INTELLECTUAL CHARACTERISTICS
Having accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen as a disturbing and
revolutionizing force, which met with the utmost resistance at the
outset, and was gradually accepted before the close of his career, we
may try to define what the nature of his revolt was, and what it was,
precisely, that he attacked. It may be roughly said that what peculiarly
roused the animosity of Ibsen was the character which has become
stereotyped in one order of ideas, good in themselves but gradually
outworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a new kind. Ibsen
meditated upon the obscurantism of the old regime until he created
figures like Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school are
crystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympathetically
into the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, there
is no one of his plays more valuable in its purely theoretic way than
_Rosmersholm_. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it
surveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies upon
Rosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can go
no further. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would be
salutary, he cannot move--he is bound in invisible chains. It is useless
to argue with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic, but he
simply cannot, when it comes to action, cross the bridge where Beate
threw herself into the torrent.
But Ibsen had not the ardor of the fighting optimist. He was one who
"doubted clouds would break," who dreamed, since "right was worsted,
wrong would triumph." With Robert Browning he had but this one thing in
common, that both were fighters, both "held we fall to rise, are baffled
to fight better," but the dark fatalism of the Norwegian poet was in
other things in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness of the
English one. Browning and Ibsen alike considered that the race must be
reformed periodically or it would die. The former anticipated reform
as cheerily as the sower expects harvest. Ibsen had no such happy
certainty. He was convinced of the necessity of breaking up the old
illusions, the imaginative call for revolt, but his faith wavered as to
the success of the new movements. The old order, in its resistance to
all change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but it is the work of
a blind Sampson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground.
In _Rosmersholm_, all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the
lucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutly
intrenched. In the end it is not the new idea who conquers; it is the
antique house, with its traditions, its avenging vision of white horses,
which breaks the too-clairvoyant Rebecca.
This doubt of the final success of intelligence, this obstinate question
whether, after all, as we so glibly intimate, the old order changeth at
all, whether, on the contrary, it has not become a Juggernaut car that
crushes all originality and independence out of action, this breathes
more and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler
condemns the old order, in its dulness, its stifling mediocrity, but she
is unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, and
she sinks into deeper moral dissolution. She hates all that has been
done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that
detestable condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees
the need of creation, and can only show the irritation which its own
sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do,
to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Loevborg, and to kill herself
with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the
Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do best to die.
We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love of self is the
fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of
self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every
manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between
the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda
Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the
master-builder Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in
the act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoons
to death, "dizzy, lost, yet unupbraiding." Ibsen's exact meaning in the
detail of these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but they repay
the closest and most reiterated study. Perhaps the most curious of all
is _The Lady from the Sea_, which has been examined from the technically
psychological view by a learned French philosopher, M. Jules de
Gaultier. For M. de Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen's
conception of human life, with its conflicting instincts and
responsibilities, is more fully centred in _The Lady from the Sea_ than
in any other of his productions.
The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen's constant aim is to
reconcile and to conciliate the two biological hypotheses which
have divided opinion in the nineteenth century, and which are known
respectively by the names of Cuvier and Lamarck; namely, that of the
invariability of species and that of the mutability of organic forms.
In the reconciliation of these hypotheses Ibsen finds the only process
which is truly encouraging to life. According to this theory, all the
trouble, all the weariness, all the waste of moral existences around
us comes from the neglect of one or other of these principles, and
true health, social or individual, is impossible without the harmonious
application of them both. According to this view, the apotheosis of
Ibsen's genius, or at least the most successful elucidation of his
scheme of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in _The Lady from
the Sea_ where Wangel succeeds in winning the heart of Ellida back from
the fascination of the Stranger. It is certainly in this mysterious and
strangely attractive play that Ibsen has insisted, more than anywhere
else, on the necessity of taking physiology into consideration in every
discussion of morals. He refers, like a zooelogist, to the laws which
regulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decision
of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example of
the limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. The
extraordinary ingenuity of M. de Gaultier's analysis of this play
deserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted, as embraced by
Ibsen's intention, may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect
that, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct of Ibsen was
probably subtler still.
In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward, with the glimmering taper of
his Catilina, there was but one person in the world who fancied that
the light might pass from lamp to lamp and in half a century form an
important part of the intellectual illumination of Europe. The one
person who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself. Against
all probability and common-sense, this apothecary's assistant, this
ill-educated youth who had just been plucked in his preliminary
examination, who positively was, and remained, unable to pass the first
tests and become a student at the University, maintained in his
inmost soul the belief that he was born to be "a king of thought." The
impression is perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makes
the case unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that it
happened to be true. But the impact of Ibsen with the social order of
his age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unlucky
than that of any other great man of the same class with whose biography
we have been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all that
was successful and respectable and "nice" from the outset of his career
until near the end of it.
Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to the
world there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in the
mouth like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it as
nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one
of those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no other
writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing
with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the
satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and
thin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns, Ibsen is
uniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problems
of life than any other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but it was
his surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays of
Alexandre Dumas _fils_ flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon.
But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all the
protean forms of organic social life and coldly draws up his diagnosis
like a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. We
have seen that, long before a sentence was written, he had invented and
studied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characters
who were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their
experience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he was
building up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, fetiches
which represented people to him, stood arranged on his writing table,
and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by some
feat of black magic, he turned them into living persons, typical and yet
individual.
We have recorded that the actual writing down of the dialogue was often
swift and easy, when the period of incubation was complete. Each of
Ibsen's plays presupposes a long history behind it; each starts like an
ancient Greek tragedy, in the full process of catastrophe. This
method of composition was extraordinary, was perhaps, in modern
times, unparalleled. It accounted in measure for the coherency, the
inevitability, of all the detail, but it also accounted for some of the
difficulties which meet us in the task of interpretation. Ibsen calls
for an expositor, and will doubtless give occupation to an endless
series of scholiasts. They will not easily exhaust their theme, and to
the last something will escape, something will defy their most careful
examination. It is not disrespectful to his memory to claim that Ibsen
sometimes packed his stuff too closely. Criticism, when it marvels most
at the wonder of his genius, is constrained to believe that he sometimes
threw too much of his soul into his composition, that he did not stand
far enough away from it always to command its general effect. The
result, especially in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, and
excites the spectator too much.
One very curious example of Ibsen's minute care is found in the
copiousness of his stage directions. Later playwrights have imitated
him in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago such
minuteness seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential
to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The
stage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader who
desires to follow the dramatist's thought step by step without losing
the least link. These notes of his intention will be of ever-increasing
value as the recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In 1899 Ibsen
remarked to me that it was almost useless for actors nowadays to try to
perform the comedies of Holberg, because there were no stage directions
and the tradition was lost. Of his own work, fortunately, that can never
be said. Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating studies of the
Greek Tragedies, has pointed out more than once the "undesigned and
unforeseen defect with which, in studying ancient drama, we must
perpetually reckon," namely, the loss of the action and of the
equivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine "what problems
Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the _Poetae Scenici
Graeci_," and not more difficult to realize how many things there would
be to puzzle us in _Ghosts_ and _The Wild Duck_ if we possessed nothing
but the bare text.
The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, so
passionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to be
welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in
Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an
extravagant character. At the present moment any one conversant with
Norwegian society who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer
or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will be
surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the
attractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almost
universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be
found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into
the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national
conscience, that even works like _Ghosts_, which shocked, and works like
_Rosmersholm_, which insulted the prejudices of his countrymen, were
excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who
reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at
every national habit and showed a worm at the root of every national
tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be
accompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation," and
he who had almost starved in exile to be conducted to the last resting
place by a Parliament and a King.
It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to the
whole world--his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this
dissemination--yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home
that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how
hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between
his country and himself was complete long before the prophet died. As he
walked about, the strange, picturesque little old man, in the streets
of Christiania, his fellow-citizens gazed at him with a little fear,
but with some affection and with unbounded reverence. They understood
at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it
applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it
their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante
said in the _New Life_:--
e costui Che viene a consolar la nostra mente, Ed e la sua tanto
possente, Ch'altro pensier non lascia star con nui.
No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which
Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his _virtu_, upon the Norwegian
conscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it and had
banished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows will
doubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, and
at the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the
world, owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurtured
in that new temper of mind, that _spiritel nuovo d'amore_ which was
inculcated by the whole work of Ibsen.