spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the
responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This
queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main
endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions
and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which
peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a
letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands
alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found
pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is
marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never
writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it
necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.'
'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from
doing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this
intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical
cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could
never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that
'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an
admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and
feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in
Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had
been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one
is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'
He insists, again and again: 'Environment has a great influence upon the
forms in which the imagination creates'; and, in a tone of
half-burlesque, but with something serious in his meaning, he declares
that wine had something to do with the exaltation of _Brand_ and _Peer
Gynt_, and sausages and beer with the satirical analysis of _The League
of Youth_. And he adds: 'I do not intend by this to place the
last-mentioned play on a lower level. I only mean that my point of view
has changed, because here I am in a community well ordered even to
weariness.' He says elsewhere that he could only have written _Peer
Gynt_ where he wrote it, at Ischia and Sorrento, because it is 'written
without regard to consequences--as I only dare to write far away from
home.' If we trace him through his work we shall see him, with a strange
docility, allowing not only 'frame of mind and situation in life,' but
his actual surroundings, to mould his work, alike in form and in
substance. If he had never left Norway he might have written verse to
the end of his life; if he had not lived in Germany, where there is
'up-to-date civilisation to study,' he would certainly never have
written the social dramas; if he had not returned to Norway at the end
of his life, the last plays would not have been what they were. I am
taking him at his word; but Ibsen is a man who must be taken at his
word.
What is perhaps most individual in the point of view of Ibsen in his
dramas is his sense of the vast importance trifles, of the natural human
tendency to invent or magnify misunderstandings. A misunderstanding is
his main lever of the tragic mischief; and he has studied and diagnosed
this unconscious agent of destiny more minutely and persistently than
any other dramatist. He found it in himself. We see just this brooding
over trifles, this sensitiveness to wrongs, imaginary or insignificant,
in the revealing pages of his letters. It made the satirist of his
earlier years; it made him a satirist of non-essentials. A criticism of
one of his books sets him talking of wide vengeance; and he admitted in
later life that he said to himself, 'I am ruined,' because a newspaper
had attacked him overnight.
With all his desire to 'undermine the idea of the state,' he besieges
king and government with petitions for money; and he will confess in a
letter, 'I should very much like to write publicly about the mean
behaviour of the government,' which, however, he refrains from doing. He
gets sore and angry over party and parochial rights and wrongs, even
when he is far away from them, and has congratulated himself on the
calming and enlightening effect of distance. A Norwegian bookseller
threatens to pirate one of his books, and he makes a national matter of
it. 'If,' he says, 'this dishonest speculation really obtains sympathy
and support at home, it is my intention, come what may, to sever all
ties with Norway and never set foot on her soil again.' How petty, how
like a hysterical woman that is! How, in its way of taking a possible
trifling personal injustice as if it were a thing of vital and even
national moment, he betrays what was always to remain narrow, as well as
bitter, in the centre of his being! He has recorded it against himself
(for he spared himself, as he proudly and truthfully said, no more than
others) in an anecdote which is a profound symbol.
During the time I was writing _Brand_, I had on my desk a glass
with a scorpion in it. From time to time the little animal was ill.
Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell
furiously and emptied its poison into it--after which it was well
again. Does not something of the kind happen with us poets?
Poets, no; but in Ibsen there is always some likeness of the sick
scorpion in the glass.
In one of his early letters to Björnson, he had written: 'When I read
the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable
narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane
man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen
gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and
less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the
black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the
earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned
something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when
he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the
energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he
said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead
and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle
and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had
learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is
always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual
vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I
stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably
compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther
ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied
himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a
palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but
a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he
was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a
follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His
future was to be peopled by great individuals.
It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and
truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought
for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally
'efficacious,' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That
purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an
artist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing is
to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself--not to determine
to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one _must_ do because
one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.' He conceives of
truth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a
matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the
kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably
minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a
new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never
deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something
narrow as well as something intense in this certainty, this calmness,
this moral attitude towards art. Nowhere has he expressed more of
himself than in a letter to a woman who had written some kind of
religious sequel to _Brand_. He tells her:
_Brand_ is an æsthetic work, pure and simple. What it may have
demolished or built up is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
It came into being as the result of something which I had not
observed, but experienced; it was a necessity for me to free myself
from something which my inner man had done with, by giving poetic
form to it; and, when by this means I had got rid of it, my book
had no longer any interest for me.
It is in the same positive, dogmatic way that he assures us that _Peer
Gynt_ is a poem, not a satire; _The League of Youth_ a 'simple comedy
and nothing more'; _Emperor and Galilean_ an 'entirely realistic work';
that in _Ghosts_ 'there is not a single opinion, a single utterance
which can be laid to the account of the author.... My intention was to
produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing
something real.... It preaches nothing at all.' Of _Hedda Gabler_ he
says: 'It was not really 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 the social
conditions and principles of the present day.' 'My chief life-task,' he
defines: 'to depict human characters and human destinies.'
Ibsen's development has always lain chiefly in the perfecting of his
tools. From the beginning he has had certain ideas, certain tendencies,
a certain consciousness of things to express; he has been haunted, as
only creative artists are haunted, by a world waiting to be born; and,
from the beginning, he has built on a basis of criticism, a criticism of
life. Part of his strength has gone out in fighting: he has had the
sense of a mission. Part of his strength has gone out in the attempt to
fly: he has had the impulse, without the wings, of the poet. And when he
has been content to leave fighting and flying alone, and to build
solidly on a solid foundation, it is then that he has achieved his great
work. But he has never been satisfied, or never been able, to go on
doing just that work, his own work; and the poet in him, the impotent
poet who is full of a sense of what poetry is, but is never able, for
more than a moment, to create poetry, has come whispering in the ear of
the man of science, who is the new, unerring artist, the maker of a
wonderful new art of prose, and has made him uneasy, and given
uncertainty to his hand. The master-builder has altered his design, he
has set up a tower here, 'too high for a dwelling-house,' and added a
window there, with the stained glass of a church window, and fastened on
ornaments in stucco, breaking the severe line of the original design.
In Ibsen science has made its great stand against poetry; and the
Germans have come worshipping, saying, 'Here, in our era of
marvellously realistic politics, we have come upon correspondingly
realistic poetry.... We received from it the first idea of a possible
new poetic world.... We were adherents of this new school of realistic
art: we had found our æsthetic creed.' But the maker of this creed, the
creator of this school of realistic art, was not able to be content with
what he had done, though this was the greatest thing he was able to do.
It is with true insight that he boasts, in one of his letters, of what
he can do 'if I am only careful to do what I am quite capable of,
namely, combine this relentlessness of mind with deliberateness in the
choice of means.' There lay his success: deliberateness in the choice of
means for the doing of a given thing, the thing for which his best
energies best fitted him. Yet it took him forty years to discover
exactly what those means to that end were; and then the experimenting
impulse, the sense of what poetry is, was soon to begin its
disintegrating work. Science, which seemed to have conquered poetry, was
to pay homage to poetry.
Ibsen comes before us as a man of science who would have liked to be a
poet; or who, half-equipped as a poet, is halved or hampered by the
scientific spirit until he realises that he is essentially a man of
science. From the first his aim was to express himself; and it was a
long time before he realised that verse was not his native language. His
first three plays were in verse, the fourth in verse alternating with
prose; then came two plays, historic and legendary, written in more or
less archaic prose; then a satire in verse, _Love's Comedy_, in which
there is the first hint of the social dramas; then another prose play,
the nearest approach that he ever made to poetry, but written in prose,
_The Pretenders_; and then the two latest and most famous of the poems,
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_. After this, verse is laid aside, and at last we
find him condemning it, and declaring 'it is improbable that verse will
be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the immediate
future.... It is therefore doomed.' But the doom was Ibsen's: to be a
great prose dramatist, and only the segment of a poet.
Nothing is more interesting than to study Ibsen's verse in the making.
His sincerity to his innermost aim, the aim at the expression of
himself, is seen in his refusal from the beginning to accept any poetic
convention, to limit himself in poetic subject, to sift his material or
clarify his metre. He has always insisted on producing something
personal, thoughtful, fantastic, and essentially prosaic; and it is in a
vain protest against the nature of things that he writes of _Peer Gynt_,
'My book _is_ poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception
of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the
book.' His verse was the assertion of his individuality at all costs; it
was a costly tool, which he cast aside only when he found that it would
not carve every material.
Ibsen's earliest work in verse has not been translated. Dr. Brandes
tells us that it followed Danish models, the sagas, and the national
ballads. In the prose play, _Lady Inger of Östraat_, we see the
dramatist, the clever playwright, still holding on to the skirts of
romance, and ready with rhetoric enough on occasion, but more concerned
with plot and stage effect than with even what is interesting in the
psychology of the characters. _The Vikings_, also in prose, is a piece
of strong grappling with a heroic subject, with better rhetoric, and
some good poetry taken straight out of the sagas, with fervour in it,
and gravity; yet an experiment only, a thing not made wholly personal,
nor wholly achieved. It shows how well Ibsen could do work which was not
his work. In _Love's Comedy_, a modern play in verse, he is already
himself. Point of view is there; materials are there; the man of science
has already laid his hand upon the poet. We are told that Ibsen tried to
write it in prose, failed, and fell back upon verse. It is quite likely;
he has already an accomplished technique, and can put his thoughts into
verse with admirable skill. But the thoughts are not born in verse, and,
brilliantly rhymed as they are, they do not make poetry.
Dr. Brandes admits everything that can be said against Ibsen as a poet
when he says, speaking of this play and of _Brand_:
Even if the ideas they express have not previously found utterance
in poetry, they have done so in prose literature. In other words,
these poems do not set forth new thoughts, but translate into metre
and rhyme thoughts already expressed.
_Love's Comedy_ is a criticism of life; it is full of hard, scientific,
prose thought about conduct, which has its own quality as long as it
sticks to fact and remains satire; but when the prose curvets and tries
to lift, when criticism turns constructive, we find no more than bubbles
and children's balloons, empty and coloured, that soar and evaporate.
There is, in this farce of the intellect, a beginning of social drama;
realism peeps through the artificial point and polish of a verse which
has some of the qualities of Pope and some of the qualities of Swift;
but the dramatist is still content that his puppets shall have the air
of puppets; he stands in the arena of his circus and cracks his whip;
they gallop round grimacing, and with labels on their backs. The verse
comes between him and nature, as the satire comes between him and
poetry. Cynicism has gone to the making of poetry more than once, but
only under certain conditions: that the poet should be a lyric poet,
like Heine, or a great personality in action, like Byron, to whom
cynicism should be but one of the tones of his speech, the gestures of
his attitude. With Ibsen it is a petty anger, an anger against nature,
and it leads to a transcendentalism which is empty and outside nature.
The criticism of love, so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and
Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile
than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks
he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a
denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal
suicide such as that in _Rosmersholm_, or may feed the brain on some air
unbreathable by the body, as in _When we Dead Awaken_. It is the old
idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of
self-intensification; and it comes, like asceticism, from a contempt of
nature, a distrust of nature, an abstract intellectual criticism of
nature.
Out of such material no poetry will ever come; and none has come in
_Love's Comedy_. In the prose play which followed, _The Pretenders_,
which is the dramatisation of an inner problem in the form of a
historical drama, there is a much nearer approach to poetry. The
stagecraft is still too obvious; effect follows effect like
thunder-claps; there is melodrama in the tragedy; but the play is, above
all, the working-out of a few deep ideas, and in these ideas there is
both beauty and wisdom.
It was with the publication of _Brand_ that Ibsen became famous, not
only in his own country, but throughout Europe. The poem has been
seriously compared, even in England, with _Hamlet_; even in Germany with
_Faust_. A better comparison is that which Mr. Gosse has made with
Sidney Dobell's _Balder_. It is full of satire and common-sense, of
which there is little enough in _Balder_: but not _Balder_ is more
abstract, or more inhuman in its action. Types, not people, move in it;
their speech is doctrine, not utterance; it is rather a tract than a
poem. The technique of the verse, if we can judge it from the brilliant
translation of Professor Herford, which reads almost everywhere like an
original, is more than sufficient for its purpose; all this
argumentative and abstract and realistic material finds adequate
expression in a verse which has aptly been compared with the verse of
Browning's _Christmas-eve and Easter-day_. The comparison may be carried
further, and it is disastrous to Ibsen. Browning deals with hard matter,
and can be boisterous; but he is never, as Ibsen is always, pedestrian.
The poet, though, like St. Michael, he carry a sword, must, like St.
Michael, have wings. Ibsen has no wings.
But there is another comparison by which I think we can determine more
precisely the station and quality of _Brand_ as poetry. Take any one of
the vigorous and vivid statements of dogma, which are the very kernel of
the poem, and compare them with a few lines from Blake's _Everlasting
Gospel_. There every line, with all its fighting force, is pure poetry;
it was conceived as poetry, born as poetry, and can be changed into no
other substance. Here we find a vigorous technique fitting striking
thought into good swinging verse, with abundance of apt metaphor; but
where is the vision, the essence, which distinguishes it from what,
written in prose, would have lost nothing? Ibsen writes out of the
intellect, adding fancy and emotion as he goes; but in Blake every line
leaps forth like lightning from a cloud.
The motto of _Brand_ was 'all or nothing'; that of _Peer Gynt_ 'to be
master of the situation.' Both are studies of egoism, in the finding and
losing of self; both are personal studies and national lessons. Of _Peer
Gynt_ Ibsen said, 'I meant it to be a caprice.' It is Ibsen in high
spirits; and it is like a mute dancing at a funeral. It is a harlequin
of a poem, a thing of threads and patches; and there are gold threads in
it and tattered clouts. It is an experiment which has hardly succeeded,
because it is not one but a score of experiments. It is made up of two
elements, an element of folklore and an element of satire. The first
comes and goes for the most part with Peer and his mother; and all this
brings Norwegian soil with it, and is alive. The satire is fierce,
local, and fantastic. Out of the two comes a clashing thing which may
itself suggest, as has been said, the immense contrast between Norwegian
summer, which is day, and winter, which is night. Grieg's music,
childish, mumbling, singing, leaping, and sombre, has aptly illustrated
it. It was a thing done on a holiday, for a holiday. It was of this
that Ibsen said he could not have written it any nearer home than Ischia
and Sorrento. But is it, for all its splendid scraps and patches, a
single masterpiece? is it, above all, a poem? The idea, certainly, is
one and coherent; every scene is an illustration of that idea; but is it
born of that idea? Is it, more than once or twice, inevitable? What
touches at times upon poetry is the folk element; the irony at times has
poetic substance in it; but this glimmer of poetic substance, which
comes and goes, is lost for the most part among mists and vapours, and
under artificial light. That poet which exists somewhere in Ibsen,
rarely quite out of sight, never wholly at liberty, comes into this
queer dance of ideas and humours, and gives it, certainly, the main
value it has. But the 'state satirist' is always on the heels of the
poet; and imagination, whenever it appears for a moment, is led away
into bondage by the spirit of the fantastic, which is its prose
equivalent or makeshift. It is the fantastic that Ibsen generally gives
us in the place of imagination; and the fantastic is a kind of
rhetoric, manufactured by the will, and has no place in poetry.
In _The League of Youth_ Ibsen takes finally the step which he had half
taken in _Loves Comedy_. 'In my new comedy,' he writes to Dr. Brandes,
'you will find the common order of things--no strong emotions, no deep
feelings, and, more particularly, no isolated thoughts.' He adds: 'It is
written in prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have
paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have
accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact
without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;
the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability
on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of
things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the
satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no
doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the
photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief
from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the
intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to
get the mechanism in order.