LAST YEARS
With the publication of _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen passed into what we may
call his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of his
own growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as the
most eminent imaginative writer of the three Scandinavian countries, but
as the type there of what literature should be and the prophet of what
it would become. In 1880, Norway, the youngest and long the rawest of
the three civilizations, was now the foremost in activity, and though
the influence of Bjoernson and Jonas Lie was significant, yet it was not
to be compared for breadth and complexity with that of Ibsen. The nature
of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between
1880 and 1890, that is to say from _Ghosts_ to _Hedda Gabler_, was
destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama
of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace
and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and
sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in
Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and
catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the
old banal poetry; his spirit breathed upon it in fire, and in all its
faded elegance it withered up and vanished.
The next event was that the new generation in the three Northern
countries, deprived of its traditional authorities, looked about for a
prophet and a father, and they found what they wanted in the exceedingly
uncompromising elderly gentleman who remained so silent in the cafes
of Rome and of Munich. The zeal of the young for this unseen and
unsympathetic personage was extraordinary, and took forms of amazing
extravagance. Ibsen's impassivity merely heightened the enthusiasm of
his countless admirers, who were found, it should be stated, almost
entirely among persons who were born after his exile from Norway.
His writings supplied a challenge to character and intelligence
which appealed to those who disliked the earlier system of morals and
aesthetics against which he had so long fought single-handed.
Among writers in the North Ibsen began to hold very much the position
that Whistler was taking among painters and etchers in this country,
that is to say the abuse and ridicule of his works by a dwindling
group of elderly conventional critics merely stung into more frenzied
laudation an ever-widening circle of youthful admirers. Ibsen repented,
for a time almost exclusively, "serious" aims in literature, and with
those of Herbert Spencer, and in less measure of Zola, and a little
later of Nietzsche, his books were the spiritual food of all youthful
minds of any vigor or elasticity.
In Sweden, at this time, the admiration for Ibsen took forms of almost
preposterous violence. The great Swedish novelist, Gustaf af Geijerstam,
has given a curious and amusing account of the rage for Ibsen which came
to its height about 1880. The question which every student asked his
friend, every lover his mistress, was "What do you think of Ibsen?" Not
to be a believer in the Norwegian master was a reef upon which love
or friendship might easily be shipwrecked. It was quoted gravely as
an insufferable incompatibility for the state of marriage. There was
a curious and secret symbolism running through the whole of youthful
Swedish society, from which their elders were cunningly excluded, by
which the volumes of Ibsen, passed from hand to hand, presented on
solemn occasions, became the emblems of the problems interesting to
generous youth, flags carried in the moral fight for liberty and truth.
The three Northern countries, in their long stagnation, had become
clogged and deadened with spiritual humbug, which had sealed the sources
of emotion. It seemed though, after the long frost of the seventies,
spring had come and literature had budded a at last, and that it was
Ibsen who had blown the clarion of the West Wind and heralded the
emancipation.
The enthusiasm for the Norwegian dramatist was not always according
to knowledge, and sometimes it took grotesque forms. Much of the
abuse showered in England and France upon Ibsen at the time we are now
describing was due to echoes of the extravagance of his Scandinavian
and German idolaters. A Swedish satirist [Note: "Stella Kleve" (Mathilda
Malling, in _Framat_ 1886)] said that if Ibsen could have foreseen how
many "misunderstood" women would leave their homes in imitation of Nora,
and how many lovesick housekeepers drink poison on account of Rebecca,
he would have thrown ashes on his head and have retreated into the
deserts of Tartary. The suicide of the novelist, Ernst Ahlgren, was the
tragic circumstance where much was so purely comic. But if there were
elements of tragicomedy in the Ibsen idolatry, there were far more
important elements of vigorous and wholesome intellectual independence;
and it was during this period of Ibsen's almost hectic popularity that
the foundations of a new fiction and a new drama were laid in Sweden,
Denmark and Norway. A whole generation sucked strength and energy from
his early writings, since it is to be remarked that, from 1880 to 1890,
the great prestige of Ibsen did not depend so much on the dramas he was
then producing, as on the earlier works of his poetic youth, now reread
with an unexampled fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of Robert
Browning, which faintly resembles that of Ibsen, did not attract the
younger generation to the volumes which succeed _The Ring and the Book_,
but sent them back to the books which their fathers had despised, to
_Pippa Passes_ and _Men and Women_. To the generation of 1880, Ibsen was
not so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those old
but now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, _The Pretenders_,
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.
In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strong
personal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did he
find it confined to Scandinavia. He had travelled about in Germany, and
everywhere his plays were being acted. Berlin was wild about him; at
Weimar he was feted like a conqueror. He did not settle down at Munich
until May, and here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer, hard at
work. After the success of _Hedda Gabler_, which overpowered all adverse
comment, Ibsen began to long to be in Norway again, and this feeling
was combined, in a curious way, with a very powerful emotion which now
entered into his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful existence,
mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himself
to the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desert
in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams. No adventure, of any
prominent kind, had ever been seen to diversify Ibsen's perfectly
decorous and domestic career. And now he was more than sixty, and the
gray tones were gathering round him more thickly than ever, when a real
ray of vermilion descended out of the sky and filled his horizon with
color.
In the season of 1889, among the summer boarders at Gossensass, there
appeared a young Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach. She
used to sit on a certain bench in the Pferchthal, and when the poet,
whom she adored from afar, passed by, she had the courage to smile at
him. Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon Ibsen was on
the bench at her side. He readily discovered where she lived; no less
readily he gained an introduction to the family with whom she boarded.
There was a window-seat in the _salle a manger_; it was deep and shaded
by odorous flowering shrubs; it lent itself to endless conversation.
The episode was strange, the passion improbable, incomprehensible,
profoundly natural and true. Perhaps, until they parted in the last days
of September, neither the old man nor the young girl realized what their
relations had meant to each. Youth secured its revenge, however; Miss
Bardach soon wrote from Vienna that she was now more tranquil, more
independent, happy at last. Ibsen, on the other hand, was heart-broken,
quivering with ecstasy, overwhelmed with joy and despair.
It was the enigma in his "princess," as he called her; that completed
Miss Bardach's sorcery over the old poet. She seems to have been no
coquette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at his feet; she broke
the thread which bound the charms of her spirit and poured them over
him. He, for his part, remaining discreet and respectful, was shattered
with happiness. To a friend of mine, a young Norwegian man of letters,
Ibsen said about this time: "Oh, you can always love, but I am happier
than the happiest, for I am beloved." Long afterwards, on his seventieth
birthday, when his own natural force was failing, he wrote to Miss
Bardach, "That summer at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the most
harmonious portion of my whole existence. I scarcely venture to think
of it, and yet I think of nothing else. Ah! forever!" He did not dare to
send her _The Master-Builder_, since her presence interpenetrated every
line of it like a perfume, and when, we are told, she sent him her
photograph, signed "Princess of Orangia," her too-bold identification
of herself with Hilda Wangel hurt him as a rough touch, that finer tact
would have avoided. There can be no doubt at all that while she was
now largely absorbed by the compliment to her own vanity, he was still
absolutely enthralled and bewitched, and that what was fun to her made
life and death to him.
This very curious episode [Note: It was quite unknown until the
correspondence--which has not been translated into English--was
published by Georg Brandes at the desire of the lady herself (September,
1906).], which modifies in several important respects our conception
of the dramatist's character, is analogous with the apparent change
of disposition which made Renan surprise his unthinking admirers so
suddenly at the epoch of _L'Eau de Jouvence_ and _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_.
It was founded, of course, on that dangerous susceptibility to which
an elderly man of genius, whose life had been spent in labor and
reflection, may be inclined to resign himself, as he sees the sands
running out of the hour-glass, and realizes that in analyzing and
dissecting emotion he has never had time to enjoy it. Time is so short,
the nerves so fragile and so finite, the dreadful illusion, the _maia_,
so irresistible, that the old man gives way to it, and would sooner die
at once than not make one grasp at happiness.
It will have been remarked that Ibsen's habit was to store up an
impression, but not to use it immediately on creative work. We need,
therefore, feel no surprise that there is not a trace of the Bardach
episode in _Hedda Gabler_, although the composition of that play
immediately followed the _hohes, schmerzliches Glueck_ at Gossensass. He
was, too, no moonlight serenader, and his intense emotion is perfectly
compatible with the outline of some of the gossip which was repeated at
the time of his death; Ibsen being reported to have said of the Viennese
girl: "She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her--for my
play." These things are very complex, and not to be hastily dismissed,
especially on the rough and ready English system. There would be give
and take in such a complicated situation, when the object was, as Ibsen
himself says, out of reach _unversichtbar_. There is no question that
for every pang which Hilda made her ancient lover suffer, he would
enrich his imagination with a dozen points of experience. There is no
paradox in saying that the poet was overwhelmed with a passion and yet
consciously made it serve as material for his plays. From this time
onwards every dramatic work of his bears the stamp of those hours among
the roses at Gossensass.
To the spring of 1891 belongs Ibsen's somewhat momentous visit to
Vienna, where he was invited by Dr. Max Burckhard, the director of the
Burg Theatre, to superintend the performance of his _Pretenders_. Ibsen
had already, in strict privacy, visited Vienna, where his plays enjoyed
an increasing success, but this was his first public entrance into a
city which he admired on the whole more than any other city of Europe.
"Mein schoener Wien!" he used to murmur, with quite a clan of affection.
In April, 1891, after the triumph of his tragedy on the stage, Ibsen
was the guest at a public banquet at Vienna, when the ovations were
overwhelming and were extended until four o'clock next morning. A
performance of _The Wild Duck_ produced, what was almost as dear to
Ibsen as praise, a violent polemic, and he passed on out of a world of
storm and passion to Buda-Pesth, where he saw _A Doll's House_ acted
in Hungarian, amid thunders of applause, and where he was the guest
of Count Albert Apponyi. These were the happy and fruitful years which
consoled the heart of the poet for the bitter time when
"Hate's decree Dwelt in his thoughts intolerable."
In the ensuing summer, in July, 1891, Ibsen left Munich with every
intention of returning to it, but with the plan of a long summer trip
in Norway, where the triumphant success of _Hedda Gabler_ had been very
agreeable to his feelings. Once more he pushed up through the country to
Trondhjem, a city which had always attracted him and pleased him. Here
he presently embarked on one of the summer coasting-steamers, and saw
the shores of Nordland and Finmark for the first time, visiting the
North Cape itself. He came back to Christiania for the rest of the
season, with no prospect of staying. But he enjoyed a most flattering
reception; he was begged to resume his practical citizenship, and he was
assured that life in Norway would be made very pleasant to him. In the
autumn, therefore, in his abrupt way, he took an apartment in Viktoria
Terrasse, and sent to Munich for his furniture. He said to a friend
who expressed surprise at this settlement: "I may just as well make
Christiania my headquarters as Munich. The railway takes me in a very
short time wherever I want to go; and when I am bored with Norway I can
travel elsewhere." But he never felt the fatigue he anticipated, and,
but for brief visits to Copenhagen or Stockholm, he left his native
country no more after 1891, although he changed his abode in Christiania
itself.
For the first twelve months Ibsen enjoyed the pleasures of the prodigal
returned, and fed with gusto on the fatted calf. Then, when three years
separated him from the illuminating soul-adventures of Gossensass, he
began to turn them into a play. It proved to be _The Master-Builder_,
and was published before the close of December, 1892, with the date 1893
on the title-page. This play was running for some time in Germany and
England before it was played in Scandinavia. But on the evening of
March 8, 1893, it was simultaneously given at the National Theatre in
Christiania and at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. It was a work which
greatly puzzled the critics, and its meaning was scarcely apparent until
it had been seen on the stage, for which the oddity of its arrangements
are singularly well adapted. It was, however, almost immediately noticed
that it marked a new departure in Ibsen's writings. Here was an end of
the purely realistic and prosaic social dramas, which had reigned from
_The League of Youth_ to _Hedda Gabler_, and here was a return to the
strange and haunting beauty of the old imaginative pieces. Mr. Archer
was happily inspired when he spoke of "the pure melody" of the piece,
and the best scenes of _The Master-Builder_ were heroically and almost
recklessly poetical.
This remarkable composition is full of what, for want of a better word,
we must call "symbolism." In the conversations between Solness and Hilda
much is introduced which is really almost unintelligible unless we take
it to be autobiographical. The Master-Builder is one who constructs,
not houses, but poems and plays. It is the poet himself who gives
expression, in the pathetic and erratic confessions of Solness, to his
doubts, his craven timidities, his selfish secrets, and his terror at
the uniformity of his "luck." It is less easy to see exactly what Ibsen
believed himself to be presenting to us in the enigmatical figure of
Hilda, so attractive and genial, so exquisitely refreshing, and yet
radically so cruel and superficial. She is perhaps conceived as a symbol
of Youth, arriving too late within the circle which Age has trodden
for its steps to walk in, and luring it too rashly, by the mirage of
happiness, into paths no longer within its physical and moral capacity.
"Hypnotism," Mr. Archer tells us, "is the first and last word of the
dramatic action"; perhaps thought-transference more exactly expresses
the idea, but I should not have stated even this quite so strongly. The
ground of the dramatic action seems to me to be the balance of Nemesis,
the fatal necessity that those who enjoy exceptional advantages in life
shall pay for them by not less exceptional, but perhaps less obvious,
disadvantages. The motto of the piece--at least of the first two of its
acts--might be the couplet of the French tragedian:--
C'est un ordre des dieux qui jamais ne se rompt De nous vendre bien cher
les grands biens qu'ils nous font.
Beneath this, which we may call the transcendental aspect of the play,
we find a solid and objective study of the self-made man, the headstrong
amateur, who has never submitted to the wholesome discipline of
professional training, but who has trusted to the help of those trolls
or mascots, his native talent and his unfailing "luck." Upon such a man
descends Hilda, the disorganizer, who pierces the armor of his conceit
by a direct appeal to his passions. Solness has been the irresistible
sorcerer, through his good fortune, but he is not protected in his
climacteric against this unexpected attack upon the senses. Samson
philanders with Delila, and discovers that his strength is shorn from
him. There is no doubt that Ibsen intended in _The Master-Builder_ a
searching examination of "luck" and the tyranny of it, the terrible
effects of it on the Broviks and the Kajas whom nobody remembers, but
whose bodies lie under the wheels of its car. The dramatic situation is
here extremely interesting; it consists in the fact that Solness, who
breaks every one else, is broken by Hilda. The inherent hardness of
youth, which makes no allowances, which demands its kingdom here and now
upon the table, was never more powerfully depicted. Solness is smashed
by his impact with Hilda, as china is against a stone. In all this it
would be a mistake to see anything directly autobiographical, although
so much in the character and position of Solness may remind us,
legitimately enough, of Ibsen himself, and his adventures.
The personal record of Ibsen in these years is almost silent. He was
growing old and set in his habits. He was growing rich, too, and he
surrounded himself with sedentary comforts. His wealth, it may here
be said, was founded entirely upon the success of his works, but was
fostered by his extreme adroitness as a man of business. Those who are
so fond of saying that any man of genius might have excelled in some
other capacity are fully justified if they like to imagine Ibsen as
the model financier. He certainly possessed a remarkable aptitude for
affairs, and we learn that his speculations were at once daring and
crafty. People who are weary of commiserating the poverty of poets may
be pleased to learn that when Ibsen died he was one of the wealthiest
private citizens of Christiania, and this was wholly in consequence of
the care he had taken in protecting his copyrights and administering his
receipts. If the melancholy couplet is correct which tells us that
Aux petits des oiseaux Dieu donne la pature,
Mais sa bonte s'arrkete a la litterature,
we must believe, with Ibsen's enemies, that his fortunes were not under
the divine protection.
The actual numbers of each of his works printed since he first published
with Hegel in Copenhagen--a connection which he preserved without a
breach until the end--have been stated since his death. They contain
some points of interest. After 1876 Hegel ventured on large editions
of each new play, but they went off at first slowly. _The Lady from the
Sea_ was the earliest to appear, at once, in an issue of 10,000 copies,
which was soon exhausted. So great, however, had the public interest in
Ibsen become in 1894 that the edition of 10,000 copies of _Little Eyolf_
was found quite inadequate to meet the first order, and it was enlarged
to 15,000, all of which were gone in a fortnight. This circulation in so
small a reading public as that of Denmark and Norway was unprecedented,
and it must be remembered that the simultaneous translations into most
of the languages of Europe are not included.
_Little Eyolf_, which was written in Christiania during the spring and
summer of 1894, was issued, according to Ibsen's cometary custom, as the
second week of December rolled round. The reception of it was stormy,
even in Scandinavia, and led to violent outbursts of controversy. No
work from the master's pen had roused more difference of opinion among
the critics since the bluster over _Ghosts_ fourteen years before. Those
who prefer to absolute success in the creation of a work of art the
personal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed to
place _Little Eyolf_ very high among his writings. Nowhere is he more
independent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may even
be said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this play
may fairly be considered in the light of a _tour de force_. Ibsen--one
would conjecture--is trying to see to what extremities of agile
independence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped me;
but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty not
quite easily or completely overcome which _Little Eyolf_ produces.
To mention but one technical matter; there are but four characters,
properly speaking, in the play--since Eyolf himself and the Rat-Wife
are but illustrations or symbolic properties--and of these four, one
(Borgheim) is wholly subsidiary. Ibsen, then, may be said to have
challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three
characters in it. By a process of elimination this has been done
by Aeschylus (in the _Agamemnon_), by Racine (in _Phe*dre_ and
_Andromaque_), and in our own day by Maeterlinck (in _Pelle*as et
Me*lisande_). But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his
experiment seems not wholly successful. _Little Eyolf_, at least, is,
from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope. We may hazard
the conjecture that no drama gave Ibsen more satisfaction to write,
but for enjoyment the reader may prefer less prodigious agility on the
trapeze.
If we turn from the technical virtuosity of _Little Eyolf_ to its moral
aspects, we find it a very dreadful play, set in darkness which nothing
illuminates but the twinkling sweetness of Asta. The mysterious symbol
of the Rat-Wife breaks in upon the pair whose love is turning to hate,
the man waxing cold as the wife grows hot. The Angel of God, in the
guise of an old beggar-woman, descends into their garden, and she drags
away, by an invisible chain, "the little gnawing thing," the pathetic
lame child. The effect on the pair of Eyolf's death by drowning is the
subject of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is incarnate, and she
seems the most vigorous, and, it must be added, the most repulsive,
of Ibsen's feminine creations. The reckless violence of Rita's energy,
indeed, interpreted by a competent actress--played, for instance, as it
was in London most admirably by Miss Achurch--is almost too painful for
a public exhibition, and to the old criticism, "nec pueros coram populo
Medea trucidet," if a pedant chooses to press it, there teems no reply.
The sex question, as treated in _Little Eyolf_, recalls _The Kreutzer
Sonata_ (1889) of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask Ibsen
whether there was anything in this, he was displeased, and stoutly
denied it. What, an author denies, however, is not always evidence.
Nothing further of general interest happened to Ibsen until 1896, when
he sat down to compose another drama, _John Gabriel Borkman_. This was a
study of the mental adventures of a man of high commercial imagination,
who is artificially parted from all that contact with real affairs
which keeps such energy on the track, and who goes mad with dreams of
incalculable power, a study, in fact, of financial megalomania. It was
said, at the time, that Ibsen was originally led to make this analysis
of character from reading in the Christiania newspapers a report of the
failure and trial of a notorious speculator convicted of fraud in 1895,
and sentenced to a long period of penal servitude.
Whether this be so or not, we have in the person of John Gabriel
Borkman a prominent example of the ninteenth century type of criminous
speculator, in whom the vastness of view and the splendidly altruistic
audacity present themselves as elements which render it exceedingly
difficult to say how far the malefactor is morally responsible for
his crime. He has imagined, and to a certain point has carried out, a
monster metal "trust," for the success of which he lacks neither courage
nor knowledge nor practical administrative capacity, but only that
trifling concomitant, sufficiency of capital. To keep the fires blazing
until his vast model is molten into the mould, he helps himself to
money here, there, and everywhere, scarcely giving a thought to his
responsibilities, so certain is he of ultimate and beneficent triumph.
He will make rich beyond the dreams of avarice all these his involuntary
supporters. Unhappily, just before his scheme is ready and the metal
runs, he is stopped by the stupidity of the law, and finds himself in
prison.
Side by side with this study of commercial madness runs a thread of that
new sense of the preciousness of vital joy which had occupied Ibsen so
much ever since the last of the summers at Gossensass. The figure of
Erhart Borkman is a very interesting one to the theatrical student. In
the ruin of the family, all hopes concentre in him. Every one claims
him, and in the bosoms of each of his shattered parents a secret hope
is born, Mrs. Borkman believing that by a brilliant career of commercial
rectitude her son will wipe out the memory of his father's crime;
Borkman, who has never given up the ambition of returning to business,
reposing his own hopes on the co-operation of his son.
But Erhart Borkman disappoints them all. He will be himself, he will
enjoy his life, he will throw off all the burdens both of responsibility
and of restitution. He has no ambition and little natural feeling;
he simply must be happy, and he suddenly elopes, leaving all their
anticipations bankrupt, with a certain joyous Mrs. Wilton, who has
nothing but her beauty to recommend her. Deserted thus by the _ignis
fatuus_ of youth, the collapse of the three old people is complete.
Under the shock the brain of Borkman gives way, and he wanders out into
the winter's night, full of vague dreams of what he can still do in the
world, if he can only break from his bondage and shatter his dream. He
dies there in the snow, and the two old sisters, who have followed him
in an anxiety which overcomes their mutual hatred, arrive in time to
see him pass away. We leave them in the wood, "a dead man and two
shadows"--so Ella Rentheim puts it--"for _that_ is what the cold has
made of us"; the central moral of the piece being that all the errors of
humanity spring from cold-heartedness and neglect of the natural heat
of love. That Borkman embezzled money, and reduced hundreds of innocent
people to beggary, might be condoned; but there is no pardon for his
cruel bargaining for wealth with the soul of Ella Rentheim, since that
is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. There are points of
obscurity, and one or two of positive and even regrettable whimsicality,
about _John Gabriel Borkman_, but on the whole it is a work of lofty
originality and of poignant human interest.
The veteran was now beginning to be conscious of the approaches of old
age, but they were made agreeable to him by many tokens of national
homage.
On his seventieth birthday, March 20, 1898, Ibsen received the
felicitations of the world. It is pleasing to relate that a group of
admirers in England, a group which included Mr. Asquith, Mr. J. M.
Barrie, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. Pinero and
Mr. Bernard Shaw took part in these congratulations and sent Ibsen
a handsome set of silver plate, this being an act which, it had been
discovered, he particularly appreciated. The bearer of this gift was the
earliest of the long stream of visitors to arrive on the morning of the
poet's birthday, and he found Ibsen in company with his wife, his son,
his son's wife (Bjoernson's daughter), and his little grandson, Tankred.
The poet's surprise and pleasure were emphatic. A deputation from the
Storthing, headed by the Leader of the House, deputations representing
the University, the various Christiania Theatres, and other official or
academic bodies arrived at intervals during the course of the day;
and all the afternoon Ibsen was occupied in taking these hundreds of
visitors, in parties, up to the case containing the English tribute, in
showing the objects and in explaining their origin. There could be no
question that the gift gave genuine pleasure to the recipient; it
was the first, as it was to be the last, occasion on which any public
testimony to English appreciation of his genius found its way to Ibsen's
door.
Immediately after the birthday festivities, which it was observed had
fatigued him, Ibsen started on a visit to Copenhagen, where he was
received by the aged King of Denmark, and to Stockholm, where he was
overpowered with ovations from all classes. There can be no doubt that
this triumphal progress, though deeply grateful to the aged poet's
susceptibilities, made a heavy drain upon his nervous resources. When
he returned to Norway, indeed, he was concealed from all visitors at
his physician's orders, and it is understood that he had some kind of
seizure. It was whispered that he would write no more, and the biennial
drama, due in December, 1898, did not make its appearance. His stores
of health, however, were not easily exhausted; he rested for several
months, and then he was seen once more in Carl Johans Gade, smiling; in
his usual way, and entirely recovered. It was announced that winter that
he was writing his reminiscences, but nothing more was heard of any such
book.
He was able to take a vivid interest in the preparations for the
National Norwegian Theatre in Christiania, which was finally opened
by the King of Sweden and Norway on September 1, 1899. Early in the
morning, colossal bronze statues of Ibsen and Bjoernson were unveiled in
front of the theatre, and the poets, now, unfortunately, again not on
the best of terms, were seen making vast de*tours for the purpose of
satisfying their curiosity, and yet not meeting one another in flesh
or in metal. The first night, to prevent rivalry, was devoted to
antiquarianism, and to the performance of extracts from the plays of
Holberg. Ibsen and Bjoernson occupied the centre of the dress circle,
sitting uplifted in two gilded fauteuils and segregated by a vast
garland of red and white roses. They were the objects of universal
attention, and the King seemed never to have done smiling and bowing to
the two most famous of his Norwegian subjects.
The next night was Ibsen's fete, and he occupied, alone, the manager's
box. A poem in his honor, by Niels Collet Vogt, was recited by the
leading actor, who retired, and then rushed down the empty stage,
with his arms extended, shouting "Long live Henrik Ibsen." The immense
audience started to its feet and repeated the words over and over again
with deafening fervor. The poet appeared to be almost overwhelmed
with emotion and pleasure; at length, with a gesture which was quite
pathetic, smiling through his tears, he seemed to beg his friends to
spare him, and the plaudits slowly ceased. _An Enemy of the People_ was
then admirably performed. At the close of every act Ibsen was called to
the front of his box, and when the performance was over, and the actors
had been thanked, the audience turned to him again with a sort of
affectionate ferocity. Ibsen was found to have stolen from his box, but
he was waylaid and forcibly carried back to it. On his reappearance, the
whole theatre rose in a roar of welcome, and it was with difficulty that
the aged poet, now painfully exhausted from the strain of an evening
of such prolonged excitement, could persuade the public to allow him
to withdraw. At length he left the theatre, walking slowly, bowing and
smiling, down a lane cleared for him, far into the street, through the
dense crowd of his admirers. This astonishing night, September 2, 1899,
was the climax of Ibsen's career.
During all this time Ibsen was secretly at work on another drama, which
he intended as the epilogue to his earlier dramatic work, or at least to
all that he had written since _The Pillars of Society_. This play, which
was his latest, appeared, under the title of _When We Dead Awaken_,
in December, 1899 (with 1900 on the title-page). It was simultaneously
published, in very large editions, in all the principal languages
of Europe, and it was acted also, but it is impossible to deny that,
whether in the study or on the boards, it proved a disappointment.
It displayed, especially in its later acts, many obvious signs of the
weakness incident on old age.
When it is said that _When We Dead Awaken_ was not worthy of its
predecessors, it should be explained that no falling off was visible in
the technical cleverness with which the dialogue was built up, nor in
the wording of particular sentences. Nothing more natural or amusing,
nothing showing greater, command of the resources of the theatre, had
ever been published by Ibsen himself than the opening act of _When
We Dead Awaken_. But there was certainly in the whole conception a
cloudiness, an ineffectuality, which was very little like anything
that Ibsen had displayed before. The moral of the piece was vague, the
evolution of it incoherent, and indeed in many places it seemed a parody
of his earlier manner. Not Mr. Anstey Guthrie's inimitable scenes
in _Mr. Punch's Ibsen_ were more preposterous than almost all the
appearances of Irene after the first act of _When We Dead Awaken_.
It is Irene who describes herself as dead, but awakening in the society
of Rubek, whilst Maia, the little gay soulless creature whom the great
sculptor has married, and has got heartily tired of, goes up to the
mountains with Ulpheim the hunter, in pursuit of the free joy of life.
At the close, the assorted couples are caught on the summit of an
exceeding high mountain by a snowstorm, which opens to show Rubek and
Irene "whirled along with the masses of snow, and buried in them," while
Maia and her bear-hunter escape in safety to the plains. Interminable,
and often very sage and penetrating, but always essentially rather
maniacal, conversation fills up the texture of the play, which is
certainly the least successful of Ibsen's mature compositions. The
boredom of Rubek in the midst of his eminence and wealth, and his
conviction that by working in such concentration for the purity of art
he merely wasted his physical life, inspire the portions of the play
which bring most conviction and can be read with fullest satisfaction.
It is obvious that such thoughts, such faint and unavailing regrets,
pursued the old age of Ibsen; and the profound wound that his heart had
received so long before at Gossensass was unhealed to his last moments
of consciousness. An excellent French critic, M. P. G. La Chesnais,
has ingeniously considered the finale of this play as a confession that
Ibsen, at this end of his career, was convinced of the error of his
earlier rigor, and, having ceased to believe in his mission, regretted
the complete sacrifice of his life to his work. But perhaps it is not
necessary to go into such subtleties. _When We Dead Awaken_ is
the production of a very tired old man, whose physical powers were
declining.
In the year 1900, during our South African War, sentiment in the
Scandinavian countries was very generally ranged on the side of the
Boers. Ibsen, however, expressed himself strongly and publicly in favor
of the English position. In an interview (November 24, 1900), which
produced a considerable sensation, he remarked that the Boers were but
half-cultivated, and had neither the will nor the power to advance
the cause of civilization. Their sole object had come to be a jealous
exclusion of all the higher forms of culture. The English were merely
taking what the Boers themselves had stolen from an earlier race; the
Boers had pitilessly hunted their precursors out of house and home, and
now they were tasting the same cup themselves. These were considerations
which had not occurred to generous sentimentalists in Norway, and
Ibsen's defence of England, which he supported in further communications
with irony and courage, made a great sensation, and threw cold water on
the pro-Boer sentimentalists. In Holland, where Ibsen had a wide
public, this want of sympathy for Dutch prejudice raised a good deal of
resentment, and Ibsen's statements were replied to by the fiery young
journalist, Cornelius Karel Elout, who even published a book on the
subject. Ibsen took dignified notice of Elout's attacks (December 9,
1900), repeating his defence of English policy, and this was the latest
of his public appearances.
He took an interest, however, in the preparation of the great edition of
his _Collected Works_, which appeared in Copenhagen in 1901 and 1902,
in ten volumes. Before the publication of the latest of these, however,
Ibsen had suffered from an apoplectic stroke, from which he never wholly
recovered. It was believed that any form of mental fatigue might now be
fatal to him, and his life was prolonged by extreme medical care. He was
contented in spirit and even cheerful, but from this time forth he was
more and more completely withdrawn from consecutive interest in what was
going on in the world without. The publication, in succession, of his
juvenile works (_Kaempehoejen_, _Olaf Liljekrans_, both edited by Halvdan
Koht, in 1902), of his _Correspondence_, edited by Koht and Julius
Elias, in 1904, of the bibliographical edition of his collected works by
Carl Naerup, in 1902, left him indifferent and scarcely conscious. The
gathering darkness was broken, it is said, by a gleam of light in
1905; when the freedom of Norway and the accession of King Hakon were
explained to him, he was able to express his joyful approval before the
cloud finally sank upon his intelligence.
During his long illness Ibsen was troubled by aphasia, and he expressed
himself painfully, now in broken Norwegian, now in still more broken
German. His unhappy hero, Oswald Alving, in _Ghosts_, had thrilled the
world by his cry, "Give me the sun, Mother!" and now Ibsen, with glassy
eyes, gazed at the dim windows, murmuring "Keine Sonne, keine Sonne,
keine Sonne!" At the table where all the works of his maturity had
been written the old man sat, persistently learning and forgetting the
alphabet. "Look!" he said to Julius Elias, pointing to his mournful
pothooks, "See what I am doing! I am sitting here and learning my
letters--my _letters_! I who was once a Writer!" Over this shattered
image of what Ibsen had been, over this dying lion, who could not die,
Mrs. Ibsen watched with the devotion of wife, mother and nurse in one,
through six pathetic years. She was rewarded, in his happier moments,
by the affection and tender gratitude of her invalid, whose latest
articulate words were addressed to her--"_min soede, kjaere, snille
frue_" (my sweet, dear, good wife); and she taught to adore their
grandfather the three children of a new generation, Tankred, Irene,
Eleonora.
Ibsen preserved the habit of walking about his room, or standing for
hours staring out of window, until the beginning of May, 1906. Then
a more complete decay confined him to his bed. After several days of
unconsciousness, he died very peacefully in his house on Drammensvej,
opposite the Royal Gardens of Christiania, at half-past two in the
afternoon of May 23, 1906, being in his seventy-ninth year. By a
unanimous vote of the he was awarded a public funeral, which the King of
Norway attended in person, while King Edward VII was represented there
by the British Minister. The event was regarded through out Norway as a
national ceremony of the highest solemnity and importance, and the poet
who had suffered such bitter humiliation and neglect in his youth was
carried to his grave in solemn splendor, to the sound of a people's
lamentation.