1883-91
With the appearance of _An Enemy of the People_, which was published
in November, 1882, Ibsen entered upon a new stage in his career. He had
completely broken with the Conservative party in Norway, without having
gratified or won the confidence of the Liberals. He was now in personal
relations of friendliness with Bjoernson, whose generous approval of his
work as a dramatist sustained his spirits, but his own individualism had
been intensified by the hostile reception of _Ghosts_. His life was now
divided between Rome in the winter and Gossensass in the summer, and
in the Italian city, as in the Tyrolese village, he wandered solitary,
taciturn, absorbed in his own thoughts. His meditations led him more and
more into a lonely state. He floated, as on a prophet's carpet, between
the political heavens and earth, capriciously refusing to ascend or
to alight. He had come to a sceptical stage in his mental evolution,
a stage in which he was to remain for a considerable time, gradually
modifying it in a conservative direction. One wonders what the
simple-minded and stalwart Bjoernson thought of being quietly told
(March 28, 1884) that the lower classes are nowhere liberal-minded or
self-sacrificing, and that "in the views expressed by our [Norwegian]
peasants there is not an atom more of real Liberalism than is to be
found among the ultramontane peasantry of the Tyrol." In politics
Ibsen had now become a pagan; "I do not believe," he said, "in the
emancipatory power of political measures, nor have I much confidence
in the altruism and good will of those in power." This sense of the
uselessness of effort is strongly marked in the course of the next work
on which he was engaged, the very brilliant, but saturnine and sardonic
tragi-comedy of _The Wild Duck_. The first sketch of it was made during
the spring of 1884 in Rome, but the dramatist took it to Gossensass with
him for the finishing touches, and did not perfect it until the autumn.
It is remarkable that Ibsen invariably speaks of _The Wild Duck_, when
he mentions it in his correspondence, in terms of irony. He calls it a
collection of crazy tricks or tomfooleries, _galskaber_, an expression
which carries with it, in this sense, a confession of wilful paradox. In
something of the same spirit, Robert Browning, in the old days before
he was comprehended, used to speak of "the entirely unintelligible
_Sordello_," as if, sarcastically, to meet criticism half-way.
When _The Wild Duck_ was first circulated among Ibsen's admirers, it
was received with some bewilderment. Quite slowly the idea received
acceptance that the hitherto so serious and even angry satirist was,
to put it plainly, laughing at himself. The faithful were reluctant to
concede it. But one sees now, clearly enough, that in a sense it was so.
I have tried to show, we imagine Ibsen saying, that your hypocritical
sentimentality needs correction--you live in "A Doll's House." I have
dared to point out to you that your society is physically and morally
rotten and full of "Ghosts." You have repudiated my honest efforts as a
reformer, and called me "An Enemy of the People." Very well, then, have
it so if you please. What a fool am I to trouble about you at all. Go
down a steep place in Gadara and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, it
can amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers Werle. _Vogue la galere_.
"But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the
right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of the
union from the flag," burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegian
politics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway";
it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of my
caring. It is in reading _The Wild Duck_ that for the first time the
really astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes
apparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist now
relinquishes any other central object than the presentation to his
audience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last,
and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that is
not catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than _Ghosts_,
_The Wild Duck_ is an avalanche which has begun to move, and with
a movement unaffected by the incidents of the plot, long before the
curtain rises. The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all other modern
dramas, depend upon nothing that happens while they are being exhibited,
but rush downwards to their inevitable close in obedience to a series of
long-precedent impulses. In order to gain this effect, the dramatist
has to be acquainted with everything that has ever happened to his
personages, and we are informed that Ibsen used to build up in his own
mind, for months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was now
master of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find one
of the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of _The Wild
Duck_ that "never before had the poet displayed such an amazing power
of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after
veil from the past."
The result of a searching determination to deal with personal and not
typical forms of temperament is seen in the firmness of the portraiture
in _The Wild Duck_, where, I think, less than ever before, is to be
found a trace of that incoherency which is to be met with occasionally
in all the earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the effect of a
sudden caprice or change of the point of view. There is, so far as I
can judge, no trace of this in _The Wild Duck_, where the continuity of
aspect is extraordinary. Confucius assures us that if we tell him our
past, he will tell us our future, and although several of the characters
in _The Wild Duck_ are the most sordid of Ibsen's creations, the author
has made himself so deeply familiar with them that they are absolutely
lifelike. The detestable Hialmar, in whom, by the looking-glass of a
disordered liver, any man may see a picture of himself; the pitiable
Gregers Werle, perpetually thirteenth at table, with his genius for
making an utter mess of other people's lives; the vulgar Gina; the
beautiful girlish figure of the little martyred Hedvig--all are wholly
real and living persons.
The subject of the play, of course, is one which we do not expect,
or had not hitherto expected, from Ibsen. It is the danger of "a sick
conscience" and the value of illusion. Society may be full of poisonous
vapors and be built on a framework of lies; it is nevertheless prudent
to consider whether the ideal advantages of disturbing it overweigh the
practical disadvantages, and above all to bear in mind that if you rob
the average man of his illusions, you are almost sure to rob him of his
happiness. The topsy-turvy nature of a this theme made Ibsen as nearly
"rollicking" as he ever became in his life. We can imagine than as he
wrote the third act of _The Wild Duck_, where so horrible a luncheon
party--"we'll all keep a corner"--gloats over the herring salad, he
indulged again and again in those puffs of soundless and formidable
mirth which Mr. Johan Paulsen describes as so surprising an element of
conversation with Ibsen.
To the gossip of that amiable Boswell, too, we must turn for a valuable
impression of the solidification of Ibsen's habits which began about
this time, and which marked then even before he left Munich. He had now
successfully separated himself from all society, and even his family
saw him only at meals. Visitors could not penetrate to him, but, if
sufficiently courageous, must hang about on the staircase, hoping to
catch him for a moment as he hurried out to the cafe. Within his study,
into which the daring Paulsen occasionally ventured, Ibsen, we are to
believe, did nothing at all, but "sat bent over the pacific ocean of his
own mind, which mirrored for him a world far more fascinating, vast and
rich than that which lay spread around him." [Note: _Samliv med Ibsen_,
1906, p. 30.]
And now the celebrated afternoons at the cafes had begun. In Rome Ibsen
had his favorite table, and he would sit obliquely facing a mirror
in which, half hidden by a newspaper and by the glitter of his gold
spectacles, he could command a sight of the whole restaurant, and
especially of the door into the street. Every one who entered, every
couple that conversed, every movement of the scene, gave something to
those untiring eyes. The newspaper and the cafe mirror--these were the
books which, for the future, Ibsen was almost exclusively to study; and
out of the gestures of a pair of friends at a table, out of a paragraph
in a newspaper, even out of the terms of an advertisement, he could
build up a drama. Incessant observation of real life, incessant capture
of unaffected, unconsidered phrases, actual living experience leaping
in his hands like a captive wild animal, this was now the substance
from which all Ibsen's dreams and dramas were woven. Concentration of
attention on the vital play of character, this was his one interest.
Out of this he was roused by a sudden determination to go at last and
see for himself what life in Norway was really like. A New England wit
once denied that a certain brilliant and Europe-loving American author
was a cosmopolitan. "No," he said, "a cosmopolitan is at home even in
his own country." Ibsen began to doubt whether he was not too far off
to follow events in Norway--and these were now beginning to be very
exciting--well enough to form an independent judgment about them; and
after twenty years of exile there is no doubt that the question was
fairly put. _The Wild Duck_ had been published in November, 1884, and
had been acted everywhere in Scandinavia with great success. The critics
and the public were agreed for the first time that Ibsen was a very
great national genius, and that if Norway was not proud of him it would
make a fool of itself in the eyes of Europe.
Ibsen had said that Norway was a barbarous country, inhabited by two
millions of cats and dogs, but so many agreeable and highly-civilized
compliments found their way to him in Rome that he began to fancy that
the human element was beginning to be introduced. At all events,
he would see for himself, and in June, 1885, instead of stopping at
Gossensass, he pushed bravely on and landed in Christiania.
At first all went well, but from the very beginning of the visit he
observed, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country was
thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetorical
resolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutional
horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway
from one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, the
Swedish emblem in the national flag, these were the subjects of frenzied
discussion, and in none of these did Ibsen take any sort of pleasure. He
was not politically far-sighted, it must be confessed, nor did he guess
what practical proportions these "theoretical questions" were to assume
in the immediate future.
That great writer and delightful associate, the Swedish poet, Count
Snoilsky, one of the few whose company never wearied or irritated Ibsen,
joined him in the far north. They spent a pleasant, quiet time together
at Molde, that enchanting little sub-arctic town, where it looks
southward over the shining fjord, with the Romsdalhorn forever guarding
the mountainous horizon. Here no politics intruded, and Ibsen, when
Snoilsky had left him, already thinking of a new drama, lingered on at
Molde, spending hours on hours at the end of the jetty, gazing into the
clear, cold sea. His passion for the sea had never betrayed him, and at
Rome, where he had long given up going to any galleries or studios, he
still haunted the house of a Norwegian marine painter, Nils Hansteen,
whose sketches reminded him of old days and recollected waters.
But the autumn comes on apace in these high latitudes, and Ibsen had to
return to Christiania with its torchlight processions, and late noisy
feasts, and triumphant revolutionary oratory. He disliked it extremely,
and he made up his mind to go back to the indifferent South, where
people did not worry about such things. Unfortunately, the inhabitants
of Christiania did not leave him alone. They were not content to have
him among them as a retired observer, they wanted to make him stand out
definitely on one political side or the other. He was urged, at the end
of September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession planned
in his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough to
see that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably too
self-conscious in believing that a trap was being laid for him. He said
that, not having observed that his presence gave the Union any great
pleasure, he did not care to have its expression of great joy at t his
departure. This was not polite, for it does not appear that the students
had any idea that he intended to depart. He would not address a reply to
the Union as a body, but to "my friends among the students."
A committee called upon him to beg him to reconsider his resolution,
but he roundly told them that he knew that they were reactionaries, and
wanted to annex him to their party, and that he was not blind to their
tricks. They withdrew in confusion, and Ibsen, in an agony of nervous
ness, determined to put the sea between himself and their machinations.
Early in October he retreated, or rather fled, to Copenhagen, and thence
to Munich, where he breathed again. Meanwhile, the extreme liberal
faction among the students claimed that his action had meant that he was
heart and soul with them, as against the reactionaries. A young Mr. Ove
Rode, who had interviewed him, took upon himself to say that these were
Ibsen's real sentiments. Ibsen fairly stamped with rage, and declared,
in furious communications, that all these things were done on purpose.
"It was an opportunity to insult a poet which it would have been a
sad pity to lose," he remarked, with quivering pen. A reverberant
controversy sprang up in the Norwegian newspapers, and Ibsen, in his
Bavarian harbor of refuge, continued to vibrate all through the winter
of 1885. The exile's return to his native country had proved to be far
from a success.
Already his new play was taking shape, and the success of his great
personal ambition, namely that his son, Sigurd, should be taken with
honor into the diplomatic service of his country, did such to calm his
spirits. Ibsen was growing rich now, as well as famous, and if only the
Norwegians would let him alone, he might well be happy. The new play
was _Rosmersholm_, and it took its impulse from a speech which Ibsen had
made during his journey, at Trondhjem, where he expounded the gospel of
individualism to a respectful audience of workingmen, and had laid
down the necessity of introducing an aristocratic strain, _et adeligt
element_, into the life of a truly democratic state, a strain which
woman and labor were to unite in developing. He said: "I am thinking,
of course, not of birth, nor of money, nor even of intellect, but of the
nobility which grows out of character. It is _character_ alone which can
make us free." This nobility of character must be fostered, mainly, by
the united efforts of motherhood and labor. This was quite a new creed
in Norway, and it bewildered his hearers, but it is remarkable to notice
how the best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded to the appeal,
and how little surprise the present generation would express at a
repetition of such sentiments. And out of this idea of "nobility" of
public character _Rosmersholm_ directly sprang.
We are not left to conjecture in this respect. In a letter to Bjoern
Kristensen (February 13, 1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, while
correcting a misconception of the purpose of _Rosmersholm_, that "the
play deals with the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have
to wage with themselves in order to bring their lives into harmony with
their convictions.... Conscience is very conservative. It has its deep
roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict." When
we come to read _Rosmersholm_ it is not difficult to see how this order
of ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The mansion called by
that name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois
aristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timid
conservatism as is represented by Rector Kroll, with his horror of all
things new because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in its inherent
nobility, is to be superior to a craven horror of the democracy, and is
to show, by the courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny, that
it looks above and beyond all these momentary prejudices, and accepts,
from all hands, whatever is wise and of good report.
The misfortune is that Ibsen, in unconscious bondage to his ideas, did
not construct his drama sturdily enough on realistic lines. While not
one of his works is more suggestive than _Rosmersholm_, there is not one
which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral
house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of
a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The
absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to
eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided.
Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief
and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is
a sort of troll; nobody can explain--and yet an explanation seems
requisite--what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to
work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright
for once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of
_Rosmersholm_ that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last,
Ibsen, in the act of theorizing, loses his hold upon reality. He places
his ingenious, elaborate and--given the premises--inevitable denouement
in a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan
opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately
on the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of real
life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality
of _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that
he may leap the further forward.
In other words, _Rosmersholm_ is the proof of Ibsen's desire to conquer
another field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with great
severity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was nevertheless
ineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of the
spectator no other impression than that he was observing something which
had actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in which
it would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, the
principle that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, "like
some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times." But the soul of man
cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly
prosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but
that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever
there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut
himself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowing
how to set about it, that he would once more give the spiritual and
the imaginative qualities their place in his work. These had now been
excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of _Peer Gynt_,
and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again in
verse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenile
and fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-like
bard of sixty. But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, and
especially to fantastic beauty of landscape.
The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the old
enchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods
and the waters which we had lost sight of since _Peer Gynt_. But this
element was still more evident in _The Lady from the Sea_, which was.
published in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long hours, in the
summer of 1885, at the end of the pier at Molde, gazing down into the
waters, or watching the steamers arriving and departing, coming from
the great sea beyond the fjord or going towards it. As was his wont,
he stored up these impressions, making no immediate use of them. He
actually prepared _The Lady from the Sea_ in very different, although
still marine surroundings. He went to Jutland, and settled for the
summer at the pretty and ancient, but very mild little town of Saeby,
with the sands in front of him and rolling woods behind. From Saeby
it was a short journey to Frederikshavn, "which he liked very much--he
could knock about all day among the shipping, talking to the sailors,
and so forth. Besides, he found the neighborhood of the sea favorable to
contemplation and constructive thought." So Mr. Archer, who visited him
at Saeby; and I myself, a year or two later, picked up at Frederikshavn
an oral tradition of Ibsen, with his hands behind his back, and the
frock-coat tightly buttoned, stalking, stalking alone for hours on the
interminable promenade between the great harbor moles of Frederikshaven,
no one daring to break in upon his formidable contemplation.
In several respects, though perhaps not in concentration of effect,
_The Lady from the Sea_ shows a distinct advance on _Rosmersholm_. It is
never dull, never didactic, as its predecessor too often was, and there
is thrown over the whole texture of it a glamour of romance, of mystery,
of beauty, which had not appeared in Ibsen's work since the completion
of _Peer Gynt_. Again, after the appearance of so many strenuous
tragedies, it was pleasant to welcome a pure comedy. _The Lady from
the Sea_ [Note: In the _Neue Rundschau_ for December, 1906, there was
published a first draft of _The Lady from the Sea_, dating as far back
as 1800.] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defence
of individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity of
developing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism.
It is in some respects the reverse of _Rosmersholm_; the bitterness
of restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death,
being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and gratified
individuality, which leads to health and peace. To the remarkable
estimate of _The Lady from the Sea_ formed by some critics, and in
particular by M. Jules de Gaultier, we shall return in a general
consideration of the symbolic plays, of which it is the earliest.
Enough to say here that even those who did not plunge so deeply into
its mysteries found it a remarkably agreeable spectacle, and that it has
continued to be, in Scandinavia and Germany, one of the most popular of
its author's works.
Ibsen left his little tavern at Saeby towards the end of September,
1887, in consequence of an invitation to proceed directly to Stockholm,
where his Swedish admirers, now very numerous and enthusiastic, would
no longer be deprived of the pleasure of entertaining him publicly.
He appeared before them, the breast of his coat sparkling with foreign
stars and crosses, the Urim and Thummim of general European recognition.
He was now in his sixtieth year, and he had out lived all the obscurity
of his youth. In the three Scandinavian countries--even in recalcitrant
Norway--he was universally hailed as the greatest dramatist of the age.
In Germany his fame was greater than that of any native writer of the
sang class. In Italy and Russia he was entering on a career of high
and settled popularity. Even in France and England his work was now
discussed with that passionate interest which shows the vitality of what
is even, for the moment, misinterpreted and disliked. His admirers at
Stockholm told him that he had taken a foremost place in re-creating
their sense of life, that he was a fashioner and a builder of new social
forms, that he was, indeed, to thousands of them, the Master-Builder.
The reply he made to their enthusiasm was dignified and reserved, but it
revealed a sense of high gratification. Skule's long doubt was over;
he believed at last in his own kingdom, and that the world would be
ultimately the better for the stamp of his masterful soul upon its
surface.
It was in an unusually happy mood that he sat dreaming through the early
part of the uneventful year 1889. But it gradually sank into melancholy
when, in the following year, he settled down to the composition of a
new play which was to treat of sad thoughts and tragic passions. He told
Snoilsky that for several reasons this work made very slow progress,
"and it robbed him of his summer holidays." From May to November, 1890,
he was uninterruptedly in Munich writing what is known to us now as
_Hedda Gabler_. He finished it at last, saying as he did so, "It has
not been my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I
principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions and
human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions
and principles of the present day." It was a proof of the immense growth
of Ibsen's celebrity that editions of _Hedda Gabler_ were called for
almost simultaneously, in the winter of 1890, in London, New York,
St. Petersburg, Leipzig, Berlin and Moscow, as well as in Copenhagen,
Stockholm and Christiania. There was no other living author in the world
at that moment who excited so much curiosity among the intellectual
classes, and none who exercised so much influence on the younger
generation of authors and thinkers.
In _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen returned, for the last time, but with
concentrated vigor, to the prosaic ideal of his central period. He never
succeeded in being more objective in drama, he never kept more closely
to the bare facts of nature nor rejected more vigorously the ornaments
of romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play. There is no poetic
suggestion here, no species of symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, or
monster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Archer when he
says that he finds it impossible to extract any sort of general idea
from _Hedda Gabler_, or to accept it as a satire of any condition of
society. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individual
that she interested Ibsen. We have been told, since the poet's death,
that he was greatly struck by the case, which came under his notice at
Munich, of a German lady who poisoned herself because she was bored
with life, and had strayed into a false position. _Hedda Gabler_ is the
realization of such an individual case. At first sight, it seemed as
though Ibsen had been influenced by Dumas _fils_, which might have been
true, in spite of the marked dislike which each expressed for the other;
[Note: It is said that _La Route de Thebes_, which Dumas had begun
when he died, was to have been a deliberate attack on the methods and
influence of Ibsen. Ibsen, on his part, loathed Dumas.] but closer
examination showed that Hedda Gabler had no sort of relation with the
pamphlets of the master of Parisian problem-tragedy.
The attempt to show that _Hedda Gabler_ "proved" anything was annoying
to Ibsen, who said, with more than his customary firmness, "It was not
my purpose to deal with what people call problems in this play. What I
chiefly tried to do was to paint human beings, human emotions and human
fate, against a background of some of the conditions and laws of society
as it exists to-day." The German critics, a little puzzled to find
a longitude and latitude for Tesman's "tastefully decorated" villa,
declared that this time Ibsen had written an "international," not a
locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the
contrary, _Hedda Gabler_ is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian
of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly
civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural
little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a
lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality
in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the
Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a "west end of
Christiania" of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it was
that to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than the
latter.
A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had
special opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately
(1907) depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomed
to a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom she
had mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth. In other
circumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good." If
this ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered as
the leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil
is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes
thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact
of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been
useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might
paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine
and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and
the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent
egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her
cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an
equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the
mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called a
caricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him into
regions where the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power.