shows
a certain sense of maturity, a suspicion that, now in his fifty-third
year, he might be nearly at the end of his resources. As a matter of
fact, he was just entering upon a new inheritance. In the summer of 1881
he went, as usual now, to Sorrento, and there [Note: So the authorities
state: but in an unpublished letter to myself, dated Rome, November
26, 1880, I find Ibsen saying, "Just now I am beginning to exercise my
thoughts over a new drama; I hope I shall finish it in the course of
next summer." It seems to have been already his habit to meditate long
about a subject before it took any definite literary form in his mind.]
the plot of _Ghosts_ revealed itself to him. This work was composed with
more than Ibsen's customary care, and was published at the beginning of
December, in an edition of ten thousand copies.
Before the end of 1881 Ibsen was aware of the terrific turmoil which
_Ghosts_ had begun to occasion. He wrote to Passarge: "My new play has
now appeared, and has occasioned a terrible uproar in the Scandinavian
press. Every day I receive letters and newspaper articles decrying or
praising it. I consider it absolutely impossible that any German theatre
will accept the play at present. I hardly believe that they will dare to
play it in any Scandinavian country for some time to come." It was, in
fact, not acted publicly anywhere until 1883, when the Swedes ventured
to try it, and the Germans followed in 1887. The Danes resisted it much
longer.
Ibsen declared that he was quite prepared for the hubbub; he would
doubtless have been much disappointed if it had not taken place;
nevertheless, he was disconcerted at the volume and the violence of
the attacks. Yet he must have known that in the existing condition of
society, and the limited range of what was then thought a defensible
criticism of that condition, _Ghosts_ must cause a virulent
scandal. There has been, especially in Germany, a great deal of
medico-philosophical exposure of the under-side of life since 1880. It
is hardly possible that, there, or in any really civilized country, an
analysis of the causes of what is, after all, one of the simplest and
most conventional forms of hereditary disease could again excite such
a startling revulsion of feeling. Krafft-Ebing and a crew of
investigators, Strindberg, Brieux, Hauptmann, and a score of probing
playwrights all over the Continent, have gone further and often fared
much worse than Ibsen did when he dived into the family history of
Kammerherre Alving. When we read _Ghosts_ to-day we cannot recapture the
"new shudder" which it gave us a quarter of a century ago. Yet it must
not be forgotten that the publication of it, in that hide-bound time,
was an act of extraordinary courage. Georg Brandes, always clearsighted,
was alone in being able to perceive at once that _Ghosts_ was no attack
on society, but an effort to place the responsibilities of men and women
on a wholesomer and surer footing, by direct reference to the relation
of both to the child.
When the same eminent critic, however, went on to say that _Ghosts_ was
"a poetic treatment of the question of heredity," it was more difficult
to follow him. Now that the flash and shock of the playwright's audacity
are discounted, it is natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work of
pure art, _Ghosts_ stands high among Ibsen's writings. I confess, for my
own part, that it seems to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that is
to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. It
is extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as
a foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, the
characters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types than persons.
In the old fighting days it was necessary to praise _Ghosts_ with
extravagance, because the vituperation of the enemy was so stupid and
offensive, but now that there are no serious adversaries left, cooler
judgment admits--not one word that the idiot-adversary said, but--that
there are more convincing plays than _Ghosts_ in Ibsen's repertory.
Up to this time, Ibsen had been looked upon as the mainstay of the
Conservative party in Norway, in opposition to Bjoernson, who led the
Radicals. But the author of _Ghosts_, who was accused of disseminating
anarchism and nihilism, was now smartly drummed out of the Tory camp
without being welcomed among the Liberals. Each party was eager to
disown him. He was like Coriolanus, when he was deserted by nobles and
people alike, and
suffer'd by the voice of slaves to be Whoop'd out of Rome.
The situation gave Ibsen occasion, from the perspective of his exile, to
form some impressions of political life which were at once pungent and
dignified:
"I am more and more confirmed" [he said, Jan, 3, 1882] "in my belief
that there is something demoralizing in politics and parties. I, at any
rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its
side. Bjoernson says, 'The majority is always right'; and as a practical
politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of
necessity say, 'The minority is always right.'"
In order to place this view clearly before his countrymen, he set about
composing the extremely vivid and successful play, perhaps the most
successful pamphlet-play that ever was written, which was to put forward
in the clearest light the claim of the minority. He was very busy with
preparations for it all through the summer of 1882, which he spent at
what was now to be for many years his favorite summer resort, Gossensass
in the Tyrol, a place which is consecrated to the memory of Ibsen in the
way that Pornic belongs to Robert Browning and the Bel Alp to Tyndall,
holiday homes in foreign countries, dedicated to blissful work without
disturbance. Here, at a spot now officially named the "Ibsenplatz," he
composed _The Enemy of the People_, engrossed in his invention as was
his wont, reading nothing and thinking of nothing but of the persons
whose history he was weaving. Oddly enough, he thought that this,
too, was to be a "placable" play, written to amuse and stimulate, but
calculated to wound nobody's feelings. The fact was that Ibsen, like
some ocelot or panther of the rocks, had a paw much heavier than he
himself realized, and his "play," in both senses, was a very serious
affair, when he descended to sport with common humanity.
Another quotation, this time from a letter to Brandes, must be given to
show what Ibsen's attitude was at this moment to his fatherland and to
his art:
"When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is
at home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged,
a deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might
just as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not need
poetry at home; they get along so well with the party newspapers and the
_Lutheran Weekly_."
If Ibsen thought that he was offering them "poetry" in _The Enemy of
the People_, he spoke in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has never
opened its arms wide enough to embrace all imaginative literature as
poetry, and in the English sense nothing in the world's drama is denser
or more unqualified prose than _The Enemy of the People_, without
a tinge of romance or rhetoric, as "unideal" as a blue-book. It is,
nevertheless, one of the most certainly successful of its author's
writings; as a stage-play it rivets the attention; as a pamphlet it
awakens irresistible sympathy; as a specimen of dramatic art, its
construction and evolution are almost faultless. Under a transparent
allegory, it describes the treatment which Ibsen himself had received at
the hands of the Norwegian public for venturing to tell them that their
spa should be drained before visitors were invited to flock to it.
Nevertheless, the playwright has not made the mistake of identifying his
own figure with that of Dr. Stockmann, who is an entirely independent
creation. Mr. Archer has compared the hero with Colonel Newcome, whose
loquacious amicability he does share, but Stockmann's character has much
more energy and initiative than Colonel Newcome's, whom we could never
fancy rousing himself "to purge society."
Ibsen's practical wisdom in taking the bull by the horns in his reply to
the national reception of _Ghosts_ was proved by the instant success
of _The Enemy of the People_. Presented to the public in this new and
audacious form, the problem of a "moral water-supply" struck sensible
Norwegians as less absurd and less dangerous than they had conceived it
to be. The reproof was mordant, and the worst offenders crouched under
the lash. _Ghosts_ itself was still, for some time, tabooed, but _The
Enemy of the People_ received a cordial welcome, and has remained ever
since one of the most popular of Ibsen's writings. It is still extremely
effective on the stage, and as it is lightened by more humor than the
author is commonly willing to employ, it attracts even those who are
hostile to the intrusion of anything solemn behind the footlights.